Indian-American Kamala Harris `female Obama` in making: Report

Lalit K Jha
Washington, Dec 25 (PTI) Indian-American Kamala Harris,
California's next Attorney General, is the "female Obama" in
making and likely to be a national figure shortly, a media
report said on Saturday.
Daughter of an Indian mother and African-American father,
Harris is being called the future of the Democratic Party, a
rising political star in the mold of one of her big supporters
— President Barack Obama, the 'Politico' said in a lead story.
"At first glance, the President and Harris have much
in common: Both are mixed-race children of immigrants raised
by a single mother; both are eloquent, telegenic big-city
lawyers with strong liberal credentials who catapulted from
relative obscurity to the national stage.
"And like the first African-American President, Harris
has broken a long-standing barrier — she's California's first
African-American Attorney General and the first woman to hold
the office," Politico said.
She is a rare talent who will be a national figure
shortly, Chris Lehane, a former Clinton aide, who is now a
consultant in California, was quoted as saying.
"People call her the female Obama. It's more apt to say
she is the female Obama that progressives thought they were
voting for," Lehane said.
Harris replaces Democratic Jerry Brown, who won election
for Governor of California.
In December 2003, she was elected as the first woman
District Attorney in San Francisco's history, and as the
first African-American woman and South Asian-American woman in
California to hold the office.
She was overwhelmingly re-elected to a second term
in November 2007.
Born and raised in the East Bay, Kamala is the daughter
of Dr Shyamala Gopalan, a Tamilian breast cancer specialist
who traveled to the US from Chennai to pursue her graduate
studies at UC Berkeley.
Harris has spent the majority of her professional
career in the trenches as a courtroom prosecutor.
In 1998, she was named managing attorney of the
Career Criminal Unit of the San Francisco District Attorney's
Office, where she prosecuted three strike cases and serial
felony offenders. She then served as the head of the San
Francisco City Attorney's Division on Families and Children.
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