Successful predictions of unlikely candidates becoming US president are rare but two stand out. In 1968, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy predicted that a ‘Negro’ would become president in 40 years and it happened with Barack Obama in 2008. Then in October 1989, former US President Gerald Ford responded to a question from a young girl that a woman would become president by way of the vice presidency and it looks as it might happen with US Vice-President Kamala Harris.
When in 2000 US presidential candidate Joe Biden picked California Senator Harris to be his running mate, he opened many possibilities which included incapacitation of the president, very close to the way Ford predicted. Age and infirmity have knocked Biden out of the 2024 presidential candidacy and Harris has stepped in.
Harris, like Obama, is symbolic of evolving America that is torn between a past of sordid discrimination and atrocities on people who are not white and a possible bright future of the original American vision/dream of opportunities for the taking. She is the first woman to occupy the vice-presidency but she is neither white nor the first woman to run for the presidency or the vice-presidency. At least, three other American women of varied political persuasions were before her in vice presidential races. Angela Davis, Geraldine Ferraro, and Sarah Palin unsuccessfully tried the vice-presidency; Harris clinched it. In 2016, Hillary Clinton came close to clinching the presidency but narrowly lost it to Donald Trump. Harris is, like Clinton, also facing Trump and has serious chance of clinching the presidency, thereby symbolising big change in American political outlook.
For Harris, however, the political tide is favourable. She is an outsider who happens to be inside but she had pushed her way into the white inside. Riding on the tide, she has real chance of becoming president and in being that symbol of evolving America. The United States, the strongest and richest of the world wide British colonial implants, attracts migrants from other former extensions of the expansive British Empire. These include Third World countries from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The daughter of two immigrants from former British colonies who met in the United States, the mother is an Indian from the Indian sub-continent and the father is a Jamaican from the Caribbean.
Harris might be a target of subdued resentments and, like Angela Davis might be identity conflict. Unique in the 1960s and 1970s as a civil rights activist struggling with her triple identities as a woman, black, and communist, Davis wrote deeply analytical book, Women, Race, and Class in which she examined the three-way identity conflicts within her as woman, black, and communist and the circumstances that dictate which identity to stress when. Harris faces a similar challenge of being woman, black, and Indian seeking the highest office in America.
In the emerging American political accommodation of ambitious people with external roots, egos get bruised. Before Obama plunged into the US presidential race, for instance, the Reverend Jesse Jackson had been the perennial black candidate forcing African and African-American issues into campaign platforms. He was, as US Ambassador to Kenya Prudence Bushnell once termed him, a ‘terrific American’ but his political star never rose above being an articulate maverick that excited democratic conventions. To Jackson’s chagrin, Obama upstaged him and took away the prize.
Harris faces Trump who spent time questioning Obama’s Americanness. While receiving a lot of official ‘sisterly’ support, there is subdued racism partly because she does not have deep multi-generational roots in the American past. A mixed-race daughter of an Indian and a Jamaican is probably not what Ford had in mind in 1989. This, however, will not take the spark from the Harris excitement. In the current political environment where convict Trump is the Republican candidate, prosecutor Harris might symbolise new politics in Washington.
