Does Kamala Harris deserve to be vice president?

Is it rude to refer to the Vice President of the USA as the world’s most famous diversity hire? Possibly. But it is the same with so many things that are true.

You needn’t take my word for it. Joe Biden made his selection priorities clear when he was confirmed as his party’s nominee last year. He immediately declared that his search for a running mate was going to focus on non-white women. And in some ways it was a savvy move. Like John McCain in 2008, he knew that the US media might not thrill to a ticket made up of a couple of white, male soon-to-be octogenarians.

Yet the decision left him with a relatively small list of qualified people to choose from. It would be the same if he’d decided that his running mate had to be a gay. It inevitably shrinks the talent pool and turns the focus from aptitude to identity. So it was that Biden ended up choosing Kamala Harris, a senator and former state attorney general who had distinguished herself most in the primaries by attacking him as a racist. On the sole occasion this was raised after she joined the ticket Harris laughed her special laugh. You are lucky if you have not heard this laugh. It is of a type rarely heard outside a penitentiary: a sort of wild, false, exaggerated impersonation of how a human being might laugh. Harris laughs like Mark Zuckerberg moves — as though he has studied these humanoids and is hoping to stay undercover until cyborg D-Day.

But I digress. The point is that Harris is a heartbeat away from the presidency because of her chromosomes and the fact that her parents were born in India and Jamaica.