Politics
Kamala Harris was hailed as ‘the female Barack Obama.’ It built credibility, and a burden
Sixteen years ago, the late journalist Gwen Ifill appeared on David Letterman’s “Late Show” and touted a group of emerging Black politicians, including a little-known district attorney from San Francisco who she described as a tough and brilliant prosecutor who “doesn’t look anything like anybody you ever see on ‘Law & Order.’”
“They call her the female Barack Obama,” Ifill said. “People aren’t very imaginative about these things anymore.”
Ifill’s sheepish comparison helped catapult Kamala Harris’ profile and gave her new credibility. Suddenly, national reporters were flying into the Bay Area. Donors, eager to get in early on the next Obama, crowded her fundraisers.
But the Obama label also was a burden, one that Harris still carries. During her primary run in the 2020 presidential contest and through some of her tenure as vice president, the comparison fueled questions over whether she could live up to the hype.
“In some respects, the comparisons are right,” said Ashley Etienne, who served previously as Harris’ vice presidential communications director. “What’s unfortunate is it doesn’t give those politicians room to be themselves. The constant comparison is overwhelming and exhausting.”
Just ask any basketball player declared Michael Jordan 2.0 or a singer who is dubbed Taylor Swift redux. Many become draft-day busts or one-hit wonders. And even those who succeed often find it hard to overcome the weight of expectations.
“The whole idea of ‘The Next’ anyone is foolish, but we do it all the time,” said David Axelrod, Obama’s New York-born former strategist, who can still tick off all the supposed heirs to Yankees great Mickey Mantle. “Obama was a singular talent in a particular moment in time.”
Axelrod calls the comparisons “lazy and glib and insulting.”
This week, Obama will make the first of several appearances for Harris’ presidential campaign, holding a rally in Pittsburgh. He remains the Democratic Party’s top star and one of the biggest draws in politics.
He and Harris are longtime political allies. They met when he held a California fundraiser for his 2004 U.S. Senate run, according to Debbie Mesloh, Harris’ communications director for her district attorney campaign that year, her first run for elected office.
Obama helped Harris raise money in 2005 to retire campaign debt. Their bond was cemented in 2008, when Harris broke with the establishment by endorsing Obama for president over Hillary Clinton, giving him crucial early backing when he was still an underdog.
Harris also was one of the few down-ballot politicians he helped in 2010, when she ran for California attorney general and he was president. That was the year Democrats took, as Obama put, a “shellacking” in congressional elections.
The two shared a more awkward encounter in 2013, when Obama introduced Harris at a fundraiser as the “best-looking attorney general in the country,” prompting Obama to apologize for a remark that did not land well with Harris’ inner circle.
Still, “they always had an affinity for each other because they are so much alike,” Mesloh said. “Anyone who’s grown up being different in some sort of way reflects on that experience and I think it’s a necessary part of sort of surviving.”
Both are trailblazing politicians, mixed-raced children with unusual names, whose biographies epitomize the nation’s changing face. Harris’ parents were born in India and Jamaica; Obama’s father was born in Kenya. Neither came from wealth and both had to defy doubters to become their party’s standard-bearer.
The comparison between them, however, goes only so far.
Obama made his name with soaring oratory about a collective opportunity to fulfill America’s promise and a memoir that was deeply introspective about his role in that fight. He learned politics as a community organizer in Chicago, from the outside in.
Harris came up politically from the inside, as a prosecutor and state attorney general who tried to balance the demands of outside activists with the responsibilities of representing the establishment and the need to court police unions. She is averse to public introspection, spending far more time in her memoir reciting autobiographical details than dissecting them.
And her speeches, although designed to uplift, have been aimed at making the case that she will not be too transformative.
“I will be a president who unites us around our highest aspirations,” she said at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. “A president who leads and listens, who is realistic, practical and has common sense.”
Her attempts at Obama-style rhetoric have often fallen flat. “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,” has become a favorite line to mock among her detractors, who say her more philosophical appeals amount to word salad.
