Kamala Harris makes history in run for the White House with Biden
WASHINGTON— Kamala Harris will be the first Black woman to run as part of a major-party ticket after presumed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden announced her as his running mate on Tuesday afternoon.
“I have the great honour to announce that I’ve picked @KamalaHarris — a fearless fighter for the little guy, and one of the country’s finest public servants — as my running mate,” Biden tweeted.
“Back when Kamala was (California’s) attorney general, she worked closely with (Biden’s late son) Beau. I watched as they took on the big banks, lifted up working people, and protected women and kids from abuse. I was proud then, and I’m proud now to have her as my partner in this campaign,” Biden wrote in a followup tweet.
Harris is the safe, predictable choice after months of speculation about a long and frequently shifting list of candidates that included former Obama adviser and United Nations ambassador Susan Rice, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Purple-Heart war veteran Sen. Tammy Duckworth, among others.
Harris, who ran against Biden for the presidential nomination before dropping out late last year and endorsing him in March, is the only Black woman in the Senate.
“Joe Biden nailed this decision,” former president Barack Obama said in a statement. “He’s underscored his own judgment and character.”
“I am ecstatic,” Rep. Jim Clyburn, the South Carolina legislator whose support for Biden was considered by many to be pivotal in his nomination, said on MSNBCshortly after the announcement.
“I just believe we are breaking ground here in such a way that every single person in this country, irrespective of gender or colour, is going to be very proud.”
Harris will be just the third woman in U.S. history to run as a vice-presidential candidate, after Republican Sarah Palin in 2008 and Democrat Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, and the fourth woman to appear on a major party ticket after Hillary Clinton ran against Donald Trump in 2016.
As the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father, she is also the first person of South Asian descent to ever run on a major presidential ticket.
At the age of 12, Harris moved to Montreal when her mother took a job at a local hospital and a teaching position at McGill University. She attended Westmount High School — the alma mater of Leonard Cohen, Stockwell Day, Mila Mulroney and architect Moshe Safdie — where former classmates told the Star in 2018 that she was a cheerful presence and a great dancer.
“In my opinion, she’d be a great president because she’s fair,” Dean Smith, now a Montreal basketball coach, told the Star of his one-time classmate.
Harris had long led speculation about potential Biden running mates because she is a centrist in the party — like Biden — who developed a large national profile during her own presidential primary run.
At 55, she is significantly younger than Biden, who would be the oldest president to ever assume office if he’s elected.
And, as Biden found out when she clashed with him during the primaries over his past position on school busing, she is a confident and lively debater.
That she is Black is an important attribute in an election year in which Black Lives Matter protests about racial injustice and police treatment of Black Americans have become a defining issue.
In that same context, her record as a prosecutor — both as the district attorney of San Francisco and attorney general of California — will cut both ways.
On the one hand, her record as a self-described “top cop” is unlikely to impress activists making calls to defund police. According to a recent New York Times report, during her time as a public lawyer, Harris did not vigorously prosecute police accused of misconduct. She has recently been making more direct appeals on the need to reform policing in response to the massive nationwide protest movement.
On the other had, her history as a prosecutor could somewhat blunt the avalanche of
“law-and-order” attacks from Trump on the Biden campaign.
(Trump, predictably, was having none of that argument. “She was my number-one pick” to run against, he told a news conference at the White House after Harris’s selection was announced. “We’ll see how she works out. She did very poorly in the primaries as you know.”)
The safe, predictable choice makes sense for Biden, who has positioned himself as the safe, predictable candidate who the party coalesced around after flirting with bold progressive campaigns from Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
Since he effectively tied up the nomination — which will be made official at the Democratic convention next week — Biden has largely played it safe and predictable too, avoiding the spotlight as the protests and the coronavirus crisis have overtaken Trump’s presidency.
So far, that strategy appears to be working: A Monmouth University poll released Tuesday showed Biden maintaining a10point lead over Trump in the presidential race, and an average of polls by fivethirtyeight.com shows Biden with an 8.3 per cent lead. Biden had no reason to make a big splash or stir things up with his VP pick.
So he played it safe and predictable. Biden is no doubt betting that in a year that so far has featured an impeachment trial, more than 160,000 deaths from coronavirus and civil unrest alongside the largest street protest movement in U.S. history, his lead represents a yearning for some measure of safety and predictability.