A historic November 7, 2020. When the results of Pennsylvania were announced, several major US media announced that Joe Biden had now won the US presidential election. A victory that also sends his running mate Kamala Harris to Washington for the next four years.
The one that outgoing President Donald Trump denigrated by calling her “totally improbable”, “communist” and then, twice, “monster”, the day after her debate with Vice President Mike Pence, becomes the first woman Vice President of the United States.
“This election is much more than just Joe Biden or me. It is about the soul of America and our willingness to fight for it. We have a lot of work ahead of us. Let’s start, ”she said a few moments after the announcement of the victory of the Democratic ticket.
This accomplishment is not ultimately a surprise as the 56-year-old senator is a regular at the firsts. An ambition nurtured during his youth in Oakland, with his parents who campaigned for civil rights, a father professor of economics of Jamaican origin and a mother, a researcher specializing in breast cancer of Indian origin, now deceased .
The former Democratic primary candidate was also the first black woman to lead the judiciary in the country’s most populous state by becoming California’s attorney general (2011-2017). She was then in 2017 the first woman from South Asia elected to the Senate and the second black senator in history.
“The ideal partner”
At 56, she brought Joe Biden, 77, a youthful asset with a pugnacity and dynamism that has already helped him win in his “life, death” duel against Trump. It also mobilized a section of the electorate not necessarily inclined to vote for “Sleepy Joe”. Kamala (pronounced Comma-La, as the New Yorker pointed out in a portrait last year ), a first-generation American, has succeeded in attracting voters aspiring to be better represented at the top of power, especially in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. However, her opponents, especially within the American left, regularly remind her of her past positions, especially when she was a prosecutor, like her opposition to the legalization of cannabis or threats to the parents of absentee students.
Barack Obama, his first supporter, in any case said of her that she was “the ideal partner to help him (Editor’s note, Joe Biden) to measure up to the very real challenges facing America at the moment, and which it will face in the years to come. “
A graduate of Howard University – which was founded in Washington to accommodate African-American students in the midst of segregation – she regularly recalls her membership in the “Alpha Kappa Alpha” black student association.
The 2024 election in the sights
It was her experiences in the legislative, judicial and executive branches of power, and her closeness to Beau Biden, Joe’s son and former Delaware prosecutor who died of cancer in 2015, that nevertheless convinced her ex-rival to choose her. as running mate last year.
Facing Mike Pence, in the only vice-presidents’ debate, she had repeatedly attacked the executive’s management of the coronavirus crisis, which she described as “the biggest failure of any presidential administration in the world. ‘history’ of the country.
With a brilliant career, worthy of the most beautiful of “American dreams”, she no doubt aspires to become, one day, the first black president of the United States. This vice-presidency offers him the best possible launch pad to run for the 2024 election, and the hope of breaking the ultimate glass ceiling. For the record, only four outgoing vice-presidents have succeeded in this challenge.
Original article by : www.leparisien.fr
