If California Attorney General Kamala Harris is the nation's "best-looking attorney general," as President Barack Obama said last week (before apologizing but not retracting), she's also the most up-and-coming attorney general in the country.
Politically, of course.
Harris, 48, has had her profile increased since Obama's comments at a fundraiser in the San Francisco Bay Area last week, according to the San Jose Mercury News. Which is hard to do — when you're known to Time magazine as "the female Barack Obama," and the New York Times names you as among the women most likely to become president.
According to "most experts," it is "only a matter of time" before the upwardly-mobile Harris — daughter of Stanford professors who catapulted from an assistant district attorney job in Alameda County to elected district attorney to attorney general in 20 years — moves onto a new job, "perhaps to succeed U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, some have speculated, or even to the U.S. Supreme Court," the newspaper reported.
"Her name ID probably went up in Southern California," said Stanford political science professor Bruce Cain.
She has a record to run upon, too. While she angered law enforcement in San Francisco for famously not seeking the death penalty againt a cop-killer, she has made big moves against big banks, mortgage companies and other populist targets while in Sacramento.
She's also clearly close in line with the policies of her friend the president, for whom she campaigned heavily in 2007 and 2008: she filed briefs in support of Obamacare and Obama's repudiation of same-sex marriage ban Proposition 8 is in line with her stance to not defend the law.
In other words, it appears to be going nowhere but up for Harris.
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