The Story:
Former Vice President Joseph Biden, the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for President of the United States, named his running mate, now the presumptive nominee for Vice President: Senator Kamala Harris of California. He announced his choice to the public on Tuesday, August 11, ninety minutes after breaking the news to Senator Harris in a Zoom call.
Background:
Harris was a rival of Biden’s for the Presidential nomination. She and he engaged in a sharp and memorable exchange in one of the debates about the use of court-ordered school busing for racial desegregation. Biden says that he does not “hold grudges,” so all of that is now behind them.
Harris is the child of an Indian woman who arrived in the United States in 1960 to study medicine, specifically endocrinology, at UC Berkeley, and of a Black man who emigrated from Jamaica the following year to study economics in the US — also, as fate would have it, at UC Berkeley.
The Thing to Know:
Harris has built a “tough cop” reputation on the strength of a series of prosecutorial positions in California. This may give the ticket some law-and-order credibility, blunting the force of one of President Trump’s expected lines of attack.
