Kamala Harris was greeted by a massive, cheering crowd during the first rally of her newly announced presidential campaign in 2019. Speaking on a January day outside city hall in her hometown of Oakland, California, she framed her bid as part of something bigger than winning an election.
“We are here at this moment in time because we must answer a fundamental question,” Harris said, invoking Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 call for “moral leadership.” “Who are we as Americans?”
With Democrats in despair at the time over Donald Trump’s presidency, the first-term California senator appeared to be an ideal cure. The daughter of an Indian mother and a Black Jamaican father, Harris evoked comparisons to Barack Obama, whose powerful biography and soaring rhetoric galvanized Democrats more than a decade earlier.
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