There's a growing buzz among Democrats about Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris: Democrats' anti-Palin

It’s easy to understand why Kamala Harris, California’s next attorney general, is being called the future of the Democratic Party, a rising political star in the mold of one of her big supporters — President Barack Obama.

At first glance, the president and Harris have much in common: Both are mixed-race children of immigrants raised by a single mother; both are eloquent, telegenic big-city lawyers with strong liberal credentials who catapulted from relative obscurity to the national stage. And like the first African-American president, Harris has broken a long-standing barrier — she’s California’s first African-American attorney general and the first woman to hold the office.


But Harris, whose position, potential and glamour will most likely give her as high a national profile as she wants, resists the comparisons.

“It’s flattering,” she told POLITICO, just weeks after claiming victory in a photo-finish race against Steve Cooley, her Republican opponent. Nevertheless, “these comparisons make me uncomfortable because I know what I want to do. I am really excited about being attorney general.”

(Word that some eager Democrats have dubbed her the “anti-Palin” draws a one-word reply: “Oy.”)

Instead, what Harris mostly wants to talk about is an issue that’s almost entirely off the national radar.

“What I would like to contribute to the conversation,” she added, “is an in-depth discussion about what we can do to create smarter criminal justice policy.”

But Harris will have to do it over the Democrats’ growing buzz about her.

When she broke out of a six-candidate primary field in the race for attorney general, the San Francisco prosecutor won big endorsements from party heavyweights, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, as well as endorsements from labor unions like the Service Employees International Union and most of California’s top newspapers. She also was the only down-ballot Democrat for whom President Obama raised funds this year.

That level of support — coupled with glowing profiles in national magazines like Ebony and The Daily Beast, as well as appearances on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and a Matt Lauer interview on Today — lead top Democrats to predict she will soon become a household name.

“She’s a rare talent who will be a national figure shortly,” said Chris Lehane, a former Clinton aide who is now a consultant in California. “People call her the female Obama. It’s more apt to say she is the female Obama that progressives thought they were voting for.”

Harris swept into Washington last week for a handful of meetings at the Justice Department and an hour of congressional testimony on “cyberbullying.” But she also was scheduled for a photo shoot with Harper’s Bazaar, the glossy fashion magazine.

Predictions about Harris’s bright future stems as much from her résumé — she spent a decade as a front-line prosecutor in San Francisco before taking over the district attorney's office, where she pioneered efforts to slow recidivism — as her liberal credentials. In an approach hailed by progressives, she advocates for “smart” reform of the criminal justice system, including tackling root causes like recidivism, and is opposed to the death penalty, refusing to ask for it in the prosecution of a cop-killer — a decision that a national GOP group allied with Cooley, the Los Angeles district attorney, bludgeoned her with in the closing days of the campaign.

And her signature program, “Back on Track,” reportedly reduced the recidivism rate in San Francisco from the state standard of 70 percent to less than 10 percent. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger praised it as a model for the state, and Harris wants to build on that model in her new job.

But like Obama, Harris has sought to avoid being tied to Democratic orthodoxy. Her “ Smart on Crime” approach in San Francisco included cracking down on truancy — including charging the parents of chronically truant children with a misdemeanor punishable by jail time and a fine. Civil libertarians and conservatives alike raised questions about the move, but Harris was unapologetic.

“My staff went bananas” at the policy, Harris said, as did school administrators. Citing statistics linking crime and truancy, she argues that she’s nipping a problem in the bud.

“My bottom line is these children have to be in school,” she said.

“There will be outrage when in 10 years they’re a menace to society hanging out on the corner.”

Harris’s new post gives her an instant national platform: Her predecessors in the post, including California Gov.-elect Jerry Brown, used the office to influence national environmental policy, while New York Gov.-elect Andrew Cuomo, who was his state’s top prosecutor, raised his profile as a crusader for consumer rights.

Given California’s giant auto and utilities markets, Harris can position herself as a major player in shaping federal climate policy if any advances and in using her post to drive federal environmental policy if Washington doesn’t act. She’s also signaled an interest in other high-profile battles that could garner national attention, including online privacy in social networks like Facebook.

Though she’s a deeply loyal Obama supporter — she campaigned for him in 2004 and, as San Francisco’s district attorney, Harris was the first California elected official to endorse him in 2008 — she’s considering a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency over auto emissions levels.

“We are making decisions about suing the EPA around what we want to do around our standards, and whether they should be national standards,” she said, but was at pains to cast it as a friendly lawsuit threat.

“I want to use my position of leadership to help move along at a faster pace what I believe and know the Obama administration wants to do around the urgency of climate change,” she said.

While her personal story prompts comparisons to Obama, the two have had slightly different paths to political power.

Harris’s father, an economics professor from Jamaica, was active in San Francisco’s liberal politics, while her mother, a cancer researcher born in India, raised her daughter as a single parent, taking her to the lab and putting her to work cleaning pipettes. A graduate of Howard University, Harris did an internship with the late Sen. Alan Cranston, an influential Democrat from San Francisco, and bypassed law school at Georgetown to head west for the University of California — Hastings Law School in San Francisco.

After law school, Harris served in the legal trenches as a front-line prosecutor in the San Francisco district attorney’s office. She gained notice for her approach to crime, but she also made headlines for a brief but still-famous fling with then-San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, a high-profile politician.

She also lacked Obama’s electoral good fortune. Amid a Democratic sweep in California during the 2010 midterm elections, Harris had the toughest race: She had to fight out a seven-way primary, then persuade voters to elect a woman of color from liberal San Francisco to its top law enforcement post, a job previously held only by white men.

But Harris has been trying to inject her brand of law enforcement into the national debate for a couple of years. She rushed her book, “ Smart on Crime,” to publication in hopes of gaining attention at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, but the effort fell flat.

“I was so sure that there would be this robust debate about criminal justice policy, and I hoped to inform it in some way,” she recalled ruefully. “We remember that there was no debate.”

Indeed, Democrats have traditionally struggled to frame their party’s stance on crime, and Republicans have often used it to bash Democratic candidates as being soft on what has become a hot-button issue among voters.

“Most elected [officials] will not visit that debate upon themselves if they don’t have to. It is a prickly subject,” said Harris.

“Generally speaking, the public appetite for criminal justice policy is just tough talk.”

Harris’s Republican foe, Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley, sought to cast her as a “radical,” but she tacked right on some aspects of criminal justice policy. She opposed a referendum legalizing medical marijuana and driver’s license for illegal immigrants, and she said she opposes the prospect of a budget-driven early release of some 40,000 state prisoners.

“I believe people should serve their full sentence,” she said, arguing that the immediate solution to crowded prisons is effective programs to prevent criminals from re-offending, programs that involve everything from job training to parenting classes.

“We have got to stop being so damn reactive, reacting to the predictable because it’s always been happening, and reacting as though it’s shocking,” she said.

The truancy policy, in particular, offers a glimpse both of her potential to appeal to the liberal base — this is activist government, with a focus on helping the urban poor — without alienating conservatives.

And her pragmatic, I’ll-consider-ideas-from-anywhere defense of the truancy policy echoes Obama’s pitch.

“What we all want is public safety. We don’t want rhetoric that’s framed through ideology,” she said in an interview with San Francisco’s KQED-TV last month. “We want results.”