Dear Kamala Harris, how the heck do you walk on those spiky high heels?

I can’t be the only one who wonders by what occult power you can keep your balance and not break an ankle or twist your back out of whack while strutting your stuff in such excruciating footwear on the highest-stakes stage in the world.

I sent you $50 when you were running for president in 2020. You folded your campaign before it ever got off the ground, but you sent me a bumper sticker that I stuck on the back of my Subaru well into your years as vice president. It was a one-word message: KAMALA.

Now that you’re looking like the Democratic nominee for president, four years later with a lot of experience in and around the White House, is it disrespectful to call you by your first name? Harris sounds rather generic, but Kamala carries a note of distinction, a uniqueness that elevates your character.

To me you’ll always be a Bay Area homegirl, familiar, liberal, and who knows, maybe that will doom your chances with middle-of-the-road Americans. But it’s also possible that, like Barack Obama before you, you will captivate the imagination of multicultural young people who never would’ve bothered to vote for Biden.

If you prove tough enough in the course of the campaign to shake off the attacks of the Trumplicans and prosecute your case against the serial sexual abuser and chronic fraudster while making your case that you’re ready to take charge, you may well win over a critical mass of voters and end up as president — yet another breakthrough in your ceiling-smashing career.

So much of our national politics, like high school politics, is about personality, and your combination of self-confidence and style, as well as your funny laugh, may count as much as any of your policy proposals. You have the forceful rigor of a prosecutor and the natural, businesslike, no-nonsense charm and low-key charisma of a high-powered big-league operator. I look forward to seeing how you hold up under the onslaught of mud from the far right; if you’re not rattled, I think you will make a favorable impression on the undecided when they compare you to the creep you’re running against.

The sheer meanness of your opponent and his running mate and their imitators is repulsive, and the racism and woman-hatred fueling and befouling their rhetoric is likely to turn a lot of people off.

The hysteria of their reaction to the surge in enthusiasm for your candidacy is evidence of a panic attack they don’t know how to control. We’ll see if divine intervention can save the ex-president’s bacon in a face-to-face encounter on the debate stage with someone who’s not intimidated by his aggression.

If his incoherence and cognitive deficits and terrible manners are exposed in a way that can’t be unseen — like Joe Biden’s fatal performance in June — will the big man recover, or will he just get meaner and crueler and crazier as he’s backed into a corner by his own karma?

Mostly in the background for the last four years, you haven’t had a chance to establish a public profile of your own, but we’ll soon find out who you really are and what you’re made of. The speed with which you organized your team to lock up the nomination is a sign of skillful, efficient leadership, and I believe you’ll be able to move and mobilize a healthy swath of the population and lift their spirits — make people feel that something good is possible — and the kind of excitement you’ve sparked already has a happier vibe than vengeance.

So, Kamala — Ms. President soon, I hope — I wish you much strength, sharp wits, tons of campaign cash and a cool head in these next months of what you know will be a dirty fight. You have a lot of people in your corner, and a lot on the line, and a great occasion to rise to.

Stephen Kessler is a Santa Cruz writer and a regular Herald contributor. To read more of his work visit www.stephenkessler.com