Is Joe Biden's choice of Kamala Harris a tick-the-box exercise?

She is hard to ignore in a party that has made diversity an organising principle

At the outset, let me just say, I vote Democrat and in the state of Florida. But even I find myself less enthused than I should be by Joe Biden’s decision to run again and that too with Kamala Harris.

Is that just a tick-the-box exercise, one might wonder.

Everyone understands that Ms Harris made history the first time round. The daughter of a Jamaican economist and an Indian scientist (with her first name meaning “lotus” in Sanskrit), she is America’s first female, first African-American and first Asian-American vice-president. Everyone knows, as a canny writer once put it, that she is hard to ignore in a party that has made diversity an organising principle. But Ms Harris has, unfortunately, done little to build her reputation as an empathetic and effective politician in the past three years. Shouldn’t performance (or lack of) be the determining factor?

A caveat is in order. It is patently unfair to blame Ms Harris for failing to carve out a properly defined ‘veep’ role because the vic…