Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi: How America's most powerful women look to make history again

WASHINGTON – They made history once before. Now they’re trying to do it again.

Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi quickly settled into their seats directly behind President Joe Biden as he delivered the opening lines of his first speech to a joint session of Congress. The annual ritual had been repeated for decades. But this time the tableau was very different.

For the first time ever, both leaders were women.

“Madame Speaker, Madame Vice President: From this podium, no president has ever said those words – and it’s about time,” Biden said, acknowledging the history of the moment on April 28, 2021.

Three years later, Harris aims to make history again by becoming the nation’s first female president.

When she formally accepts the Democratic nomination Thursday night at the party’s national political convention in Chicago, she will owe her rise to the top of the ticket in part to Pelosi, whose behind-the-scenes pressure campaign led Biden to drop out of the race just four weeks ago and to the party’s decision to anoint Harris as the nominee.

It was a remarkable turn of events that once again brought together the two most powerful women in American politics – both from the San Francisco Bay area, both products of the city’s Democratic political machine, both at the pinnacle of power in Washington.

From different generations and family backgrounds, Harris and Pelosi aren’t close personally. But their unlikely rise through San Francisco’s competitive political environment instilled in them a mutual admiration, according to multiple people in the orbits of both women.

“Politically, officially, personally, I have great respect for her,” Pelosi said of Harris in an interview with USA TODAY.

Pelosi said she was particularly impressed by how quickly Harris wrapped up the presidential nomination after Biden’s exit and the skill with which she navigated her successful campaign for California attorney general more than a decade ago.

“She's a person of faith and values in terms of civic life and being responsible in the community,” Pelosi said. “She's a person officially who is strong. And you see how she's led the way on a woman's right to choose, for one thing, but there are many others. … She's politically astute.”

Harris offers similar praise for Pelosi.

“There is so much about the future of our country that has relied on leaders like Nancy Pelosi who have the grit, the determination, the brilliance to know what is possible and then to make it so,” she said at a fundraiser in San Francisco last week.

The thing Pelosi admires most about Harris is the same thing Harris admires about her, said Ashley Etienne, who was head of communications for Pelosi when she was House speaker and for Harris as vice president.

“Maybe it speaks to their California political roots, but it's their level of sort of shrewdness,” Etienne said. “Pelosi's has been on full display for decades now. But now we're starting to see Harris' to a different degree, which is quite refreshing and interesting.”

Both have the ability to keep their heads down and do the background work necessary to excel without drawing attention to it, Etienne said.

“I always say Pelosi plays five-dimensional chess, and you rarely ever know what she's fully up to,” she said. “And I think the same is the case with Harris.”

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'Someone who was special'

Harris, 59, and Pelosi, 84, come from different political generations, but both have bridged San Francisco’s long activist tradition and its old-school local Democratic machine.

Harris was born in Oakland and raised by a single mother, a cancer researcher involved in the civil rights movement who intentionally brought up the future vice president and her sister in multicultural, multiethnic communities. Harris spent much of her childhood in Canada and attended Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington, where she interned in the same Senate office she would one day hold. She returned to California for law school.

On the other side of the country, Pelosi grew up in a political family, the daughter of a powerful Maryland congressman who went on to become mayor of Baltimore. When her family moved to San Francisco, Pelosi joined the city’s political circles but never ran for local office. Eventually, she rose to become chairwoman of the California Democratic Party, orchestrated the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco and made an unsuccessful bid to run the national Democratic Party.

San Francisco, like many cities, has core political families that shape the political landscape. Harris and Pelosi would both come through what locals call the “Burton-Brown machine.”

Former Democratic Rep. Phil Burton organized a coalition made up of labor, civil rights leaders, and gay and Asian voters to win control of the city from Republicans in the 1950s.

“All these different communities had something very much in common, which was no one was paying attention to them,” said Sam Lauter, a longtime friend of both Harris and Pelosi. “For the most part, that coalition has been the most successful entity in San Francisco politics.”

Willie Brown, a legendary political figure who served as speaker of the California State Assembly and later as San Francisco mayor, extended those coalitions when he rose to power in the 1980s and 1990s.

When Burton died of heart failure in 1983, his wife, Sala Burton, succeeded him. Four years later, on her own deathbed, Sala Burton made it clear who she wanted to replace her: Nancy Pelosi.

Pelosi’s rise from political operative to political candidate was a surprise.

“I never viewed Nancy Pelosi as ambitious," Lauter said. “No one thought she was going to be an elected official, including her.”

In typical Pelosi style, she not only entered the race, but she won.

Lauter, whose mother is a close friend of Pelosi's, then made a prediction: One day she would be House speaker.

A few years later, Harris would begin making a name for herself in political circles. A prosecutor in the Alameda County District Attorney's office, she formed friendships and developed allies within the local political world. Those friendships led to a position in the San Francisco district attorney’s office and a short-lived romantic relationship with Brown, along with several state board positions and involvement in local campaigns.

