So, it’s Kamala. After all the speculation about whom Biden might pick to be his running mate, he chose the woman most likely to get the nod all along, according to the betting markets.
The California senator was and is widely seen as the “safe” choice, given the constraints Biden had imposed on himself. He pledged to pick a woman, and after the George Floyd protests he seemed increasingly likely to pick an African-American woman.
Harris checks both boxes, and as the only black female Democratic senator or governor in the United States, she definitely seems to be a safer pick in the middle of an economic and health crisis than a former state legislator from Georgia, the mayor of Atlanta, or a little-known House member from Florida or California. Harris was vetted somewhat by the press during her presidential campaign, and she can be a poised speaker — the kind of relentlessly on-message politician who will likely avoid any campaign-destroying gaffes.
But was Harris really the safest and smartest pick?
To win in 2020, Biden needs to turn out the moderate voters who abandoned Republicans in 2018. And with that in mind, Harris certainly comes with some risks. Republicans have been painting Biden as a stalking horse for the left wing of the Democratic party: Sure, Biden might say he opposes the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, goes the Republican message, but just you watch who’s really going to hold power. And the Democratic presidential nominee who turns 78 in November — amid a plague that is particularly deadly to the elderly — went ahead and picked a running mate who supports Medicare for All and the Green New Deal and federal legislation that would override state laws restricting late-term abortions . . . and on and on.
Despite her attempts to align with the left wing of the Democratic Party on almost every matter of policy, Harris did little to generate actual enthusiasm on the left during the Democratic primary. She hemmed and hawed on Medicare for All’s politically toxic proposal to abolish private health insurance and made the preposterous claim that universal health care would not require any new taxes on the middle class. She effectively portrayed Biden as a racist for opposing forced busing in the 1970s, and then backtracked on whether she now supported new forced-busing measures.
