"Now that we are learning about Harris, what’s not to like?"
Herb Rothschild
This isn't just relief. It is optimism.
Guest post author Herbert Rothschild has called Biden probably the best president of his lifetime. Biden succeeded in passing into law legislation that will improve the lives of Americans, and did it with razor-thin or nonexistent majorities in Congress. He got done what neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama could, and Obama briefly had 60 --yes, 60! -- Democratic votes in the Senate. But it is time to turn the page from Biden, Rothschild writes, and from Trump, too. Rothschild is optimistic about the future of a Kamala Harris presidency.
Rothschild was a professor of English at LSU. He has been a lifetime activist on behalf of peace, justice, and the environment. He is the author of The Bad Old Days, a memoir of his years as a civil rights activist in Louisiana. He was the founder of ashland.news, a now-thriving online newspaper for Ashland, Oregon. He writes a weekly column, and this post appeared there earlier this week.
Guest Post by Herb Rothschild
Right after the debate between Biden and Trump, I wrote a column that was published with the headline, “Even I no longer believe that Biden is fit for the office.” I ended it by writing, “I am deeply troubled by this development. A second Trump presidency will be much worse than the first. . . . My best hope is that Biden will withdraw in time for a more eligible Democratic nominee to emerge and prevail.”
When that hope was realized, I breathed a sigh of relief along with perhaps half the adult population of the U.S. It was as if a great weight had been lifted from us, and we responded with an enthusiasm that was expressed in measurable ways. According to Kamal Harris’s campaign, in the first week it raised more than $200 million dollars and signed up over 170,000 new volunteers. Of the donors, 66% hadn’t given to Biden.
That it took Biden so long to acknowledge that he was leading his party—and thus his country—to disaster worked out for the best. Democrats expended no time or money, nor created any intramural grievances, deciding who would take his place at the top of the ticket. And it’s become apparent that Harris is probably a better standard bearer than the person who would have emerged from primary contests.
Her charisma had no scope to manifest itself in the crowded field of the 2020 primaries. And despite the current necessity of crediting her with a share of Biden’s accomplishments, in fact she was no exception to the rule that vice presidents are kept on the periphery of presidential power. Thus, she was largely unknown to most of us.
Now that we are learning about Harris, what’s not to like? She projects strength even as she projects human warmth. That may be the undoing of Trump’s candidacy, because his entire schtick is projecting strength, and meanness is a part of it. That self-presentation worked in proximity to Biden. In proximity to Harris, Trump as strong man seems like a head pushed through the hole in a cardboard cutout of Superman.
For a misogynist, that a woman projects more strength than he adds insult to injury. It seems to have confused Trump. How else can one account for his bizarre claim that “I’m a much better looking person than Kamala”? He said that on August 17 at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, PA after referencing Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan’s assertion that Harris’s beauty gives her a big advantage. After saying he had never thought about that before, three times Trump said he was better looking than she. I infer that, troubled by finding his “manhood” (i.e., his power to dominate) challenged by a woman, he was emotionally impelled to challenge her “womanhood” (i.e., her physical beauty).
On the last night of the Democratic convention, former Illinois Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger gave utterance to the gathering sense that Trump as Rambo is a phantasm. “Donald Trump is a weak man pretending to be strong. He is a small man pretending to be big. He’s a faithless man pretending to be righteous. He’s a perpetrator who can’t stop playing the victim. He … puts on quite a show. But there’s no real strength there.” That truth needed to be made explicit at the convention, but only once. When Harris appeared shortly thereafter, she communicated it by being herself.
Those who composed the messages of the convention and orchestrated the various ways they were pitched did a superb job. The phrases “turning the page” and “We’re not going back,” the second of which became a mantra, resonated in multiple ways. Most obviously, they communicated that we’re not going back to a Trump presidency. But they also exploited the turn of events that has made Trump the old candidate. plucking from his hand one of his winning cards. And more subtly but also effectively, they cast Trump as an entertainer past his heyday, an act that has become stale.