Mesloh believes Harris’ natural rhetorical style is more lawyerly, when she can deliver a methodical case as if cross-examining a witness in front of a jury. But she has also seen Harris connect in more personal ways to people who lost loved ones in homicides, who often demanded to speak with her directly.
Harris is hardly the only politician to get the “Next Obama” treatment. Ifill, back in 2008, named several other Black politicians, including Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, who was then the mayor of Newark, and then-Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama, who is no longer in politics. More recently, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore has been compared to Obama, as has Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a rare white politician to earn a mention.
“It’s one of those comparisons that is helpful when people are saying it about you or your candidate, but it’s not necessarily the type of thing that she or someone on her staff would feel comfortable going around outwardly advertising,” said Brian Brokaw, who led Harris’ 2010 attorney general campaign.
Harris brushed off Obama comparisons in a Politico story that speculated about her presidential ambitions just weeks after she won statewide office for the first time.
“It’s flattering,” she told the outlet. But “these comparisons make me uncomfortable because I know what I want to do. I am really excited about being attorney general.”
U.S. military forces stopped and boarded a second sanctioned tanker carrying oil from Iran in the Indian Ocean, the Pentagon said on Thursday, ramping up pressure on Tehran as the Trump administration seeks to resume negotiations to end the war.
A naval boarding team roped down from hovering helicopters and fanned out on the vessel, the M/T Majestic X, according to a Pentagon statement that included a 17-second video of the operation.
The military said the boarding was part of a “global maritime enforcement to disrupt illicit networks and interdict vessels providing material support to Iran, wherever they operate.”
Earlier this week, Navy SEALS boarded another ship in the Indian Ocean, the M/T Tifani, after the Pentagon said it was carrying oil from Iran.
Navy destroyers are also shadowing several other Iranian vessels, including the Dorena and Sevin, which had left from the Iranian port of Chabahar before the U.S.-imposed blockade began on April 13, a U.S. military official said. The Navy is directing those ships to return to an Iranian port, the official said.
With the M/T Tifani and M/T Majestic X now at least temporarily in the custody of the military, a U.S. military official said it was up to the White House to decide what to do with the sanctioned vessels and their cargo. The administration previously seized several tankers carrying illicit oil from Venezuela after a U.S. commando raid there in January that seized Nicolás Maduro, the country’s president.
“International waters cannot be used as a shield by sanctioned actors,” the Pentagon said in its statement on Thursday, adding that the department would “continue to deny illicit actors and their vessels freedom of maneuver in the maritime domain.”
Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hinted last week that the U.S. military would likely commence boarding operations like the ones this week. He said that U.S. military commanders elsewhere in the world, and especially in the Indo-Pacific region, would “actively pursue any Iranian-flagged vessel or any vessel attempting to provide material support to Iran.”
The U.S. Navy has turned back at least 31 ships trying to enter or exit Iranian ports since an American blockade outside the contested Strait of Hormuz began about a week ago, U.S. Central Command said late Wednesday.
Last Sunday, a Navy destroyer disabled and seized the Touska, an Iranian cargo ship, after it tried to evade the blockade. It was the first time a vessel was reported to have tried to evade the U.S.-imposed blockade on any ship entering or exiting Iranian ports since it took effect last week.
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt explained why President Donald Trump does not consider Iran’s seizure of two ships in the Strait of Hormuz a violation of the ceasefire agreement.
Leavitt made the statement during an interview with Fox News’ Martha McCallum on Wednesday just hours after Iran captured the Greek and Mediterranean-flagged vessels.
“Does the seizure of two ships — as we said, they were Greek and Mediterranean-owned ships with cargo on them, and the reports are that Iran basically seized them and then moved them into Iranian waters. We don’t know what’s going to happen to these crews. We’re not sure where all of this is going. Does the president view that as a violation of the ceasefire?” McCallum asked.
