First-term Sen. Kamala Harris kicked off her 2020 Democratic presidential campaign Sunday by proclaiming a progressive and populist agenda that includes Medicare-for-all, economic equality and a tax cut for working- and middle-class Americans.
“With faith in God, with fidelity to country and with the fighting spirit I got from my mother, I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for the presidency of the United States,” Harris said at a rally in Oakland, Calif., her hometown.
“I’m running for president because I love my country. I’m running to be a president of the people, by the people and for all the people,” she said to chants of “Kamala! Kamala! Kamala!”
She called health care and education fundamental rights for all Americans along with universal pre-K and debt-free college.
Harris said she wanted an America “where you only have to work one job” and where “any worker can join a union.”
She promised the raucous crowd that she would “deliver the largest working- and middle-class tax cut in a generation” and “we’ll pay for it by reversing this administration’s giveaway” to the wealthiest Americans.
And she talked about the possibility of running against President Trump.
“I do not lightly dismiss the danger and the difficulty of challenging an incumbent president. But these are not ordinary times and this will not be an ordinary election,” she said. “At stake is not simply the leadership of our party and even our country — it is our right to the moral leadership of this planet.”
Harris, who will be among a large field of Democrats vying for the presidency, addressed the #MeToo movement.
“I’m running to fight for an America where our daughters, and our sisters, and our mothers, and our grandmothers are respected where they live and where they work,” she said.
The daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India also talked about the racial divide that exists in the country.
“I’m running to fight for an America where no mother or father has to teach their young son that people may stop him, arrest him, chase him or kill him because of his race,” she said.
Harris, the former district attorney for San Francisco and attorney general for California, announced her campaign last Monday on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Her staff said she was also inspired by Shirley Chisholm, the congresswoman from Brooklyn who announced her presidential campaign 47 years ago last Monday.