Biden Picks Kamala Harris
Photo by Phil Roeder via Wikimedia Commons
Joseph R. Biden Jr. selected Senator Kamala Harris of California as his vice-presidential running mate on Tuesday, embracing a former rival who sharply criticized him in the Democratic primaries but emerged after ending her own campaign as a vocal supporter of Mr. Biden and a prominent advocate of racial-justice legislation after the death of George Floyd in late May.
Ms. Harris, 55, is the first Black woman and the first person of Indian descent to be nominated for national office by a major party, and only the fourth woman in history to be chosen for one of their presidential tickets. She brings to the race a far more vigorous campaign style than Mr. Biden’s, including a gift for capturing moments of raw political electricity on the debate stage and elsewhere, and a personal identity and family story that many find inspiring.
Mr. Biden announced the selection over text message and in a follow-up email to supporters: “Joe Biden here. Big news: I’ve chosen Kamala Harris as my running mate. Together, with you, we’re going to beat Trump.”
In case you’ve blocked out the memory of the endless Democratic primary,1 Harris was briefly a contender for President. She raised lots of money and briefly surged in the polls after attacking Biden on busing. But poor organization, an unfamiliarity with the issues and on-stage destruction at the hands of Tulsi Gabbard based on her record as a prosecutor dashed those ambitions.
Her choice is hardly a surprise. Harris has been the leading contender since the primary ended. In fact, I predicted a Biden/Harris ticket a year ago2. Biden was going to pick a woman of color. He was going to pick someone younger. Harris is fairly within the Democratic mainstream and is a team player. For all the grousing of progressives about her record and all the kvetching of fossilized stalwart Democrats about how she didn’t apologize for a perfectly reasonable hit in the July debate, she was still the most likely choice. And given the recent surge in crime, the “Kamala is a Cop” line probably made her more viable rather than less. For all the hoopla of the last few weeks, this decision was almost certainly made weeks if not months ago. The rest was building up some tension so Biden/Harris could — however briefly — take the spotlight from Trump.3
While Harris’s record will cause some grousing among progressives, I expect the vast majority will easily line up to vote for her. And, together with Biden, the “law-and-order” credentials on the ticket should serve as a counterweight to Trump’s most recent attacks on the Democrats as being the source of the recent inner-city chaos. I am not convinced that she is either qualified or suitable, having only served a partial term in Congress and being most famous for an aggressive line of questioning of Brett Kavanaugh that ended up going precisely nowhere. And that concern is going to weigh more heavily given Biden’s age and the likelihood of him finishing a first term, let alone a second.
However, vice-presidential picks rarely matter. Everyone was convinced Bush the First had blundered with Quayle but, in the end, he won. Many people lost their minds when Sarah Palin was nominated4 But the conservative base loved her, and McCain wasn’t going to win anyway. What a VP pick is usually about is solidifying the base and balancing the ticket. Their duties are, typically, to raise money, generate some enthusiasm and not say anything particularly stupid. Harris will do that just fine, whatever I or anyone else thinks of her prosecutorial excesses. And ultimately, this election is going to be about Donald Trump, with Biden and Harris only playing bit parts.
In the end, the primary has left us where we were a year ago: All that digital ink and strum and drang ended with Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and a somewhat progressive agenda that — even if Biden wins — is unlikely to be implemented. The Democrats have completed their first goal: not nominating a lunatic. Now the challenge is to complete their second goal.
Only 83 days left until we can put this all behind us.
As a San Franciscan, I approve this choice. Kamala was fairly or very progressive as District Attorneys go. The “Kamala is a Kop meme” is basically for libertarians who were never seriously going to vote Democratic and leftier than thou purists who were also never going to vote Democratic.Report
Is this the first westerner the Democrats have put on the ticket in my lifetime (born late 1953)? Have the Democrats ever put a westerner on the ticket?
I point out as being of possible relevance that come January, there is a good chance the Mountain West may have more Democratic US Senators than the Pacific Coast states, or the Midwest. And that of the four official Census Bureau regions, the West will have more Democratic US Senators than any of the other three.Report
If you don’t count Texans as westerners, and that is defensible, then no, there hasn’t been a westerner on a Democratic ticket in our lifetimes, or in any year since anything that we would now consider a “western” state had been made part of the Union. Before that, there were some candidates from states that were, at the time, considered “western.”Report
Does Hawaii count?Report
Yes. The five Pacific states will have eight Democratic Senators. The eight Mountain West states will have (if you believe the current polls) either nine or ten.Report
I mean, before fairly recently, the whole Mountain West was largely Republican or filled with Democrat’s who’d likely never accept a spot on the national ticket, and the West Coast, outside of Scoop Jackson and the Brown family, was firmly Republican.Report
I think the strength that is being ignored by most pundits is that Harris won two different statewide offices in a state that is heavily Latino. If Biden holds all the states Clinton won, and flips AZ and FL, he wins.Report
Solid pick. I still like Duckworth but not to be. Harris should be a strong campaigner and can do the Veeping. The attacks so far are predictable (ie; she’s a cop who will be super left wing and hates cops) and incoherent. We’ll see what the next level of attack is and how sleazy it gets.Report
The attacks so far are predictable
She’s been the VP pick for like twenty minutes. Give ’em some time.Report
Well they got the pre scripted attacks ready for all the front runners. I’ve since seen the “slept her way to the nom” and “soros!!! OMG the jews” already. Which is of course predictable. They are only hitting par on the sleaze factor so far.Report
I would have preferred Duckworth as well.
My big concern with Harris is that she’ll better enable Biden to soft shoe police reform from the federal level. Not that I am expecting a whole lot from the federal level, but the feds could end the military hardware giveaways (or limit them to gear that is not weapons and vehicles), and end CAF or even CAF sharing by the feds.Report
Well, considering she OK’d falsifying* evidence, put parents in jail for actions of the children, extended sentences to ensure more free labor in California prisons and a whole host of other crimes, including being RICO’d due to attacks on the first amendment, to say she would “soft shoe” police reform is a sick, sad joke.
She literally repudiates everything the left talked about and considered important over the last 50 years.
*she literally argued to a judge that falsifying evidence and withholding exculpatory evidence wasn’t bad because it wasn’t chaining up someone and beating them. Because, you know, spending time in prison when you were innocent is totes cool!Report
This case, or are you thinking of another?