“No, because these were not U.S. ships. These were not Israeli ships. These were two international vessels,” Leavitt responded.
US FORCES ATTEMPTING TO BOARD SANCTIONED RUSSIAN-FLAGGED OIL TANKER IN NORTH ATLANTIC, SOURCES SAY
Karoline Leavitt, White House press secretary, conducts a press briefing. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“And for the American media, who are sort of blowing this out of proportion to discredit the president’s facts that he has completely obliterated Iran’s conventional Navy, these two ships were taken by speedy gunboats. Iran has gone from having the most lethal Navy in the Middle East to now acting like a bunch of pirates. They don’t have control over the strait,” she continued.
“This is piracy that we are seeing on display. And the naval blockade that the United States has imposed continues to be incredibly effective. And, to be clear, the blockade is on ships going to and from Iranian ports. And the point of this is the economic leverage that we maintain over Iran now. While there’s a ceasefire with respect to the military and kinetic strikes, Operation Economic Fury continues, and the crux of that is this naval blockade,” she added.
The Iranian made ‘Seraj’ a high-speed missile-launching assault boat on display in Tehran on August 23, 2010, as Iran kicked off mass production of two high-speed missile-launching assault boats the ‘Seraj’ (Lamp) and ‘Zolfaqar’ (named after Shiite Imam Ali’s sword) speedboats which will be manufactured at the marine industries complex of the ministry of defense. (YALDA MOAIERY/AFP via Getty Images)
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps said the vessels, identified as the MSC Francesca and the Epaminondas, were operating without proper authorization and had tampered with navigation systems, accusations that could not be independently verified. The ships had earlier reported coming under fire near the strait, underscoring the increasingly volatile conditions in one of the world’s most critical shipping lanes.
US ‘LOCKED AND LOADED’ TO DESTROY IRAN’S ‘CROWN JEWEL’ ‘IF WE WANT,’ TRUMP WARNS
The Guard attacked a third ship, identified as the Euphoria, which had become “stranded” on the Iranian coast, Iranian media reported. It did not seize that vessel.
Ships and tankers in the Strait of Hormuz off the coast of Musandam, Oman, April 18, 2026. (Reuters)
Both the U.S. and Iranian sides have targeted commercial and cargo vessels as part of a broader pressure campaign tied to stalled negotiations. U.S. forces have also moved to seize at least one Iranian-linked vessel in the region, with each side accusing the other of violating the terms of a fragile ceasefire.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
The Strait of Hormuz is a vital artery for global oil shipments, with roughly 20% of the world’s supply passing through it. Traffic has slowed dramatically as ships reroute or avoid the area amid gunfire, seizures and conflicting directives from both militaries.
Fox News’ Morgan Phillips contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger met privately with President Trump and administration officials Wednesday to press for federal support and yet-unpaid wildfire recovery funding as the region continues to rebuild from the 2025 fires.
“This afternoon we met with President Trump and Administration officials to advocate for families who lost everything,” Bass and Barger said in a statement. “We had a very positive discussion about FEMA and other rebuilding funds as well as the support of the President to continue joining us in pressuring the insurance companies to pay what they owe — and for the big banks to step up to ease the financial pressure on L.A. families.”
Barger said the two leaders had a “high-level discussion” with the president in the Oval Office, sharing stories about what fire survivors are experiencing day to day. She added that “we left details behind with the President,” but did not specify whether Trump made any funding or policy promises during the meeting.
“First and foremost, today’s meeting was to thank the President for his initial support of infusing federal resources to expedite debris removal, as well as his recent tweet about insurance companies, which have already proven fruitful,” she said in a statement provided to The Times.
Bass was similarly reserved about the discussions, telling reporters that “we will follow up with the details,” but signaled progress is being made on federal support.
“I think what’s important is that we certainly got the president’s support in terms of, you know, what is needed, and then the appropriate people were in the room for us to follow up. And that was Russ Vought, who is the head of the Office of Management and budget,” Bass told KNX on Wednesday.
