Cartoon by Daniel Murphy

In choosing Kamala Harris, Biden may have found the anti-Trump

The Guardian: Joe Biden may have just chosen the anti-Trump as his running mate – and, if he wins, as his successor.

The selection of California senator Kamala Harris for the Democrats’ vice-presidential nomination puts a woman of colour on a major party ticket for the first time in America’s 244-year-old history.

It also comes loaded with symbolism in an era that has seen the election of a president roared on by white supremacists, the dawn of the #MeToo movement and a mass uprising for the cause of Black Lives Matter. Tuesday shows how the picture is changing.

“It makes it look more like America,” Eugene Robinson, a newspaper columnist, told the MSNBC network. “It makes it more like the America that we are becoming than the other party which looks more like the America we once were, or the America that many think we once were.”

Just when it seemed the contrast between these national visions could not be more vivid, it became even more so. The moment of racial reckoning became even more acute.

And given Biden’s age – he will be 78 years old on inauguration day – and his lack of clear commitment to serving a second term, Harris is now better placed than anyone to be America’s first female president, a glass ceiling that Hillary Clinton did not manage to shatter in 2016.

That is why this vice-presidential pick is way more important than usual. John Adams, the first person to hold the job, called it “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived”. John Nance Garner famously said it “is not worth a bucket of warm spit”. Walter Mondale said: “The office is handmade for ridicule and for dismissal. In the nature of it, you always look like a supplicant, a beggar, a person on a string.” >>>