Knighted by Joe Biden, the American vice-president has had a sometimes rocky path to power.
When Joe Biden announced on Sunday that he was finally throwing in the towel after weeks of pressure from his party, the American president quickly made it clear that he had only one successor in mind.
“My very first decision as the party’s candidate in 2020 was to choose Kamala Harris as my vice president”he wrote in a post on X.
“And it was the best decision I ever made. Today, I want to offer my full support and backing to Kamala to be our party’s candidate this year. Democrats – it’s time to come together and defeat Trump. Let’s do it.”
The person concerned reacted quickly: “On behalf of the American people, I thank Joe Biden for his extraordinary leadership as President of the United States and for his decades of service to our country.
“I am honored to have the President’s support and I intend to deserve and earn this nomination.”
But the game is not over yet for Kamala Harris. She has yet to be officially nominated by her party at the convention to be held in Chicago in a few weeks, and it is not yet known whether she will face an opponent.
But the combination of her current position, Joe Biden’s support and the collective exhaustion from the efforts to oust him will make it difficult for other candidates to explain why she should fight for the nomination — especially since, if elected, she would be the country’s first female president and its second black president, after Barack Obama.
How did she reach the threshold of the presidency?
The daughter of a Jamaican-American father and a Tamil-Indian mother, Kamala Harris, 59, grew up in Oakland, California. After graduating from law school, she became a district attorney and rose through the ranks of the California judicial system before being elected state attorney general in 2010.
Re-elected in 2014, She was then elected to the US Senate in 2016.replacing outgoing Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer. She quickly became known nationally for her prosecutorial skills during committee hearings, subjecting seasoned, knowledgeable witnesses to headline-grabbing legal interrogations.
Those witnesses included Trump’s only two confirmed attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, as well as his Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh.
Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 confirmation process, which ultimately resulted in the judge’s confirmation to the highest court in the United States, is now best known for the serious allegations of sexual assault made publicly against him by women who knew him in high school and college.
However, before these allegations were made and discussed in the Senate, Kamala Harris had already used the hearings to pressure Mr. Kavanaugh because of his restrictive positions on abortion, asking him in particular if he could think about “a law that gives the government the power to make decisions about the male body.”
Shortly after Mr Kavanaugh’s hearings, Ms Harris announced that she would run for the Democratic presidential nomination, a campaign that would pit her against Joe Biden.
“That little girl was me”
Having built a powerful national brand in a relatively short period of time, Kamala Harris launched her presidential campaign in January 2019. Her first campaign rally drew 20,000 supporters, and her first fundraising numbers indicated that she was a force to be reckoned with.
However, the number of Democratic candidates quickly exceeded twenty, and it became difficult to stand out politicallyespecially in the face of her bolder, more left-wing counterparts, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
Her most memorable moment, ironically, was when she confronted Joe Biden in a televised debate about his opposition to the “bussing” policies implemented to facilitate school desegregation after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Criticizing his “civil” relationship with segregationist senators in the early 1970s, she reminded him of the impact of desegregation.
“And you know, there was a little girl in California who was in the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”
This exchange turned out to be the highlight of Ms. Harris’ campaign. By the third quarter of 2019, it was clear that her campaign was internally disorganized, experiencing high staff turnover, and struggling to raise money. Even as the Democratic field began to narrow and consolidate around early candidates, her poll numbers failed to improve, and she dropped out of the race before the first primary.
Then, in the summer of 2020, Joe Biden chose her as his running matedescribing it as “a fearless fighter for the common people and one of the country’s finest public servants.”
Despite the constraints of the COVID-19 pandemic, she emerged as a compelling candidate in the 2020 race, delivering an effective debate performance against Trump’s Vice President Mike Pence.
When she and Joe Biden won the election, Harris became the first woman, the first black person and the first person of South Asian descent to serve as vice president from the United States in one fell swoop.
Ms Harris’s vice-presidential tenure, however, proved to be complicated.
Difficult beginnings
The Biden administration began in the shadow of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, as the pandemic continued to kill thousands of Americans and the economy struggled to recover.
In this context, Joe Biden entrusts Kamala Harris with a portfolio of thorny issuesincluding immigration and voting rights – deeply divisive issues that can only be addressed through major legislation, which requires the support of a supermajority in the Senate that Democrats do not have.
Harris was left championing sweeping reforms that had no chance of success on Capitol Hill. Her efforts to tackle decades-old immigration problems were not helped by an infamous interview in which she visibly bristled when asked why she had not yet visited the U.S.-Mexico border.
There was also a constant stream of negative articles about the atmosphere in Ms. Harris’ officewhich experienced a surprisingly high staff turnover rate in the early years of the administration, and outsiders have made unflattering speculation about the real importance of its role.
But as Joe Biden’s re-election campaign got underway, Kamala Harris returned to the campaign trail, proving once again that she could draw and enthuse a crowd, even as the aging president found it increasingly difficult to do so.
When it became clear that the party was opposed to the prospect of Joe Biden running again, speculation that she would be the natural successor immediately multiplied, leading to an explosion of memes featuring her trademark laugh and repeated invocation of one of her mother’s favorite sayings: “Do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”
It remains to be seen whether Kamala Harris can do better than President Biden, whose poll numbers are anemic and fundraising is declining, and It is not yet certain whether she will face a candidate for the nomination.
However, the relief over Joe Biden’s withdrawal should inject new energy and optimism into his party, at least in the short term – and the Donald Trump campaign’s well-rehearsed attacks on the president’s age are now moot.
What is more embarrassing for his rival is that the electorate already remembers that before entering politics himself, he personally donated to the two California campaigns of his future rival.