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8xwkab/jamal-trulove-wants-kamala-harris-to-talk-about-his-wrongful-convictionReport
Just in case we miss it, Jaybird called it a year ago.Report
Nice pull.
I guess my last hope was Duckworth… my criteria was West of Missippi, Woman (had he declared that already when we guessed?), and not an also-ran. I suppose Harris is 2 outa 3 but I felt pretty strongly it wouldn’t be an also-ran.
Bonus: Totally correct about lane consolidation… but totally wrong about who would consolidate whom.
Prognostication index for both: 0.33Report
Yeah, I think a lot of people her as the obvious. Young. Ish. A safe seat they won’t miss.Report
If you had asked me if I wanted to change my vote for who the VP would be while we were smack dab in the middle of the Mostly Peaceful Protests, I would have.Report
I think she’s a pretty respectable choice for 2020. I don’t think she was a wise choice for setting up 2024.Report
The safe move is the wrong move. Should’ve picked a midwesterner, not the lady who couldn’t handle Tulsi and has never won a seriously contested election. Dumb choice driven by dumb focus group decision-making. Hopefully it turns out not to matter.Report
I agree.Report
For all the talk about Tulsi “taking her out” and everything, there’s no evidence in the actual polls that Harris got hurt by Tulsi’s attack, outside of Twitter people and people pre-disposed to hate Kamala, and at the end of the day, Tulsi will be forgotten about accept by Fox News viewers when she’s brought on to be the next Fox News Democrat and Kamala has 50/50 odds to be the first woman POTUS, so at the end of the day, who actually won that debate exchange that I barely remember, and I’m a political dork?Report
As someone who’s family roots in San Fransisco go back to the 1850s, I will be voting for Bidens opponent solely because of this.
This woman is as pure evil as I have ever seen. She used prisoners as slave labor, fucked her way into politics, laughed at the number of people whom she through into jail for marijuana… The list of horrors goes on and on.
Bidens handlers seemed to have done the one thing necessary to make me vote for Trump. Huzzah?Report
“pure evil” ummm yeah….that really make me think and see things in a new way. “fucked her way…” Way to go full Limbaugh. If you were gonna vote trump you were gonna do that no matter what.Report
He’s not wrong.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/kamala-harris-launched-political-career-with-120k-patronage-job-from-boyfriend-willie-brownReport
They got it backward.
Brown was a fading has-been, and Harris the smart ambitious rising star. He slept his way back into political relevance.
As Elizabeth Warren might say, “Go Cougars!”Report
That’s not how it works, otherwise we’d have a narrative that went “Bill Clinton was a fading has-been, and Lewinsky was the smart ambitious rising star. He slept his way back into political relevance.”
When Willie Brown, San Francisco’s mayor for 15 years, was dating Kamala, she was a deputy district attorney. Her career wasn’t going anywhere until he appointed her to some boards and supporter her campaign for DA. Keep in mind that DA isn’t a particularly lofty position, either.
So what did Willy Brown say about all this?
She’s not a normal politician. She’s far more sociopathic than that.Report
She was a famous rising star.
When you are famous you can do things like seduce an older man, or grab him by the willie.
Its that sort of assertive sexual confidence, that machisma that this country needs.Report
And #metoo becomes poundmetoo.Report
Chip,
Saying the Dem VP nominee isn’t any worse than Trump is intended to win … what argument exactly?Report
I’m not saying she is “no worse”;
I’m saying her sexual ethics are head and shoulders above Trump.
They were consenting adults, instead of harasser and victim; They were both of age, unlike the girl Trump is accused of raping.
But in any event, their accusations are harmless since I don’t think the “Frustrated Gamergater/ Bitter Divorced Dad” demographic is going to be pivotal anyway.Report
But in any event, their accusations are harmless
Chip, if you didn’t exist Democrat-God would have to invent you.Report
Hey, I’m not the guy performing the Elmer Gantry role here.Report
There is no such thing as a famous deputy district attorney, unless perhaps for one who does something crazy like assassinate a mayor. My housemate started his legal career as a deputy DA for Louisville. It’s a pretty ordinary starting job straight out of law school.Report
Got me there.
So what you are saying is that conservatives think this was scandalous because she was a nobody.
Seems on-brand.Report
Conservatives aren’t saying its scandalous, just that she shot up the ranks due to her other-than-legal skills.
As a prosecutor, she was pretty darn bad. From a trial attorney’s perspective, she’s also pretty darn bad. One of the key tricks top lawyers use when questioning someone (and this is really clever) is to allow the person to answer the questions. She doesn’t ever do that. She just hurls questions, demands answers, and every time the person starts to open their mouth she tells them to shut up and let her talk.Report
Chip, rather than pretending you don’t understand conservatives criticism of Harris on this issue, it might be better to argue she ended up being a great DA and AG and Senator, so she would have risen through the ranks anyway.
You know, something that actually makes her look *good*.Report
I honestly, seriously, truly DON’T understand their objections to Harris’ relationship with Brown.
Do you? Can you spell it out here, in plain English?
Are they opposed to premarital sex? No, they all have premarital sex.
Are they opposed to May/December romances? Nope, they support Roy Moore.
Are they opposed to power imbalances in romantic relationships? Not that I can see.
Are they opposed to a powerful person using another person as a toy then casting them aside when it no longer suits them? Of course not, they venerate men like that.
So seriously, what is it that they find objectionable here?Report
Amazing.
I honestly, seriously, truly DON’T understand their objections to Harris’ relationship with Brown.
That’s because they haven’t expressed a view of that. What they’re doing is *accusing* Harris of trading sex with Brown for career advancement. Which he admits he did!
“But what she did isn’t worse than what Trump did! I DON’T UNDERSTAND!”Report
So, like Gingrich, Trump, David Brooks, and half the Republicans in Congress trading in the first wife for the trophy?
That sort of thing is what gets their panties in a bunch?
Sure, lets have an in depth national conversation about transactional sex.Report
George: “Harris traded sex for career advancement.”
Chip: “Sure, but Newt Gingrich has been married THREE times.”Report
So they are opposed to young women sleeping with powerful men for advancement?
