So will she be the first woman President?
He’D promised it would be a woman and, at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement has his party in its grip, there’d have been a huge row if it hadn’t been a black woman, too.
California senator Kamala Harris – daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, and Joe Biden’s choice as Democratic running mate in the epic battle to unseat Donald Trump this November – is both.
How much more this is than a carefully calibrated box-ticking exercise, and an attempt to inject a little excitement into an unexciting candidacy is a matter of some importance. For while Harris is not only the first black or Indian-American woman to be nominated by one of the major parties, there’s a very good chance she may also soon be the first woman President.
For all the hoo-ha that surrounds the choice of a vice presidential candidate, the decision is usually not that big a deal. A particularly exotic pick can provide a bit of drama – remember the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin? But generally, a White House contender chooses a VP who can help him win extra votes in a crucial battleground state. (Biden doesn’t need any help winning solidly Democrat California but he does need help with ethnic minority and women voters).
This time, however, many believe it could be very different. Turning 78 in November, Biden – who is ahead of a floundering Trump in the polls – would be by far the oldest person to be sworn in as president.
even before the coronavirus pandemic sent him scuttling down to his basement, his health – particularly his mental faculties – prompted speculation that he might not last even a single term in the White House. If he couldn’t serve a full term – and a major poll this week found that 59 per cent of Americans think that ‘likely’ – his VP would automatically become president.
VOTeRS know what they’re getting with Biden, Barack Obama’s genial but gaffe-prone VP, but 55-year-old Harris is a different matter. She has been described as ‘almost unnaturally self-controlled’ (certainly a change from the current president) which has made finding out what she actually believes even harder.
Republicans say she’s a Leftwinger who will bring in the progressives’ extreme agenda, while Left-wingers fear she’ll just defend the status quo, complaining that, as a former California attorney general, she was too focused on throwing people in prison rather than
improving their lives. The Trump election campaign, never prone to mincing its words, immediately dismissed her as a ‘phony’ who has ‘abandoned her own morals in an attempt to appease the socialist mob seeking to destroy America’. Her selection, it warned voters, made Biden a ‘Trojan horse for the radical Left’s extreme agenda’.
The Biden team will no doubt be hoping that the predictable criticism from both sides will convince voters that they’ve got it about right in a choice that has been widely described as ‘safe’.
But is it? What a President Harris might be like is harder to envisage than it would be for her Democrat rivals, whether it’s radicals Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, or the moderate Biden.
She has positioned herself as somewhere in between, a pragmatic reformer who wants to address America’s glaring inequality and unfairness, but not by pulling the economy apart. However, in trying to appeal to both Leftwingers and moderates, she’s been accused of lacking conviction. The daughter of immigrant academics (her Jamaican father is an economist, her south Indian mother a cancer researcher), her impecunious parents split up when she was seven and her father – who claims to be descended from a Northern Irish plantation owner – had little involvement in her upbringing.
Raised largely in Berkeley, California, and Quebec, Kamala – pronounced ‘Comma-la’ – became a prosecuting lawyer and rose swiftly, becoming district attorney in San Francisco, then the state’s attorney general and, in 2017, the second ever black woman US senator. The media started calling her ‘the female Obama’ some years ago.
As you’d expect of a seasoned prosecutor, she is a strong debater – unlike Joe Biden.
In Congress, she first drew national attention grilling various Trump nominees with a penetrating style and deceptive bright smile that has been compared to ‘the mum that knows exactly what’s going on and you’re all in trouble’. She’s clearly highly ambitious and self-confident, not to mention telegenic (Obama once got into trouble for calling her ‘by far the best-looking attorney general in the country’) so it was little surprise she would stand as president in the 2020 battle.
SHE showed early promise in the televised debates – ironically, she was particularly hard on Biden. She further soured their relationship when she said she believed the women who accused Biden of inappropriate touching.
The Biden campaign team now insists they actually get along well, noting that Harris became friends with his late son, Beau, when he was Delaware’s Attorney General.
She backs cutting taxes for the less affluent, making lynching a federal crime and reforming the police – all policies that appeal to Left-wing ‘progressives’.
And yet, she was vague on key issues such as healthcare reform, and unable to shake off her decidedly un-progressive past during ten years as California’s ‘top cop’.
Running out of money, Harris pulled out of the nomination battle last year even before the first votes were cast.
When she later endorsed Biden for president, she was asked how she could so easily come around to a rival she had previously monstered. ‘It was a debate,’ she said – a cynical reply that only encouraged Left-wing sceptics who say she is a political weathervane.
Her supporters counter that she’s simply not driven by ideology. ‘Policy has to be relevant,’ Harris said last year. ‘That’s my guiding principle: Is it relevant? Not, “Is it a beautiful sonnet?”.’
So while, in California, she pushed a seemingly conservative plan to punish parents for their children’s truancy, she also pleased liberals by calling for non-violent, first-time drug offenders to avoid prison by getting a high school diploma. ‘She is not somebody who can easily be pigeonholed,’ says her former campaign manager Brian Brokaw.
Taylor Swift, Whoopi Goldberg and Halle Berry led the predictable Hollywood cheering yesterday while Barack Obama said Biden had ‘nailed this decision’. But BLM activists claimed the choice was showing them ‘the middle finger’.
Harris has tried hard to soften the hard, illiberal image she earned in California. When, last year, a radio host asked if she supported legalising marijuana, she replied laughing: ‘Half my family’s from Jamaica – are you kidding me?’
Her father, Donald, was furious, accusing her of trading in ‘fraudulent stereotype’ of Jamaicans.
AFTER spending her adult life focused on her work, Harris belatedly married in 2014. Her husband Doug is a Jewish corporate lawyer and she is stepmother of two children, Ella and Cole who are – according to the official biography – her ‘endless source of love and pure joy’.
Acknowledging the importance of a White House incumbent having a family, longtime Harris supporter claimed that, as soon as she married, ‘I knew she was running for president’.
Her past love life may provide one area for the Republicans’ attack dogs to wound her. As a young prosecutor, she went out with Willie Brown, a powerful, controversial and married, black California politician almost the same age as her father.
Brown – once named one of the world’s ten sexiest men by Playgirl magazine – has twice been investigated by the FBI for corruption although never charged. He mentored Harris, appointing her to two state commissions posts and encouraging her political ambitions.
However, Brown has said that Harris later made it clear that, despite their relationship, she would charge him if he ‘so much as jaywalked’ while she was San Francisco’s district attorney.
Left-wingers gripe that she can hardly claim to be a progressive reformer after so many years coming down hard on crime, but after a summer in which US cities have been gripped by violence and looting ordinary voters may be yearning (even if they dare not say so) for a politician who is tough on law and order.
In fact, pundits believe Republicans will have their work cut out making too much political capital out of her selection.
While she’s clearly to the Left of Biden, (which among Democrats, isn’t hard), she’s far from the wildeyed communist they would have been hoping for.
Suburban swing voters are unlikely to have sleepless nights worrying about California’s former ‘top cop’ coming to destroy their America.