We have just witnessed the first exchange in what is going to be more than likely the most miserable campaign for the U.S. presidency that many of us can remember.

Maybe in all of American history.

Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Kamala Harris spoke to us back to back about the abject failures of the Donald Trump-Mike Pence administration.

My initial takeaway, though, has to do with a personal aspect of the relationship between the members of the Democratic Party presidential team.

It is that Joe Biden does not carry a grudge. It was Harris, you’ll remember, who drew a bit of Biden’s blood during a Democratic presidential joint appearance when she hit him hard over his Senate opposition to federally mandated busing of school children.

The fact that Biden would select Harris to run with him tells me in stark terms: That’s OK; you took your best shot and I survived. Now, join me in this fight to the finish.

I am looking forward to watching this campaign unfold, even though the misery we can expect will be deep and will be intensely personal. That’s how Trump rolls.

There once was a time when candidates joined national campaigns and their opponent would offer them a tepid “Welcome to the fight” greeting.

Not these days.

U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris became former VP Joe Biden’s running mate this week and Donald Trump began a Twitter torrent lambasting the California Democrat for being a weak Democratic primary presidential opponent.

Trump said Harris is the kind of candidate he dreams about. He calls her a champion of the “far left.” Hah! I’ll go instead with some of the progressive outfits who complain that Harris isn’t “far left” enough for them.

In reality, the more I consider Harris’s candidacy, the more I buy into her mainstream moderate approach to governance.

She is a former prosecutor, meaning she hunted down bad guys and put ’em in the slammer. She is no one’s fool. Harris is tough, resilient and vows to work as hard as she can to elect Biden as the next president of the United States.

Harris teamed up once with the late Beau Biden, the former VP’s son, in pursuing fraudulent bankers. Beau Biden happened to be attorney general in Delaware while Harris ran the California justice department.

The old days of common courtesy are gone. Donald Trump is lying in wait (pun kind of intended here, if you get my drift). He is going to cast every possible aspersion he can on Sen. Harris, not to mention what he plans for the former vice president.

Neither of them needs to respond in kind. They have plenty of political action organizations ready to do their own version of the kind of dirty work they can expect from the Donald Trump-Mike Pence team.

I admit my political bias regularly and without apology. I mean, we all have bias, we are imbued in it, it propels our political principles.

At least it propels my principles.

I lean toward the Democratic Party. I have been voting for president every four years since 1972 and not once have I cast a presidential vote for a Republican. I don’t regret my votes, although as I look back on one of them with decades of experience under my belt, I might have thought differently about the 1976 race between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford.

I say all this as a cautionary tale to the excitement many of my fellow pro-Democratic Party voters are feeling today with the selection of Sen. Kamala Harris as the party’s latest vice-presidential pick.

She’s already made history by being the first woman of color to be chosen. She is black and she is of Indian descent; her father hailed from Jamaica, her mother from South Asia. That’s historic!

Sen. Harris now stands on the brink of making even more history in 88 days by being elected the first woman as vice president.

I am trying mightily to temper my excitement. I am going to succeed in tamping it down. How do I know that? Because I fear that Donald Trump, the current president of the United States, has the resources and the willingness to deploy them to win re-election to a second term. He will do whatever it takes to win.

Now, I most certainly don’t want that to happen. It is a fear that well might keep me up at night as we get closer to Election Day.

My bias remains as strong as ever. My desire to see Joe Biden elected president is at full boil. I intend to use this blog toward that end. I feel compelled, though, to reel in my excitement at the prospect until we get much closer to the election. I need assurances that the excitement is warranted.

I am hoping Kamala Harris can excite millions of Americans who are as frightened as I am at the prospect that Donald Trump can repeat the astonishing political fluke he performed in 2016.