Tag Archives: Kamala Harris

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‘I’ll look at it’

There you go. The president of the United States had a chance this week to shoot down in flames the latest lie about a politician who happens to be “of color,” that she somehow isn’t constitutionally qualified to run for public office.

Instead, Donald Trump said “I’ll look at it.” The “it” being reports that U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, a California Democrat who is now set to be nominated as her party’s vice-presidential candidate, was born somewhere other than the United States.

This is a racist rant that needs to be plowed under. Why in the name of presidential statesmanship doesn’t Donald Trump do so? Well, I know why. It’s because he is no statesman. Trump is a racist chump who trades on innuendo and invective.

Moreover, Trump is a card-carrying member of the lunatic/wack job/fruitcake/racist wing of what used to be a great political party.

Trump, you’ll recall fomented a similar lie about President Obama. Then he surrendered, offering a tepid “He’s a citizen of the United States” response to a question about the birther lie.

For the record, Sen. Harris is the daughter of a Jamaican man and an Indian woman. They met in California. They got married and they produced a daughter. Little Kamala came into this world in Oakland. Calif., in 1964. There. She’s a U.S. citizen. She is fully qualified. End of argument, yes?

Hardly. It will continue for as long as Donald Trump gives such idiocy any sort of currency, which is what he did with his “I’ll look at it” non-answer.

I like the response given by Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, who called the birther baloney a “racist, ignorant lie.”

It’s all of that … and I also would call it “hate speech.”

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Battle is now joined

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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.

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Welcome to the show, Sen. Harris

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.

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Digesting this VP choice

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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.

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Sen. Harris? Let’s ponder this pick

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I will start with a bit of candor about U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris.

She was not my favorite choice for Joseph R. Biden’s vice-presidential running mate. Of the names that rose to the top, my preference gravitated toward Susan Rice, the former national security adviser during Barack Obama’s second term as president.

I also would have gotten fully behind U.S. Rep. Val Demings, U.S. Rep. Karen Bass, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Harris, though, is the one.

Now, that all said, I am left to place my faith in the selection process that Biden — himself a former vice president — used to make this dramatic selection. Biden served with great distinction as VP during the eight years of the Obama administration. President Obama has said many times that his selection of Biden was the “first major decision I made” as a presidential nominee and he never regretted it.

So, Biden presumably went through the same grueling process to which he was subjected during his own vetting to be VP during the Obama years.

In one respect, Biden’s selection of Harris suggests that the former VP, indeed, holds no grudges. It was Harris who drew blood from Biden during one of the Democratic primary debates when she challenged his boasting of being able to work with segregationist senators. Biden could have held that against her. He didn’t.

As some observers have noted already, this new Democratic team reminds them of Republicans Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush teaming up in 1980 after Bush called Reagan an adherent of what he called “voodoo economics.” The Reagan-Bush team steamrolled to two landslide victories.

Do I have any concerns now about Kamala Harris? Again, I will defer to Joe Biden’s knowledge of the vetting process. If she checks all the boxes to Biden’s satisfaction, then that is good enough for me.

Just as Joe Biden wasn’t my first pick to lead the Democratic challenge against Donald Trump, Kamala Harris wasn’t my first pick to join him in that effort.

Now that they’re a team, I’m all in.

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Democratic POTUS field thinning out as it should

You cannot refer to U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris as a “top-tier” Democratic Party presidential hopeful, because were she such she wouldn’t be announcing her withdrawal today from the 2020 race for the White House.

She joins Montana Gov. Steve Bullock as the most recent presidential wannabes to call it a campaign.

This in-and-out business with the current field of Democrats vying to be nominated to run against Donald Trump is getting a bit difficult to track. Harris and Bullock never got traction. Neither did Beto O’Rourke, or Tim Ryan, or … whomever else has come and gone. There remain a boatload of others who should call it quits and leave the contest to the actual frontrunners.

Then we have these late entries. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is in because, he says, the current field is too weak to take on Trump. No one stands out as someone who can defeat the president; so, Bloomberg says he’s the one. He surely can outspend Trump, given that his personal wealth dwarfs that of the president, who has boasted about his own filthy richness. And then we have former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, whose entry baffles me. I don’t know what he brings to the campaign that isn’t already personified in many of the others.

As for Harris, she was another one who entered the contest with high hopes and high expectation. She’s now about to be history — in terms of the presidential campaign.

I will await the further culling of the field as these joint appearances continue and the Democratic National Committee keeps setting the bar for inclusion in these events even higher.

Moreover, I am looking forward to the Democratic Party getting a nominee who can deliver a knockout blow to the fraud who masquerades as president of the United States.

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Harris scores big, but now faces some blowback

Kamala Harris pounded Joe Biden with some serious body blows at that debate this past week. The U.S. senator and former California attorney general caught the former senator and former vice president flat footed when she questioned him about his senatorial relationships with avowed segregationists.

Oh, my. Then came the initial response. Harris now is on the front rank of Democratic challengers to Donald Trump. Her fans think better of her, if that’s possible. Biden’s fans initially were somewhat dismayed.

Now, though, the senator is getting a bit of push back, some resistance from those who think she might have let her ambition get the better of her. She shouldn’t have gone low with that attack against the ex-VP, some are saying.

