US Presidential Election: Biden Chooses Harris As Running Mate
The presidential candidate on the ticket of the Democratic Party, Joe Biden on Tuesday named Kamala Harris, a black US Senator from California, as his VP choice, ending a months-long search for a Democratic partner to challenge the incumbent, President Donald Trump in November.
He tweeted, “I have the great honor to announce that I’ve picked @KamalaHarris — a fearless fighter for the little guy, and one of the country’s finest public servants — as my running mate,” Biden, 77.
His team stated that the two Democrats will deliver remarks on Wednesday in Wilmington, Delaware as they kick off their campaign to defeat the Republican candidate, Donald Trump.
the 55-year-old Harris now seeking to become the first female vice president of the United States, was the first black attorney general of California, the first woman to hold the post, and the first woman of South Asian heritage to be elected to the US Senate.
Harris has been a trailblazer all her life and with the 77-year-Biden expected to serve a single term if elected, she would be favored to win the Democratic presidential nomination four years from now.
“Senator Harris is a tenacious and trailblazing leader who will make a great partner on the campaign trail,” said Susan Rice, who served as national security advisor under president Barack Obama and was also under consideration to be Biden’s running mate.
Harris launched her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination on Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday in January 2019 at an event attended by 20,000 people in Oakland.
She clashed with Biden during the first Democratic debate, chiding the former senator over his opposition to 1970s busing programs that forced integration of segregated schools.
“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her into public school, and she was bused to school every day,” she said. “And that little girl was me.”
Upon ending her White House run and endorsing Biden, Harris has stepped up her criticism of President Donald Trump on a number of issues ranging from his handling of the COVID-19 outbreak to race to immigration. she has tweeted recently that, “Trump’s repeated racist rhetoric tries to place blame for his corona virus failures on anyone but himself, It’s dangerous and it’s wrong and has real life consequences for Asian Americans and Asian immigrants.”
Anecdotal information about her reveals that Kamala was born on October 20, 1964 in Oakland, California to Donald Harris her father, an economics professor and her mother Shyamala Gopalan, a breast cancer researcher. Her parents separated when Kamala was about five years old and she and her sister Maya were raised by her mother, who died in 2009.
She earned her undergraduate degree at the historic Howard University in Washington and is a proud member of “Alpha Kappa Alpha,” the oldest African-American sorority.
She earned her law degree from the University of California, Hastings College of Law, became a prosecutor and served two terms as a district attorney in San Francisco.
She was elected attorney general of California in 2010 and re-elected in 2014, the same year she married Douglas Emhoff, a lawyer with two children from a previous marriage.
As attorney general, Harris developed a working relationship with Biden’s late son Beau, who held the same position in the state of Delaware. Beau Biden died of cancer in 2015.
Her failure, however, to enact bold criminal justice reforms while attorney general dogged her presidential campaign and did not sit well with many black voters during the primaries.