House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) on Sunday evening said vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris “is an idea whose time has come,” echoing the theme the establishment media and Democrats have been hammering—that Harris is the face of the “emerging America” and a “walking rebuke” to “Trumpism.”
After former Vice President Joe Biden announced his running mate, MSNBC host Joy Reid said the Biden-Harris “ticket belongs to the emerging america the america that Trumpism and anger and meanness cannot stop.”
MSNBC historian Michael Beschloss said Harris is a “walking rebuke” to Trump’s racism and misogyny. He added that Harris, unlike Trump, stands for the rule of law and is a “person of deep experience” while also being a symbol against Trump’s “hatred of immigrants” because she is the daughter of immigrants. New America CEO Anne Marie Slaughter told Fareed Zakaria on Sunday that Harris represents the “future of America.”
The New York Times noted that Harris’s “selection also highlights a remarkable shift in this country: the rise of a new wave of children of immigrants, or second-generation Americans, as a growing political and cultural force, different from any that has come before”:
The last major influx of immigrants, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, came primarily from Eastern and Southern Europe. This time the surge comes from around the world, from India and Jamaica to China and Mexico and beyond.
In California, the state where Ms. Harris grew up and which she now represents in the Senate, about half of all children come from immigrant homes. Nationwide, for the first time in this country’s history, whites make up less than half of the population under the age of 16, the Brookings Institution has found; the trend is driven by larger numbers of Asians, Hispanics and people who are multiracial.
An editorial board member at The St. Louis American argued that though Harris’s resume makes her the best pick, “it’s her biography that makes her the right VP choice” because “it’s that biography that makes Harris more than representative of that emerging America. She is that emerging America. But that emblematic biography was 55 years in the making”:
This America is 40% people of color, with over 47 million immigrants. It’s 51% female with more college-educated women in the workforce than college-educated men. It’s young, with 60% of the population under 45. Within the next 25 years, a majority of its population will be non-white.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) told InStyle in a Monday interview that Harris will “change the face of power in America.” Hillary Clinton told the Atlantic Council on Monday that Harris’s “life story will be very compelling in this election.”
The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein even stated that it is difficult to imagine Democrats ever nominating two white men on a presidential ticket ever again.
Brownstein argued that “by selecting Harris, Biden has positioned the Democratic Party for a profound generational and demographic transition, and he’s addressed the fundamental incongruity of his candidacy: the inherent strain of a nearly 78-year-old white man leading a political coalition that relies on big margins among young voters, people of color, and women”:
Biden represents the Democratic Party of his post–World War II coming-of-age: a coalition centered on blue-collar white people who worked with their hands, mostly in smaller industrial cities such as Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he was born. From almost every angle, Harris embodies the Democratic Party of the 21st century: a biracial child of immigrants (who is herself in an interracial marriage) who rose to political prominence from a base in San Francisco, a diverse, globalized hub of the emerging information economy.
Brownstein added that many in the Democrats’ “coalition of transformation,” which includes “professional women, immigrants, and African Americans,” will “see aspects of their experience reflected in Harris’s life.” He said “that could make her a resonant symbol of the Democrats’ embrace of a changing America, and offer a rebuke—not only in her words but through her sheer presence—to a president who has openly wielded racist and sexist language.”
“But whether Biden wins or loses in November, her nomination may be remembered as a moment when the pinnacle of Democratic Party leadership came to more closely resemble the base of voters that elects it to power,” Brownstein wrote. “Even as the GOP at every level remains dominated by white men—starting with Trump and Pence—the Democrats haven’t nominated a presidential ticket of two white men since 2004. It’s difficult to imagine when they ever will again.”
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