In a run-up to the Presidential election held in November 2020, Joe Biden has announced that 55 years old Kamala Harris will be his running mate.
After Joe Biden, the official nominee for the President’s office from the democratic party, announced his running mate for the 2020 presidential race, it became clear that Kamala Harris would be the first black Indian-American woman to run for the office of Vice President.
In a run-up to the Presidential election held in November 2020, Joe Biden has announced that 55 years old Kamala Harris will be his running mate. Biden and harris will take on the current Trump-Pence duo in an election held right in the middle of a global pandemic and economic crisis.
Harris’s nomination has been considered historical because she’s the first African American and the first South Asian American to be chosen as the running mate of a major party’s presidential candidate.
Who is Kamala Harris?
Harris is one of the US senators known for her pragmatic moderate views. She was also a rival to Biden for Presidential post during democratic primaries. Other than that, Harris was a barrier-breaking and reputed prosecutor before she became a senator in 2016.
Harris, who was born in Oakland, California, is a former attorney general of California and a former San Francisco district attorney.
Early Life
Kamala Harris was born on 20 October 1964 to an immigrant couple: Shyamala Gopalan, a breast-cancer scientist who had emigrated from Tamil Nadu, India in 1960 to pursue a doctorate in endocrinology at UC Berkeley, and Donald Harris, a Stanford University emeritus professor of economics, who emigrated from British Jamaica in 1961 for graduate study in economics at UC Berkeley. Kamala, a biracial of Tamil and Afro-Jamaican descent, identifies simply as “American”.
Kamala, growing up along with her younger sister Maya Harris in Berkeley, California, went to both a black Baptist church and a Hindu temple, while she and her sister visited their mother’s family in Madras (now Chennai), India, on occasion. Harris, in her memoir “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey”, says she understands small amounts of Tamil. Taking reference from Hindu mythology, her mother named her Kamala Devi which loosely translates as Goddess Laxmi.
Education and Activism
Her parents got divorced when she was 7. Harris narrates a story that when she and her sister visited their father in Palo Alto on weekends, neighbors’ kids were not allowed to play with them because they were black. When she was 12, Harris and her sister moved with their mother to Montreal, Canada, where their mother had accepted a research position at Jewish General Hospital and teaching at McGill University.
Graduating from Westmount High School in Westmount, Quebec in 1981, Kamala was a fairly popular student.
Harris double-majored in political science and economics (B.A. 1986) at Howard University in Washington DC. She then went on to intern as a mailroom clerk for California senator Alan Cranston, chaired the economics society, led the debate team, demonstrated against apartheid, and joined Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
Returning to California, she earned her Juris Doctor from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco in 1989. On June 14, 1990, Kamala passed the bar examination and gained admission to the State Bar of California.
Professional Career
Kamala Harris was hired in 1990 as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County, California. It was there that she earned the praise of being “an able prosecutor on the way up”. California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, who Harris allegedly dated back then, appointed Harris to the state Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and later the California Medical Assistance Commission. To serve in these positions, arris took a leave of absence from her prosecutor’s job.
Harris was later recruited as an assistant district attorney in 1998 by San Francisco district attorney Terence Hallinan. She became the chief of the Career Criminal Division there, supervising five other attorneys, where she prosecuted homicide, burglary, robbery, and sexual assault cases – particularly Three-Strikes cases. Over proposition 21, which would have granted prosecutors the option of trying juvenile defendants in Superior Court rather than juvenile courts, Harris clashed with Hallinan’s assistant, Darrell Salomon. Harris campaigned against the measure and Salomon opposed directing media inquiries about Proposition 21 to Harris. Harris was also reassigned by Saloman in what it seemed like a de facto demotion. Harris, not only filed a complaint against him but also quit the job.
Harris decided to run against Hallinan in 2003 for district attorney. Running against Hallinan, and defense attorney, Bill Fazio, Harris was the least known candidate, but noted to be “whip-smart, hard-working, and well-credentialed”. Harris sought to run a campaign that disrupted negative stereotypes of black women.
(Credits: Chronicle/Michael Macor)
In the runoff, Harris pledged never to seek the death penalty and to prosecute three-strike offenders only in cases of violent felonies.
Harris won with 56-44 percent of the vote, becoming California’s first American district attorney of color.
Harris worked as district attorney of San Fransisco from 2004 to 2011. She inherited a 50% felony conviction rate from Hallinan when she took over in 2004. During her tenure, the felony conviction rate rose to 53% in 2005 to 66% in 2006, the highest in a decade. The felony conviction was scaled up to 76% in 2009. Convictions of drug dealers increased from 56% in 2003 to 74% in 2006.
Harris ran unopposed in 2007 and was re-elected.
In 2008, Harris announced her candidacy for California attorney general. In the general election, she faced Republican Los Angeles County district attorney Steve Cooley. On election night, November 2, 2010, Cooley declared victory, but mail-in and provisional ballots remained uncounted, with the lead changing four times. On November 24, as the count advanced, Harris led by more than 55,000 votes.
