By Bukola Sofidiya
It is no more news that the United States’ Democratic Party candidate for the upcoming election in November, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has picked Senator Kamala Devi Harris who is a junior senator from California as his running mate but what would be in the news for a long time and sure to be remembered forever in the annals of the nation’s political history is the emergence of Sen. Kamala Harris as the first woman vice president.
If elected in November, Sen. Kamala Harris will make history not just as the first woman to be elected as the Vice President of the country that pride herself as the only country with a continuous democracy of more than 200 years, but also the first woman of color to be so elected. Kamala whose father is Jamaican-American and mother, an Indian-American is not new to glass shattering in both her professional and political lives.
She was elected in 2007 as the first South Asian-American and second African-American woman in the US Senate. Prior to that in 2003, she became the District Attorney of the City and County of San Francisco where she served for two terms before making history when she was elected as the first African-American and first woman to serve as California’s Attorney General.
Biden’s choice of Harris is not unconnected with the fact that the divisiveness of the country has reached an alarming rate occasioned by President Donald Trump’s demagoguery that has further embolden the activities of the white supremacist which is agitating the psyche of African-Americans in the country.
Another reason for Harris’ choice is the way President Trump handles the two-edged sword of incessant killings of African-Americans by the police and the Covid-19 pandemic which has killed over 170,000 Americans.
In an interview with People magazine, Biden who once referred to the November election as the battle for the soul of the nation said he picked Harris as his running mate because “the government should look like the country,” he added that “there’s a new law of physics in politics: Any country that does not engage more than half their population in sharing the full responsibilities of governance and power is absolutely going to lose.”
If the duo eventually win the election which pundits have tagged as the most important election in modern American history, they will be saddled with the huge task of uniting the nation, providing the leadership needed to tackle the rate of contagion of the corona virus, tackle unemployment and revamp the moribund economy that is sliding into recession. They will also be tasked to change the immigration policy of the present administration most importantly the hold placed on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
DACA was instituted in 2012 by the Barack Obama administration to allow some individuals with unlawful presence in the United States after being brought to the country as children to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation and become eligible for a work permit in the U.S.
On the international level, they will have to re-establish the United States diplomatic relationship with allies like NATO and the EU as well as provide the leadership needed to checkmate the growing threat from Russia against NATO.
Bukola Sofidiya writes in from Houston, Texas.
