US Senator Kamala Harris has been nominated as Democratic vice presidential candidate for US elections 2020 on Wednesday at the Democratic National Convention held virtually due to the Coronavirus pandemic.
She was joined by former US President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who together with Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, vowed to build an all-inclusive United States.
Kamala Harris, the senator from California, whom Biden has picked as his running mate, accepted her nomination from Wilmington, Delaware. She is the first Black American and also first Indian-American to fight for the vice presidential post from a major party.
“Donald Trump’s failure of leadership has cost lives and livelihoods,” the former California prosecutor charged in her acceptance speech. “We’re at an inflection point.”
Biden, who faces Trump on November 3, is due to give his own acceptance speech on Thursday, closing a Democratic convention held wholly online and on television due to Coronavirus safety precautions.Shortly before Harris spoke, America’s first black president, Barack Obama, delivered his own condemnation of Trump and appeal for Biden’s election.
Obama said that on handing over the White House to Trump in 2017, he thought the Republican “might show some interest in taking the job seriously; that he might come to feel the weight of the office and discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care”. “But he never did,” Obama said.
As a result, Trump has left America’s “worst impulses unleashed, our proud reputation around the world badly diminished, and our democratic institutions threatened like never before,” Obama said. Trump responded by telling reporters that Obama had been “a terrible president.” Leave nothing to chance.
Secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who narrowly lost the 2016 presidential election to Trump, pleaded with voters to take nothing for granted in another tight contest.
Harris in her acceptance speech lashed out as US President Donald Trump and said that Trump’s policies has cost lives and livelihoods of US citizens.
Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords were also present in the event where Harris accepted the nomination. She will challenge US vice president Mike Pence when US goes to polls on November 3.