Harris made history on January 3, 2011, as the first African American and South Asian American woman to serve as California attorney general.
On November 4, 2014, Harris was re-elected as California Attorney General against Republican Ronald Gold, winning 57.5% of the vote.
(Credits: Web)
Entry in politics
California’s junior senator, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) announced her intention to retire from the United States Senate at the end of her term in 2016. Harris was the first candidate to declare her intention to run for Boxer’s senate seat. Harris officially announced the launch of her campaign on January 13, 2015.
Endorsed by President Obama and VP Biden, Harris faced congresswoman, and fellow Democrat, Loretta Sanchez, in the general election. Harris defeated Sanchez, capturing over 60% of the vote, carrying all but four counties.
Controversies
According to NPR, In 2011, the Supreme Court demanded the state of California reduce its prison population by 33,000 inmates in the next two years due to overpopulation resulting in starvation, inhumane treatment, and even death. The federal judges, however, in 2014, ordered: “all nonviolent second-strike offenders be eligible for parole after serving half their sentence.”
According to the LA Times, most of those prisoners were working as groundskeepers, janitors, and kitchen staff. Harris’ lawyers argued in court that releasing them would drastically reduce their prison labor pool.
In 2010, Kamala Harris staunchly opposed to the use of recreational marijuana.
“Spending two decades in court rooms, Harris believes that drug selling harms communities. Harris supports the legal use of medicinal marijuana but does not support anything beyond that,” her then-campaign manager Brian Brokaw told Capitol Weekly.
Whereas in 2018, her stance over marijuana had evolved and as a senator, she co-signed Senator Corey Booker’s Marijuana Justice Act.
“Right now in this country people are being arrested, being prosecuted, and end up spending time in jail or prison all because of their use of a drug that otherwise should be considered legal,” Harris had said.
Harris avoided taking any position on the 2015 California Assembly proposal to make sure incidents involving police using deadly force got independent investigations.
Harris also did not support a 2015 push to require all law enforcement officials to wear body cameras. Though she said it was up to local governments to decide whether their employees should wear them, she had agents in her agency do so.
2020 Campaign and suspension
Kamala Harris, the junior United States Senator from California, officially began her 2020 presidential campaign on January 21, 2019, with an announcement on Good Morning America. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Harris announced that she would seek the Democratic Presidential nomination. Her campaign slogan, “For the People,” is the phrase she used to formally announce her appearances as a prosecutor in the California supreme courts.
Harris’s campaign received over $1.5 million in donations from about 38,000 individuals across all fifty states within 24 hours.
On November 29, The New York Times published an article detailing rifts in the Harris campaign, with “competing factions eager to belittle one another” loyal to either campaign manager Juan Rodriguez or campaign chair Maya Harris. Other staffers told the Times that it was “unclear who’s in charge of the campaign”. The article described the campaign’s financial situation as “dire,” with the campaign unable to afford polling or television advertisements, and quoted staffers and supporters who described Harris as an indecisive candidate.
On December 3, 2019, Harris officially ended her campaign to become the Democratic nominee for President, after stating she did not have enough funding to continue.
(Credits: LVR- Journal)
Biden-Harris For 2020
On March 8, 2020, Kamala Harris endorsed Joe Biden for President saying, “I believe in Joe”.
Presumptive Democratic party presidential nominee Joe Biden on Tuesday named 55-year-old Harris as his vice presidential running mate, making history by selecting the first black woman to compete on a major party’s presidential ticket.
Biden and Harris will face Trump and Pence in the 2020 elections, trying to cash on the anti-incumbency the Trump administration is facing post mishandling of the coronavirus crisis, tanking of the economy, and an uprising against racial discrimination.
Why Biden Chose Harris?
Kamala Harris has been vetted on the national stage due to her own 2020 bid. Both as the California attorney general and as a US senator since 2017, she has experience in government. Being a lot younger (55) than Joe Biden (78), Harris represents a younger generation of leaders. She is not only a historic pick as the first Black and South Asian American woman to appear on a major party’s national ticket, but she also emerged as an outspoken voice on race — and the need for police reform — following the death of George Floyd in May and the subsequent protests it sparked.
There must have been no one else on Biden’s mind who ticked so many boxes for his running mate.
Kamala Harris On India
Harris has spoken out on several occasions over the Kashmir issue.
“We have to remind the Kashmiris that they are not alone in the world,” she said in October 2019 while she was eying presidential nomination.
“We are keeping a track on the situation. There is a need to intervene if the situation demands,” she had said.
She also came out in support of her fellow Indian American Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, with whom External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar refused to meet during his visit to the country last year.
“It’s wrong for any foreign government to tell Congress what members are allowed in meetings on Capitol Hill,” Harris slammed Jaishankar.
(Credits: LA Times)
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