USA TODAY International Edition
Biden needs Harris or Demings as VP
Make it a priority to fight racism in policing and life
Joe Biden has a profound opportunity, if he chooses to take it. It starts with picking Sen. Kamala Harris or Rep. Val Demings as his running mate.
Biden, Harris and Demings all have come under criticism for overly tough or insufficiently reformist approaches to law enforcement and criminal justice in their earlier respective roles as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, prosecutor and police chief. With George Floyd dead in Minneapolis, American cities burning and President Donald Trump fanning the flames, the historic moment has now rushed to meet them.
Harris is the daughter of immigrants, a Jamaican economist and an Indian breast cancer researcher. She grew up in a modest neighborhood and, as she told Biden in an attack on his 1970s anti- busing position, was bused to a better school in a wealthier, whiter neighborhood. The confrontation shocked Biden and backfired on Harris, who later dropped out of the Democratic presidential race and endorsed him. But that fearless engagement would be an advantage against a GOP ticket.
Demings is a descendant of slaves, the daughter of a maid and a janitor, the last of seven children and the first in her family to go to college. She became a social worker, then a night patrol officer, then chief of police, then a member of Congress and an impeachment manager in Trump’s Senate trial. Like Harris, she would take the fight to Republicans. “This president time and time again demonstrates that he is totally unfit for the office that he holds,” Demings said when asked about Trump’s response to the Floyd killing.
Changing with the country
Biden, Harris and Demings all have said in recent years that they own guns. And all three have changed as cellphones and social media have documented tragic inequities in policing and criminal justice. Biden was part of the Obama administration drive to release prisoners sentenced under harsh and discriminatory drug laws. He says that as president, he’d end mandatory minimum sentences and the disparity between federal crack and powder cocaine sentences. He’d also restore Justice Department leadership to “root out unconstitutional or unlawful policing.”
Harris has a lengthy reform proposal from her presidential campaign that covers much of the same ground. And Demings just wrote an op- ed reminding her “brothers and sisters in blue” that they need trust to function. She wants a national review of hiring standards and practices, diversity, training and use- of- force policies.
In part because of her record as San Francisco prosecutor and California attorney general, but also because Biden was so popular with African American voters, Harris had trouble winning black support in the 2020 primaries. Demings has some of the same potential liabilities in the criminal justice area, and is untested nationally.
Law- and- order credentials
But these problems might be overblown. Serving on juries in Washington, D. C., years ago, my husband was the wimpy white liberal holdout wondering whether there was guilt beyond a doubt. I was the liberal white wimp obsessing over sloppy police work (“The report said the shirt was white but in the photo it’s purple”). The black women on our juries rolled their eyes and lectured us on our naivete. They would no doubt agree that black lives matter, but they also wanted safer neighborhoods — a point both Demings and Harris have made.
Would a black woman on the Democratic ticket scare white voters? Or would this pair’s lawand- order credentials be a reassuring neutralizer? Would those credentials turn off black voters, or would the choice of Harris or Demings turn them out? It’s impossible to say.
What’s indisputable, however, is that unlikely people can make great leaps forward. There’s a reason “Nixon to China” is a cliché. Richard Nixon was notoriously anti- communist — yet as president, his 1972 trip to China put the two nations on the road to normalized relations.
A more recent example is Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat nearly forced to resign last year after the revelation that racist photos had appeared on his medical school yearbook page. He pledged to reduce racial inequality in health care, housing and education and began to deliver almost immediately. This year, he signed new laws to reform criminal justice, expand access to voting, remove racist language from Virginia laws and allow localities to remove Confederate statues.
In 2009, President Barack Obama signaled the importance of recession recovery by installing Biden to oversee $ 800 billion in recovery funds. Now, with health and economic disparities laid bare by the coronavirus pandemic, punctuated by the searing deaths of black people at the hands of cops and a former cop, it’s time to finally put racism at the top of the agenda; to finally begin to repair the enduring damage wrought by America’s original sin.
Biden should run with one of these women and put her in charge of this historic project. It is sorely needed — not just to right racial wrongs, but also to restore the character of a country.