Kamala Harris: ‘The American Public Wants A Fighter’

Jan. 22--It was no coincidence Sen. Kamala Harris announced her candidacy for president on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Harris, California's junior Democratic senator, told "Good Morning, America" Monday the holiday held special meaning because of her parents' involvement in the civil rights movement.

"The thing about Dr. King that always inspired me, is he was aspirational," said Harris, 54. "He was aspirational like our country is aspirational."

Harris was the fourth woman in a matter of weeks to announce her candidacy for president in 2020, joining her Senate colleagues Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. Other candidates from Congress include Reps. John Delaney of Maryland and Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii. President Barack Obama's former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Julian Castro, also is in the mix.

From the private sector, Andrew Yang, a New York entrepreneur, will make his eighth trip to Iowa next week with more than a dozen events scheduled across the state.

Alexandra Rucinski, of Burlington, already has her mind made up for caucus night in February 2020. After seeing Harris speak in 2017 at the Women's March in Washington, D.C., Rucinski was impressed.

"She is a strong, smart, powerful woman who genuinely cares about the future of this country and the issues we are facing," said Rucinski, a patient advocate and activist for Planned Parenthood. "The progressive values that are important to me such as universal health care and raising the minimum wage, are important to Sen. Harris."

Though she supported Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2016 election -- Sanders has yet to announce whether he will run again in 2020 -- Rucinski said he will not have her vote next year in the primary.

"Watching Hillary Clinton lose the election was a painful watershed moment in my life. I vowed to myself that when a woman I believed in ran for president again, I would champion her with everything I have."

As a career prosecutor and former attorney general of California, Harris said in spite of her short tenure in Congress (she was elected in 2016), she was qualified and prepared to be America's next commander in chief.

"What I believe the American people want in their next commander in chief is someone who has leadership skills, who has experience, who has integrity, and who will fight on their behalf," she said. "And on all those points, I feel very confident about my ability to lead. I feel very confident about my ability to listen and to work on behalf of the American public."

Harris has made a name for herself during Donald Trump's presidency as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee who always has a tough line of questioning for the president's nominees, be it Justice Brett Kavanaugh or his pick for attorney general, William Barr.

She last visited Iowa in October, ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. The senator will be back in the Hawkeye State Monday, according to the Des Moines Register, for a town hall in Des Moines hosted by CNN.

Though she didn't mention Trump by name in her Monday morning interview, Harris noted the partial government shutdown, caused by Trump's insistence on funding for a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and her belief in Americans' true priorities.

"Those folks don't want a wall, they want a paycheck," Harris said, of the 800,000 federal employees affected by the shutdown. "And as leaders, we need to be able to give them some certainty that we understand what their lives are like."

A December Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa Poll showed 49 percent of likely Democratic caucusgoers had a favorable view of Harris, but only 11 percent claimed her as their first or second choice candidate.

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