Former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign has assigned an out woman to be chief of staff to his running mate, putting a lesbian in one of the campaign’s most senior positions.
Shortly before announcing that Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) would be his running mate in the 2020 general election, the Biden campaign announced that senior campaign advisor Karine Jean-Pierre would be the vice-presidential candidate’s chief of staff. Jean-Pierre is the first Black person to serve as chief of staff to a vice-presidential candidate.
Jean-Pierre confirmed the appointment on Twitter, calling herself “ambitious,” a reference to how the term is often negatively applied to women with careers in politics but not to men in the same way.
Originally
from the French West Indies island of Martinique, Jean-Pierre was raised in New
York City and attended graduate school at Columbia University.
She started
her career in politics working for the John Edwards campaign in 2004 and later
worked for Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns as well as Martin O’Malley’s
2016 presidential campaign.
During Obama’s
first term, she worked in the White House Office of Political Affairs, a
position said was important to her as a lesbian.
“What’s been
wonderful is that I was not the only; I was one of many,” she told The
Advocate in 2011. “President Obama didn’t hire LGBT staffers, he
hired experienced individuals who happen to be LGBT.”
“Serving and
working for President Obama where you can be openly gay has been an amazing
honor. It felt incredible to be a part of an administration that prioritizes
LGBT issues.”
Outside of her
work with political campaigns and the government, she was the national
spokesperson for the progressive organization MoveOn in 2016, a commentator for
NBC News and MSNBC, and a lecturer at Columbia University.
People who
have followed the 2020 Democratic primary closely may remember Jean-Pierre from
a viral video of a white, male animal rights activist taking Harris’s
microphone away from her during a 2019 MoveOn forum.
Jean-Pierre
leapt to her feet up to grab the mic back.
SOURCE: LGBTQ NATION
This makes me very happy. This is the type of people Biden/Harris need to attract and employ. This woman is someone everybody needs in their corner. Thanks for sharing this. Things like this just go unnoticed. And that is such a shame. How exciting.
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