Irish Examiner View: Reasons to hail historic nomination of Kamala Harris

The nomination of Kamala Harris was greeted with excitement as she became the first woman of colour to be put on a major party ticket

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his running mate Senator Kamala Harris. Picture: AP/David J. Phillip, File

There are many reasons to celebrate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s choice of running mate, Kamala Harris. To begin, it is a historic first. The California senator is the first woman of colour to be put on a major party ticket. Her nomination was greeted with excitement and a measure of relief that black women, seen as the backbone of the Democratic party, finally have a national platform.

Adding her to the Democratic ticket also carries a particular charge at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement is forcing a country to confront the enduring legacy of its own racial past. Now, Americans can redraw their image of a national leader which, for so much of the country’s history, was male, white and often elderly.

The fight for the top position will still be fought in traditional fashion, between two ageing white males, but it is a symbol of the potential for real change that Kamala Harris, a woman who already made history as the first black attorney general of California, enters the running for vice-president.

Not that the office will do much to effect change. As John Adams, the first person in the job, once said, the vice-presidency is “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived”. Another former VP, Walter Mondale famously said the office was handmade for ridicule and made its holders look like “a person on a string”.

This time round, though, Joe Biden’s choice is important and not just because of its symbolism. He will be 78 if he wins and takes up office, which means he is unlikely to contest a second term. That opens the way for Kamala Harris to become the first female president of the United States.

Sen. Kamala Harris. Picture: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

That is some way off, though, as Biden and Harris have yet to negotiate a campaign that intensified yesterday with a characteristic tirade of crude insults from the incumbent. President Trump got in early and below-the-belt with an attack ad and slurs a-plenty.

He branded Senator Harris ‘nasty’, ‘mean’ and ‘phoney’ and, in the coming days, it is likely he will make much political capital of the heated clash between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden during the first round of Democratic debates last June. Senator Harris accused the presidential hopeful of working with segregationists and opposing 1970s bus programmes designed to promote racial integration in schools. It is likely that we will hear more about that as the campaign goes on.

Meantime, Trump is attempting to label Harris as “radical left”, but he will find it difficult to say that she is soft on crime. Some of her own party members claimed her stance as former prosecutor was too harsh before she dropped out of the Democratic presidential campaign last December.

We can expect Donald Trump to do all he can to distract voters from his handling of a pandemic that has led to an economic crisis and more than 160,000 deaths. But none of the rhetoric to come – and it will, in spades – can take from the fact that Kamala Harris (55), the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, is the first woman of colour to run for vice president.