The meeting comes on the heels of a yearlong standoff between California leaders and the Trump administration over wildfire recovery funding, disaster response and whether the federal government should have a say in local rebuilding permitting.
California leaders, led by Gov. Gavin Newsom, have accused the Trump administration of withholding billions in critical wildfire aid, prompting a lawsuit over stalled recovery funds. Officials allege political bias in the delay of billions of dollars from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Newsom visited Washington in December. When he made his rounds on Capitol Hill, he met with five lawmakers, including three who serve on the Senate and House appropriations committees, to renew calls for $33.9 billion in federal aid for Los Angeles County fire recovery.
But the governor said he was denied a meeting with FEMA and would not say whether he had attempted to meet with Trump to discuss the issue.
Bass, meanwhile, appears to have found a path to the president on a subject that has been paramount for her community.
The fruitful meeting comes after Trump lobbed insults at the mayor at a news conference earlier this year, where he called her “incompetent” for how she handled last year’s wildfire recovery efforts. He alleged that under Bass’ leadership, the city’s delay in issuing local building permits will take years when it should have taken “two or three days.”
California officials, including Newsom, have urged the Trump administration to send Congress a formal request for the $33.9 billion in recovery aid needed to rebuild homes, schools, utilities and other critical infrastructure destroyed or damaged when the fires tore through neighborhoods more than 15 months ago.
What Bass and Barger’s meeting with the president ultimately produces remains to be seen.
The billions in recovery aid have not yet materialized, but the meeting could potentially give those discussions new momentum.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment about the meeting.
Earlier this month, Trump criticized insurance provider State Farm on Truth Social for its handling of the devastating Los Angeles County wildfires. He accused the insurance giant of abandoning its policyholders when tragedy struck.
“It was brought to my attention that the Insurance Companies, in particular, State Farm, have been absolutely horrible to people that have been paying them large Premiums for years, only to find that when tragedy struck, these horrendous Companies were not there to help!” Trump wrote.
But the rebuke didn’t come out of the blue. It stemmed from a controversial February visit to Los Angeles by Trump administration officials.
Trump tapped Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin in an effort to strip California state and local governments of their authority to permit the rebuilding of homes destroyed in the Eaton and Palisades fires.
Within the week, Zeldin was in Los Angeles, bashing Newsom and Los Angeles officials at a roundtable with fire victims and reporters, saying that residents were suffering from “bureaucratic, red tape delays and incompetency” and that leadership was “denying them … the ability to rebuild their lives”.
During the trip, officials heard direct complaints from local leaders and fire victims about insurers being slow, restrictive and insufficient with their claim payouts.
After these meetings, Trump directed Zeldin to investigate the insurers’ responses. State Farm, facing roughly $7 billion in fire-related claims, is also under formal investigation by California’s insurance commissioner over its handling of the crisis.
Despite tensions with the administration, Bass and Barger appeared confident that progress was being made on the insurance and funding issues.
“Our job is to fight for our communities,” their joint statement concluded. “When it comes to this recovery, our federal partners are essential, and we are grateful for the support of the President.”
-
California6 minutes agoDozens of Mexican mafia members arrested in California
-
Colorado11 minutes ago
Federal judge orders release of family of man charged in Colorado firebomb attack
-
Connecticut17 minutes agoNew Haven’s Chapel Street shift from one-way to two-way traffic brings confusion, concerns
-
Delaware24 minutes agoDelaware State football player sues DeSean Jackson, school after alleged locker room assault
-
Florida29 minutes agoFlorida Lottery Powerball, Lotto, Fantasy 5 results for April 22, 2026
-
Georgia35 minutes agoWildfires rage across Georgia and northern Florida amid severe drought
-
Hawaii42 minutes agoBench in Honokaʻa to Hilo storefront: Knickknackery Hawaii brings old-time island charm to Hilo
-
Idaho47 minutes agoIdaho ranks last in per pupil spending, again – Local News 8