Kamala Harris: How Kamala Harris Can Benefit Or Harm Joe Biden's Run For The White House
Sometimes the most obvious choice is for a reason.
Kamala Harris was one of the favorites to become Joe Biden's running mate for the White House from the moment he announced in March that he was choosing a woman.
Harris was a safe and practical option.
And now she is also in a position to become her natural heir in the Democratic Party: either four years from now because Biden loses the election this November, or because she wins and does not run for reelection in 2024; or in eight years if Biden wins and serves two terms.
That's why perhaps there seemed to be so many attempts to lower her ego or nurture other candidates in the past month.
Kamala Devi Harris
- She was born on October 10, 1964, in Oakland, California.
- Daughter of immigrants: her mother was born in India and her father in Jamaica.
- She was a San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general, the first black and Asian-American woman to do so.
- She is a senator for the state of California.
- She ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, but withdrew due to lack of support.
- Current residence: between Los Angeles and Washington.
This was, in fact, the first battle for the future Democratic presidential nomination and Harris - whose ambitions are clear - has stepped into the competition.
But evaluating future Democratic nominees is a battle for another day. The pressing question for the party right now is how Harris can help Biden win the White House.
Here are three strengths he brings to the candidacy and perhaps some concerns Democrats may have that could benefit Donald Trump.
Strengths
1- Diversity
To put it bluntly, the current Democratic Party is nothing like Joe Biden.
The training is young and ethnically diverse.
It was an increasingly obvious question that the presumptive vice presidential candidate had to be someone young and, well, less white to have a presidential formula that reflected the people who are going to vote for her.
Harris, whose father was born in Jamaica and her mother immigrated to the United States from India, meets this requirement perfectly.
She has become both the first black woman and the first Asian-American to stand in a major party presidential bid.
And even though she's not exactly young at 55, compared to Bien's 77, Harris is absolutely lively.
On Tuesday afternoon, before she was announced as Biden's pick, Harris tweeted about the need for diversity in the party's leadership positions.
"Black and women of color have been underrepresented in elected office, and in November we have an opportunity to change that," she wrote.
It turns out that Harris could be directly responsible for part of that change.
2- Aggression
One of the traditional roles of a vice president as a running mate is to "get dirty" with the opposition.
While the person leading the bid tends to avoid exhausting confrontations, "number two" breaks her knuckles with the opposition.
For example, in 2008, Sarah Palin, the presidential running mate of John McCain (Republican), more than lived up to her nickname, Sarah "the barracuda."
And if this is a task that falls to Harris, her track record suggests that she will not disappoint.
Biden no doubt recalls that Harris went against him during the first Democratic primary debate in July 2019, criticizing his opposition to busing, public school transportation and distribution schemes that tried to correct segregation in the 1970s.
Harris has also proven to be an aggressive and determined interrogator during her tenure in the US Senate.
Donald Trump clearly remembers it: on Tuesday, she said she thought Harris was "extraordinarily unpleasant" to her second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh.
Trump may not like it, but "nasty" may be precisely what Biden is looking for in this election.
3- Stability
One of the things that politicians who have competed in the race for national public office have repeated over and over again is that it is impossible to understand the intense pressure that campaigns create until one has been involved in one of them.
Although Harris's bid for the White House in 2020 was unsuccessful and she withdrew before most of her competitors, it served to feel the pressure of being under such scrutiny.
When she launched her campaign in front of tens of thousands of supporters in January 2019, Harris was treated as a top-tier presidential candidate.
For a time in July, after his first strong participation in the debate, he rose to the top of the polls.
Harris has been through the fire, at least for a while, and he knows what it's all about. If I had serious - and large - dead hidden in the closet, they would have come to light by now.
Given that she has already pursued the presidency, it is not impossible for many Americans to envision her as president one day.
The California senator may not have been the most dynamic candidate in the 2019 Democratic primary campaign, and she was certainly not nearly the most successful, but right now she is notorious.
And, for Biden, who leads the polls, the fewer surprises during the campaign for the White House, the better.
Inconveniences
1- "Harris is a cop"
Harris has the longest track record in law and order of almost any other contender for the vice president's job.
Given the recent spate of protests against police brutality and allegations of institutional racism in law enforcement, Harris's résumé may give some progressives within the Democratic Party food for thought.
It certainly did so during Harris's presidential campaign, when the phrase "Harris is a cop" became a mocking indictment against the California senator on more than one occasion.
As a San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general, Harris sided with the police against suspects, even in cases where they may have received a wrongful conviction.
Although he has voiced his personal opposition to the death penalty, Harris has supported its use while in power.
Being a tough crime fighter can be an attractive attribute to more conservative and independent voters in presidential elections, but if that support comes at the cost of enthusiasm on the left over the Biden-Harris candidacy, then it may not have a positive impact.
Since the death of George Floyd, Harris has been vocal in advocating for reform of the police system, which has earned him the praise of some progressives. But it can be said with certainty that they still harbor doubts.
2- Changing values
At the beginning of the article, she mentioned Harris's presidential campaign as a point in her favor.
But there is also another side to the coin. Her campaign, although it started with enthusiasm and had its highlights, also showed serious flaws, some of them related to the candidate herself.
Although Harris has a fairly moderate record as a senator and attorney general, she tried to move to the left during the campaign.
She opted for free higher education, the Green New Deal plan against climate change and, for example, was in favor of a universal health system, but she never sounded completely convinced about it.
In particular, Harris stumbled upon the question of whether private health insurance should be banned, an extreme welcomed by progressives but scandalized by many moderates.
"Let's get rid of all that," he said in an apparently simplistic way during an interview. "Let's go forward."
In these times, the death sentence for politicians is to appear too political: to be perceived as willing to change your values and beliefs based on what the voters want.
Sincerity - or at least the appearance of it - is a virtue voters reward, and part of the reasons Donald Trump became president.
Although his followers did not always agree with him, they felt that he spoke what he thought.
Harris's shift from moderate to more left-wing, and now back to moderation, may perhaps leave some voters confused about what her values really are.
Or if it does.
