Why Joe Biden should pick Sen. Kamala Harris to be his running mate

If Joe Biden is elected president of the United States, defeating Donald Trump in November, he may well serve only one term.

By the end of his first four years in office, Biden will be 82 years old, and his bumbling ways suggest he already may be running short of runway.

A presidential candidate’s choice to be his or her running mate is always of huge importance, but it is especially so now for Biden in this election. He’ll be looking for somebody who can help him win — always the first calculation — but who also is fully Oval Office-ready.

Biden has promised to choose a woman to be his vice president. And, if he’s smart and fair-minded, that woman should be an African American — Sen. Kamala Harris of California.

When Democratic voters, in a recent CBS News poll, were asked their “first choice” for vice president, they picked Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts before all others — 36% of the time.

Harris came in second, chosen by 19% of those polled, followed by former Georgia state Rep. Stacey Abrams at 14%, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota at 13%.

The blunt political reality, though, is that Biden is the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee because African Americans voted for him in large numbers in the primaries — and now he owes them. African American Democrats have reached the end of the line when it comes to being taken for granted.

It is reciprocity time.

Warren and Klobuchar floundered precisely because their candidacies failed to resonate with African American voters. And Abrams, though she fits the bill in the sense of being African American, falls short on the necessary political and management experience. She is a charismatic, outspoken advocate for voting rights, and a heroine among some liberal Democrats. Yet she lost her 2018 bid to become the nation’s first black woman governor.

What Abrams lacks in political savvy and management experience, Harris has plenty of.

Last summer, the former California attorney general vanquished Biden at the second Democratic presidential debate in Miami. The poised former prosecutor was the only black woman on stage, and she was fearless.

Harris tore into Biden’s relationships with Southern white segregationists and his opposition to school busing in the 1970s and 1980s. At that time, African American and civil rights leaders were embracing busing as an essential weapon in the fight against segregation.

More so than ever, because of COVID-19, black Americans are dying sooner than other Americans. The pandemic has hit people of color — first African Americans and now Latinos — especially hard. We need a voice in the White House for those people.

Harris is positioned to speak up for voters who are disgusted, even terrorized, by the racist pandering by Trump and his fellow bigots. And her mettle would make her a fierce advocate for the mothers who fear their sons will become the next Trayvon Martin or Ahmaud Arbery.

Given their fractious history on the campaign trail, a Biden/Harris alliance might seem like the height of hypocrisy. Alas, hypocrisy is embedded in American politics. Trump is exhibit No. 1.

What matters is that Democrats win big in November — and govern well.

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