I’ll reserve lengthier comment until I read some of the other reactions, limiting myself to just two. First, I think that there were better candidates among those whom VP Biden reportedly had on his short list.
And, second, I find it a bit embarrassing that Democrats are, apparently, reluctant to nominate candidates who have been reared by black mothers in the context of a black community.
IMO with that pick the Democrats are conceding the 2020 Presidential race. They are also shutting down the Clinton machine and making its members available for prosecution, eliminating Harris as a future Presidential candidate, and hoping Durham’s investigation will not end up indicting anybody significant outside of the Clintonites.
Harris’ only ‘plus’ is her skin color. She doesn’t add any electoral votes to the ticket, she’s unpleasant, she did some pretty sketchy things as AG (keeping convicts beyond their jail terms to use as labor is absolutely despicable), and a lot of women will be turned off by her having slept with Willie Brown when he was still married.
It will be interesting to see how female voters react to a woman who rose to power by sleeping with an older man and has no children. I think it will send a bad message to young women if they see this is what it takes to reach high office.
Biden said he would choose a “Black†woman for his running mate, which most people assumed was an African American woman. Kamala Harris is of Indian/Jamaica descent, which technically doesn’t check the racial box. Furthermore, Harris’s questionable prosecutorial ethics and insatiable ambition for higher office creates an unsavory backdrop for what kind of personal integrity she would have as VP. Worst yet, being how frail Biden is, she realistically could be president in the near future. It’s a blood curdling thought, especially considering how unpopular she is in CA, only gleaning 7% of the vote during the presidential primary, in her home state.
If the Democrats, or at least the Biden camp, have decided to go all with the far left then Warren would have been better. He put himself in a box with his black pledge.
I must say, as Tars noted, she does seem to be an unlikeable person with skeletons.
I guess we get the old double standard here dont we?People are mentioning her sexual ethics when Trump always ragged about his affairs while married. It really isn’t likely that you can find a worse example of sexual ethics than Trump.
“insatiable ambition for higher office”
This isn’t true of other politicians? Of many people who rise to the top in the corporate world?
“questionable prosecutorial ethics”
Such as? IIRC correctly, as both a DA and AG she had good success at successfully prosecuting criminals. I believe she prosecuted a number of Democratic politicians and went after the drug cartels. I saw some criticism for how she went after Backpage but dont know the details. Will confess that i have trouble feeling sorry for a company that did online sex slavery. At any rate, I am a data guy and just looking at her raw numbers they looked good. What did she do wrong? I have limited exposure to her since she is from CA.
” hoping Durham’s investigation ”
We should start a pool. The GOP has been investigating the investigators longer than it took for the Mueller investigation. My guess is that if they are going to take any formal action it will be mid to late September. Too early and the voters forget. Not early enough and they dont get to talk it up. My caveat here is that if the polls turn and it looks like Trump will win they will continue the investigation for another few years. Works great for both faux outrage and fund raising, the real purpose of all of the GOP investigations that never find anything. Probably cheaper to have one long investigation rather than 8 separates ones like Benghazi so kudos to whoever realized that.
Steve
“candidates who have been reared by black mothers in the context of a black community.”
That’s a dis qualifier. The country has too many problems to have a one issue leader staring at it’s historically racist bellybutton for four years or eight.
Whether or not Biden picked her, or even knows he “picked” her, the fact is she is not publicly associated with the Democrat lunatic fringe. That is a huge relief to the Party leadership. Her DA background is a big advantage, especially her overreaches. She is a law and order candidate. Given the restrictions, she is the best possible choice for Biden’s campaign. Her chief opposition will be the left radicals, and some blacks once they understand her background.
She is not African-American. Her mother is Hindu-Indian (full blood and believing/practicing), and her father is a Jamaican mulatto (likely ¼ to 1/16 African). This is also an advantage, and makes her much more acceptable to whites. Remember, Hindus are Aryans, i.e., Whites. (Obama also is not African-American in the actual meaning of the word: descent from slaves.)
I think this choice wins the Presidency for Biden (and her). When she succeeds to the Presidency, her administration will be liberal, but it will not be radical. She is no Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Rashida Tlaib We will not be in for a course of Green Economics nor rampant anti-Semitism.
Take a look at the actual positions she has taken, Bob. I’m not so sure Tlaib or AOC is the correct standard of comparison.
