Kamala Harris was the safest, most experienced and most tested choice Biden could make

The process was long and winding, but in the end, former vice president Joe Biden landed exactly where he was expected to from the very beginning. Sen. Kamala D. Harris of California was always the safest, most experienced and most tested choice Biden could make.

Harris will create excitement as the first Black woman on a major-party ticket, but no ideological anxiety among middle-of-the road voters. Like Biden, she occupies the Democratic Party’s center ground. And she will raise no questions as to whether she is qualified to take over as president.

A man shaped by the U.S. Senate, Biden was comfortable with a legislator who had shined during difficult hearings related to President Trump’s malfeasance.

An emotive person who values personal ties, Biden chose a running mate who was close to his dear departed son Beau, from the days when Harris and the younger Biden were state attorneys general.

A White politician often referred to as “working class Joe,” Biden understood how important Black voters had been in paving his way to the nomination by giving him a sweeping victory in the South Carolina primary.

A rising movement for racial justice in the wake of the killing of George Floyd certainly made Harris’s nomination more likely. But her moderation, her long political résumé and, paradoxically, her vigorous campaigning as a Biden foe for the nomination were decisive. If she was, at moments, very tough on Biden on matters related to race, she was even tougher in everything she said about Trump.

Biden prides himself on not bearing grudges, and nothing could prove that more than picking Harris. And he knows that a vice-presidential nominee must be a fearless and ferocious prosecutor of the case against the other party and its nominee.