Obama. Harris. Excited again.

The last time I was truly excited about a presidential election was in 2007 when a U.S. senator from Illinois named Barack Hussein Obama declared his candidacy as a Democrat. I heard he was coming to San Francisco, across the bay from my hometown Oakland, and I said, “I’m going!”

I’m a regular voter, registered as a Democrat, but otherwise not active in party politics. I had never donated any money to a presidential candidate until Obama came along. That gained me entry to his event at a San Francisco nightclub that had a stage at one end, expansive floor space, and U-shaped mezzanine overlooking the main floor.

I put on a blue sportscoat, beige slacks, button-down long sleeve shirt, tie, dress shoes and drove over for the early evening shindig. After standing in a long line on the sidewalk, I headed up to the mezzanine for a better view as the room was packed, standing room only. Obama emerged to thunderous applause and gave a rousing stump speech. I was giddy to be there, hopeful that, finally, America would get a president who wasn’t your standard-issue white guy.

As his campaign unrolled, I watched clips of his much-touted speech at the 2004 Democratic Party convention, his glorious introduction to America. I read of his unconventional background – African (Kenya) father, white American (Kansas) mother, born in Honolulu, lived in Indonesia in his youth, attended Ivy League universities, became a community organizer, taught constitutional law, won state and federal legislative seats, and married Michelle Robinson, a Chicago lawyer. I read his books, Dreams from My Father, Audacity of Hope – what a writer! Overall, a thoughtful, brilliant man. And, at about 6 feet 2 inches tall, he loved to play basketball, my favorite sport.

More than hoops, what attracted me most to Obama wasn’t a particular policy position or ideological leanings, but his connections to Asia and Asian Americans. No other American presidential candidate in my lifetime up to that point had any direct relationship to my own racial-ethnic-cultural heritage. As I relate in Sons of Chinatown: A Memoir Rooted in China and America, such identities are who I am, in an American context. I know, I know, we shouldn’t be so ethnocentric, but in the wildly kaleidoscopic racially drenched history of America, having a president who knows something of Asian American experiences touched me deeply.

Now, 17 years later, in the summer of 2024, I’m excited again about a presidential election. Before July 21, I wasn’t. My choice for the November election wasn’t in doubt. It was President Joe Biden, seeking a second term to continue his consequential and positively impactful current term. Feeling queasy, though, I chose not to watch his debate with Donald Trump. By all accounts, Biden’s performance was disastrous. He looked fatigued; he slurred words; he couldn’t finish some sentences; he mixed up names.

I really felt for him. I’m 16 months older than he is and happily retired. Other than occasional public events to promote Sons of Chinatown and social engagements with family and friends, I’m home putzing around, reading, cooking, cleaning, and watching TV. In other words, a relatively low-stress life. And still, I need my afternoon nap!

President Biden has tons more to do than I do. I’m not sure how he does as well as he does with speeches, meetings, and heavy-duty life-and-death decisions. He must be “on” much of the day and some evenings too. However, it’s clear that Father Time has slowed him down considerably. It happens to all of us.

On July 21, Biden succumbed to tremendous pressure to withdraw from the presidential race. He endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to be the Democratic presidential nominee. His action exploded into a political phenomenon we haven’t seen since Obama.

As cheesy as it sounds, I like that Harris and I share a hometown, Oakland. My only journalistic coverage of her was shortly after she was elected San Francisco district attorney in 2003, and it was peripheral, not policy substantive. By then, I was no longer a full-time journalist but was an occasional freelance columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. I noticed that local news coverage of her election identified her principally as a Black (lower-case b in those days) pioneer. I wrote a column wondering why reporters omitted her other racial-ethnic identity, Indian, as in South Asian (her mother; her father was a Jamaican).

I hadn’t closely monitored Harris’ political ascension in San Francisco, California, and eventually Washington, D.C., but it was apparent she was becoming a political celebrity. When she announced her presidential candidacy in 2019, my wife Joyce and I joined the approximately 20,000 (!) people who crowded Oakland streets to try to catch a glimpse of a star politician seeking the most powerful political office in the world. We couldn’t get close enough to see her, but the energy suffusing the streets was electric.

Her stardom lost some sheen when she ended her presidential campaign early. It regained a little when Biden chose her as his vice-presidential running mate. Her now so-so political persona persisted, as the second-in-command is practically invisible. I heard private criticisms of her from several California politically connected Democratic friends who know her casually. I had doubts about her viability as Biden’s successor because I thought myself to be realistic (or pessimistic?) that America wasn’t ready to elect a Black South Asian woman to be president.

Then, literally overnight – from July 21 to July 22 – darkness became an almost blinding brightness on Harris’ political future. Choose your cliched punchline: jaw-dropping, head-spinning, mind-blowing. Her stardom reemerged and rocketed her to even greater heights, from an after-thought to a ubiquitous presence, now a superstar in our celebrity-soaked world. In public appearances since July 21, according to video clips I’ve seen, she’s assertive, serious, confident, forceful, substantive, and light-hearted, defying the earlier perception of her of being an insubstantial lightweight.

Our broad Asian connection is one reason I’m excited that Harris could become the first woman “of color” president. Similar to my joy about Obama’s unique rise to power, I feel Harris advances the notion that America could – repeat, could -- fulfill its aspirational status as a land of equal opportunity for all Americans, not just white men. Go ahead, call me a naïve fantasist!

As was the case with my attraction to Obama, my political fondness for Harris isn’t related to a particular policy position or ideological bent since I am of the belief that, in general, the Democratic Party embraces laws, policies, governance principles and philosophies, as well as human values that seek to improve the human condition in a superior manner than the Republican Party, especially in the latter’s current MAGA madness.

My warm and fuzzy feeling about Harris is more than simply feeling “represented,” for she isn’t precisely representative of who I am, first and foremost a Chinatown Cantonese Chinese American loosely aligned with Japanese Americans, Filipino Americans, and Korean Americans. We made up what was the “old” Asian America (a non-existent label in my youth), ranging from the Gold Rush of 1849 to World War II. We were barely a blip in America – less than one percent – and politically, culturally invisible and irrelevant.

Those Americans with roots in India like Harris weren’t part of the Asian American core until the 1960s when U.S. immigration laws were liberalized to open America more widely for Asians to migrate here (Latinos too). I am in awe (and maybe a wee bit envious) of this “new” Asian America, which shot up our percentage of the American population to about seven percent and which has members who stand out in politics, the law, medicine, the sciences, business, arts and media, and other American pursuits.

It’s an endlessly fascinating discussion about whether the entirety of today’s Asian America is fundamentally synergistic or whether, because of our many and varying cohorts, it is fractured, much less cohesive than yesterday’s. Or is it both?

In today’s political America, that hardly matters, because the emerging Harris coalition is like a flash mob with Americans of many colors (yes, including white), genders, classes, and cultures, way beyond Black America and Asian America. She represents the new America, the better America, one where women and people who look like her, Obama and – yes – me can be in the room where things happen (thanks, Lin-Manuel Miranda!).

Finally, there’s her bright smile and hearty laugh, which the MAGA Republicans make fun of. Harris’ exuberant public joy – at appropriate moments to balance a necessary serious demeanor of a national leader -- symbolizes a hoped-for brighter future, incremental progress in our unending slog to become a more perfect union, not a regression to a joyless imperfect one espoused by MAGA world.