America, Re-Meet Kamala Harris

Although pundits keep saying we don't know the vice president, maybe we do

Aug. 22: Harris to highlight prosecutorial past … Palestinian advocacy denied DNC stage time … Finally Trump uses protection … Kennedy announcement :::yawn::: Friday …

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Kamala Harris addresses the 2020 Democratic National Convention virtually, on Aug. 19, 2020. (Screengrab / PBS video.)

Vice President Kamala Harris will accept the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination tonight in Chicago.

She reportedly will discuss her experience as a prosecutor fighting child abuse and big banks.

But ever since Pres. Joe Biden dropped out of the race, pundits have not stopped telling us that we don’t know Harris. Not really. Y’know, not the way pundits know fellow bro politicians who will hang out with them.

So what do we know? 

Harris is a 59-year-old daughter of immigrants. A daughter of a successful Indian woman who gave her life to fighting cancer and then lost her life to it. A daughter of a Jamaican man who studied money and economic systems. A daughter of divorce. A daughter. A daughter who married a Jewish father and has been mother to his children but — as Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) definitely doesn’t obsess about — has never given birth with her own personal uterus.

Those are the (very) broad biographical strokes. Then there is the professional biography.

A prosecutor early on, who rose to become the top law-enforcement official in the biggest state in the country. And then a senator. Then a presidential candidate. Then a vice president — the best decision Biden ever made, he says.

If there’s any legitimacy to the idea that there’s some mysterious Harris-ness to which we’re not privy, Politico has an interesting piece describing lost or missed opportunities for Harris to introduce herself to America over the years. 

Convention speeches are more typically preludes to a presidential run, rather than big moments like tonight for “introduction,” but her 2012 convention speech was “listless,” Politico said, noting claims that Pres. Barack Obama’s team watered her speech down, neutering her conflicts with both the federal government and big banks in the aftermath of the 2007/2008 global economic crash. So she couldn’t introduce herself the way she wanted to then.

Thanks to California’s elections system, Harris’s 2016 Senate opponent was a Democrat, denying Harris a chance to display a full-throated challenge to a Republican. And then the 2020 convention was COVIDed.

So her team may have a point that she’s lost out on opportunities to take that spotlight. On the other hand, she did have the 2020 presidential campaign and debates — and in her defense she did score a big moment against Biden, assailing his history opposing busing with her own history being bused to school.

Y’know, like so many other Indian-American kids were. (Busing, it’s worth noting, worked.)

There may be some merit to the idea that Americans don’t know Harris — at least to the same extent we don’t really know any political leaders, or anyone we haven’t met. (I mean, do we really know Tom Hanks?)

Instead, voters seem to have gravitated to her based on viral videos and memes. Obviously that’s nowhere nears as substantive or meaningful as having a good sense of her resume. But maybe it is? Maybe the pundits are — I hope you’re sitting down — wrong?

Maybe Harris’s viral self is actually a better indicator of who she is; maybe that’s the person her resume has made her.

What really matters isn’t “who she is,” which doesn’t exist. What matters is who she’ll be on Day One. And then on Day Two. So on. We can debate nature vs. nurture, but the political context on those days will also shape who she is as president.

Still, it’s worth revisiting some arcane episodes in her life and career.

Some on the right like to say that Harris fucked her way to the top. It’s not true, but even if it were, good fucking is a skill that certainly trumps fucking people over. I haven’t seen the polling, but I guarantee a majority of likely voters value good fucking.

The claim is based on the fact that in the mid-’90s she was seeing Willie Brown, who became San Francisco mayor during that time. How did Brown get Harris to the top in return for fucking?

He appointed her to the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and then the California Medical Assistance Commission.

There’s some debate over whether Harris’s political career was jumpstarted more by handling unemployment insurance appeals or whether it was the medical-assistance commission that ignited Harris’s political career, rocketing her into the national spotlight just serving on California state commissions did for literally no human ever in the 6,000 years since Eve fucked her way to the top.

Harris was, by the way, already not just a lawyer but a former deputy district attorney.

Then there’s this great account of Harris getting pushed down by a boss in San Francisco who felt threatened by her. There was conflict over a proposed referendum to let prosecutors charge kids in grown-up court instead of juvenile court.