Let them make that case then. Say it openly, and see where the logic leads.Report
It’s like you don’t even understand retail politics. Which isn’t true…
So you’re pretending.Report
Are we speaking in our own voices here, in good faith?
Or are we doing a ventriloquist voice thing, where we are claiming to speak about what other people believe and think?
Like, is George himself and you yourself offended by Harris’ relationship?
Then please make the case and explain the moral logic here.
Because I’m not seeing any moral logic; Our society is rife with transactional relationships, and even if we were to take the charge seriously that she “slept her way up”, that would make her the victim and Willie Brown the villain.
So please, explain in detail how this offends.Report
lol
Chip: “Why are people so opposed to corruption? I just don’t get the moral logic to it.”Report
OK, so this is corruption?
On whose part? Brown’s, or Harris’s?Report
There has never been an easier time to be a ventriloquist. If you can’t succeed at it now, you’re not even trying.Report
This is an attack on her competence. Pointing out that she slept her way to multiple promotions is a way to imply she doesn’t have the skill or merit to advance without that.
The counter for it is to look at her resume after her relationship with Brown ended, i.e. how good a job did she do as a Senator and AG? You’re looking for things which imply merit.
Or you could point to the other reasons she was picked. Of course here that’s because she’s female and black.Report
From the Bee: Kamala Harris Humbled To Have Been Chosen Exclusively For Her Race, Gender
Meanwhile, Rose McGowan is going after Harris for cashing fat checks from Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein when she was running for AG. I guess that mostly shows that Weinstein knew who he needed to buy off.Report
OK, so the problem is that the Trumpists are offended by nepotism and cronyism in hiring of government officials?
Are you sure about that?Report
I’ve long thought that in addition to being terrible for the Republican party, Trump would enable the Democrats to cite Trump while they do all sorts of things they, Democrats, officially denounce.
It will be a weird “we don’t really do these things, we only do them because: Trump” … so you’ll be able to have the restrictions without the ties that bind.
This thread is essentially this, manifest.Report
The problem with that argument is you can make the reverse true, flipping D’s to R’s and verse visa.
It is all about what your hate can explain away. But, in the end, you only have to live with yourself and your own demons.Report
That isn’t the problem with the argument… that’s how the argument works. It’s not a BSDI argument its an internal argument of self-defeating premises. It’s onmidirectional.Report
The sort of cronyism of Willie Brown appointing his fully qualified girlfriend to a minor office, is something I have no problem denouncing.
But lets get real here, its one of the most minor and petty forms of bad behavior in politics. So if this is the real, actual reason conservatives bring it up, then fine I will happily accept a minor blemish on an otherwise good record.
But, as the lawyers would say, now that we have opened the door to THAT issue, lets talk about nepotism and cronyism a bit more, shall we?Report
This would be a long overdue conversation but I doubt it will happen this election cycle. The foreign corrupt practices law should be extended to the children of American politicians as well as foreign politicians and it should also work internally.
We’ve had far too many children of politicians end up with mid-6-digit “jobs” that are clearly motivated by access to their relatives and not their own skills. Presumably Hunter Biden will be brought up in this cycle but whatever. Neither Trump nor Biden have any interest in reforming this problem.Report
Based on my annual training in these matters… I think the question isn’t so much what KH got out of it but all the people we don’t know about – what was it they *didn’t* get out of it. Aren’t those the things we’re trying to avoid? Sometimes referred to as ‘systemic”? What does it mean when you ‘win’ in the systemic bad thing?Report
We don’t really know much about the dynamics of their relationship because both have kept the details secret.
Was Brown the Harvey Weinstein figure? Or was it an entirely consensual relationship, and entirely unrelated to their political benefits?
We just don’t know.
But what we do know is that Harris was entirely qualified for the positions. Even seen in the worst light, Harris was guilty of nothing more than being ambitious and taking advantage of the system of favor brokering and patronage.
Not a good thing, but small potatoes.
I think we can agree its not on a scale of lets say, appointing your completely unqualified daughter and son in law as de facto chief of staff and allow them to grift around the world.Report
If memory serves most of the people on the board have a background in medical oversight and many decades of experience (she was 30, next youngest member was 60). I think there’s a stronger argument that these were patronage jobs after retirement so everyone is “qualified”.
Agreed.
I thought the Middle-East peace plan the son in law came up with was pretty sane in that it matched the facts on the ground (in the ME this is a new approach). If they ever get serious about peace they’ll use something pretty close to it.
I’m good with the daughter being an advisor for the same reason I’m good with HRC (or Nancy Reagan) being “advisors” to their husbands. Trump is arguably closer to his daughter than to his wife. There was serious talk about making her first lady and I can’t think of anything the actual first lady has even attempted.
Where we run into problems is with something like Hunter Biden’s $600k/yr job which seems to have been a raw pay off… and The Trump Foundation is this massive FU to the rules and all sorts of good standards. Unfortunately, TTF has an economic reality that is independent of political power so it needs to be grandfathered in.Report
There’s a particular kind of argument from ignorance that, seriously, always calls to me like a Siren.
And I always steer my ship into it and crash upon the rocks.
“I don’t understand why X!”
“Oh! Well, here’s why X.”
See? Fairly straightforward from my point of view.
But I need to remember the little old ladies from the church where I grew up.
“I don’t understand how someone could engage in Particular Sin.”
To answer the lady that Particular Sin is fun, or cathartic, or whatever, is to miss the point of the statement.
The declaration that “I don’t understand how someone could engage in Particular Sin” is a way to communicate Holiness.
And to make this little old lady understand how someone could engage in Particular Sin, and make her see how someone could, seriously, be tempted by it, would be to remove some of this little old lady’s Holiness.
It is, indeed, an *ATTACK* on this woman to explain to her the thing that she does not understand. It would lessen this woman to understand it.
And, as someone who sees the world and, good God, wants to understand it even at the cost of his immortal soul, I will dash that ship upon that rock every goddamn time.
And then, as I sink beneath the waves (again), remember: Oh. Yeah.Report
That was 10 years later (and yes, she dumped him when he wasn’t useful).
When she was 29 and dating Brown who was 60, he was the most politically powerful man in CA and her star was rising only because she was his girlfriend.
