When you read the section of Jason L. Riley’s Wall Street Journal column below on the selection of Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s running mate, keep in mind that 99% of Democratic primary voters voted for candidates other than Sen. Harris in the primaries. Here’s the portion of the column:
As George Will put it after Ferraro died, “she was an instrument—Geraldine Ferraro was—of identity politics, a Catholic woman from Queens.†The result? Mondale lost Catholics and women. Reagan even came close in Queens.
Like all presidential candidates, Mr. Biden was looking for someone to help him—or at least not hurt him—geographically and with certain voting blocs. His campaign has made no secret of his strategy to win back white working-class residents of battleground states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin who left the Democratic Party to vote for Donald Trump. It’s hard to see how Ms. Harris will help him with those voters. Barack Obama won them over in 2008 by playing down racial differences on the campaign trail. Ms. Harris’s most memorable moment during the primary was to suggest that Mr. Biden was a racist for expressing opinions about forced busing in the 1970s that turned out to be nearly identical to her own.
The inconvenient truth for progressives is that primary voters bypassed several female and minority candidates—including Ms. Harris—to nominate Mr. Biden. If having a woman on the ticket were a priority for most Democrats, why did Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar flame out? In addition to Ms. Harris, black voters might have opted for Cory Booker if race was a top concern, yet they overwhelmingly went for Mr. Biden. Perhaps liberal elites and their media allies care more about a presidential ticket that “looks like America†than the average Democratic voter does.
My question about the selection of Sen. Harris is, what will its net effect be? Will it result in more votes for Joe Biden, fewer, or make no difference? Have we entered a new domain of politics in which the results don’t matter?
IMO the ticket will receive fewer votes than might otherwise have been the case. Mr. Biden had painted himself into a corner with his pledge to pick a black woman and found it difficult to follow through with that commitment while satisfying the DNC. I still don’t understand why he picked Kamala Harris.
Actually, Biden’s performance during his announcement of the Harris selection is the most important thing. Biden was presidential, confident, coherent, articulate–no sign of alleged dementia or confusion. He hit all the traditional Democrat positions spot on, and he downplayed the Green Economy and race baiting stuff. If he can do that in a debate, he will win.
Harris’ follow on was also good, standard, Democrat stuff.
The VP choice seldom makes a big difference. In this case it was a counter to the law and order theme the Trump campaign was pushing. It also signaled that he wasn’t totally catering to the far left of the party. He probably loses fewer independents.
Steve
So, being “confident, coherent, articulate†are the current standards for presidential qualifications? Hmmm, someone could sober up a drunk, give him a substantial meal, pep talk and he too could momentarily seem confident, coherent and articulate.
However, no matter how much the democrat media and the base do a weekend-with-Bernie push, in order to downplay any signs of cognitive decline, one just can’t hide the fact that Biden is only a shell of a man, he once was, who debated Paul Ryan years ago. Maybe, by Biden’s handlers limiting his appearances, tightly scripting what he’s allowed to say, and medication Biden will be able to turn in an acceptable presidential performance, especially in the eyes of those who desperately want to unseat Trump. For those republicans, moderate democrats, independents who seek societal normalcy, the shell game of masking Biden’s obvious deficiencies will simply not work. Also, adding Kamala Harris will further turn people off, as she is anything but a moderate politician intrinsically willing to moderate today’s immoderate populace and problems.
Kamala Harris has the most liberal voting record in the Senate if memory serves. Yet she is being touted as a moderate and rejection of the far left. But the far left still isn’t happy, which tells you what you need to know about them.
She wants your guns. Not a good stance. She will come off affable. Good. She will need to explain her sudden conversion to supporting someone she basically said was a rapist. Bad. She’s supposedly law and order………..but the black community is not happy. She’s going to need to explain her embrace of a man she described as a racist, by current definitions. Yet she comes from a slave owning heritage.
Hmmmm. Sounds like a real chameleon. I can’t see this being a net positive. The ads kind of write themselves.
David Axelrod presumably is still connected with the campaign brain trust — ghostwrites the reasoning.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/11/opinions/why-kamala-harris-won-vp-content-axelrod/index.html
This is the key quote
Voters should read this part and think about the implications very carefully.
If Biden’s brain trust is like this; how will D.C / State Governments / other countries going to act to a President who is presumed a lame duck on inauguration day?
“Kamala Harris has the most liberal voting record in the Senate if memory serves.”
