Kamala Harris has made history. At 11:43 a.m. on Wednesday (20) local time (1:43 p.m. in Brasilia), the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant and an Indian immigrant became the first woman, the first black person and the first of Asian descent to assume the post of Vice. – Presidency of the United States. Moreover, the new second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, is the first Jew married to a vice president in history.
Within minutes of taking the oath, his running mate, Joe Biden, also took the oath and officially assumed the US presidency, ending Donald Trump’s four-year tenure.
The person responsible for taking the oath was Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina and the first non-white woman in the history of America’s highest court. When she started the ritual, she mispronounced the Democrat’s name, calling him “Kamála” – the correct one is “Kâmala”.
The new vice president has made a career as a prosecutor, first in the neighborhood where the city of San Francisco is located, and then throughout California – where she was born. In 2016, she was elected a state senator and immediately became a rising star in the Democratic Party.
Kamala, 56, even competed for the nomination to run for White House Legend in 2020. She was treated as a favorite at the start of the race, but lost her support and, in December 2019, announced withdrawing from the race because she had not done so. had more money for the campaign.
Just over three months later, he declared his support for Biden, who at that time was a nomination contestant with Independent Senator Bernie Sanders, one of the symbols of the more progressive wing of Democrats. .
The new MP is seen as a representative of some sort of middle ground for the party, to the right of Sanders and to the left of Biden and other names in the moderate wing. For this reason, their positions are often compared to those of Barack Obama (2009-2017), the first African American to occupy the White House.
Biden was Obama’s deputy and the two developed a close relationship, with the deputy becoming the incumbent’s number one adviser. When it became clear that he would win the race to be the Democratic nominee against Donald Trump last year, Biden continued his search for a name that could play a role similar to the one he himself had played. .
Kamala emerged from the start as one of the favorites to fill the post, both for his more centrist political stance and for his profile. The then-candidate publicly stated that his deputy would be a woman, and there was a lot of pressure to be a black person, especially after the anti-racism acts and police violence that set the United States on fire from the end of May 2020.
On August 11, Biden closed the mystery and announced Kamala as his running mate. She thus became the third woman candidate for vice in one of the two great American parties. Before her, Geraldine Ferraro was nominated by the Democrats themselves in 1984, and Sarah Palin was Republican John McCain’s finalist in 2008. Both, as is known, lost.
The Biden-Kamala ticket, of course, won. Or as Kamala herself put it in the phone call to the President-elect on November 7, as victory was on the cards, “we did it, Joe”.
That same day, dressed in white – a symbol of the struggle for women’s suffrage in the United States – Kamala opened her speech by saying, “I may be the first woman to hold this position. But I do not. will not be the last “.