To be fair, my strong inclination is to ignore the sex lives of politicians unless it obviously is affecting their jobs. She has a resume greater than the fluff not-really-jobs she got because of her relationship with him. So she’s moved on and so should we.Report
Agreed in her case.Report
You seem to assume that Stacey Abrams isn’t going to successfully contest Biden’s decision. It’s not over until she concedes, and that might be well into 2021 or 2022.
What gets me is that Harris is the type of DA or AG who would have dropped the charges against Derek Chauvin, since she often did things like that. I really don’t see how Biden’s handlers didn’t realize how that might go over with their base, especially since it became one of the key issues that pushed her out of the race.
I think another way Biden may have blown this opportunity was by picking one of the primary candidates he defeated. This Democratic primary cycle seems to have given several months worth of unearned adoration to any fresh face who showed up (see Beto and Mayor Pete). Picking an outsider or relative unknown might have generated a lot of excitement his campaign desperately needs, and Kamala Harris, having dropped out back in December, will bring none of that.
Over at Instapundit, I suggested that maybe Karl Rove was responsible for the pick, but someone else said that no, the decision had all the hallmarks of something Roger Stone would pull. Well, in that case, let me say “Roger Stone, you magnificent bastard!”Report
Ummm weren’t you predicting HRC would be on the scene by now George?Report
And Barr’s people will indict on Russiagate any day now . . .Report
Durham and his valkyries will charge into the fray any moment with flaming indictments!Report
Well, that’s going to work in Kamala’s favor because she’s not one of the co-conspirators in an attempt to rig and election or overthrow the government of the United States, Biden is.
What’s amusing is that she was soundly rejected by Democrats everywhere, yet there she’ll be, at the top of the ticket as soon as Biden is gone, saving her the trouble of filing papers on the 25th Amendment and Alzheimer’s the day after Biden’s inauguration .
Kamala got beat in the New Hampshire Democratic primary by Trump. She also got beat there by Tulsi Gabbard, Tom Steyer, Joe Sestak, MIchael Bloomberg, Deval Patrick, Michael Bennet, Corey Booker. She did manage to beat Marianne Williamson, so there’s that.
Her campaign didn’t fizzle because she was too obscure. It didn’t fizzle because she didn’t get fawning media coverage. It fizzled because the more Democrats saw of her, the less they liked her. She had to drop out before Iowa. She still lost in New Hampshire to other candidates who’d already dropped out, and to one candidate who wasn’t even on the ballot, and of course to Donald Trump himself.
That Biden picked is just another illustration that he no longer has the mental capacity to make sound decisions, although there’s also a chance that he was as surprised as anybody by the pick. He had to have the text of his announcement sitting in front of him when he made it.Report
Heheh, sure George, but won’t it be moot since HRC is going to seize the nomination at the virtual convention? Or have you given up on that one?Report
Hillary is already discussing her potential role in a Biden Administration, saying she is ready to serve. That means she needs more billions to support her private jet and mansion hobbies.Report
It’s amusing you think any of us actually believe you weren’t going to vote for TrumpReport
Aaron always manages to prove the points of my posts without directly replying.Report
Well, I am glad someone can make a point out of them.Report
You can believe whatever you like, no skin off my back.Report
Aaron, you’ve been posting here a long time.
We all knew you were gonna vote for Trump. I’m not sure what’s funnier — that you’re pretending Harris is the reason or pretending we’d even indulge you in that fantasy.
It’s almost like you’re ashamed of voting for Trump. But you were always going to vote for him. He was your pick before the Democrats picked anyone for anything.Report
We all knew you were gonna vote for Trump.
I’ve been *almost* as critical of the Dem party over the years as Aaron has. Does everyone – do you JS? – think I’m going to vote for Trump?Report
If a whole lot of brand-D loyalists from the old days, the Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama, and Hillary voters, start voting for Trump, it might signal a problem. Did they change their core beliefs in any way before abandoning the party, or as Reagan said, did the Democratic party abandon them?
So a key set of questions to ask such people is this. Would you still have voted for Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama, and Hillary, with your beliefs as they are now? If the answer is still yes, then the party has shifted, not the voter.
As Brandon Straka put it, (paraphrasing from memory)”I didn’t lose any of my belief in fairness, liberalism, and tolerance, the party did.” It’s long been noted here that some of the behaviors of the SJW, cancel-culture, woke mobs are antithetical to traditionally liberal beliefs. Angry white mobs attacking black people’s homes and smashing the windows of Jewish businesses are not what most older liberals signed up for.Report
>I’ve been *almost* as critical of the Dem party over the years as Aaron has. Does everyone – do you JS? – think I’m going to vote for Trump?
I’ll let you reread what I said and think about that a bit.
I’m sure you didn’t mean to imply I thought Aaron was going to vote Trump because of mere volume. Nobody criticizes Democrats like Democrats, but that doesn’t mean the GOP is gonna win with 100% of the vote.Report
“She used prisoners as slave labor”
*First part of next sentence removed so the rest of the comment could be released from moderation. Keep it clean and not overly personal please. – Andrew*
…that’s not what happened. They weren’t “slave labor”, they volunteered for the job because it gave them something to do other than sit around with their thumbs up their asses. Paying them below market rates for the work was what made the work able to be done on Cal-Fire’s budget, if they’d been paid “market rates” then they wouldn’t have been paid at all because the jobs wouldn’t have existed.
If you want to get mad about something, get mad about firefighter companies not hiring ex-cons.Report
Hey, after four-plus years of “literally Hitler!” I think I am entitled to a little hyperbole for another Hitler wannabe.Report
hey, how about this instead: don’t.
like I said in another thread, if you don’t want a thing to happen then you shouldn’t be doing the thing, even if They Started It.Report
You know Duck, thank you. I needed that reminder.Report
So, does anyone think the announcement of Harris as VP has increased Biden’s chances of winning?
Anyone think they’ve gone down?Report
I’d make the case that it’s a push. Harris was considered the obvious, most uncontroversial choice and most of the conversation really hinged on trying to convince ourselves that it would be someone other than Harris.
