How Kamala Harris’s early career prepared her for this moment

“You’re working in government, and government is about service, so you never dress down for your people,” Kamala Harris, then San Francisco’s chief prosecutor, sternly told Simon. “Go home and come back tomorrow in a suit.”

Simon, who is now running for Congress to represent California’s East Bay, said the scolding was “my first taste of Boss Kamala, not Mentor Kamala.” It was an early example, nearly 20 years ago, of Harris’s exacting standards. Simon left her office chastened.

Yet when she walked into work the next day, clad in business casual clothes hastily borrowed from friends, Harris presented her with a shopping bag. Inside were a newly purchased gray pantsuit and a scarf embroidered with an “L” for Lateefah.

“She made it her business to make me better professionally and politically,” Simon recounted this week.

To her, the story illustrates the two sides of Harris: A hard-driving, demanding public servant, who also displayed compassion and kindness behind closed doors, especially with young people, whether they were on her staff or victims of a crime. Those traits helped Harris navigate the notoriously cutthroat world of Bay Area politics, where she rose from intern to district attorney in little more than a decade, building a career that has taken her to the heights of American government.

As Harris assumes the role of Democrats’ likely presidential nominee, those who worked with her and campaigned against her in California say her time in the crucible of her hometown’s politics could be both blessing and burden come November.

Oakland and San Francisco shaped her political instincts, but despite a rich history of producing powerful leaders, the Bay Area has never bred a U.S. president. Indeed, while California has sent several Republicans to the White House, no Democrat from this state has been elected to the nation’s highest office.

In the days since President Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed Harris, conservatives have quickly revived old tropes, tagging her as a “San Francisco liberal” and a “California socialist.” Simon and others say Harris’s early career prepared her to parry such attacks, like an attorney handling cross-examination.

“Every single day of my time with Kamala Harris, I saw not only her rigor and how hard she worked but also how people constantly discounted her and she refused to be anything less than excellent,” he said. “That’s the Kamala who is going to be president of the United States.”

Harris was born in Oakland and raised in a house on Bancroft Way in the formerly redlined Berkeley flatlands. It was from this home that she was bused to an elementary school in the city’s wealthy hills as part of an integration program.

She was 12 when her family left Berkeley for Canada, where her mother taught…