Maybe Biden thought of Harris as the first Indian-American Senator?

[tonedevil]

85. Not quite my take...

I'll start with the sentence, since you think had/has changes the sentence let's go with your preferred had. If we look at the sentence "Three former chairs of the black caucus, the only African American woman who had ever been elected to the United States Senate" and consider what Biden may have meant when he said "only" there are two possibilities. Either Biden meant to say a different word and accidentally said only or he meant to say only and had a reason for disregarding Harris being an African-American Woman elected to the US Senate as well.
If you believe he meant to say a different word then the meaning of the sentence is dependent on that word, but his saying "only" is a mistake. If you believe that he said "only" on purpose and was accurate in doing so you have to explain why Harris doesn't count. From this and at least one other thread on this board I see a couple of theories being proffered. One is that Biden was hearkening back to a time before Harris was elected when Moseley Braun was the only. The theory from this posting is that he wasn't aware that Harris is an African-American Woman because he only knows her as an Indian-American Woman. While these two possibilities seem to be an either/or situation to me you have argued that both are true and the either one or both are the reason that Biden said Moseley Braun was the "only".
Of course if you are arguing that Biden meant to say "only" you are arguing against the man himself. When he was confronted with the existence of Harris and her status as an African-American Woman elected to the US Senate he replied that he had said First. if we look at the sentence when we change the word he thought he had said it looks like: "Three former chairs of the black caucus, the first African American woman who had ever been elected to the United States Senate" That precludes the idea that he was trying to invoke days of old and the idea that he didn't know Harris was African-American because he thought she was Indian-American.