Harris gets personal, delivers civil rights blow to Biden
WASHINGTON (AP) — Kamala Harris spoke slowly but bluntly as she stared at Joe Biden, then began treating him as a hostile witness.
The former prosecutor turned California senator started by saying she didn’t think the former vice president was racist. But she criticized him for recently defending having worked with segregationists in the Senate and for once opposing mandatory busing of students to desegregated public schools.
Harris described a young girl in the 1970s who boarded such buses before dramatically offering, “That little girl was me.”
It was a powerful, searing line of attack against Biden, who served as vice president to the first black president. Biden entered back-to-back nights of Democratic presidential debates in Miami as the leading candidate. Harris showed promise but had not made much of a mark lately. That changed Thursday. That Harris and other Democratic presidential hopefuls would come out swinging against Biden was no surprise, and her verbal strike was hardly spontaneous. Moments after the exchange, her campaign tweeted a picture of a school-age Harris with pigtails, over the caption: “There was a little girl in California who was bused to school. That little girl was me.”
Aides to Harris later framed the confrontation as an extension of their candidate’s recent efforts to be more personal, coming after would-be supporters said they wanted to hear more of her backstory.
Still, the moment shook up the debate. In deeply personal tones, Harris hammered Biden for policy choices that she suggested betrayed the spirit of the civil rights movement, if not directly opposing all it stood for. She was relentless, exhibiting the controlled force of a practiced cross-examiner.
“Do you agree today that you were wrong to oppose busing in America?” Harris asked.
A visibly angry Biden responded that his record was mischaracterized. But he was left denying Harris’ comments on a technicality, saying he didn’t oppose public school busing, just it being ordered by the Department of Education — decrying federal intervention on the issue on behalf of local entities and states.