A passing of the torch on the VP line

When Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic vice presidential nomination on Wednesday, it was hailed as a victory for diversity and a forward-looking vision of America.

It could also be seen as the end of an era for people like Connecticut’s own Chris Dodd.

Dodd was the model of what the U.S. Senate has long represented. He served Connecticut for 35 years, first in the House and then until 2011 in the upper chamber. Dodd ran for president in 2008, and after leaving public service became a lobbyist. His father was a two-term senator.

This is the Senate of Joe Biden, and it’s no surprise the two long-serving Democrats became good friends. They look like what we picture a U.S. senator to be — a white-haired white man who has gone decades without doing anything other than serve in public office. That picture is changing, albeit slowly.

Harris’ story is a bit different. She’s the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, and at 55 is a generation removed from the two presidential contenders. From the day she was elected to the Senate in 2016, she was considered a presidential contender. Her campaign this year didn’t go as planned, but she did win the endorsement of some rising stars who themselves represent demographic change, including Connecticut’s Fifth District U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes.

Harris always made sense as a natural choice for Biden’s running mate, but it was a drawn-out process that led to her nomination. Chris Dodd was famously one of the reasons why it apparently almost didn’t happen.

As Politico reported, when Dodd, as a member of Biden’s vice presidential search committee, asked Harris about her attempt to go after Biden in an early presidential debate, her response was problematic — to Dodd, anyway.

“She laughed and said, ‘that’s politics.’ She had no remorse,” Dodd told a Biden supporter, who then told Politico on condition of anonymity.

This was considered a formidable obstacle for Harris to overcome. According to the reporting, Dodd wanted Biden to choose someone else because of that incident.

Biden, though, was smart not to listen. It hardly matters for electoral purposes who is picked to be vice president. Voters nearly always choose based on the top of the ticket.

But it’s important to remember the point Harris was trying to make in her debate against Biden, about his opposition to integration efforts in the 1970s. Hayes, in her endorsement of Harris, said the moment spoke to her personally.

“As a mother and a teacher, Senator Harris’ powerful recount of being part of the second class to be integrated in Berkeley was a defining moment for me,” Hayes wrote at the time. “In that moment, I knew exactly what she was talking about — she was talking about access to opportunity that would otherwise change the trajectory of her life. That resonated with me. That was me.”

Harris was making a point about the importance of integration, but she was also trying to win, and the way to do that is to take aim at the person leading the polls. That was Joe Biden. For Dodd, apparently, that was a grave sin, something she was supposed to have “remorse” about. As if anyone ever ran for president without doing everything they could to win.

The issues Harris raised in that debate are as present today as they were when she was a child, and can be seen in renewed efforts at a desegregation in places like Connecticut. Biden implicitly acknowledged as much in making his choice for vice president. He also showed he’s not afraid to team up with someone who will take him to task.

As for Dodd, he’s remembered in Connecticut mostly for ducking out of his last reelection campaign amid sinking polls and questions about his friends in the mortgage industry at a time when that business was toxic. But he did have his moments over the years, including championing the Family and Medical Leave Act and working to stop warrantless wiretapping.

But his time appears to have passed. And more than that, the country’s future looks a lot more like Kamala Harris than Chris Dodd. Give Biden credit for recognizing that.