US VICE PRESIDENT Kamala Harris has been endorsed by President Joe Biden after he withdrew from the 2024 presidential race last night.
Harris has been at Biden’s side since he was elected in 2020 and although she has not featured prominently during the administration, she now looks set to be the likely Democratic nominee for the presidency.
Harris is the first female vice president in US history. She is also the first black person and the first Asian-American to serve in the role.
She is known for her career as a prosecutor in California and, since becoming vice president, she has also raised eyebrows with some of her more outlandish turns of phrase, the most memorable being, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”, which has since become a certified internet meme.
On this day one year ago, Vice President Kamala Harris said, “you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” pic.twitter.com/Vh5OTv3XlF
— Know Your Meme (@knowyourmeme) May 10, 2024
Kamala Harris was born on 20 October, 1964, in Oakland, California, to parents who met as civil rights activists. Her father is a Jamaican-American economist while her mother was originally from India and worked as a biomedical scientist.
Her home town and nearby Berkeley were at the heart of the racial and social justice movements of the time, and Harris was both a product and a beneficiary.
She spoke often about attending demonstrations as a child and growing up around adults “who spent full time marching and shouting about this thing called justice”. As a young student, she was bused to school as part of the second class to integrate into Berkeley’s public education.
Harris’s parents divorced when she was young, and she was raised by her mother alongside her younger sister, Maya. She attended Howard University, a historically black university in Washington.
After graduating, Harris returned to the San Francisco Bay Area for law school and chose a career as a prosecutor, a move that surprised her activist family. She became associated with the state’s tough-on-crime approach to the criminal justice system.
She said she believed that working for change inside the system was just as important as agitating from outside. By 2003, she was running for her first political office, taking on the longtime San Francisco district attorney.
Few city residents knew her name, and Harris set up an ironing board as a table outside grocery stores to meet people. She won and quickly showed a willingness to chart her own path.
Months into her tenure, Harris declined to seek the death penalty for the killer of a young police officer killed in the line of duty, fraying her relationship with city police.
The episode did not stop her political ascent. In late 2007, while still serving as district attorney, she was knocking on doors in Iowa for then-candidate Barack Obama.
After he became president, Obama endorsed her in her 2010 race for California attorney general.
Once elected to statewide office, she pledged to uphold the death penalty despite her moral opposition to it. She refused to defend Proposition 8, a voter-backed initiative banning same-sex marriage.
Harris also played a key role in a 25 billion-dollar settlement with the nation’s mortgage lenders following the foreclosure crisis.
As killings of young black men by police received more attention, Harris implemented some changes, including tracking racial data in police stops, but did not pursue more aggressive measures such as requiring independent prosecutors to investigate police shootings.
Harris’s record as a prosecutor would dog her when she launched a presidential bid in 2019, as some progressives and younger voters demanded swifter change.
But during her time on the job, she also forged a fortuitous relationship with Beau Biden, Joe Biden’s son who was then Delaware’s attorney general. Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015, and his friendship with Harris figured heavily years later as his father chose Harris to be his running mate.
Harris married entertainment lawyer Douglas Emhoff in 2014, and she became stepmother to Emhoff’s two children, Ella and Cole, who referred to her as “Momala”.
In a televised interview, actor Drew Barrymore used the same term to say, “We need you to be Momala of the country”.
Harris had a rare opportunity to advance politically when Senator Barbara Boxer, who had served for more than two decades, announced she would not run again in 2016.
In office, Harris quickly became part of the Democratic resistance to Donald Trump and gained recognition for her pointed questioning of his nominees.
In one memorable moment, she pressed now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh on whether he knew any laws that gave government the power to regulate a man’s body. He did not, and the line of questioning galvanised women and abortion rights activists.
A little more than two years after becoming a senator, Harris announced her campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. But her campaign was marred by infighting and she failed to gain traction, ultimately dropping out before the Iowa caucuses.
Eight months later, Biden selected Harris as his running mate. As he introduced her to the nation, Biden reflected on what her nomination meant for “little black and brown girls who so often feel overlooked and undervalued in their communities”.
“Today, just maybe, they’re seeing themselves for the first time in a new way, as the stuff of presidents and vice presidents,” he said.
Once in the job, Harris was tasked with limiting immigration from Central America, but her efforts did not stop the movement of people leaving their violent and impoverished countries to seek safety and prosperity in the US.
She infamously said on a trip to Latin America: “Do not come.”
Nor was there much progress to be made on voting rights, another issue that was part of Harris’ portfolio. When Republicans limited ballot access in various states, Democrats lacked the necessary sway in Congress to push back at the national level.
Harris eventually carved out a role as the administration’s most outspoken advocate for reproductive rights after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, the landmark case that had guaranteed abortion access nationwide.
Much of Harris’s work has focused on bolstering her party’s support among women, young people and voters of colour. And in halls of power dominated by men — both in Washington and around the world — she has remained keenly aware of her status as a political pioneer.
She often repeated a line she credited to her mother: “Kamala, you may be the first to do many things, but make sure you’re not the last.”
Includes reporting from Press Association
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