Indian American VP-elect is first number two to get the designation.
Time magazine has named President-elect Joe Biden and his Indian American deputy Kamala Harris 2020’s Person of the Year saying “the Biden-Harris ticket represents something historic.”
Daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, Harris is not only the country’s first female, first Black and first South Asian vice president-elect, but also the first number two to get the designation.
Time’s choice to name Biden and Harris over Trump, who was also shortlisted, marks the first time a president-elect and vice president-elect have appeared together on a Person of the Year cover.
“The Biden-Harris ticket represents something historic,” Time tweeted announcing its choice. “Person of the Year is not just about the year that was, but about where we’re headed.”
“For changing the American story, for showing that the forces of empathy are greater than the furies of division, for sharing a vision of healing in a grieving world, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are TIME’s 2020 Person of the Year,” wrote the magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Edward Felsenthal.
READ: Indian American Gitanjali Rao is Time’s first ‘Kid of the Year’ (December 4, 2020)
“Every elected President since FDR has at some point during his term been a Person of the Year, nearly a dozen of those in a presidential election year. This is the first time we have included a Vice President,” he noted.
“If Donald Trump was a force for disruption and division over the past four years, Biden and Harris show where the nation is heading: a blend of ethnicities, lived experiences and world views that must find a way forward together if the American experiment is to survive,” he wrote.
“I will be the first, but I will not be the last,” Harris told TIME. “And that’s about legacy, that’s about creating a pathway, that’s about leaving the door more open than it was when you walked in.”
Biden, who at 78 will be the oldest person ever to assume the presidency, is also the oldest ever to be named Person of the Year by the magazine. He follows Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist who last year became the youngest ever to receive the honor — at age 16.
Biden and Harris made the cut after topping a shortlist that included the movement for racial justice, Dr. Anthony Fauci and front-line workers in the fight against covid-19.
The first president-elect named Person of the Year (then “Man of the Year”) was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in 1932, for his New Deal plan to bring America out of the Great Depression.
Biden, Felsenthal noted, “calls himself a bridge to a new generation of leaders, a role he embraced in choosing Kamala Harris, 56, the first woman on a winning presidential ticket, daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother.”
“The tell of this election,” Harris told the Time, is that regardless of “your race, your ethnicity, the language your grandmother speaks, let’s move forward knowing that the vast majority of us have more in common than what separates us.”
“The task before the new Administration is immense: a pandemic to confront, an economy to fix, a climate crisis to tackle, alliances to rebuild, deep skepticism to overcome with many Americans dubious about unity with Trump voters, and an opposition party still very much under Trump’s sway,” Felsenthal wrote.
“This will be the test of the next four years: Americans who haven’t been this divided in more than a century elected two leaders who have bet their success on finding common ground.”
“The odds may be long. But it will be among the most critical chapters in the arduous quest for a more perfect union,” Felsenthal wrote.
The Biden-Harris “Democratic ticket was an unlikely partnership: forged in conflict and fused over Zoom, divided by generation, race and gender,” Time said.
They come from different coasts, different ideologies, different Americas, it said. “But they also have much in common, says Biden: working-class backgrounds, blended families, shared values.”
“We could have been raised by the same mother,” he was quoted as saying. “In an age of tribalism, the union aims to demonstrate that differences don’t have to be divides.
No one knows the nature of this type of partnership better than Biden, who lived for eight years in the house Harris is about to move into, it said.
He has made the same commitment to her that he extracted from Barack Obama: that the VP will be the last person in the room after meetings, consulted on all big decisions, Time said.
The two communicate every day, by telephone or text message, and Harris has offered welcome advice on Cabinet selections, it noted.
“The way that he refers to himself and her when he speaks, he’s already making his biggest decisions with her at [his] side,” Maya Harris, Kamala’s sister and closest confidant was quoted as saying.
“Picking her as running mate “obviously has historic significance,” she says, “but clearly it’s been a choice that’s not about symbolism. It’s substantive.”
“Together, they offered restoration and renewal in a single ticket,” Time said. “And America bought what they were selling.”
“After the highest turnout in a century, they racked up 81 million votes and counting, the most in presidential history, topping Trump by some 7 million votes and flipping five battleground states,” it noted.