Why Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris as his vice president candidate
Almost fourteen months ago, before the pandemic put an end to traditional election campaigns, and before anyone had ever heard of Gordon Sondland, Lev Parnas, or any minor character who emerged from Donald Trump's impeachment saga, the American Democratic Party he had a problem: organizing a presidential debate with twenty candidates. He solved it by drawing lots: ten would have participated in the debate of the first evening, and ten in that of the second.
The only memorable moment came on the second night, when California Senator Kamala Harris attacked Joe Biden because as a senator in the 1970s he opposed a federal desegregation busing project, which involved using buses to drive all students to school, in schools even outside neighborhoods where only minorities lived, in an attempt to reduce racial segregation, and because for a period he collaborated with two segregationist senators.
Harris was not at the top of the polls at the time, but she was seen by many as a promising candidate: the one best able to reunite Obama's coalition of progressives, non-white voters and young people. According to experts Biden was ahead in the polls simply by recognizing his name: he said nonsense and always seemed half a step behind.
What people remember of the exchange between the two is Harris's phrase, "that child was me", as he spoke of the childhood of a woman who was traveling by bus to a school where whites were the majority. Few remember that Biden, after taking the blows, returned others, reminding the public that, unlike Harris, he was a public defender, and not a prosecutor (one of the sentences that garnered the most applause ). And afterwards she withstood the rhetorical confrontation: no small fact, given that in the debates Harris is sharp, effective and tireless.
In subsequent debates the two studied each other without ever really attacking each other again. The exchange apparently left no resentment behind: on August 11, Joe Biden announced that Harris will be his candidate for vice president in the November 3 election.
Strength points
The choice is both revolutionary and predictable. It is revolutionary, of course, because Harris, daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, is the first black woman and the first of Asian descent chosen for the national ticket of one of the two main US parties. She is also the first Democratic Party presidential or vice-presidential candidate to come from a state west of the Rocky Mountains. And she is only the fourth woman - after Geraldine Ferraro, Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton - to appear among the presidential candidates of one of the two parties.
But this choice was also predictable, because since Biden announced that he would choose a woman as deputy, Harris has always been among the favorites, first of all because she was the one with fewer defects. Elizabeth Warren is not much younger than the presidential candidate, and was in danger of losing Democrats a seat in the Senate (the governor of Massachusetts, the state of Warren, who would nominate her replacement pending a special election, is a Republican) . Stacey Abrams, the darling of progressives, was held as a top position as a deputy from Georgia. Karen Bass, who heads the US Congressional Black People Caucus, has been a fan of Fidel Castro in the past - a stumbling block for any candidate to win in Florida. And too many people who knew Susan Rice, Barack Obama's former national security advisor, have shown that they don't appreciate her at all.