So I think this neither helps nor harms Biden’s’ chances.Report
I’m not a Harris fan so my judgement may be clouded but I see it working against the Dems over the long haul. Maybe even in the short term. To the extent she’s branded as the future of the Dem party (2024 presumptive nominee and all that bullshit) I can see a bunch of Manchin-style/moderate democrats abandoning ship.Report
I suspect long haul wise it will hinge on A) Biden beating Trump/the GOP and by how much and B) what they accomplish once they do so.Report
I would bet minimal impact either way. The election will be determined by covid/the economy.Report
After the debates (we were so young…) she wasn’t doing very well in the Black community. She would regularly poll lower than Warren if I remember correctly. And if that holds, I don’t expect her to help with that Vote.
But, tomorrow is Wednesday, which is anything-can-happen day.Report
Help is probably a tall order but the first rule of Veep picking is to do no harm. It’s an open debate as to if Harris will boost Black turnout but there’s virtually no way in hell it’ll hurt. And it flummoxes the identarian left as well since, while Harris is not a particularly left wing veep she has the right identity boxes so it will be extremely hard for them to go after her.
Which is why she was always considered the obvious/low risk choice and is presumable why Biden picked her.Report
To me the risk in Kamala is that there is a very real chance she will be the primary target of the Trump campaign. He’ll say Sleepy Joe will be dead or catatonic by March so a vote for him is a vote for her. How does that play out in the states formerly known as the blue wall? Can someone who has never been tested outside of ultra-safe circumstances handle it? I don’t know, and things are dire enough it may not matter anyway.
But if I was to make a case against her that would be it, not a fractured party. I’d have tried to find someone with a 30 letter Scandinavian last name to spend the next 90 days drinking beer and eating cheese curds or whatever people do for fun out there.Report
Oh I get it, but politics is a game of connections, favors and relationships too. With Floyd, and with all that the AA constituency did for his candidacy Biden would have been taking a huge risk in choosing a white Midwesterner. I think choosing Harris is the safer play for the party in the long run. Picking her rewards a core, integral and very deserving constituency and also stymies a lot of the identarian left. They’d go absolutely bonkers over a white Midwesterner.
I grant, readily, that it opens him up to the allegations you’re talking about in a way that it wouldn’t if his #2 was a white younger midwestern moderate but that’s a risky strategy for Trump because the more he pushes it the more he lowers expectations and makes it even easier for Biden to deliver a normal debate performance and have it come off looking amazing simply because Trumps crowd has been pushing the narrative that Biden can’t even stand up behind a podium any more.Report
That’s certainly the case for her. Of course I think the identity-based promise he made to begin with was an unforced error. I don’t believe a black candidate is a requirement for getting out the black vote or that it is what caused Biden to do so well with that constituency in the primary (and IIRC Harris was not polling well with them anyway). Even if it is I’d be a bit concerned by the strategy due to the distribution of the black vote in southern states that won’t be in play or urban areas of blue states that won’t be either.* It’s HRC again where we forget the game is winning states not necessarily people.
Anyway as I said above I don’t think the election hinges on this at all. So far covid-19, the economy, and not beating ourselves still looks like it can work.
I do think it’s a concerning sign that Democratic leadership is still kind of out of touch. Too often I’m reminded of a football team that gets a big lead in the first quarter, plays not to lose instead of running up the score, and loses by a field goal as time runs out.
*Michigan is of course the exception.Report
There was a recent revealing interview with black leaders in Detroit. (I think it was in either The Atlantic, The New Yorker, or City Journal.) The leaders were not at all enthused with Biden’s decision to put a black woman on the ticket, and found it highly insulting.
They explained that Obama picked Biden because he thought selecting a racist white man would help him with some key demographics, making racist white voters less likely to fear that he was going to turn out to be some kind of black radical. But these leaders were okay with supporting Biden, despite all that, because he’d served Obama loyally and it would take something major to get them to abandon the party, even though they feel the party disrespects them and takes their vote for granted.
But Biden’s VP decision rankled them. They said it was tokenism, and nothing but tokenism, as if they were too dumb to care which black woman was picked, or why. They’ve seen white liberals do that countless times, giving a random black person some lesser and powerless position to avoid charges of racism.
So perhaps the question, regarding this particular slice of the demographic pie, is whether they’ll regard Harris as a complete slap in the face. She’s not African American, her parents are immigrants, her family owned over a hundred slaves, and she gloried over putting innocent blacks in jail and letting violent cops walk.
Basically, is the Harris pick too much like Kathleen Kennedy slapping George Lucas by making Rey a Palpatine, having her kill the last actual Skywalker, taking over the old Skywalker property, and then claiming the family name for herself?Report
I do think it’s a concerning sign that Democratic leadership is still kind of out of touch.
This. Unlike North, I can very easily see Harris’ nomination to VP splintering the already disjointed Dem coalition even further over the next couple months. Long term? I think the idea that she’ll be the presumptive nominee for four years indicates (to me!) that the Dems want to avoid a 2024 primary which challenges the existing power structures within the party. So my cynical take is that all this aligns perfectly for a Hillary 2.0 in 2024. Bad candidate not well liked by the base being rammed through the primary process.Report
This is closer to my concern. An enemy like Trump is probably enough to maintain unity in 2020, but the memory won’t be so fresh in 4 years and God willing we will be on the other side of the pandemic. My guess is the tensions in the party will only be worse, especially if a Biden presidency is perceived as in the pocket of big tech and high finance.Report
It’d depend on how Biden’s first term went. Harris will flat out not be able to party logistic the nomination the way Hillary did. She didn’t get in* because some ruling cabal shoved her in. She got in because she built up 20 years of credit with the party and cashed it all in to make all the other plausible contenders not oppose her out of either appreciation for HRC herself or fear of getting curb stomped by her.
If Harris and Biden have a bad or mediocre term then Harris will have none of that ability to sew up the nomination and if they have a good or excellent term then she won’t need it.
*I’ve said before and I’ll say it again. I grant Hillary ran a bad campaign and was not an ideal candidate in 2016 but I don’t think she was avoidable. People talking about how the Dem leadership imposed HRC on the party are incorrect both in terms of political fact and political theory. HRC didn’t get imposed by some cabal of leaders- they simply don’t have that power. That’s the political fact. And the political theory error is assuming that if the Democratic Leadership should have the power to hand the nomination off. A Democratic Party that worked that way would have been MORE vulnerable to the method HRC used to get the nomination- not less.Report
I buy that completely. My issue with leadership isn’t that I think there was a conspiracy, just incompetence and way too much willingness to buy their own BS. The latter is why the talk of favorable demographic shifts, permanent majorities, etc. is all so much nonsense. But I guess it’s tempting nonsense since the common thread is that it relieves them of having to earn victory in reality as it actually exists. It doesn’t mean we’re doomed but it does mean we will perpetually punch below our weight and make it harder to win realignment.