Coulda been worse, (Rice, Bass) and the party of the Plebes once again nominates yet another Patrician. Wonder who was the last candidate for state wide office and higher who has a scar from a errant power tool.
Need to find my Cthulhu/Dagon for President shirt.
Yes, I agree with Steve about a double standard being in place when talking about Trump and his sexual escapades. However, the double standard is one used more by Dems, as Trump’s womanizing falls way short of those of JFK, LBJ, Clinton, et. al., whose sexual misconduct followed them everywhere, even into the WH, involving a greater number of women. Nonetheless, what really gets tongues wagging , reviving accusations of affairs, is a secretly recorded Access Hollywood tape, conveniently rolled out just before his 2016 election, containing “pussy†comments. Furthermore, Trump’s openly playboy lifestyle and dalliances were not calculated ones, with sex being the conduits to achieve more powerful positions, unlike what Kamala Harris sought in her extramarital relationships.
Finally, notches on one’s prosecutorial resume may provide impressive numerical data, however, the ethics applied in achieving those wins is even more important, IMHO. Much of Harris’s record has undergone scrubbing, in order to shine up her reputation. But, there still remains remnants of legal eyesores such as her defense of a falsified transcript of a defendant’s record; blocking exculpatory DNA evidence; shielding a lab technician’s faulty work on hundreds of samples because of an opioid addiction; arbitrarily extending sentences, and extraordinarily harsh sentencing of black men and minor marijuana offenses.
Fundamentally, Kamala Harris is a ruthless political climber, much like Hillary Clinton, which may be why they are so compatible with each other. And, unlike what Bob Sykes, describes her to be, her political and policy
leanings are as far left as Sanders, AOC, Warren or anyone else in the growing Marxist contingency of today’s Democrat party.
Plus she’s clean, articulate and speaks with hardly any Negro dialect.
Just to add another page of background irony to Biden’s VP pick – Kamala Harris is related to a Hamilton Brown, who in 1817, owned 7 plantations in Jamaica which employed 200 slaves. In the era of BLM, who takes and acts out slavery retribution, reactively, to the Founding Fathers, how will this effect their view of Harris, especially when BLM and Antifa radicals continues to raze or reject anything/anyone historically associated with slavery?
If she tried, she’d probably be about as embarrassing as President Obama was in that regard.
“Plus she’s clean”
This puzzles me. Do we have examples of candidates who show up dirty?
“a scar from a errant power tool.”
Carter for sure. Lifelong woodworker, engineer and farmer. Would expect that sometime in the line of work he gets that scar. Some of the others might have got hurt putting up curtains. HW Bush was a WW2 pilot and may have helped with maintenance. W and Trump were rich kids. Obama and Clinton just dont seem the types even if they were not wealthy when young though Obama’s grandparents were pretty well off. Reagan was not wealthy when young, but no mention of him ever doing anything that would require manual labor, and actors tend to be wussies anyway.
Steve
I was going to make the wisecrack — “future historians will trace all the consequential events in the next few years to this decision; but they would be wrong, the fateful decisions were made earlier…”
Back when Harris declared her candidacy, I did say her chance at being President post Jan 21, 2020 were higher then Trump’s… and with Nate Silver giving Biden/Harris a 71% chance of winning, and Sean Trende remarking a 78 year man has a 25% chance of a major life event before 2025; her chances are pretty similar to Trumps.
A couple of other observations. From 2000, Democrats tickets are exclusively Senators. Republicans have featured a Senator once (McCain 08). I think it is causing peculiar politics in both parties.
A second observation — it is representative of the current Democratic coalition that a ex-Prosecutor (Harris) was chosen vs a ex-police chief (Demmings); given their similar biographies.
Last observation; to pick Harris who accused Biden of being weak on civil rights (Biden is quite proud of his civil rights record) — Biden is quite a forgiving person (some would call naïve).
He’s quoting a remark made by Joe Biden about Barack Obama back in 2007-2008.
I believe Al Sharpton took that remark personally, and HRC had the most cringeworthy fake Black accent.
Here is an interesting record. With Harris, this is the first election since 1968 (!) where both major tickets has no one who was an alumni of Harvard / Yale.
Shows how dominant the Harvard / Yale duopoly is in American politics.