Tag Archives: Kamala Harris

Biden/Harris 2020!!

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Finally, we’ve got something to celebrate. It seems a very long time since we last heard some good news. I almost forgot what it was like.

I was resigned to whomever Joe Biden would pick, and prepared to be disappointed. Everyone whom I know was rooting for Kamala Harris. This, in my experience, almost guaranteed it wouldn’t be her. Just like my husband’s playoff picks, my support for a candidate usually means you can make book on a loss.

Not this time. Biden’s first executive decision is golden. I have no doubt that any of the women under consideration would have made a fine Vice President, but Kamala Harris was a standout. I would have preferred Bernie or Elizabeth Warren as the Presidential candidate, or Harris, herself; but for Vice President, she always was, hands-down, my first choice.

The thought of Mike Pence having to spar with her on a debate stage is absolutely delightful. She’s smart, poised, articulate and relatable; all things that he is not. To carry water for Donald Trump, Pence must defend indecency and corruption from the hypocrite’s corner. Not an enviable position. Add to that the fact that Harris is a WOMAN, a gender with which Mike Pence is apparently very ill at ease, and one can only hope he wears a double set of dress shields under the hot lights of the debate stage.

Should Joe Biden, as president, decide against a second term, Kamala Harris is the perfect age and profile to seamlessly turn the Biden /Harris agenda into the Harris/? agenda, as presidential candidate in 2024. She represents the future of the Democratic party.

We’ll be tearing out hair out over some stupid thing Trump will do or say tomorrow, but tonight let’s raise a glasss of good cheer for Kamala Harris, the people’s candidate for Vice President in 2020.

I Can’t Watch.

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‘Can’t watch, I say.

Seems like Joe Biden has just barely entered the 2020 presidential race and already I can’t bear to watch him in action.   It’s too painful: like waiting for someone to finish a very old joke that they tell very badly.

I will, of course, support him if he is the ultimate nominee, as any sane person would; but the thought of having to watch his fossilized attempts to walk-back three decades of mis-step and mis-speak for the next year-and-a-half makes me instinctively reach for the remote.

The mere fact that he would be running against the most dishonest, most venal and most corrupt president in living memory will only slightly dampen my distaste at the spectacle of the Democrat’s least inspiring candidate feebly hoisting the banner for progressive reform.

If it has taught me nothing else, the continued popularity of Donald Trump has once and for all quashed any delusion I had of the fundamental common sense of the American people.  The fact that Joe Biden is ten points ahead of any other comers in the most recent polls just reinforces that point.

It’s as if we are being held at gunpoint by the pollsters who are telling us to disobey our nobler instincts and elevate the guy who would be least objectionable to the phalanx of assorted bigots, misogynists and toxic greed-o-philes who comprise Donald Trump’s miserable margin.

Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t think Joe Biden belongs in that stew of misanthropes.  It’s just that he is “old school;” and the checkered political past that dogs his primary path is seen as a feature, not a bug, by some of those who might otherwise fall for Donald Trump’s sour “sweet talk” once again.  And, if that is all it takes to defeat Donald Trump, I’m in.

But is it?  If his performance at last night’s debate is anything to judge by, Biden may no longer have the stuffin’ to withstand a pummeling by the Meanest Man on Earth.

In fact, over the past two days, it was the women more than anyone else who impressed.  Of course that is just my husband’s and my opinion, but I have a feeling that there is an unspoken fear that any female candidate will be “HIllaried” in a match-up with Trump.  

There is ample evidence from recent public apathy in the face of attack after attack on women’s civil rights and credible rape and assault allegations against Donald Trump and others within his sphere, that women’s status in America is actually declining after more than a century of upward trajectory. You can thank those hypocrites in the male-dominated “Christian” Right for that stone in our collective shoe.

But Kamala Harris is NOT Hillary Clinton.  Elizabeth Warren is NOT Hillary Clinton.  Kirstin Gillibrand is NOT Hillary Clinton.  Amy Klobuchar is NOT Hillary Clinton.  Tulsi Gabbard is NOT Hillary Clinton.  And  Marianne Williams is NOT…well, I don’t know exactly who she is, but she is certainly NOT Hillary Clinton.

In fact, none of them is anything like Hillary Clinton: not in personal history, nor in political experience.

And Democrats have plenty more compelling women candidates waiting in the wings.  To name just a few: there are Stacey Abrams, Jennifer Granholm and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.

So it’s time for Democratic handicappers to grow a pair and stop thinking out-loud: “we tried a woman and we LOST!”  

I am so glad that 94-year-old Jimmy Carter is still around to say unequivocally what no one else seems to want to say: Donald Trump didn’t legitimately win the presidency.  Even if no effort has been made so far to quantify the impact of Russian interference on the election outcome, ample evidence exists suggesting it could have been considerable.  That, on top of the fact that Hillary Clinton received three-million more votes than did Donald Trump, pretty much puts a lie to the “We tried a woman and she lost.” argument.

I’m a big ol’ fan of Bernie Sanders and a number of the other men look like exciting prospects, too; but my money is on the women, whom the Democrats overlook at their…and our…own peril.

Joe Biden is not the answer

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Democrats need to think outside of the box.

Joe Biden is not the answer.

He’s a nice man but he is too old, too encumbered by establishment political history, and slow to admit his own mistakes.  I wish he would take himself out of the running, because we have played this scene before.

We can do better.

If there is any overarching lesson to take away from the perilous state of our union, it is that old assumptions and conventional wisdom can no longer be relied upon.  The same must be said about polls, focus groups, handicapping and other tools of the political trade.

There’s no such thing as a sure thing in topsy turvy Trumpland, where he is still fully capable of criminal election meddling in full sight.

Don’t pick a candidate based on what Pennsylvania might do. If the people of Pennsylvania can’t figure out that ANY candidate is better than Donald Trump, even after two years of his venomous lies and letdowns, the disease has progressed too far and the patient will die.

Democrats are just too polite and rational.  They think that the problem in 2016 was that Hillary wasn’t “relatable.”  The idea is that Biden will dish-out some of his blue collar B.S. and Trump’s base of noble working men will come a-running.

Bullshit. 

Trump’s faithful base is a white supremacist soup of religious haters, woman haters, brown haters  and repressed homophobes.  Democrats should not be offering anything that would  win their votes.  

I grew up in the 1950’s, in a lower middle-class household, in a blue-collar neighborhood.  Both of my parents had to work, because they thought they had to send us to Catholic school and otherwise couldn’t afford to do so.  They scraped and they struggled throughout their lives and never took a nickel in public assistance until the blessed relief of Social Security and Medicare kicked in;  but they NEVER looked down their noses at those who did, and they taught us tolerance and progressive values despite being given every opportunity to be bitter and resentful.

If my parents could be kind of heart and generous of mind, there is no excuse for the poisonous attitude that seems to have possessed the Trump base.

I’m tired of hearing that Democrats have to somehow “win over” those misanthropes, just as I am tired of seeing the outstanding women in the race treated as if they shouldn’t aspire beyond Vice-President, and the one proud Democratic Socialist, relegated to a sidebar, despite the fact that he stubbornly refuses to slip away from the top polling positions and his central ideas spring from the few really good public policies that we all depend upon.

If we don’t strive to be better than this, we deserve what we get.  

Put Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris on the debate platform opposite Donald Trump and be done with it.  Was there ever a more important moment to take a courageous stand?

After the dust clears, if we still have a “United States of America” maybe we’ll finally have the guts to mandate public funding for elections, eliminate special interest funding, put some guardrails on the presidency, and really do something about the environment.

If we can’t do that, what is the bloody point?