It’s a different problem than the GOP has, that being that they all know they’re full of it and that the base and right wing media has figured it out.Report
This morning I read an interesting observation on campaigns that was made back in April. It’s about how Republican campaigns hire people who went to state universities, whereas Democrats hire people who went to a few Ivy league schools. This makes it hard for Democratic campaigns to correctly connect to voters because they tend to view things through their very narrow bubble of elite life.
It says, in part:
What’s interesting is that the situation is reversed from what would’ve been expected decades ago, where the Democratic staffers were up-by-the-bootstraps, hard-scrabble, community college or local college graduates, taking on elite Ivy League Republicans who came over on the Mayflower.Report
That’s realignment.Report
Minorities were extremely negative on Kamala. Shaun King, noted white black leader, said Harris was one of the two candidates in the field that he couldn’t ever support, the other being Biden, due to their abysmal records on race and incarceration.
*looks for his old ttweet that’s being juxtaposed next to his latest one*
Old Shaun King tweet
The question is whether other Democrats will be as wildly inconsistent as Shaun King.
And will Kamala Harris continue to remind voters that they shouldn’t support a sexual predator like Joe Biden?
Yes, this pick is a gift to everyone who loves making meme’s. 🙂Report
https://afropunk.com/2019/01/kamala-harris-has-been-tough-on-black-people-not-crime/
And there a many, many more of these out there regarding her. I guess the Dems could be trying to pivot away from the mob violence they have been remarkably silent on, but it is a bit too pat of a trick to look kosher.Report
Earlier I joked that Biden’s folks were probably relieved that he didn’t nominate a cat or potted plant. But that is telling, because to anyone on the left or right with any moral sense, a cat or potted plant would be a more sensible pick. At least Paul von Hindenburg had a strategy he was pursuing and a situation to deal with when he screwed up that badly. Biden either has an extreme fondness for racist abuses (even in his younger days he accepted an award from George Wallace), or his senility is already causing potentially catastrophic blunders because he doesn’t even know what’s really going on, and who various people are.
Would Kamala Harris take advantage of someone with early dementia? Given her record regarding what can only be described as sociopath level evil, do I even need to ask that question?Report
Mmhmm, that may be a problem for Harris when she tries to run for President herself but it isn’t going to be a difficulty for Biden with Harris as his veep. And even you are implicitly acknowledging that she’s not wildly left wing which, again, drives another stake through the idea that Biden/the Dems are lurching wildly to the left.
Harris is far from my favorite pick and no doubt highly informed voters already have their opinions baked in but neither you nor I were going to change our votes based on Bidens veep pick and voters like us are a vanishing minority in the electorate. None of the stuff you’re talking about is going to resonate, in the slightest, with the larger majority of the electorate at all. Especially not considering who they’re running against.Report
She is going to be portrayed as the true candidate or the Trojan candidate no matter if the left likes it or not. So, in my view, for what it is worth, this already is in the cards. And, I would argue, that this is a huge part of the D’s calculus in this. That Biden is already a lame duck and a strong Veep is what the party needs to ensure the transition. And I disagree with you re: left-wing. She is the new left-wing; totalitarian. And a very extreme one.
As you know, elections are about motivating the bases and capturing that small handful of swing voters. I don’t see her as doing either. But it did push this swing voter. Away.Report
There are lots of fresh takes in this Daily Mail article.
It’s mostly cut-and-paste from Twitter, thank goodness, since the DM seems to hire children and ESL students as writers, but it does provide cause for concern. If the radical activists are upset, they’ll keep each other upset almost no matter what the mainstream media or the party say to them. Many of the most vocal activists are also far from being a reliable, solid base, are likely to engage in a protest vote for crazy third-party alternatives and loudly encourage others to do so.
So the pick could both push swing voters away and drive hard-core anti-police activists into voting for Kanye or for a Green Party, Socialist Democrat Party, Communist Party, or hypothetical BLM party candidate.Report
Oh well, when HRC pulls the lever and drops them both through the trapdoor during the virtual DNC convention and seizes the nomination that’ll all be a concern of the past no?
But yeah, that whole line of reasoning is rock solid:
Kamala Harris is a cop—
—who is an anti-police extremist.
A radical leftist—
—who is causing a “revolt” among Bernie voters.
Yeah that sounds like the modern conservative movements caliber of argumentation, heh. Thanks for the reassurance George.Report
Yeah somehow I doubt you were gettable- who would biden have had to pick to have even a shot at your vote? Joe Jorgensen? Likewise the GOP would have portrayed any selection what so ever as a trojan horse for extreme leftists.
I hear their current critique is that Kamela is a cop. That’s gonna mesh fine with Trumps “Biden is an Antifa anarchist candidate” theme. I’m sure they’ll settle on some kind of line of attack for her that voters will, maybe, take seriously, eventually, someday. But the fact that they’re flailing around like this doesn’t bode well for them.
I don’t know that Harris really adds to Bidens odds, but I’m deeply skeptical that she hurts his odds. She’s the safe predictable pick and by choosing her one thing is certain- Biden’s people think he’s winning. They’re probably right.Report
You put too much faith in the need for coherence. The voters might not come up with a single, strong, coherent reason to vote against candidate X, but they don’t need to because they’ll each vote against candidate X for their own strongly held individual reasons.Report
You put too much faith in the need for coherence.
Trump tweeted yesterday that Harris is a “phony radical”, and Dems (in classic fashion) lined up to pounce: if she’s phony about being a radical, then she isn’t a radical you big dummy! Burn!
Trump’s tweet is effective because he calls her “phony”. He calls her “radical”. He associates those concepts with her character, her name. That’s what people hear.