Let’s play this out for a moment.

Suppose Biden remains the favorite among Democrats. Suppose, too, he gets the party’s presidential nomination in the summer of 2020. Who would he choose as his running mate. One Biden anonymous supporter said, “That sh** ain’t happening.”

Really? Let’s see. George H.W. Bush called Ronald Reagan’s fiscal policy “voodoo economics” when the two of them ran for the Republican nomination in 1980. Reagan then selected Bush to run with him; they served as a team for two terms and Bush got elected president in 1988.

Oh, then we had Biden running against Barack Obama in 2008. They fought hard for as long as Biden was in the hunt. Then the Delaware U.S. senator dropped out. Democrats nominated Sen. Obama — who then chose Biden to run with him. You know the rest of it.

Moral of the story? If Biden gets nominated, do not count out Sen. Kamala Harris as a potential running mate.

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Biden stumbles, but he didn’t knock himself out

Well, there you go. Former Vice President Joe Biden had to know one of his presidential campaign foes would come after him for his vote on busing and his tepid acknowledgement of working with segregationist senators back in the day.

Still, he seemed flummoxed when Sen. Kamala Harris challenged him directly during last night’s Democratic presidential debate on the busing matter. Biden’s response was that he voted against the busing measure in the Senate only because it was being dictated by the Department of Education.

Still, Harris came off as the winner of that exchange. Biden, the clear frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, came up short.

Is this the end of Biden’s bid? Hardly.

Leave it to former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican no less, to put it in perspective, which he did this morning.

Christie noted that in 1984, President Reagan suffered through a terrible debate performance against former VP Walter Mondale while campaigning for re-election; Reagan stumbled, bumbled and mumbled his way through forgetful efforts to answer questions. He also noted that President Obama had a horrible debate showing against Mitt Romney in 2012 when he was running for re-election.

They both came back, Christie said, with Reagan winning re-election in a 49-state landslide and Obama winning a second term with a surprisingly comfortable margin.

The message? One stumble does not doom a presidential candidacy. It’s still early and Joe Biden will have plenty of opportunity to regain his footing.

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Democrats looking for sure-fire ‘diversity’ on 2020 ticket?

At the risk of confirming my pledge to avoid political predictions by getting another prediction dead wrong, I am going to offer a possible result in the Democratic Party’s presidential primary campaign in 2020.

It’s looking to me as though Democrats — whoever they nominate for president a year from now — will include (a) a woman or (b) a person “of color” on their presidential ticket to run against Donald J. Trump, or (c) maybe both.

A Politico.com story talks about how former Vice President Joe Biden is building on his early front-running momentum as he kicks his presidential campaign into high gear. It also references the chatter about how Biden, the prohibitive early front runner, could produce a political juggernaut if he wins the presidential nomination and then selects Sen. Kamala Harris to run with him as his vice-presidential nominee.

I don’t know who the Democrats will nominate. If it’s Biden, it seems to make all the sense in the world for him to find a young, vibrant running mate. Harris fits the bill. She also, quite obviously is of the correct gender and she also happens to be biracial.

A woman of color!

How does look?

As Politico reports: “Harris is everything the 76-year-old Biden is not. The freshman senator from California is younger, a woman and a person of color. As Biden gets dinged for his bipartisan bromides, Harris is winning applause for her merciless cross-examination of Trump officials.”

OK, I cannot predict a Biden-Harris ticket will materialize. It seems to make perfect sense, though, for Democrats to look consciously for someone who isn’t a white guy for one of the two spots at the top of their presidential ticket.

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus call such a lineup to be a political “dream ticket.” They might be on to something.

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Has Beto waited too long?

Beto O’Rourke’s legion of followers might be witnessing a total eclipse of a political star.

The one-time West Texas congressman who came tantalizingly close to defeating Ted Cruz in the race for the U.S. Senate is now watching on the sidelines as three former congressional colleagues scarf up all the headlines while running for president.

Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker have become the flavors of the moment. As Politico reports, those on the sidelines are waiting for one or more of them to mess up. Beto might be one of them waiting with bated breath.

I am not yet convinced that Beto O’Rourke is presidential material. He’s a young man. He waged an unconventional, no-consultant, no-polling campaign for the U.S. Senate seat in Texas. He damn near won against a Republican incumbent!

He has nowhere to go but . . . down? Not really.

However, politics is often like baseball, meaning that “timing is everything.” Given the pace of politics in this Internet/social media/ digital age it appears possible that Beto O’Rourke’s window might be closing. He’s not alone, of course. A crowd of other Democrats are being caught flat-footed by the excitement generated already as the 2020 campaign starts to ignite.

Kamala Harris’s announcement was a spectacular event. Elizabeth Warren is seeking to shed the baggage she piled on herself with that DNA test to prove her native American heritage. Cory Booker is seen by some as “too establishment” to suit the base of the Democratic Party.

Does that make Sen. Harris the early frontrunner? Oh, it’s possible, I suppose.

As for Beto O’Rourke, I am thinking he’d better decide quickly whether he’s in . . . or out.

Hey, there’s always 2024!