WASHINGTON — Conquering his Democratic foes for president, freshman Sen. Barack Obama cast Joe Biden as his No. 2. Obama was a star rookie next to veteran Biden, who spent 35 years in the clubby Senate.

This hard summer, Biden picked Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate. He's 77, and she's 55, a Gen Xer. In an inspired rhyme across 12 years of time, the Californian is also a freshman Black senator.

Did Biden feel he owed the winds of history one? Once the chosen, he chose one that echoed the magic of Obama. Obama and Harris are both biracial. But Harris is not the second coming of Obama.

In 2008, Obama won a euphoric victory as the first Black president in American history, a distinction he never dwelled on. There's the rub, in retrospect. Dark stuff festered on social media during his presidency and then surfaced in our burning square in 2016.

The first Black president always acted as if we were a post-racial society, a pleasant fiction. Police brutality in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri, did not evoke an outcry from his White House. Obama did not answer the ugly "birther" charges of one Donald Trump for ages, because it was beneath his dignity.

While carving his place in the pantheon, Obama did not directly advance the status of Blacks or voting rights, though in 2015, he joined an annual march in Selma, Alabama, with the champion in Congress, John Lewis. Three months later, he sang "Amazing Grace" in a eulogy at a South Carolina church for nine murdered members, African Americans slain in a mass hate crime.

(A song I can't stand, the lyrics by a wretched slave trader.)

Race is at a crossroads: a crisis in America right now, exploding even in heartland states such as Wisconsin and Minnesota. We can't just blame Mississippi.

The crisis calls for a more direct intervention and systematic change in law.

We know that President Donald Trump is running hard on race toward the November election, fueling further racism, unrest, resentment and violence wherever he can find it. In four years, this is what we've become — not only he but we the people.

Obama and Harris, lawyerly and alike on paper, could not be more different.

Take it from me, one who's kept an eye on the junior senator from my home state. Harris does not go out of her way to be chummy and collegial on the Senate floor, like Biden. Like Obama, she can beam in bursts, but no peer has his lofty velocity of pure public genius.

Obama sought to lift and unify with flights of soaring oratory. In March 2008, as a candidate, he gave his most wrenching, forthright statement on race.

"I am the son of a Black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army."

Obama's dual belonging is blended Black and white.

For Harris, her Black identity is not mixed but out there as one. A star prosecutor, she's crisp in demeanor, capable of flustering or dressing down a witness.

Campaigning, Harris already brings specific Black outreach to the hip among us on "Verzuz." She lets it be known that Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha is a source of strength. Unlike Harvard snob Obama, Harris went to Howard University, a historically Black institution founded at the Civil War's end.

Harris will look at race tensions more squarely in the eye. She'll confront them more clearly and call out a president's hate talk. She may be the woman to swim in our rough sea currents, reaching the other shore.

I hate to say it, but Obama could have done more for Blacks, redressing racial inequality — past and present. Unfortunately, his Pentagon unloaded heavy weaponry and tanks to police departments, who became more militarized. What a mistake.

As for mass incarceration, Biden was its legal architect, and Obama never addressed it.

What we need is straight talk and swift action, not a beautiful sermon, speech or song.

Harris may rise to the moment. It's too early to tell. It's a vexing time, and she has a high mountain to climb.

Jamie Stiehm can be reached at JamieStiehm.com. To read her weekly column and find out more about Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, please visit creators.com.