Dems seem incapable of understanding this….Report
Yesterday Amy Klobuchar failed basic communications (PR, branding, etc) speaking in a Fox News interview with Brett Baier. She said Trump was saying Kamala was a mean, nasty person, etc., and went on at some length repeating all the words Trump is trying to mentally associate with Harris. Maybe Klobuchar is trying out for Kayleigh McEnany’s job as Trump spokesperson?
Note to Amy: If you repeat the opponent’s best attack lines, you’re giving them free airtime. It’s almost an in-kind contribution to their campaign.Report
Effective with…who?
Is this just the Pundit Fallacy, where your offered the best electoral advice is really just your policy preference?Report
Chip, Did you know that propaganda used to be a discipline you could study at a University? You can still learn the same stuff, but now it’s called “public relations” and “advertising”. Trump uses those rhetorical tricks because they have been proven to be effective for over a hundred years.
OTOH, that Dems think the antidote to Trump’s tweets is *a dictionary* is why lots of people vote for Trump. Dems just don’t get it.Report
But propaganda isn’t a precise science.
Its not like words like “radical” are magic incantations that always work without fail.
I’m not saying Trumps attacks won’t work.
I’m just saying we don’t really have any evidence yet that they will.Report
The only way to know if he was successful is by the result posted the night of November 4.
Let’s not worry about this stuff until then, OK?Report
I was going to vote for JoJo, but I had said, here I believe, that if Harris was the choice for Pres, I would vote Trump. Well, considering Biden and his mental state (seriously, my father just passed away from Alzheimer’s, what I am seeing with Biden is way to close for comfort), whoever was his Veep pick was the real contender for the #1 slot. And as it is Harris, and I have made it clear how I felt about her here in this thread, well, there you go.
But to get away from the “Kamala is a cop/Biden is the anti-law and order candidate” trap, he would need to denounce both BLM and the ‘FA. Which he hasn’t done, as that would cost him at least the ‘FA vote, and maybe both. All to pick up a few women who voted Trump last go round and the left has been calling racist for four straight years? But seriously, the establishment left tried to get Kamala in as President, but he party had no interest and she was demolished by Tulsi.
Demings, from down in FL, now she might have pulled me back in the fold. But this is a further sign of the left not being the party of liberalism but has assumed the mantel of hate, they are the totalitarians now.Report
Well, hell, Val Demings was my #1 pick too but Joe wants to play it safe and Demings is both light on experience and hasn’t been vetted.Biden’s team doesn’t seem to feel they need to shake up the race, thus a Harris pick which is basically a push. She delights who Biden needs to delight, she defangs who he needs to defang and she enrages groups he was never going to get anyhow.Report
The research shows that VP generally move the needle very little which makes sense. She is a good pick but I can’t see how this is a game changer. She does work as a unity candidate I believe though.Report
Vox is talking about how Kamala might be what Joe needed to win over Silicon Valley.
Report
“So, does anyone think the announcement of Harris as VP has increased Biden’s chances of winning?”
It’s certainly increased my chances of voting for him. On this site, in the past, I’ve said I’d vote for Harris, and on Twitter I said that Harris is like Clinton without Clinton’s baggage (and, one hopes, the Clintons’ weird obsession with Muslim dictators.)Report
It’s a weird world where Density & I are alignedReport
This is going to be the first ticket where neither the President or Vice President had any Ivy League credentials in a long time.Report
Harris is, well, fine. I personally was hoping for Val Demings.
This is the most unsurprising historic choice for Veep ever. I can’t honestly say I’m surprised; I can’t say I’m disappointed, I just am like- ok, so he picked who everyone thought he’d pick.
But, on the plus side, this is yet another wooden stake through the heart of the “Democrats are careening off to the left” nonsense.Report
There were probably a few sighs of relief that Biden didn’t pick a cat or a potted plant or something. ^_^Report
Why on earth would he pick one of those things?Report
For the hilarity of watching a potted plant beat Pence in a debate.Report
My keyboard! God(ess?) dammit Chip!!!Report
Hey, don’t knock it. Two of the main characters in the Hugo Award winning “A Fire Upon the Deep were potted plants.Report
What’s gratifying is to see the support from all the other contenders- Warren, Rice, Whitmer, Abrams.
I like also how the Republicans can’t settle on a coherent line of attack.
So overall a solid pick.Report
I had predicted this a while back, on this very blog, though I said at the time I didn’t have any real basis for it other than that it seemed to make sense to me. Which would normally be a strike against it.Report
On a scale of Worst Troll Ever to Galactic Brain Omniscience… where would starting the rumor of Tulsi for Trump’s VP rate?Report
Troll of right wingers maybe? I don’t think even Trump is stupid enough to disrespect his hypocritical social con base that sharply. Especially after the supreme court rulings he’s gotten.Report
To my observation, Tulsi never triggered the SoCons … she triggered the NeoCons.
Given that the Left treated her SoCon flip-flop as insincere, flop-flipping wouldn’t be that hard, I don’t think.Report
It’s not so much choosing Tulsi that I’m talking about- it’s benching Pence. Pence is an evangelical culture warrior with impeccable social con credentials. From a social con perspective benching him to pick Tulsi (even if Tulsi was insane enough to accept) is a big step down.
Maybe if Trumps judges had given the evangelicals the revanchist rulings they wanted he could have gotten away with it but with the rulings he’s gotten? No way in hell.Report
I see… I’m not really tapped into Evangelical circles, from general SoCon circles I don’t think there’s a strong feeling that Pence is somehow an important lynch-pin for anything – benignly neutral is general sense I get… but I’ll not speak for Evangelicals on the matter; maybe he’s seen as an important talisman (though honestly, I can’t say that my adjecent spaces pick that up).Report
Well god(ess?) knows I am not one either so I could be wrong. I read a few social con sites and I’ve always gotten the vibe that they acknowledge that Trump is a Cyrus sort of figure but as reassured because with Pence they know they have one of their own in the room.Report
A reason for those still on the fence to vote Biden:
Report
The only Ivy Leaguer in the race is the one whose Wharton School degree has a concentration in looting.Report
So are any other Dems getting text messages from the DNC?
