The moment you’ve all been waiting for is here: Joe Biden selects his running mate and heads to the convention with a huge swing of momentum… to his basement.
On Tuesday, August 11th, Biden announced that first-term California Senator Kamala Harris would be joining the ticket in the 2020 presidential election. The two made their first public appearance on Wednesday, August 12th, where we found out why Biden picked her: to throw those haymakers that Biden won’t.
“America is crying out for leadership,” Harris said during her first speech as Biden’s running mate. “Yet we have a President who cares more about himself than the people who elected him”
Surely, it’s not the only reason why Biden picked her.
Harris, who ran for president in the Democratic primary before suspending her campaign in December 2019, was actually the biggest threat to Biden, especially in the first debate when she criticized him for getting cozy with segregationists and opposed bussing. Biden picking her is a signal that he could bury the hatchet and extend an olive branch to one of his old foes.
Obviously, this is a historic moment in American politics. Harris is the first black woman to be on a major party ticket in American history. However, she’s also the first Asian-American to be on a major party ticket since her mother emigrated from India.
So, surely Democrats will be thrilled by the news, right? Well, it’s kind of a mixed bag. To establishment Democrats, it’s welcome news. To progressives, it’s equivalent to Biden giving them the New York Salute.
Throughout the primary, Harris was lambasted for her record as a prosecutor, serving as the San Francisco District Attorney before moving on to become the California Attorney General, where she sponsored a 2010 state truancy law that resulted in some parents being jailed and oversaw more than 1,900 marijuana convictions. But perhaps her worst sin as a prosecutor, at least in the eyes of fierce advocates of criminal justice reform, was shying away from debates in the California State Assembly to curb racial profiling by law enforcement and rejected pleas to investigate deadly police shootings of young black men in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Obviously, once Harris got to the U.S. Senate, she pivoted further to the left, pushing to legalize marijuana for recreational use, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and even medicare for all.
With all that being said, Biden and Harris will go to the Democratic National Convention, hoping to unify a party that was left divided during the 2016 convention when the website Wikileaks published hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee revealing that Democratic leaders were tipping the scales in favor of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
Will Democrats be able to toe the line this time around and reclaim the so-called “Blue Wall” in the Rust Belt? Anything can happen between now and November that can change that dynamic, but if we’re going to read the tea leaves to see how united Democrats will be, the convention is the first place to look.
