Kamala’s next goal: get towork retrieving the soul of America
‘WE DID it, we did it, Joe,’ squealed vice president-elect Kamala Harris yesterday as she congratulated Joe Biden on his victory.
The video of the 56-year-old – which showed her in running gear embracing her husband Douglas Emhoff – contrasts sharply with her comments 18 months ago which threatened to derail Mr Biden’s bid for the White House.
In a debate involving Democrats vying for their party’s nomination to take on Donald Trump, Ms Harris asked to speak about ‘the issue of race’ and proceeded to accuse Mr Biden of making ‘very hurtful’ comments about having worked with two segregationist senators.
‘I do not believe you are a racist,’ she said. ‘But it is personal.’
He denied her claim but his support slumped while hers soared.
Now the pair will make history together – he as the oldest ever president, she as both the first female and the first black and Asian American to be vice president.
Ms Harris’s mother was from India and her father was Jamaican. After they divorced, she was raised by her Hindu single mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a cancer researcher and civil rights activist.
‘My mother used to have a saying, and she would say to me, “Kamala, you may be the first to do many things, but make sure you’re not the last,” ’ Ms Harris recalled last year.
Given Mr Biden’s age, it is thought likely she will contest the next presidential election for the Democrats in 2024.
A lawyer and former attorney general of California, she initially soared through a crowded field of Democratic candidates, only to drop out when her early gains faded.
It was therefore a surprise when Mr Biden chose her to take on Mr Trump and his running mate Vice President Mike Pence. In a volte-face, Ms Harris tweeted: ‘Joe Biden can unify the American people because he’s spent his life fighting for us.’
Mr Trump branded Ms Harris a radical left-wing socialist – and she has taken a more moderate stance in recent months. She has, for example, been notably muted on calls by Black Lives Matter activists to defund police departments, arguing instead there should be ‘reform’ instead.
Last year, she backed a Senate bill to legalise cannabis across America, adding: ‘Times have changed – marijuana should not be a crime.’
It represented a U-turn from her time as attorney general when she took a hardline stance on the drug, which critics said disproportionately affected ethnic minority communities.
Ms Harris has also co-sponsored bills calling for tougher gun control measures and ‘Medicare for All’ to establish a US health system open to everyone.
While a rising star in Democratic politics for the past two decades, she was only elected to the Senate in 2016 – but has never shied away from her ambition.
‘My mother always used to say, “Don’t just sit around and complain about things. Do something”,’ she tweeted after Mr Biden announced that he had chosen her as his running mate. ‘I dearly wish she were here with us this week.’
Her mother came to the US in the early 1960s to attend the University of California, Berkeley, and met Ms Harris’s father Donald, an economics professor, at a civil rights protest.
They married, but then divorced in 1971.
Her childhood included a spell in Canada when her mother took a job teaching in Montreal before th the family returned to California.
Ms Harris went to Howard University, one of the top black colleges in America, and earned her law degree at the University of California.
She became the district attorney for San Francisco in 2003, before being elected the first woman and the first black person to serve as California’s attorney general.
Ms Harris describes herself simply as ‘an American’. In an interview with The Washington Post, she argued politicians should not have to fit into compartments because of their colour or background.
‘My point was: I am who I am. I’m good with it,’ she said. She married Mr Emhoff, a lawyer, in 2014 and became stepmother to his two children from a previous marriage.
In an interview with Elle magazine last year, she said: ‘When Doug and I got married, Cole, Ella and I agreed that we didn’t like the term “stepmom”. Instead they came up with the name “Momala”.’
Yesterday, Ms Harris tweeted a video showing Americans from diverse backgrounds to the the song ‘America, the Beautiful’ by Ray Charles.
‘This election is about so much more than Joe Biden or me,’ she wrote. ‘It’s about the soul of America and our willingness to fight for it. We have a lot of work ahead of us. Let’s get started.’
‘She backed marijuana – and is tough on guns’