The press is extolling California Senator Kamala Harris as the Next Big Thing on the U.S. political scene in assorted reports. They're calling her inevitable and the next Barack Obama.

Oh, spare us.

The latest and worst version of this Hollywood-grade build-up comes from U.S. News & World Report, in a big piece titled "The Inevitability of Kamala Harris," carrying faint echos of the progressive claims of the "inevitability" of their version of "progress."

She may well be the person the Democrats pick as their nominee for president, but she's hardly a shoe-in for the presidency, particularly in the age of Trump.

She's billed as someone young and fresh in a party dominated by gerontocrats, but her act is actually pretty old.

What does she offer for starters?

She's a woman. And she's black.

"With an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, Harris strikes some observers as a California version of Barack Obama," the Los Angeles Times wrote in October 2004, during Harris' first year of elected office and a month before Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate.

(U.S. News carries on several paragraphs dwelling on this detail.)

Just empty identity politics as a substitute for ideas, on the grounds that she isn't an individual, but someone who 'represents.' That logic presumptuously assumes that all women and black people all have the exact same interests. We all want the same abortion and affirmative action privileges, so the thinking goes. And a woman who happens to be black will, robotlike, follow that template precisely and all will be well. Not a word out there about differing interests, such as the right to not have to finance abortions, or the problem of seeing African and Caribbean immigrants and their children take all the affirmative action slots while Black Americans are stuck in lousy union-controlled public schools and left out. All it takes is a woman who can project herself as black in a two-fer because Democrats know what we want. Throw us another abortion and take care of the 'woman' issue, will you?

In the post-Hillary Clinton, post-Obama-era, been there, done that.

Clinton was billed as just that 'Vote for me, I'm a woman' idea and voters rejected her because she was out of touch on serious things that mattered to them, such as jobs, the nightmare of Obamacare, bad schools, and economic growth.

Obama was billed as modern and multiracial, heralding a new era of racial healing and globalization - and we got none of that on his watch as president. Like Harris, he too was a one-term Senator with no accomplishments to speak of, coming from a far left urban center.

Voters are expected to buy it a second time?

Beyond the identity package, Harris actually carries quite a bit of baggage from her stint in California politics.

She served as San Francisco's District Attorney and then went on to become California's Attorney General. While in office, she showed a lot about how she governs.

Glenn Reynolds, of Instapundit, shows some of her worst record in her political start here:

I remember when she was defending fake confessions:

What prosecuting attorney Robert Murray did was produce a translated transcript of the defendant’s interrogation to which he had added a fraudulent confession. The defense attorney got a copy of the audio tape of the interrogation, but it “ended abruptly.” Eventually, Murray admitted to falsifying the transcript, presumably in the hopes of either coercing a plea deal, or ensuring a victory at trial.

When the trial judge found out, charges against the defendant were dismissed. Incredibly, the State of California, via Attorney General Kamala Harris, decided to appeal the case. The state’s key argument: That putting a fake confession in the transcript wasn’t “outrageous” because it didn’t involve physical brutality, like chaining someone to a radiator and beating him with a hose.

Well, no. It just involved an officer of the court knowingly producing a fraudulent document in order to secure an illicit advantage. If Harris really thinks that knowingly producing a fraudulent document to secure an illicit advantage isn’t “outrageous,” then perhaps she slept through her legal ethics courses.

She also comes off as a woman who slept her way to the top, with U.S. News reporting that she "dated" the notorious Willie Brown, swamp creature extraordinaire of San Francisco politics in the 1990s. After that, Brown used his political capital to build her up in her quest for higher offices.

Is that really what voters are looking for?

Her campaign approach is something that turns off voters, too.

As I wrote last October, she's a regular on the Democrats' Beautiful People fundraising circuit.

California's wunderkind Democratic Senator, Kamala Harris, is loading up for a presidential run. According to the Washington Free Beacon, she's doubled her campaign spending on the media company that first raised Bernie Sanders' profile with voters, and gone all in on hiring Hillary Clinton's leftover campaign staffers to a newly rented office in Washington, D.C. She's also made the rubber chicken circuit in the tony Hamptons in search of big dollar donors among the rich liberals, the kind who previously bankrolled Clinton's campaign.

Ain't making the elite circles fun?

Here's another bit of baggage:

San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris' office on Monday defended allowing about a half dozen first-time drug offenders to clear their records by going through a job-training program, even after prosecutors learned they were deportable as undocumented immigrants.

But Harris' aides said they have since made changes in the program that would prevent a recurrence of instances in which illegal immigrants got their criminal records cleared by going through the Back on Track jobs program, which trains offenders for jobs that undocumented immigrants legally would be prevented from holding.

Here's one detail of that slovenly policy from the Los Angeles Times, explaining why she had to backtrack:

In 2008, convicted cocaine dealer Alexander Izaguirre avoided prison after being accepted into the program. Izaguirre later stole a woman's purse and then drove into her with an SUV, fracturing her skull.