The campaign organizers worked hard and intelligently to undermine the perception that Trump is a champion of workers without college degrees, those who, truth be said, were abandoned by Democrats as well as Republicans from 1980 to 2016. Those folks needed to realize that nothing changed in 2017 but the rhetoric, that Trump was a faux populist. Some speakers, such as UAW president Shawn Fain, tackled the assignment head-on, pointing to the Trump and Biden (/Harris) records. But there were less straightforward tactics. Several changes were rung on the contrast between the working-class backgrounds of the Democratic nominees and Trump’s, such as Harris’s stint at MacDonalds. And simply by being who he is—a white, male, Midwestern former football coach without a portfolio of stocks and bonds—Tim Walz greatly helped make the case.
But what struck me as the best salvo was when Michelle Obama spoke of “the affirmative action of generational wealth.” In a speech that was the best I heard at the convention, she dismantled Trump’s claim to champion working people against the elites. He was born into the elite class and remains loyal to it because he remains loyal to his material self-interest. But that phrase, “the affirmative action of generational wealth,” was a brilliant way of communicating to the white males whose grievances Trump has hitherto exploited so effectively that he has turned their gaze away from the real cause of their grievances.
The convention gave women and people of color multiple reasons to vote the Harris/Walz ticket. Freedom, specifically applied to reproductive freedom, freedom to vote and freedom from fear of gun violence, was a message sure to appeal to them. And the prominence of women and people of color at the podium, culminating with Harris herself, was an even more effective appeal.
Whether the convention gave enough white working-class males sufficient reason to vote the Harris/Walz ticket remains to be seen. Frankly, the Democrats don’t need a majority of them to win. Still, were they to start voting Democratic again, it would signal an end to the politics Trump epitomizes.
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7 comments:
Regarding an end to the politics Trump epitomizes, he increasingly epitomizes a new Confederacy ready and willing to dump our democracy. How else do you explain the appeal of a convicted criminal who tried to overthrow the government and who desecrates the sanctity of Arlington National Cemetery by using it for a campaign ad? He might as well have gotten his MAGA minions to smear feces on the headstones, as they did on the walls of our national Capitol.
Kamala Harris, whom he calls a commie slut, represents everything he hates and fears: justice for all.
Trump is as faux as faux gets, to be sure, and what isn’t faux is worse still. But please let’s not rhapsodize about the prefab “working class background” of the Democrat. Harris, daughter of two PhDs, never mentioned a stint making fries at McDonald’s in two memoirs and multiple resumes and personal appearances prior to her 2019 presidential run. McDonalds and the Harris campaign suddenly have no comment concerning the supposed location and other details of that work. (By contrast, Barack Obama’s Baskin-Robbins outlet became a tourist attraction). Walz’ origin story if anything is more replete with puffery, as indeed was Biden’s. Pass the koolaid. In their defense, though, the Democratic candidates are only mendacious within the pale.
I don't, for a minute, think Biden's withdrawl was not planned long ago.
I think Don Old was rope-a-doped.
It's worked out very well for the Democratic party and the country.
As M2inFLA put it a couple of days ago, we could be headed for World War Three. Even so, I cannot resist: The absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, or something like that. Kamala Harris says she worked at McDonald's, and she deserves to be taken at her word. Snopes discusses this at length. Among the salient points is that most people applying for a job as a lawyer in a justice department or DA's office would not put a summer job at McDonald's on their resume (or they'd seem weird), nor, for that matter, would they put their eighth-grade grade-point average on their resume. The franchisee who owned that McDonald's probably tossed the box of 1980s payroll records years ago. For myself, I never say on resumes that I was a dish washer at a ski resort, but I was. Still, where is this McDonald's, anyway? Shattuck Avenue? Ashby Avenue? Maybe I ate a hamburger there when she worked in fries and ice cream.
The point is that Harris did NOT say it, until comparatively recently, and after she had summarized her entire existence for political purposes to that point on multiple occasions, sans reference to McDonalds. Left-leaning pols, concerned as they are with leveling and images of social justice, are eager to display any early working class bona fides they might possess. Again, case in point, Obama the ice cream scooper—verified via multiple sources years later. Harris and fries? So far it’s just her latter day claim. You’d think McDonalds would be eager to claim her. If only they could….
It's a conspiracy!!!
Nah. Apparently just more cynical politician bio puffery, somehow unmentioned in Harris’ own memoirs. It’s a bipartisan practice.
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