The Democratic Presidential Ticket 2020: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris, US Senator from California, has been chosen by Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden as his Vice Presidential running mate.

Harris is a former San Francisco District Attorney and California Attorney General. Elected to the Senate in 2016, she made her mark as a tough, smart proponent on issues such as racial justice and interrogator of Donald Trump’s nominees such as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Attorney Generals Jeff Sessions and William Barr, and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

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If Biden wins in November, Harris will be the first Black woman and first person of Indian descent to hold the Vice Presidency. Her mother Shyamala Gopalan, was a breast-cancer scientist emigrated from Tamil Nadu, India in 1960 to earn her Ph.D. in endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley, and her father Donald Harris is a Stanford University emeritus professor of economics who emigrated from Jamaica in 1961 for graduate study at Berkeley.

She surged early in the Presidential campaign last autumn, challenging Biden in debate over her record on racial issues, before stalling and leaving the race in December.

Harris was selected after an extensive process of vetting and interviews by the Biden campaign, which pledged this spring to choose a woman as Vice President. Others considered included Reps. Val Demings and Karen Bass; Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Elizabeth Warren; former National Security Advisor Susan Rice; former Rep. Stacey Abrams; and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

The Biden campaign circulated an image of the former Vice President inviting Harris via a video call to join the ticket.

Biden called Harris “a fearless fighter for the little guy, and one of the country’s finest public servants”. He said he first knew her as a colleague of his son Beau, a former Delaware attorney general who died in 2015.

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.

“A Good Day for Our Country”

In a sign of a choice bridging the centrist and progressive wings of the Democratic Party, enthusiastic support for Harris immediately circulated on social media.

Sen. Warren wrote:

I’ve known Kamala Harris for a long time —– from when she took on Wall Street during the financial crisis as attorney general to working for the people every day as a United States senator.

[She] will be a great partner to Joe Biden in making our government a powerful force for good in the fight for social, racial, and economic justice.

Presidential candidates Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Julian Castro, Andrew Yang, and Mike Bloomberg joined the praise. Cory Booker enthused: “I’m proud to call Kamala Harris my dear friend and sister — and next year, I’ll be even more proud to call her our Vice President.

And Mary Trump, Donald Trump’s niece, added her endorsement: “We are going to take our country back!!!”

The Trump campaign struggled in its initial response, with the contradictory blast of Harris as both a “radical” and a too-tough prosecutor who angered Black Americans.

At his daily White House briefing, purportedly about a Coronavirus pandemic which has killed almost 165,000 Americans, Trump railed about “leftwing anarchists” and rioting in “Democrat-controlled cities”.

Mispronouncing Harris’s first name, Trump derided her as “nasty” and claimed that he wanted her as a campaign target: “She was my Number 1 draft pick.”

He then spun off into wild falsehoods: “The fact is, we caught Joe Biden, President Obama the whole group…we caught them spying on our campaign [in 2016]. This was an illegal act. This was the highest level of treason.”