Kamala Harris made me feel seen when no one else looked

My wife Diana and I met Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff in the summer of 2015, when Harris and I were both preparing to run for Senate. And by preparing to run, I mean traveling the country fundraising, because the amount of money it takes to run for the U.S. Senate requires you to spend more than a year flying around gathering up cash, like a marathoner accepting little cups of water from strangers.

Harris won her Senate race and I got a silver medal in mine, but we stayed in touch and I would visit her sometimes during trips to D.C. We were friends, but not super close, which is common for friendships in politics. 

Despite losing that Senate race, my political profile continued to grow and for a time I was among the couple of dozen Democrats preparing to make a 2020 run for the presidency. But in the latter half of 2018, I dropped out of the 2020 presidential mix, and then out of public life for a while, to go to the VA to seek therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder. I’d been putting it off since serving in Afghanistan with the Army over a decade earlier, and it caught up to me rather abruptly. 

Just like that, I went from what the political world cynically calls a “bold faced name” to a vet with no job other than growing a beard, going to therapy, and trying to learn how to be useful around the house. When I first made the announcement, it seemed like everybody I knew, famous or otherwise, reached out. But after a while, most of those calls tapered off as people went on with their lives and I disappeared from their televisions and their social media feeds.

Kamala Harris was one in a small group of people in the political world who continued to call. In fact, she checked in on me with some regularity. She would sometimes call just to catch up, or sometimes she had a big speech or meeting coming up with a veterans’ or national security group and I’d be a sounding board. I don’t know how much she actually needed my advice about that stuff when she asked for it, and I don’t know how much I helped, but her asking made me feel valuable at a time when I’d sort of given the world permission to forget about me. And I appreciated that gesture a lot.  

I remember answering her call one day while pushing a cart through Costco. This was well after she was headlong into the 2020 campaign, and she had her veterans’ policy person on the line because she wanted to run some language by me. Once that was done, she thanked that person and then politely asked that they go ahead and drop off the line so we could catch up.  

As usual, she expressed genuine interest in how my mental health was coming along. By that point I was truly into a post-traumatic growth chapter and had moved on to a role as an executive at a national veterans nonprofit. At some point, I mentioned that I was thinking about doing some TV surrogate stuff for the campaign. It was kind of a big-deal decision for me at the time because I’d been out of the mix for almost two years by then.  

She was clearly excited for me, because she spent a couple minutes describing in great detail how to set up my home office to make cable hits easy and comfortable. I still use the ring light she suggested.  

My point in sharing this admittedly uneventful and humdrum anecdote is that I’m excited about the prospect of a Kamala Harris presidency not just because she’s brilliant and skilled and hardworking and believes in the right things. I’m also excited because, in my experience, she’s a downright decent person who shows people respect and makes sure they feel seen.

And I’m not trying to do some humblebrag “I’m friends with the next president” flex here because I’ll be the first to tell you we’re not close friends. At best, we’re friendly acquaintances who used to work in the same field.

And that’s my point. She is the type of person who is thoughtful enough to treat a peer like a peer, even when that person has bowed out and is no longer really a peer at all. And that’s the kind of everyday decency I believe she’ll bring to the presidency.