Dan Morain: Making History with Kamala Harris

Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

Kamala Harris is going toe-to-toe with Donald Trump in a high-stakes race for the presidency. Though she has served as vice president for four years, many Americans don’t know a lot about her. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, we know her from her days as San Francisco district attorney and then California attorney general and senator. But perhaps no observer knows her as well as journalist Dan Morain, whose biography of Harris—Kamala’s Way—gives insight into her history in the Bay Area. And Morain returns to Commonwealth Club World Affairs to talk about Harris on the cusp of making history on the national stage.

There’s very little that’s conventional about Kamala Harris, and yet her personal story also represents many Americans. She grew up the eldest daughter of a single mother, a no-nonsense cancer researcher who emigrated from India at the age of 19 in search of a better education. She and her husband, an accomplished economist from Jamaica, split up when Kamala was only five. The Kamala Harris the public knows today is tough, smart, quick-witted, and demanding. She’s a prosecutor—her one-liners are legendary—but she’s more reticent when it comes to sharing much about herself, even in her memoirs. Fortunately, former Los Angeles Times reporter Dan Morain has been there from the start.

Join us in-person in San Francisco or online to learn more about the person who might well be America’s first female president, its first southeast Asian president, and its second Black president.

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