'Do something:' Harris' rapid rise driven by call to action

Now she’s back in an election she calls the most consequential of her lifetime.“My mother Shyamala raised my sister Maya and me to believe that it was up to us and every generation of Americans to keep on marching,” Harris said Wednesday in her first speech after Biden announced his selection. Do something.”___Harris seemed bound to rise in politics from the very earliest days of her career.She was a Howard University graduate without family wealth or high-powered ties when she returned her native Bay Area for law school and took a job at the Alameda County District Attorney’s office in 1990. They launched a mentoring program to connect inner-city students interested in fine arts with museum members, giving the kids access to one of the city’s elite institutions.“I love to say that Kamala has been fighting for the people long before anyone was looking,” Schaaf said.Among Harris’s friends and later political backers were members of the Getty family of oil fortunes and then-California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. She promised to bring more attention to domestic violence cases and to Black mothers who had lost their children to homicide, issues she felt Hallinan was neglecting.Debbie Mesloh, a longtime friend and adviser, said Harris cut her teeth in that first race, learning lessons that she would carry into national politics. “The whole idea of a progressive prosecutor is a pretty recent phenomenon,” he said.Harris’ allies argue that she worked within the confines of the system and the politics of the time. Nathan Barankin, then Harris’s chief of staff and a longtime aide, recalled Harris making an aggressive case to her colleagues that they should not be satisfied by Kelly’s answers despite his record as a well-respected military officer.“I don’t think there are too many freshmen that do that,” Barankin said.Harris was quickly viewed as a Democrat with White House potential. Many of her mother’s closest friends were Black men and women who became “aunts and uncles” to the girls, later influencing Harris’s decision to attend a historically Black university, Harris said.“She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as Black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud Black women,” Harris wrote of her mother. But their combined net worth, excluding real estate, ranges from $2.8 million to as much as $6.3 million, the records show.Harris, mindful of her history-making role, on Friday called Biden bold for choosing a Black woman to join him on the ticket.“I have not achieved anything that I have without the support of many who believed in the possibility of someone who has never been there before,” she said in an interview with the news outlet The 19th.__Dale reported from Philadelphia.