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Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms holds a news conference Saturday. (Ben Gray/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/AP)
The unrest in major cities has quickly reshaped the conversation about Joe Biden's potential running mate, with a growing focus on the black women on his shortlist, and growing skepticism about one of the white women.
Amy Klobuchar had already been criticized for doing little outreach to black voters in the primary and faced
skepticism from her state's NAACP, and now she was
confronted over not prosecuting Derek Chauvin in her final days as Hennepin County district attorney. Her successor did so — Chauvin was involved with a shooting in the final days of Klobuchar's DA term — but Democrats close to Biden said that the new scrutiny would hurt her chances.
“We are all victims sometimes of timing,” House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) told reporters Friday. “This is very tough timing for Amy Klobuchar, who I respect so much.”
Kamala D. Harris, another former DA who faced primary attacks over her prosecutorial record, faced less criticism than Klobuchar as she spoke on the George Floyd killing. She made a silent appearance at a Saturday afternoon protest outside the White House (a peaceful one, ending before a more violent protest that evening), tweeted
video of incidents where police shot rubber bullets at journalists and made TV appearances where she said that the president had exacerbated tensions instead of relieving them after the death of George Floyd.
“He is dead, and black blood stains the sidewalks of America,” Harris said in one TV hit. “Folks are in pain, and have been, for a long time.”
Keisha Lance-Bottoms, the first-term mayor of Atlanta and a long-shot VP candidate, earned perhaps the most positive media attention of any mayor with a weekend news conference in which she called for calm and handed the microphone to Killer Mike, a Bernie Sanders supporter who had favored another candidate for mayor. In a Sunday CNN interview, she called on President Trump to “just stop talking” and for the focus to return to police misconduct.
“What happens when we have these violent protests and uprisings in our city, we get distracted from what the real issue is,” Lance-Bottoms said. “And we need to get back to what the problem is. And that's the killing of unarmed black people in America.”
Val Demings, a three-term Florida congresswoman who previously led Orlando's police department,
published a Washington Post op-ed asking for police to reflect on what they were doing wrong.
“We must conduct a serious review of hiring standards and practices, diversity, training, use-of-force policies, pay and benefits (remember, you get what you pay for), early warning programs, and recruit training programs,” she wrote.