Harris — a prosecutor — opposed it. And spent her weekends fighting the proposition. Her boss told the office’s press person to stop directing reporters to her. Here’s how that press person, Fred Gardner, describes the exchange:

“You're trying to make a star out of Kamala Harris.”

“I can't make a star out of Kamala Harris,” I said, “she already is a star.”

In 2019, reporter Aaron Glantz said in his book that Harris had bailed on helping 35,000 California homeowners after the mortgage crash, and then tried to cover it up.

It was Steve Mnuchin, not yet Pres. Donald Trump’s Treasury secretary, foreclosed on those homeowners, qualifying Mnuchin to be Trump’s Treasury secretary.

Mnuchin had bought up regional banks — with billions in federal subsidies — and then seized those 35,000 homes.

Harris has said her hands were tied by the laws, but Glantz got an internal memo of Harris’s own attorneys arguing otherwise and recommending prosecuting Mnuchin’s banks. There’s no indication of a payoff or anything, and while Glantz is obviously and appropriately critical of Harris, his book was about systemic issues. The reason so many Americans lost homes and/or got screwed is that “all of these officials screwed up and dropped the ball — and hid it.”

You’ll likely hear tonight about Harris’s triumphs against big banks — although Glantz says it was little banks more often — but it’d be nice to have a reporter shout something about this at Harris rather than about whether Vance’s latest weirdness is weird.

Going back even earlier in Harris’s history, do you remember when I wrote that today’s protesters are tomorrow’s leaders? Neither do I, but I’m pretty sure I did.

Well, back in the 1980s, Harris was a protester. She joined other Howard University students on bus trips to Washington to protest apartheid — including at the South African embassy. Here’s her college magazine:

“She would later tell Howard students, in a 2017 Commencement address, about the importance of speaking up and speaking out for what’s right.”

I dunno whether Harris will discuss her early opposition to South African apartheid — at a time when it was still accepted in some political quarters. But we likely won’t hear her discuss another system of apartheid that’s still considered acceptable in some quarters today.

So, About Apartheid

The parents of an American held hostage by Hamas for 321 days so far spoke at last night’s Democratic National Convention. They asked that Hamas release their son, 23-year-old Hersh Goldberg-Polin, and the other hostages.

They praised Pres. Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for “working tirelessly” in pursuit of a cease-fire deal that would include the release of the remaining 100 or so hostages, some of whom may have been murdered by Hamas or less intentionally killed by Israel.

Not appearing on the same stage during the convention, will be anyone speaking on behalf of Gaza’s Palestinian population, or America’s Palestinian-American population. That’s even though the Uncommitted movement opposed to Biden’s policy of arming Israel despite human-rights violations won 36 delegates to the convention.

And not just any ol’ delegates: Swing state delegates!

Last night, Uncommitted leaders announced that they had been denied any speaking time on the main stage. (They got a panel Monday.)

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Tweeted that, “Just as we must honor the humanity of hostages, so too must we center the humanity of the 40,000 Palestinians killed under Israeli bombardment. To deny that story is to participate in the dehumanization of Palestinians.”

As Kareem Elrefai noted for The Nation, Ocasio-Cortez during her own time on stage at the convention spoke only about a cease-fire and hostage release, not about ending the Biden administration’s illegal supply of arms to Israel.

And that, Elrefai points out, was just one progressive imperative largely absent from this convention. The Green New Deal is dead in the rising water — presumably because Democrats see Biden’s legislation as achieving those goals, which it only partially did. Medicare For All, too, has been largely ignored.

Pointing at this as “proof” that progressives are fakes who don’t really want to save the planet is certainly not new, but it’s easy to mistake tactical choices for strategic ones. In a year when control of both chambers will depend on a small number of races in states where these agendas can be political kryptonite, there’s an undeniable pragmatism to keeping one’s distance.

On the other hand, a convention is a once-in-four-years chance to make the case that saving the Earth and saving lives are good things actually. And that might benefit not just candidates, but the people they’re supposed to represent.

Harris can do that tonight. No one is watering down this speech. She now has an historic chance to surprise us with something radical totally supported by the vast majority of Americans. Tonight Harris can show us not who she is, but the president she’ll be.

