Biden Wants a Woman as His Running Mate. Val Demings Could Be the One.
Jonathan Capehart, Washington Post, March 18, 2020
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Floridians will have to make another decision come November between the Democratic nominee and President Trump, who is making a concerted effort to court Latino voters in Florida. Demings isn’t worried.
“My husband likes to say the best indicator of future performance is to look at past performance,” she said of her husband, Jerry Demings, mayor of Orange County, Fla., who has also served as Orlando police chief, the first black person to hold the position. “Donald Trump … has been a divider. He has said racist, derogatory things about people of color long before he entered into politics. He didn’t change his spots when he entered into politics. And certainly, he has now become the divider in chief. I don’t know whether he thinks people of color, black and brown people, are not paying attention, or maybe he believes that we have short memories. But what’s etched in my memory is this man who has a very inhumane policy of separating families at the southern border.”
The congresswoman added: “He can run all the ads he wants to. It does not erase reality, those pictures that are etched in our brains of his inhumane treatment and derogatory remarks about black and brown people.”
Demings was most animated when talking about the president. Not surprising given her role in Trump’s impeachment. {snip}
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{snip} Demings has found herself the subject of speculation about a potential vice-presidential nomination. {snip}
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When I asked Demings whether she wanted to run for vice president, the two-term member of Congress also leaned in: “I grew up the daughter of a maid and a janitor. I grew up poor, black and female in the South, someone who was told a lot of times that I wasn’t the right color or gender. But my mother pushed me and said, ‘No, you can make it. If you work hard and play by the rules, you can be anything you wanna be and do anything you wanna do,’ ” Demings said. “So the fact that my name is being called in such a special way for such an important position during such a critical time, it’s such an honor.”
