Kamala Harris was hailed as ‘the female Barack Obama.’ It built credibility, and a burden

WASHINGTON —  Sixteen years ago, the late journalist Gwen Ifill appeared on David Letterman’s “Late Show” and touted a group of emerging Black politicians, including a little-known district attorney from San Francisco who she described as a tough and brilliant prosecutor who “doesn’t look anything like anybody you ever see on ‘Law & Order.’”

“They call her the female Barack Obama,” Ifill said. “People aren’t very imaginative about these things anymore.”

Ifill’s sheepish comparison helped catapult Kamala Harris’ profile and gave her new credibility. Suddenly, national reporters were flying into the Bay Area. Donors, eager to get in early on the next Obama, crowded her fundraisers.

But the Obama label also was a burden, one that Harris still carries. During her primary run in the 2020 presidential contest and through some of her tenure as vice president, the comparison fueled questions over whether she could live up to the hype.

“In some respects, the comparisons are right,” said Ashley Etienne, who served previously as Harris’ vice presidential communications director. “What’s unfortunate is it doesn’t give those politicians room to be themselves. The constant comparison is overwhelming and exhausting.”

Just ask any basketball player declared Michael Jordan 2.0 or a singer who is dubbed Taylor Swift redux. Many become draft-day busts or one-hit wonders. And even those who succeed often find it hard to overcome the weight of expectations.

“The whole idea of ‘The Next’ anyone is foolish, but we do it all the time,” said David Axelrod, Obama’s New York-born former strategist, who can still tick off all the supposed heirs to Yankees great Mickey Mantle. “Obama was a singular talent in a particular moment in time.”

Axelrod calls the comparisons “lazy and glib and insulting.”

This week, Obama will make the first of several appearances for Harris’ presidential campaign, holding a rally in Pittsburgh. He remains the Democratic Party’s top star and one of the biggest draws in politics.

He and Harris are longtime political allies. They met when he held a California fundraiser for his 2004 U.S. Senate run, according to Debbie Mesloh, Harris’ communications director for her district attorney campaign that year, her first run for elected office.

Obama helped Harris raise money in 2005 to retire campaign debt. Their bond was cemented in 2008, when Harris broke with the establishment by endorsing Obama for president over Hillary Clinton, giving him crucial early backing when he was still an underdog.

Harris also was one of the few down-ballot politicians he helped in 2010, when she ran for California attorney general and he was president. That was the year Democrats took, as Obama put, a “shellacking” in congressional elections.

The two shared a more awkward encounter in 2013, when Obama introduced Harris at a fundraiser as the “best-looking attorney general in the country,” prompting Obama to apologize for a remark that did not land well with Harris’ inner circle.

Still, “they always had an affinity for each other because they are so much alike,” Mesloh said. “Anyone who’s grown up being different in some sort of way reflects on that experience and I think it’s a necessary part of sort of surviving.”

Both are trailblazing politicians, mixed-raced children with unusual names, whose biographies epitomize the nation’s changing face. Harris’ parents were born in India and Jamaica; Obama’s father was born in Kenya. Neither came from wealth and both had to defy doubters to become their party’s standard-bearer.

The comparison between them, however, goes only so far.

Obama made his name with soaring oratory about a collective opportunity to fulfill America’s promise and a memoir that was deeply introspective about his role in that fight. He learned politics as a community organizer in Chicago, from the outside in.

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Harris came up politically from the inside, as a prosecutor and state attorney general who tried to balance the demands of outside activists with the responsibilities of representing the establishment and the need to court police unions. She is averse to public introspection, spending far more time in her memoir reciting autobiographical details than dissecting them.

And her speeches, although designed to uplift, have been aimed at making the case that she will not be too transformative.

“I will be a president who unites us around our highest aspirations,” she said at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. “A president who leads and listens, who is realistic, practical and has common sense.”

Her attempts at Obama-style rhetoric have often fallen flat. “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,” has become a favorite line to mock among her detractors, who say her more philosophical appeals amount to word salad.

Mesloh believes Harris’ natural rhetorical style is more lawyerly, when she can deliver a methodical case as if cross-examining a witness in front of a jury. But she has also seen Harris connect in more personal ways to people who lost loved ones in homicides, who often demanded to speak with her directly.

Harris is hardly the only politician to get the “Next Obama” treatment. Ifill, back in 2008, named several other Black politicians, including Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, who was then the mayor of Newark, and then-Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama, who is no longer in politics. More recently, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore has been compared to Obama, as has Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a rare white politician to earn a mention.

“It’s one of those comparisons that is helpful when people are saying it about you or your candidate, but it’s not necessarily the type of thing that she or someone on her staff would feel comfortable going around outwardly advertising,” said Brian Brokaw, who led Harris’ 2010 attorney general campaign.

Harris brushed off Obama comparisons in a Politico story that speculated about her presidential ambitions just weeks after she won statewide office for the first time.

“It’s flattering,” she told the outlet. But “these comparisons make me uncomfortable because I know what I want to do. I am really excited about being attorney general.”