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Kamala Harris

Four years ago, when most of the Democratic Party establishment stood firmly behind Hillary Rodham Clinton, Kamala D. Harris, then San Francisco’s district attorney, spent a winter week in Iowa stumping for Barack Obama.

When she ran for attorney general two years later, the mixed-race Harris (her mother is Indian, her father Jamaican-American) drew frequent comparisons to Obama, as a rare candidate who inspired young people and ethnic minorities often alienated from the political process. The PBS newscaster Gwen Ifill once referred to her as the “female Obama.”

“Like Obama, she represents the next generation of leadership that talks about issues in a new way,” said Steve Phillips, co-founder of Power PAC, which backed Obama with millions of dollars in 2008 and then spent nearly $400,000 to support Harris’s campaign for attorney general.

But since taking office as attorney general a year ago, Harris has clashed with the Obama administration over one of her signature issues: foreclosures and mortgage fraud.

In September, Harris walked away from settlement talks with the nation’s five largest mortgage servicers, saying the proposed deal to have them pay roughly $25 billion in restitution for mortgage abuses was too weak. She said the proposed settlement sought by the Obama administration asked California to “excuse conduct that has not been adequately investigated.”

Three and a half months later, she remains outside the talks. On Tuesday, she attended a meeting of 15 state attorneys general — including Joseph R. Biden III of Delaware and Eric Schneiderman of New York — intended to compare notes about legal options outside the settlement framework and to devise a tougher approach to the negotiations.

Her posture has generated praise from MoveOn.org and other liberal advocacy groups. Rick Jacobs, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Courage Campaign, said Harris had distinguished herself by meeting with troubled homeowners. “She is steely, fiery and passionate that people are not run over by banks,” Jacobs said.

In an interview, Geoff Greenwood, spokesman for Attorney General Tom Miller of Iowa, who is leading the multistate settlement negotiations, said Harris’s decision to walk out of the talks had “enabled us to secure” a mortgage refinancing plan for borrowers who owe more than their houses are worth, which “added several billion dollars to the deal.” But the additional concessions, aimed at bringing California back to the negotiating table, have not been enough for Harris, who continues to hold out.

“We would certainly welcome California’s participation in a settlement,” Greenwood said, “but if absolutely necessary we’re prepared to pursue a path to a settlement without California.”

Dustin Hobbs, spokesman for the California Mortgage Bankers Association, said that raised the possibility California borrowers “would get nothing.”

Harris’s supporters said her position, which raises the possibility that California would independently investigate and file lawsuits against the lenders outside any federal-state agreement, simply showed that Harris had proved to be a tough negotiator, while Obama is perceived as more conciliatory.

“The joke is that he’d wear Speedos to a strip poker party,” said Mark Buell, a San Francisco philanthropist who has headed the finance committee of each of Harris’s campaigns.

Adopting a negotiating strategy that is different from the Obama administration is likely to be difficult for Harris, Buell said, because her relationship to the president is so close . Her brother-in-law, Tony West, an Oakland lawyer, is an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department. But her supporters say Harris’s differences with the administration on mortgages do not signal a major rift.

“I know for a fact that the president and the attorney general have a good relationship,” said Representative Barbara Lee, a liberal Democrat from Oakland who, like Harris, was an early supporter of Obama.

Harris has been a strong supporter of Obama’s health care law. Within weeks of taking office, Harris filed an amicus brief in federal court defending it.

“That was huge,” Lee said.

This article also appears in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.