Biden says he picked Harris as his running mate because 'the government should look like the country'


In their first joint interview together, former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) shared with People how they see their partnership working, should they be elected in November.
Harris said she and Biden have already agreed she will be "the last one in the room — and there to give him honest feedback. Being vice president to Joe Biden to me means supporting his agenda and supporting him in every way." Biden said it was important to him that he have someone like Harris on the ticket because she has an extraordinary "intellectual capacity, educational background, backbone, and stature. It's going to change a lot."
While serving as attorney general in California, Harris became friends with Biden's late son, Beau Biden, who was attorney general of Delaware. Harris said that "this is how I got to really know Joe as a person, hearing about him through his son. But I also want to add this: Joe Biden had the audacity to say he was going to have a woman as his vice president. He didn't apologize for it. In a country where we still have so much to do to fight toward our ideals, he just fast-forwarded the whole thing."
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Biden says it just made sense for him to select a woman as his running mate. "The government should look like the country," he told People. "There's a new law of physics in politics: Any country that does not engage more than half their population in sharing the full responsibilities of governance and power is absolutely going to lose."
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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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