Indian American Democratic VP nominee to focus on ‘profound failure of leadership’.
Hours before President Donald Trump accepts Republican nomination Thursday, Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris plans to deliver a prebuttal characterizing the rival convention as a dishonest distraction from the White House’s coronavirus response.
“Part of what I will be talking about is that they’re dealing in lies but also they are not grounded in reality,” said Harris, daughter of an Indian immigrant mother and a Jamaican father Wednesday.
“People are grieving. They’re grieving the loss of lives and the people they’ve loved. They’re grieving the loss of jobs. They’re grieving the loss of normalcy and consistency,” she said during a fundraising event.
Harris, 55, will detail a “profound failure of leadership” from Trump and highlight proposals by Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to control the virus and confront the economic fallout, the campaign said.
“Biden-Harris plan to contain covid-19 and build a different path forward in America,” it said as cited by the Hill.
“They want better than this, and we are better than this,” said Harris who has stepped up her activity as Biden’s running mate addressing three virtual fundraisers and an online discussion focused on Black women Wednesday.
Meanwhile, in a Washington Post op-ed on the occasion of Women’s Equality Day, she detailed women’s struggle to gain voting rights, especially women of color, who were denied suffrage despite passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920.
“If I had been alive in 1920, I might not have been allowed to cast a ballot alongside white women,” wrote the first Black and South Asian woman to figure on the national ticket of a major party.
“Neither would my mother, an immigrant from India, who first taught me how sacred our vote is,” she added.
Harris accused the Republicans of once again doing everything in their power to suppress and attack the voting rights of people of color.
“They are deploying suppressive voter ID laws, racial gerrymandering, voter roll purges, precinct closures and reduced early-voting days — all of which have been laser-targeted toward communities of color since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013,” she alleged.
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“And this year, Republicans are also spending millions on every scare tactic and trick in the book,” Harris wrote. “Most visibly, they are doing what they can to take advantage of a pandemic that the president cannot, or will not, get under control.”
“They are spreading misinformation about voting by mail — a safe and secure voting option — and they have been caught trying to politicize the US Postal Service,” Harris wrote.
The Biden campaign is committing the resources needed to beat back voter suppression, she wrote. “We need to make sure that everyone who’s eligible to vote is able to do so — and that their vote is counted.”
Calling her India-born mother Shyamala Gopalan as the greatest source of her inspiration, Harris said as an immigrant she taught her that “we not only strive for success, but to leave our country better than we found it.”
“That’s the approach she instilled in me, and I know many of you are working toward that same end,” she said during the launch of the Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) for Biden.
In a short video released later in the day on the occasion of Women’s Equality Day, Harris said that her mother was “the greatest source of inspiration in my life.”
“She taught me from a young age that I had a responsibility to fight for justice, Harris said. “In fact, she always used to say, ‘if you see a problem, don’t just sit around complaining about it, do something about it’.”
As a young girl, her maternal grandfather P V Gopalan would often take her on his morning walks in India, where he’d discuss the importance of fighting for democracy and civil rights, Harris tweeted with a video.
“That commitment and that fight for a better future live on in me to this day,” she wrote.
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