Kamala Harris joins Tulsi Gabbard in run for White House

WASHINGTON: Indian-Americans, and US Democrats at large, will face a choice between Tulsi and Kamala among others in a race from the left to challenge Donald Trump for the White House in 2020.

In an announcement that was not entirely unexpected, Kamala Harris, the Indian-African-American first-term Senator from California, announced on Monday that she is running for president in 2020, saying that the time has come to fight against "the injustices ... of the Trump presidency."




However, to get into the final stretch of the race Harris will first have to clinch the Democratic nomination in what is adding up to be a crowded field. Aside from Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, a Hindu-American of Caucasian stock, two other women have been exploring the field – Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Then there are the men: Former Vice-President Joe Biden and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders among them.

In purely numerical terms, the Democratic field is starting to resemble the Republican gaggle of 17 candidates that ran for the GOP nomination in 2016 when New York businessman Donald Trump, rather unexpectedly, clambered over the likes of Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and others to win the party ticket to face Hillary Clinton. For 2020, it is Trump who appears to be a shoo-in for the Republican ticket with more than a dozen Democrats duking it out to face him.




But Harris, who some commentators have dubbed as a "female Barack Obama" (Bi-racial, first time Senator, new generation, and left of center) has straightaway become the front-runner. The Spectator Index put her chances of winning the Democratic nomination at 25 per cent, ahead of Beto o’Rourke (20%), Joe Biden (17%) Bernie Sanders (13%) Elizabeth Warren (10%) and Other (15%)

Daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, Harris, 54, declared her intention to run on what is Martin Luther King Jr Day in an appearance on Good Morning America, following it up with a brief video her campaign released on social media.

"The future of our country depends on you and millions of others lifting our voices to fight for our American values," the former prosecutor and Attorney General of California said in the video. "That's why I'm running for president of the United States. I'm running to lift those voices, to bring our voices together."

Kamala Harris’ mother Shyamala Gopalan, who passed away in 2010, was a breast cancer researcher who immigrated to the US from Madras (now Chennai) in 1960. Her father, Donald Harris, is a Stanford University economics professor who emigrated from Jamaica in 1961 for graduate study in economics at University of California, Berkeley. They divorced when she was 7, and Kamala and her sister Maya, a civil liberties activist, grew up with their mother, who was granted custody of the children by court-ordered settlement.

Although she identifies herself primarily as African-American, as indeed does the US media, Harris has spoken in the past about her influential Indian past that involved summer holidays in Chennai’s Besant Nagar, where she visited her maternal grandfather, P V Gopalan, a freedom fighter and an Indian diplomat.

She later attended Howard University in Washington, DC, where she majored in political science and economics, before returning to California, where she earned her Juris Doctor (JD) from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, and was subsequently admitted to the State Bar in 1990 before going to become the first-ever female district attorney in San Francisco and the first black DA in all of California.

Harris is married to Doug Emhoff, a media, entertainment and intellectual property partner with two children from his earlier marriage. Her sister Maya, who will be her campaign chair, is a former senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. She announced that her campaign headquarters will be based in Baltimore, an hour from Washington DC, with a second office in her birth place in Oakland, California.

Harris' declaration of a White House run, while dispensing with the exploratory committee preamble, was timed with the Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and her campaign noted that Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to run for president in a major party, launched her campaign 47 years ago this week.

"The thing about Dr King that always inspires me is that he was aspirational ... like our country is aspirational," Harris said on GMA. "We know that we've not yet reached those ideals. But our strength is that we fight to reach those ideals. So today, the day we celebrate Dr. King, is a very special day for all of us as Americans and I'm honored to be able to make my announcement on the day we commemorate him."

Harris candidate plans to travel to Columbia, South Carolina (Incidentally, Republican Nikki Haley’s home turf) on Friday to speak at a college gala before returning to California, where she will formally launch her campaign on Sunday.