Joining a diverse field of Democrats eyeing the Primary, Senator Kamala Harris formally announced her candidacy for the US presidential election in 2020, thus becoming the fourth woman in Congress to join the race for the White House.
The Californian Democrat, who is the second ever African-American woman to have served in the US Senate, timed her announcement to coincide with Martin Luther Kings birth anniversary on Monday, in the same week when Shirley Chisholm became the first woman to seek the Democratic Partys nomination for president 47 years ago.
“Justice. Decency. Equality. Freedom. Democracy. These aren’t just words. They’re the values we as Americans cherish. And they’re all on the line now,” Harris said in her campaign video, which was released on social media Monday morning, at the same time she appeared on ABC‘s “Good Morning America” to talk about how she intends to reclaim the White House and America’s future and the issues that motivate her.
https://twitter.com/KamalaHarris/status/1087327713277460481
The path ahead
Instead of Iowa and New Hampshire that usually hold the first nomination contests for most candidates, Harris will hold her first campaign event on Friday in South Carolina, choosing a predominantly black state over two nerve-centres of white voters. Harris will formally launch her campaign on Sunday at a rally in Oakland, California, the city where she was born to immigrant parents (a South Indian mother and a father from Jamaica), and where she began her career as a prosecutor.
Announcing her presidential ambitions at the historically significant Howard College that she attended, the barrier-breaking prosecutor declared, The core of my campaign is the people, adding, Nobody is living their life through the lens of one issue. And I think what people want is leadership that sees them through the complexity of their lives and pays equal attention to their needs. Lets not put people in a box.
At the forefront of anti-Trump resistance
A frequent critic of the criminal justice system, the 54-year-old Congresswoman has been known to defy her own party on numerous reactionary measures, with a focus on crime prevention during her career as a prosecutor. Besides opposing the anti-gay Proposition 8, Harris had taken on the big banks after the foreclosure crisis and held out for a $20 billion settlement for California homeowners.
Sources claim that Democratic stalwarts her potential star power as early as when she campaigned for Barack Obama.
A former California attorney general and San Francisco district attorney, Harris has been at the fore of several widely-publicised Congressional hearings including the controversial elevation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court last year, besides standing up to President Donald Trump on several key issues including the travel ban, Obamacare, and the DACA programme for young undocumented immigrants.
Like most of her compatriots, Harris will not accept corporate donations, a disavowal that is gaining traction among Democratic voters.
In fact, within a day of announcing her candidacy, Harris raised $ 1.5 million in donations online.
Excerpts from a long legal career
However, her image as a liberal, left-leaning Democrat has come under scrutiny of late because her records suggest that Harris only embraced a more progressive agenda after getting elected to the Senate in 2016. According to Jacobin, “Kamala Harris has matched every one of her progressive achievements with conservative ones.”
Her vocal opposition of mass incarceration, for example, directly contradicts her insistence on out harsh punitive measures and “smart on crime” policy. Harris’s repertoire of authoritarian positions as a prosecutor include defending the use of death penalty, endorsement of exploiting prison , supporting the anti-truancy law which calls for punishing parents, and the three-strikes law that imposed life sentences for a third strike felony.
As attorney general, she also opposed instituting police body cameras statewide and stood against a bill requiring her office to investigate fatal police shootings. Things like this, while out of public sight and mind now, can derail her campaign for , especially as she is running on the lines of justice and equality.
Another early entrant in the race, Democrat Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii who announced her candidacy last Thursday, is already having to answer for her conservative past and some homophobic statements she made back then.
In Harris’s case, the juxtaposition of her stances also makes for a confusing case because of the pushback she faces from the Bernie Sanders camp, which her supporters claim to be a product of racism and sexism. Nonetheless, it will be an uphill battle for Harris, whose name most Americans are unsure or never heard of, according to a recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.
Competition within
She joins a new generation of female and minority candidates including Democrats Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Kirsten Gillibrand of New Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, and former housing secretary Juilán Castro, in what promises to be wide-open nomination process from an increasingly diverse and crowded field of candidates. The ticket still lacks a frontrunner and is likely to include veterans like former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, alongside young Democrats like Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.
The party is reportedly eager to field new leaders after the 2016 fiasco with Hilary Clinton, with a unifying message that can appeal to its increasingly progressive base. Harris joins this pool of egalitarian leaders who are portraying themselves as fighters of justice and equality as they prepare to take on Donald Trump.
But if the minor policy differences among these potential Democratic contenders is predictive of anything, it is of a primary that will be governed by identity, electoral strategy and style as much as ideology.
Prarthana Mitra is a staff writer at Qrius