Kamala Harris: the tough woman who blows up the glass ceiling of the White House | US elections

Kamala Harris (Oakland, California, 1964) arrives at the White House with Joe Biden, marking a new milestone in US history. After the Democratic victory, the senator, elected in 2016 by the State of California, becomes the first woman of color and American of Indian and Jamaican origin to reach the second most important position in the United States, the first world power. ideology much more progressive than Biden, he trained in Political Science and Economics at Howard University (Washington). A center that, on the other hand, has a history that connects perfectly with the political and social proposals that the Democrat has defended throughout the campaign. Howard was the first black youth college in the United States and has also pioneered the training of women, a collective that began to enter its classrooms in the late 19th century. Senator Harris’s struggle over the past few weeks has been marked by Covid-19 and the management carried out by his political enemy Mike Pence, vice president of Donald Trump, at the head of the pandemic. In fact, this health and social management of the crisis – together with a discussion around the death penalty – was one of the greatest tensions among the candidates for the US Vice Presidency during the televised debates. In one of these media confrontations with Trump’s ‘number 2’, Harris snapped at him: “I’m not going to stay here watching how the vice president wants to explain to me how the laws of our country are applied.”Harris’s weight in Biden’s team But, in addition, Harris’s presence in Biden’s candidacy is also a political response to a social movement laden with strong protests that seeks to prevent the death of African-Americans at the hands of the authorities, known as Black Lives Matter. A movement that, despite having been born around seven years ago, has taken on a new impetus this 2020 after the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Police and that, predictably, would have supported with its votes the policies of the Democratic Party embodied in Harris. The new US vice president’s policies are woven into initiatives aimed at taking charge of “historically marginalized” groups such as women, people of color and low-income Americans. For example, the Democratic senator supports ObamaCare, the closest thing to our Social Security, which Pence opposes frontally because she believes that the State should not take charge of the health of citizens. She has also been tough on the possession of assault weapons, the reprogramming of the law for well-known dreamers, as well as the path to US citizenship for undocumented immigrants.Her Husband’s Career Since her early 1990s, Harris She earned a reputation as a tough woman prosecuting drug trafficking and sexual abuse cases as a district clerk for Alameda County. And, in addition, like her candidate partner, she has lovingly managed to build an image of a woman concerned about the well-being of citizens and empathic who also has the family as the central nucleus of her life, although without conservative corsets.In fact, she treats her husband’s two children, attorney Douglas Emhoff, as his own and they refer to her as ‘Momala’, a pun that merges Mom and Kamala. The two met on a blind date in 2013 and married a year later, and since then they have shared their lives and homes in Los Angeles, Washington and San Francisco. Precisely the role of her husband as a lawyer, who has practiced law from two of the most important law firms in the US, may be one of the chiaroscuro in Harris’s future and which, curiously, collides head-on with some of the Democrat’s ideas . Emhoff has represented the pharmaceutical company Merck, the multinational Walmart, the arms distributor Dolarian Capital in a case related to the sale of AK-47 rifles to be used in Afghanistan, as well as the owner of a night club accused of harassment. and sexual assault. Ambiguity is another of Harris’s weak points, or at least this is one of the criticisms made by analysts, by some fellow ranks and, of course, by Republican Pence. He blamed him for the fact that he had persecuted more African Americans than whites in his time at the head of the Public Ministry in California and, in addition, had supported the use of the death penalty, despite protesting against this active system in the United States during the election campaign “One of the best public servants” Harris’s chance to become one of the most important women in the world came when Biden chose her to be his ‘number 2’.The president knew that with her, who was a close friend of his son Beau Biden – who died in 2015 from brain cancer – he was bringing his candidacy closer to very diverse groups that, as has been seen, have led the Democrats to the White House after four years of Trump Administration. “Harris is a relentless fighter for the modest citizen, and one of the best public servants in the country, like my running mate,” Biden said last August when announcing that Harris would aspire to the Vice Presidency, the third woman to do so and the first to do so. Before that was tried by the governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, in 2008 with the Republicans and Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 with the Democrats. Political analysts and the American media sympathetic to the Democrats also see Harris not only as the open-minded vice president. during the new Biden era, but also as the ideal candidate for the Democratic Party to remain in power in the 2024 presidential elections. A fact that, if it occurs in the future, would pit Harris against Pence. It will be in January when Biden and Harris take official possession of their position, for the moment it is unknown if when swearing in office he will quote the words of his mother again: “You can be the first, but make sure you are not the last. A culture that worships goddesses produces strong women. ”@ MaríaVillardón