 Bret Hartman/TED/Flickr. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0Kamala Harris’ presidential nomination immediately reset Democrats’ relationships with US financial elites — if not the party’s approach to their businesses. Harris came up through California’s behind-the-scenes politics of relationships and big money, rather than President Joe Biden’s small-state retail politics. She spent her time in the White House cultivating Wall Street’s big Democratic donors like Centerview’s Blair Effron, a group that had only dutifully supported Biden. But there’s “genuine enthusiasm” for the new nominee, as Liz Hoffman reported. And her roots in California’s worlds of wealth and power are decades deep. A glance at the list of donors to her 2003 run for San Francisco city attorney reveals a remarkable network even then — the author Richard North Patterson, the future US congressman Ro Khanna, and Dana Walden, now co-chairman of Disney and a key Harris ally in Hollywood. The central figure in the concentric circles of wealth and power around the Democratic nominee also first gave money to her in 2003: Her name appeared then as Laurene Jobs, and she was then the relatively low-profile wife of Apple’s legendary and mercurial CEO. She was “mainly a contributor” to that campaign, a person involved in the 2003 campaign recalled. But the women grew close after Harris launched her 2010 campaign for California Attorney General. Powell Jobs, who had hired former Clinton official Stacey Rubin as a political adviser by then, hosted a fundraising luncheon for the candidate in Palo Alto in 2009, said Debbie Mesloh, who worked on that campaign. “It was pretty clear right away that they had an affinity for each other,” Mesloh said. | 