Longtime political operative Alex Tourk first met Harris in 2000 when party officials asked them to help with a tight runoff in the supervisorial election campaign of Rev. Amos Brown, who is now the head of the San Francisco NAACP.

“I got to spend six weeks, seven days a week, 14 hours a day, side by side with her,” Tourk said. “And I knew then that this was someone who was special, who just had immense leadership abilities, could articulate strategy, (and was) incredibly, you know, inspiring.”

Harris was elected California attorney general in 2010. Six years later, when Democrat Barbara Boxer retired from the U.S. Senate, Harris ran for that seat and won, placing her in the same office where she interned under Sen. Alan Cranston of California during college. Her star clearly on the rise, Harris ran for president in 2019, but her campaign sputtered and she dropped out before the first primary or caucus vote was cast. Within months, though, Biden came calling. He had wrapped up the Democratic nomination and needed a running mate.

He wanted Harris to be his vice president.

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'Not confined by convention'

San Francisco, population 808,437, is a good training ground for politicians with ambitions for state or national office.

One of the most competitive political environments in the country, officer seekers must learn to navigate an electorate that is diverse, passionate and actively involved in the political process.

“We have more democratic clubs and neighborhood organizations than probably any other town in America,” said Dale Carlson, a veteran San Francisco lobbyist and public relations consultant. “People in this town are engaged. ... And so if you come up through politics here, you've really had to master the ability to get along with very diverse, very competing interests. And it gives you an edge.”

San Francisco’s electorate is a lot more moderate than people assume, Carlson said, and voters are discerning. People don’t tend to vote straight-ticket or automatically support ballot measures because they’re told to.

“If you're successful in San Francisco,” Carlson said, “you're a step ahead. You've mastered the game at a different level.”

To maneuver through San Francisco politics requires unique coalition-building, Tourk said.

“We don't agree on much in San Francisco,” he said. “Some would think the bluest city and the bluest state in America, that we would be holding hands on most issues. But unfortunately, it's not that way, and it can be a very energetic group of people trying to move their kind of unique policy vision forward.”

Those who successfully navigate the system, like Pelosi and Harris, apply the lessons learned in San Francisco when they move on to higher office.

Harris “has this keen ability to see people in their circumstances, and in many cases, can identify with them,” Etienne said. “People can identify with her, see themselves in her, in her own story.”

In Washington, Pelosi and Harris have the California way of wanting to do big, bold things for the country, Etienne said.

“Both of them are big thinkers,” she said. “They're not confined by convention. They kind of start with the impossible, what people would think is impossible, they work backwards from there to make it possible.”

Pelosi is a tactician while Harris is better at putting herself in other people’s shoes, Etienne said.

“When you're the speaker your job is to win the House,” she said. “You've got to be a superb strategist and a tactician. But to be the vice president or the next president United States is about vision, and then how do you rally people around, how do you inspire people around a vision? They're both just highly suited for the jobs that they actually have.”

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'Democracy is on the ballot'

Last Sunday afternoon, about 700 people crowded into San Francisco’s famous Fairmont Hotel in the affluent Nob Hill neighborhood, known for its parks, art galleries and picturesque bay views. The event was a political fundraiser, and the guest list included tech industry billionaires, titans of the business world and leading political figures like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who also came up through San Francisco politics and was mayor.

And, of course, Pelosi and Harris.

For Harris, it was her first trip back to San Francisco since she had wrapped up the Democratic presidential nomination.

“It was a homecoming,” Tourk said. “How often is, you know, one of your own positioned to be the next president of the United States?”

Pelosi spoke first and received a standing ovation. After the crowd quieted down, she heaped praise on Harris and spoke of the campaign ahead, comparing it to the Olympics, in which the difference between winning a gold, silver and bronze medal can come down to seconds.

“Elections are that close,” she said, adding later, “Democracy is on the ballot, and we want democracy to win the gold that day.”

Harris walked out a few minutes later to more cheers and another standing ovation. “We will win this election,” she said, but warned “we can take nothing for granted.”

With a mad dash ahead to introduce herself to voters over the next few weeks and lay out a policy agenda, Tourk said he wasn’t surprised Harris came back to San Francisco first. “I think she was coming home, both for resources, but also for energy as well,” he said.

She got both. The event raised $13 million for her nascent White House campaign.

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'She has to win'

Only one other woman, Hillary Clinton, has ever won a major party’s presidential nomination. Harris is the first Black woman and the first Asian woman to lead a presidential ticket. If she wins the presidency, she will shatter another glass ceiling.

Harris will win, Pelosi predicted.

“She has to win,” Pelosi said in her interview with USA TODAY. “Fate of the nation is at stake.”

What advice does the former speaker have for her fellow Californian as she prepares for the difficult race against Republican Donald Trump?

“Just to be herself,” Pelosi said. “That's my advice to everybody. Just be yourself. The authentic you, why you came here, what you believe, how you want to get things done, what your judgment is, what's in your heart. You show them that you don't need any advice. Do it your way.”

It’s not only how elections are won. It’s how history is made.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi broke the mold