Washington:
Vice President Kamala Harris recently stepped onto the campus of a Pennsylvania university and was greeted by a group of cheerleaders.
“She’s got that fever. She’s got that heat. She’s our vice president. You can’t compete,” they chanted.
Harris, 58, hopes to stoke enthusiasm among younger voters, an age group that 80-year-old President Joe Biden has struggled to reach.
To that end, Harris was given a new role on Friday: tackling the scourge of gun violence that has wrought terror in schools across the country.
Standing next to Harris and Biden during the announcement of her new role in the White House was the first member of Congress from Generation Z, 26-year-old Democrat Maxwell Frost.
Speaking about the shootings that have become a tragic part of American life, Harris, a former attorney general of California who sometimes struggled to connect with the public, tried to strike a note of empathy.
Youth and minorities
“In today’s world, students learn their teacher’s name on the first day of school. Yes, they learn the location of their cubicle and they learn how to quietly hide from an active shooter,” Harris said, citing the is a common practice in American schools to teach young people how to stay alive during an attack by a gunman.
Gun violence is on a list of key issues, including abortion rights, climate change and discrimination, that Harris — the first woman, Black person and person of South Asian descent to hold the office of vice president — is addressing during a national tour of colleges titled “Fight for Our Freedoms.”
The month-long tour will take her to colleges where she will focus on African-American and other minority students, speaking on issues that affect them most.
She is working to mobilize two constituencies that offered the keys to the White House to Biden in the last election, and whose votes will be crucial again next year: young people and minorities.
“If your generation starts voting in numbers, so many of these things will change,” Harris told students Tuesday at a college in the small town of Reading, Pennsylvania, according to local press reports.
“To make a difference in this world, of the many ways you can do that, voting is one of the biggest ways,” she said in an interview with a student, shared on X (formerly Twitter), during visiting a campus in North Carolina.
During her tour, the vice president is greeted with choreography and cheers, in stark contrast to her dismal poll numbers.
According to the polling site FiveThirtyEight, just under 40 percent of Americans have a positive opinion of the VP. Biden is more or less in the same range.
West Coast Rap
Harris tries to strike a personal note to make herself more relatable to the young people she speaks to by talking about her love of music and West Coast rap in particular.
That could go both ways: Photos and videos of her dancing at a reception celebrating hip-hop’s 50th anniversary provoked flattering reactions, but also ridicule.
And the White House is still regularly confronted with sometimes damning articles about the Veep.
In a recent, much-discussed piece, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius called on not only Biden, but also Harris not to run for re-election.
“Harris has many commendable qualities, but the simple fact is that she has failed to gain traction within the country or even within her own party,” he wrote.
Republican White House hopeful Nikki Haley, also a woman of South Asian descent, has trained her sharpest attacks on the vice president.
Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations under then-President Donald Trump, regularly emphasizes that because of Biden’s age, it is the vice president — who would succeed him if he died or became incapacitated — who must be defeated.
The idea of a President Harris “should send a shiver down the spine of every American,” Haley said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)