Kamala, Much More Than a Female Obama

I first heard the name of Kamala Harris, the current Democratic vice presidential nominee, when I was in California in Oct. 2016 covering a story for Diario de Noticias about the Portuguese community in San Diego. As now, it was during a presidential campaign, and Hillary Clinton was still favored over Donald Trump. Congress was also holding elections, and Harris stood out as a Senate candidate.

Her profile immediately reminded me of Barack Obama, the first Black U.S. president, who was then concluding his second term. He is the son of an American mother from Kansas and an immigrant Kenyan father; Harris has a Jamaican father and Indian mother. To an even greater degree, she represents the new America, in which white people will no longer constitute the majority. And, as with Obama, there were already some who saw the Senate as merely a trampoline for launching Harris toward the White House.

The most astonishing thing was that Hillary’s defeat – and we are going to refer to Kamala by her first name not because she is a woman but because it is a nom de guerre that commands respect – allowed Kamala to join the presidential race as a junior senator (as did Obama). She failed to secure the nomination, however, and Joe Biden became the Democratic presidential nominee.

I believe that Kamala failed in the primaries because, among other reasons, she seemed a lot like a female version of Obama. Biden, Obama’s former vice president, has superior credentials for defeating Trump, especially with respect to regaining the white male electorate in some decisive states. But Kamala makes sense as a No. 2: Her background as former attorney general of California guarantees her the enthusiasm of Democratic moderates and liberals. In these times of debate over racism, it may also guarantee the mass Black mobilization (an electorate of which 90% votes Democrat) on Nov. 3 that Hillary lacked in 2016.

Incredibly, this is only the third time that a woman has been a vice presidential nominee for one of the two major parties (and Hillary was the only presidential nominee). Biden is also aiming to strengthen the female vote with his choice from California.

In a sense, with this ticket, Democrats are returning to the old idea of presenting a pair of nominees that complement each other: Biden was the senator for Delaware on the Atlantic Coast and his partner comes from the Pacific Coast. He is over 70 years old; she is “young” at 55. He comes from the traditional white majority (he is not a WASP only because he is Catholic) and she represents mixed-race America, and so on.

Trump attacked the choice of Kamala by recalling that she criticized Biden in the Democratic primaries, demonstrating his ignorance of American tradition. As one example, 60 years ago, veteran Texas Sen. Lyndon Johnson lost in the Democratic primaries to a young John Kennedy from Massachusetts. The two figures seemed to be complete opposites, from their home states to their social backgrounds. Together they were the winning ticket, and ejected the Republicans from the White House. However, just as Richard Nixon, narrowly escaped defeat as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president, it is also too early to consider Trump beaten. As it was in 2016, the Electoral College gives him a greater chance than does the popular vote.

But, returning to Johnson, if he was an unexpected president in 1963 because of Kennedy’s assassination, Kamala is a likely name for first place in the White House if Biden wins this year. The former vice president, who did not run in 2016, will probably serve only one term and then pass the chance to run again for president to Kamala, making her even more of an electoral asset. And much more than a female version of Obama.