Politics
Election 2020: Joe Biden Names Sen. Kamala Harris as Running Mate
Joe Biden, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, named Sen. Kamala Harris of California as his running mate on Tuesday.
Biden, a longtime Delaware senator and former President Barack Obama’s vice president, described Harris in a tweet as “a fearless fighter for the little guy, and one of the country’s finest public servants.”
Harris, 55, is a former prosecutor and attorney general of California. One of several of Biden’s previous opponents in a crowded 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Harris was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016 and is the second African American woman to serve in the Senate.
“Joe Biden can unify the American people because he’s spent his life fighting for us,” Harris said in a tweet. “And as president, he’ll build an America that lives up to our ideals. I’m honored to join him as our party’s nominee for Vice President, and do what it takes to make him our Commander-in-Chief.”
Biden pledged in March to pick a woman to join him on the ticket, and Harris edged several prominent women, including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, after a months-long vetting process that wrapped up this week.
Biden’s announcement comes nearly three months after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which sparked nationwide outrage and protests over racial injustice and ramped up the pressure on Biden to choose a Black woman to join him in the fight against President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
Election 2020: Joe Biden names Sen. Kamala Harris as running mate. https://t.co/TKX2AuQlYw pic.twitter.com/D1JNRtUdQc
— Register-Star (@RSnewsroom) August 11, 2020
Biden added that Harris worked closely with his late son, Beau, while she was attorney general.
“I watched as they took on the big banks, lifted up working people, and protected women and kids from abuse,” he said. “I was proud then, and I’m proud now to have her as my partner in this campaign.”
Katrina Pierson, a Trump campaign senior adviser, blasted Harris as a “phony” willing to “abandon her own morals, as well as try to bury her record as a prosecutor, in order to appease the anti-police extremists controlling the (Democratic) Party.”
Trump’s first apparent comment on his opponent’s pick is a campaign video tweeted shortly after Biden’s announcement. The ad accuses Harris of “rushing to the radical left,” calling for trillions in new taxes and blasting Biden for “racist policies.”
“Slow Joe and phony Kamala. Perfect together. Wrong for America,” the narrator says as the ad closes.
Susan Rice, former national security adviser and ambassador to the United Nations under Obama and reportedly one of Biden’s top choices, offered her “warmest congratulations” to Harris in a tweet.
“I am confident Biden-Harris will prove to be a winning ticket,” she said. “I will do my utmost to help them win and govern.”
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