Kamala Harris’s decision to support Barack Obama in a 2008 primary race dominated by Hillary Clinton was a political risk. It paid off, and the former president never forgot it.
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On New Year’s Eve in 2007, Kamala Harris, then the district attorney of San Francisco, prepared to spend the holiday more than a thousand miles away from her native California. She had flown to Iowa for the first time, touching down in Des Moines during one of the wettest winters on record.
Ms. Harris turned up in a dingy campaign field office, wearing a puffy coat and boots. Near a tangle of power cords, someone had propped an “African Americans for Obama” poster against a wall. In the midst of that bleak Midwestern winter, Ms. Harris was there to knock on doors for Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois mounting a long-shot bid for the presidency.
“To be here is worth 1,000 Champagne bottles and firecrackers,” Ms. Harris told a reporter on New Year’s Day, surrounded by campaign detritus. “It’s equal to that, in terms of the thrill, the excitement and the promise for tomorrow.”
Supporting Mr. Obama was a political risk. Ms. Harris was one of the rare Californians holding elected office — and one of few in the Democratic Party writ large — to endorse him for the presidency. Most of the party’s institutional heft had been thrown behind Hillary Clinton, a senator from New York who had a powerful surrogate in her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
But Ms. Harris’s early bet paid off, and Mr. Obama has never forgotten it.
“She was just a rock-solid supporter of the president at a time the entire political establishment was not with him,” said Buffy Wicks, a California State Assembly member who was the 32nd person hired by Mr. Obama’s campaign. “She set aside significant time and energy to help get him elected, and that was greatly appreciated by him.”
On Tuesday evening at the Democratic National Convention, Mr. Obama will return the favor, delivering a speech he has been working on for at least three months, according to a person briefed on his preparations. Of course, he has in recent weeks retooled his remarks to fit a different nominee — but one who has aligned herself politically with him for two decades. The two share a view of politics that is defined by offering economic and social opportunities to people who have been historically cut off from them.
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