And when McCain ran he was the most conservative, but we know he wasn’t really. When Senators run for office they vote for every bill their party sponsors and against everything the other side offers.Just how it works. The far left recognizes that so they arent happy. Her longer record as DA and AG worries them.
“She wants your guns.” No one is taking the guns. The GOP voted to give guns back to the mentally ill. That might be overturned. You might have to qualify to carry or something, though probably not. Maybe you cant carry around 100 round magazines. The horror. How can you hunt w/o one of those. Anyway, you can bank on being able to own as many guns and as much ammunition as want by the end of any Biden/Harris time in office. I have made that guarantee at the start of every Dem presidency. Sure the gun lobby appreciates your help with selling guns.
” Yet she comes from a slave owning heritage.”
The stupidity. It burns. Many, maybe most, black people with roots during the slave era have slaveowner heritage. It was the slaveowners raping the slaves not the black men raping the white women. (Sorry Cleavon) While I am sure that you are helping black people figure out how they should feel about her I think they are capable of figuring it out on their own. (Link notes that the admixing of European genes to blacks took a big drop off after slavery ended suggesting that the mixing was not interracial marriages, which we already knew anyway.)
https://psmag.com/news/how-slavery-changed-the-dna-of-african-americans
Steve
“While studying for his Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley, he met Shyamala Gopalan, an Indian cancer researcher. The couple were married, and their daughter, the future California Attorney General and U.S. Senator, was born in Berkeley in 1964. Harris and her sister, Maya, are therefore first-generation American citizens, born in the U.S. to a Jamaican father and Indian mother.
In his Jamaica Global article, Harris claimed to be descended from the 19th-century planter and slave owner Hamilton Brown. He wrote:
“My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town) and to my maternal grandmother Miss Iris (née Iris Finegan, farmer and educator, from Aenon Town and Inverness, ancestry unknown to me). The Harris name comes from my paternal grandfather Joseph Alexander Harris, land-owner and agricultural ‘produce’ exporter (mostly pimento or all-spice), who died in 1939 one year after I was born and is buried in the church yard of the magnificent Anglican Church which Hamilton Brown built in Brown’s Town (and where, as a child, I learned the catechism, was baptized and confirmed, and served as an acolyte).†[Emphasis is added].
There is no doubt that Hamilton Brown was a prominent plantation owner in Jamaica during the first half of the 19th century, owned slaves, and also advocated against the abolition of slavery and sought to downplay the difficult working and living conditions of slaves in Jamaica.”
And then the article goes on into speculative history and descendancy.
But of course you miss the point completely, and no doubt intentionally. In today’s politics, such a person is a called a racist, at the drop of a hat, by Dem pols, media and advocacy groups…………….except for stooges desiring to obfuscate and behave hypocritically. Yes, the hypocrisy burns.
I had to admire Ms. Kamala’s acceptance speech. Cleverly inserting herself into the Liberal’s 1960″s Nativity Scene in Selma:
“My mother and father, they came from opposite sides of the world to arrive in America, one from India and the other from Jamaica, in search of a world-class education. But what brought them together was the civil rights movement of the 1960s. That’s how they met, as students in the streets of Oakland, marching and shouting for this thing called justice in a struggle that continues today, and I was part of it. My parents would bring me to protests, strapped tightly in my stroller. My mother, Shyamala, raised my sister, Maya, and me to believe that it was up to us and every generation of Americans to keep on marching.”
Even though she was born in 1965, She was there! In spirit, Side by side with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr! In Selma, Alabama! Ahem, In Spirit!
She’s down with the struggle!!
I presume she’s referring to the Sheraton-Palace Demonstration in 1964.
Steve:
White men raping Black women is your own fantasy not the reality of my experience. It surely happens but it’s rare.
Black men have a desire for white women that drives them crazy. And the reverse is as strong. On the other hand Black women are as strong or stronger than white men and have nothing to fear from them.
“But of course you miss the point completely, and no doubt intentionally. In today’s politics, such a person is a called a racist, at the drop of a hat,”
Actually, I have never seen someone called a racist just because they had a slaveowner in their history. It would mean having to call most of the people who were actually slaves racist. I am sure you have lots of examples.
Grey- White men raping black women was the norm when we had slavery, the time period which I referenced. I will be sure to ask all of the black guys at work how they manage to control themselves.
Steve
“was the norm when we had slavery”
I guess you’re older than me. I don’t remember that at all.
No one is, but we can study genetic material, and we have. We also have a lot of written history to confirm it.
Steve