Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is shooting down the notion that he was pressured into choosing a Black woman to be his vice presidential pick.
In his first joint-interview — set on air on Sunday night — with his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Biden was asked if he felt pressured to choose a woman of color to join the ticket.
ABC’s News’ Robin Roberts asked, “Did you feel pressure to select a Black woman?”
“No, I didn’t feel pressure to select a Black woman,” Biden said, adding, “The government should look like the people, look like the country. Fifty-one percent of the people in this country are women. As that old expression goes, ‘women hold up half the sky,’ and in order to be able to succeed, you’ve got to be dealt in across the board.”
He continued to say that despite their different life stories, they share similar values, “I cannot understand and fully appreciate what it means to walk in her shoes, to be an African-American woman, with Indian-American background, a child of immigrants.”
“She can’t assume exactly what it’s like to walk in my shoes. What we do know is we have the same value set,” he added.
He also described Harris as an “incredible woman” and said that of all the vice presidential contenders, Harris “fit the closest and the best.”
And he opened up a bit about one of the reasons he believed Harris was a good fit, “On the Judiciary Committee, which I used to chair for years, I watched her just insist on getting the answers, and not relented until she got the answers.”
“And so I just — it just seemed to fit,” he added.
Biden declared during the Democratic presidential primary that he would choose a woman to be his running mate, as IJR reported. In the months that followed, he faced pressure to choose a Black woman.