It is presented by three close women that Kamala Harris accepted Wednesday evening his historic candidacy for the vice-president of the United States, symbol of the central importance of his “modern family” in the life of the one who likes to be called “Momala” by her husband’s children.
The first black woman of Indian origin to run for this post, she will become the first female vice-president of the United States if Joe Biden wins the election against Donald Trump on November 3.
And in this country where spouses and children occupy a central role in electoral campaigns, his family does not tick any traditional box. But she sought to present a united and loving front on Wednesday.
Her choice of “guests” on the day of her historic appointment, during the centenary of American voting rights, made it clear: honor to women and to family. In all its variations.
“Kamala Harris is my aunt, my mother-in-law, my big sister”: the voices followed one another in a video montage, showing three central women in his life:
– His sister Maya Harris, a former Hillary Clinton campaign alumnus in 2016, who led Kamala Harris’s ill-fated candidacy for the Democratic primary in 2019.
– His niece Meena Harris, lawyer and author of a children’s book focusing on the life of Maya and Kamala Harris.
– And Ella Emhoff, daughter of her husband since 2014, Douglas Emhoff.
In her speech, she spoke at length about the memory of her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, an Indian researcher specializing in the fight against cancer, who arrived at the University of Berkeley in California at the age of 19.
She then met her father, Donald Harris, an economics student from Jamaica. They had separated when she was five and her mother had raised her, alone, with her sister. “I know she’s looking at me from up there,” said the senator and former California attorney general.
“A very modern family”
“Family is everything to me,” she said in her first official running mate speech on August 12.
It was a friend who introduced him to Douglas Emhoff, a lawyer, now 55 years old like her and who has just taken a sabbatical to support his campaign. “I’m so proud of you. You made history tonight,” he tweeted Wednesday.
Very present on the social network, it sometimes offers a dive into the daily life of the candidate.
Like showing her this week on the couch watching the convention, wearing a sweatshirt on behalf of her Howard University, founded in Washington to accommodate segregated African-American students.
“I have had a lot of titles in my career and + vice-president + will be great, but + Momala + will always be the most valuable of all,” she said on 12 August.
The senator confided that the two children of her husband, Ella and Cole Emhoff, did not like, like her, the term of “stepmother” and had thus quickly opted instead for “Momala”.
“They could not have been more welcoming,” she told Elle magazine in May 2019.
“For my brother and I, you will always be Momala, the best mother-in-law in the world,” Ella Emhoff said in the video Wednesday night.
A good understanding that she also has with their mother and ex-partner of her husband, Kerstin Emhoff. “An incredible mother” and a “great friend,” Kamala Harris told Elle magazine in May 2019.
“We are a very modern family,” she added in the pages of People this week.
On his Twitter account, Kerstin Emhoff put a pro-Kamala Harris video in the spotlight and multiplied messages and retweets encouraging him.
In response to the interview with People, she wrote on Wednesday: “I love it and it’s true! #ModernFamily”.
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