Donald Trump Is Safe

Although former Pres. Donald Trump was unprotected from the zingers of Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) and former Pres. Bill Clinton at the convention last night, he was finally safe from bullets. Probably.

Trump spoke in North Carolina yesterday, at his first outdoor rally since a 20-year-old fired a bullet that either nicked Trump’s ear invisibly or passed close enough for the shock wave to tear the skin. Trump was protected at the rally, for the first time, by bulletproof glass. Which I’m guessing is really only some-bulletproof glass.

This may be the first time in recorded history that Trump has chosen to use protection. It also means that Trump is now no longer the only thing standing between America and drag queens.

In addition, storage containers were stacked around the perimeter to more-protect Trump from the guns he wants everyone to have.

Despite all the protection, Trump was still wounded…by the remarks on Tuesday from former Pres. Barack Obama.

“He was very nasty last night,” Trump whined about Obama’s speech, which noted that Trump is constantly whining.

If You Just Can’t Help Yourself

If you just have to scratch that itch and you’re wondering what the polls look like going into Vice President Kamala Harris’s speech tonight, here’s the RealClearPolitics polling average as of this morning, with most of the polling being done before this week’s convention.

In other words, if there’s gonna be a convention bounce, it’s not reflected yet in these numbers:

Kennedy to Deliver National Address Friday

Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who came to prominence as an environmental activist and then left prominence as a guy who knows better than scientists, is going to deliver a national address on Friday.

Y’know, the same way literally millions of people do every day by livestreaming. “National” in the sense that they want the nation to watch it. “Address” in the sense that it will be words.

Kennedy is expected to drop out. Because he’s losing.

And he’s expected to endorse Donald Trump for represident. Kennedy’s running mate said earlier this week that the campaign is considering joining forces with Trump to block Vice President Kamala Harris from getting into the White House even more than she already is in the White House right now.

Trump and Kennedy recently have been speaking with each other, or at least at each other, as neither man is a renowned listener. As if to prove that he hasn’t heard a word Kennedy said, Trump has called Kennedy a “brilliant guy.”

The son of an assassinated icon and the nephew of an assassinated president, Kennedy has not service in public office but his primary accomplishment as a private citizen and activist has been to radically diminish the Kennedy family legacy.

Which would obviously be left a smoldering wasteland if Kennedy actually succeeds in making Trump represident.

Bad “Apology” for Bad Reporting

As your foresighted TFN guessed predicted yesterday, PBS’s Judy Woodruff goofed the other day when she said:

“The reporting is that former President [Donald] Trump is on the phone with the prime minister of Israel, urging him not to cut a deal right now, because it’s believed that would help the Harris campaign.”

Yesterday, Woodruff posted this:

“I want to clarify my remarks on the PBS News special on Monday night about the ongoing cease fire talks in the Middle East. As I said, this was not based on my original reporting; I was referring to reports I had read, in Axios and Reuters, about former President Trump having spoken to the Israeli Prime Minister. In the live TV moment, I repeated the story because I hadn't seen later reporting that both sides denied it. This was a mistake and I apologize for it.”

It’s good to take responsibility for a mistake you made. It’s really bad to take responsibility for a mistake you didn’t make.

The problem wasn’t that she missed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s denial that the two men spoke. The problem was that she fucked up what the reports she cited said.

Neither Axios, nor Reuters (which was alluding to Axios) reported what Woodruff initially said. That Trump “urged him not to cut a deal.”

No one reported that ever. Netanyahu’s denial was that they spoke at all. Netanyahu didn’t deny that Trump tried to tank the deal — why would he deny that, when no one was reporting it?

Woodruff doesn’t address her mistaken claim that Trump reportedly tried to tank the cease-fire deal. As I noted yesterday, the reporting — which Woodruff herself now confirms she was referring to — said the opposite, that Trump pushed Netanyahu to make a deal.

And the AP botches its own report on Woodruff’s report about the reporting she read that never reported what she reported it reported.

I’ll say it again: The Democrats missed a huge chance in 2015/2016 to take Trump’s claims of “fake news” and direct them, judo-style, at corporate journalism’s real shortcomings.

#Grrr!

TCB

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