Joe Biden selected California Sen. Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential running mate. If Biden wins the general election in November, Harris could make history thrice as the first female, Black woman and Asian American to hold the nation’s No. 2 spot in American history.
Biden, 77, the presumptive presidential nominee for the Democratic Party, made the announcement on his website on the afternoon of Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2020.
Harris, 55, once again makes a complete circle in a highly-decorated and illustrious career. She now symbolically returns to Washington where she attended college at historic Howard University and then later interned in the same office where she now serves as a senator.
Biden rationalizes his decision of selecting Harris over a spectacular pool of high-profile and charismatic candidates who were all women.
“You make a lot of important decisions as president. But the first one is who you select to be your Vice President. I’ve decided that Kamala Harris is the best person to help me take this fight to Donald Trump and Mike Pence and then to lead this nation starting in January 2021,” Biden penned in an email from his campaign headquarters according to NBC News.
Harris continues her upward trajectory in an enviable career arch that includes serving as a district attorney in San Francisco and then being elected as the California attorney general. But her record of incarcerating Black men in California remains a stone in the shoe of many in the Black electorate.
Biden’s selection of Harris surprises some of his supporters who remember the venom by which Harris attacked him, especially given how long of a relationship she has had with the Biden family. Harris was attorney general in the Golden State at the same time as Biden’s son, Beau Biden, served the same position in Deleware. The two communicated often, if not daily.
Therefore, when Harris came after Biden on his dubious history of working on busing and with segregationists during Jim Crowism, the Biden family was taken aback.
“I was prepared for them to come after me, but I wasn’t prepared for the person coming at me the way she came at me. She knew Beau, she knows me,” Biden said in an interview, according to NBC News.
And this is why the Biden-Harris pairing evokes the oft-regurgitated truism that “politics makes for strange bedfellows.”
The question now is, can the Biden and Harris generate enough support to evict the current White House occupants?
