Kamala Harris was shaped by the crucible of San Francisco politics

When Kamala Harris looks back on her first campaign, a run for San Francisco district attorney, she remembers a brutal awakening.

“San Francisco is hard-knocks politics,” the freshly declared 2020 White House hopeful once said in an interview. “People sling mud. They punch the gut.”

San Francisco is indeed a crucible that has forged state and national political leaders in numbers far out of proportion to the city’s relatively small size, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Harris’ fellow U.S. senator, Dianne Feinstein.

If she wins, Harris, 54, who announced her candidacy Monday, will be the first to take the lessons of San Francisco close-quarters combat and apply them at the presidential level.

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