Kamala Harris is different. In a good way. That was clear away from the California limelight

Kamala Harris had every right to be annoyed with me.

In 2010, she was district attorney of San Francisco and embroiled in her first campaign for statewide office in California, where she was running for attorney general. I was the editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times, the state’s largest paper and, at the time, its most influential. 

It was a very close race and not an easy call for the editorial board. “They are both worthy candidates, and closely matched. Either Steve Cooley, a Republican, or Kamala Harris, a Democrat, would do a fine job,” we wrote. But the bottom line was bound to irritate her. “After serious deliberation,” the board concluded, “The Times endorses Cooley.”

So I was a little surprised a year later, when, having won that campaign, Harris accepted an invitation from my parents to join me at a book party to celebrate the release of my biography of President Dwight Eisenhower. She arrived with little fanfare, and quietly made a lasting impression on everyone who attended.

Harris did not wow the guests that afternoon by taking over the event or clamoring for attention. To the contrary. Harris created a little stir when she arrived, but she quickly settled in. Harris asked questions, sounding out guests about history or California. Rather than holding forth or pronouncing, she listened. 

Harris was charming and gregarious without being overbearing. One guest brought their infant granddaughter, and Harris snuggled the baby, cooing and admiring little Isabella. 

Soon after that, we met for lunch in San Francisco, and I was struck again at her genuineness, her participation in a conversation rather than her use of one to deliver a message or to shore up support. (That and subsequent conversations were off the record, and even though many took place more than a decade ago, I regard that promise as binding and won’t repeat the details here.)

We talked about the changing nature of crime in the city and the broader state, about trends in violence but also about books we’d recently read and history we appreciated. If she held a grudge over the Cooley endorsement, she never let on.

I told her a slightly off-color story about a sheriff’s deputy I’d known for some time. She laughed. Yes, that laugh. It burst from her. Heads turned.

But I did not find it grating or offensive — it struck me as welcome and heartwarming. So much of the laughter that I hear from political figures is, like so much else about them, affected. It’s the soft, noncommittal laugh of the candidate who wants to connect but not to concede that anyone else might have something to say. Or it’s the joke at someone else’s expense, meant to bind the listener and teller in a common disdain. 

Harris was — and is — different. She laughs with vigor and enthusiasm, rather than calculation. In fact, it’s the way some sources described Eisenhower’s laugh — deep and genuine, not parsing or mean.

It’s the opposite, of course, of Trump’s mean-spirited smirk, the calculated glee he takes in imagining others in distress or pain. To not like Harris’s laugh is to imagine that we are better off being led by dour, vengeful officials rather than those who find joy in their work.

To mock her for it is to ridicule authenticity.

I spend a lot of time with people in politics. I’ve interviewed thousands of officeholders and candidates over the years. I’ve written books on a chief justice of the United States, Earl Warren, and a president of the United States, Eisenhower, both Republicans — as well as on the longest-serving governor in California history, Democrat Jerry Brown. I collaborated on a memoir with a former CIA director and secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, who started out as a Republican and ended up a Democrat. So I’ve seen a fair bit of history and politics from both sides of the aisle; rarely has a politician impressed me more than Harris did, starting some 15 years ago.

After one of our early conversations, I called home and told my wife — herself no stranger to politics and candidates — that I could imagine Harris being president someday.

In the years since, we’ve spoken many times. She was interested in the life and work of Warren, whose first statewide office also was as California attorney general. We talked about his achievements, as well as those of Eisenhower. She introduced me to her sister, another impressively bright and focused person.  

Through those meetings, formal and informal, Harris never came across as particularly ideological, certainly not in the way she’s portrayed by her opponent.

My conversations with Harris were often around criminal justice and law enforcement and, if anything, she was more conservative than many others in California on those subjects. She speaks and thinks like a prosecutor, not an apologist for crime or criminals.

When I interviewed her in 2015 for the first issue of Blueprint, the magazine I founded at UCLA, we talked about recidivism, the death penalty and the need for the state to be accountable for its work on crime and punishment. The headline identified her as California’s “Top Cop.” In all our conversations, she has displayed a sharp command of state and national politics. She sizes up candidates skillfully and understands the ways they reverberate off voters.

Harris was — and is — principled without being naïve.

I don’t know whether she will be elected, but if she is, America will get a refreshingly real person as its next president, a leader who has spent decades considering how to make Americans safe, a trustworthy person to whom you could hand over your baby without worry, and a joyful conversationalist who can laugh at a funny story.

In all those respects, she’s nothing like Trump. She reminds me more of Ike.