Why Kamala Harris was a good choice for Joe Biden

MORE THAN a year ago, before a pandemic put paid to traditional political campaigning, before anyone had heard of Gordon Sondland or Lev Parnas or any of the other minor characters who emerged from Donald Trump’s impeachment saga, the Democratic Party had a problem: how to hold a presidential debate with 20 candidates. They solved it by getting them to draw lots; ten would debate on the first night, ten on the second. The debates’ only memorable moment came on the second night, when Kamala Harris laid into Joe Biden over his opposition to federally mandated busing to integrate schools, and what she deemed to be his too-kind recollection of two segregationist senators.

They were the field’s centrist heavyweights. Mr Biden led in the polls, though many dismissed that as a sign of name-recognition; he was unimpressive on the stump, rambling and half a step too slow. Ms Harris, who served as San Francisco’s chief prosecutor and then California’s attorney-general (where she ran a department of 5,000 people) before becoming a senator in 2016, was seen as the candidate best able to reassemble the Obama coalition of progressives, non-white voters and the young.