My wife and I each got one asking to do phone banking.Report
I got one asking if I could spare $10 for the cause. In Mississippi Democrats tend to get written off by national this time of year in national elections. Plus as a career fed I have a raft of Hatch Act prohibitions on what I can and can’t do – even off duty. So I’m out for phone banking, door knocking and anything resembling fundraising. I can, however serve as an election judge, which I plan to do this year for the first time.Report
I remember the race for the Democratic nomination. It went on far too long, far too pointlessly, creating great waste, accomplishing nothing, proving nothing, ending out of exhaustion with more or less the status quo ante.
Or was that the Thirty Years War?Report
According to this, she’s the fourth most left-wing Senator. I really wish the Democrats would try to do better than meeting the bare-minimum requirements for being the lesser evil in comparison to Trump.Report
Um no, she’s the 4th least conservative. And when you consider they have Kristen Gillibrand as the end of the line on the left – behind Bernie Sanders, you have to wonder. Heck Ron Wyden is listed at #84 on that list, and he’s consistently left of Sen. Harris.Report
She’s not progressive enough for my tastes.
She has a record that’s already been examined by the press and others, and we know where the holes are.
Her record has been distorted by the press and others, which is no surprise.
She continues the Democrats economic march in lock step with neoliberalism.
She is a great energetic campaigner.
She can cross-examine like no ones business in a hearing, and presumably in a cabinet meeting.
She will help guide cabinet secretary selections.
I give them a 5.75 out of 10 for the pick.Report
This is what I mean about how Harris doesn’t offer any good angles for attack.
The conservative claim is that America is fed up with all the rioting and looting and wants Lawn Order even if we need to shoot some of the BLM protesters;
Also, Harris is a cop who puts Black people in jail!
Harris is a radical leftist who will usher in Socialism;
Also, she is chums with Silicon Valley billionaires;
The deeper problem here is that the Republican Party has largely abandoned any of its supposed motivating principles.
In some earlier era, say pre-1964, Harris might have been a liberal Republican who voted for both tax cuts and the Civil Rights Act.Report
It’s sort of like the whole “Jesus was an Immigrant!” argument.
“I don’t believe this stupid shit, but you say that you do so do what I want.”Report
Eh… Harris has plenty of things that may or may not play well in PA, WI, FL, MN and/or AZ – see the 538 Snake Chart
Echoing InMD’s comment above, it doesn’t matter that she’s a DEM, it matters whether the DEM ticket is going to play to the electorate in the swing states… at this point a CALI DEM who plays the CALI hits is potentially a liability.
If the ticket sounds more like Uncle Joe threatening to choke people with his Rosary rather than Sen Harris questioning whether members of the “radical” Kinghts of Columbus can participate in our democracy… then no problem.
What plays in CA has to play in the Snake States… I’m sure she’s quite capable to making that pivot, but being capable and executing are related but different things.
My “meta” critique would be that the idea of a Pitbull VP to take-on Trump is probably the wrong instinct for this race (reflects a certain NYC/CA miscalculation) … and to the extent that I’m seeing the Kamala will ‘destroy’ xyz is the extent to which I think she’ll miss the mark of what a ‘better’ VP pick would have been.
But remember, my vote was never up-for-grabs… so this isn’t about making me happy… its about winning PA, FL, WI, etc…Report
FL, Az, GA and TX too right now.Report
Yeah TX would be something!… but Snake Chart only puts it at 1.1% chance of being tipping point. Big movers are still FL, PA, WI, MN, MI
I said last week, no wait a few months ago, erm, once upon a time… that my initial play with the map makes FL *the* key state… win FL and Biden is cakewalking in.Report
I agree. I don’t honestly think Harris is a power play. I think Harris is the “We think we’re ahead, we think we’re winning and we are good with simply not rocking the boat” play. Not a lot of ups but not a lot of downs.Report
I said yesterday that I think a whole lot of pundits are ignoring that Harris won two different state-wide offices in a heavily Latino state (much more Latino than Black). And that if Biden holds everything Clinton won and adds AZ and FL, he wins. Without any of MI, PA, and WI.
By population, AZ and FL are both more Latino than they are Black, AZ much more. Sometime in the last couple of years, according to Census Bureau estimates, Latinos become the largest minority group in the US.Report
But that’s boring when we can endlessly speculate, or take a sub-section of Twitter as if it were a gold-standard poll.
The media needs a horse race, dammit. If they don’t have one, they’ll invent it.Report
Yep, AZ/FL seals the deal… all other things being equal. If that’s the plan and she adds value and they execute… well, then, brilliant pick.Report
Seems to me a Cali Brawler to take on an NYC bully is just the right grudge match calculation.Report
Clinton thought the same thing in 2016!Report
The trouble with the title-fight narrative is that Trump’s supporters strongly feel that Trump is fighting for them, whereas pretty much everybody thinks Harris is only fighting for Harris, and is willing to viciously destroy anyone who is inconvenient to her. The tales from her failed primary campaign don’t do anything to diminish that view. Wise advice says “Be kind to everyone on the way up because you’ll meet the same people on the way down.” I don’t think she was ever planning for that latter part.Report
On this you and I agree, though you’d think the reality of 31 million out of work, along with the COVID Death count – would dissuade them of that notion.Report
And Chip thinks there’s no evidence Trump’s propaganda works….Report
Trump was viciously attacked, by Biden, as a xenophobic racist for banning flights from China. Sadly, the Democrats are the party of amnesia because they have to depend on people not remembering what they said and did.Report
I suspect that’s fan service rather than a good strategy to win the presidency.
But hey, with an 8 point lead, maybe there’s enough to do both!Report
“Hey, if you have a few extra percentage points laying around why not spend ’em?”Report
Exactly; can’t fault the logic.Report
Oh, and I just thought of something regarding Kamala the cop. To get to be the law and order party, or at least get out of the “defund the police” hole, you would need the local message to be the same. And right now, that isn’t working. Far too many local DA’s, mayors, and city council members, among others, are running with this and will not back down from it. So, the message is too fractured to make a stand on it as a party.Report
Reason TV just released a Youtube video on Harris. It’s not any type of campaign ad, but are it’s points by and large valid?Report
White leftists on my Facebook feed are posting a Guardian article on how “black women are torn on Harris.” It’s rather fascinating that what makes “Black women” torn on Harris matches the concerns of White Leftists on Harris. I’m sure we would see the same for Rice and other Black woman.Report
The irony (???) of course is that Harris was picked to shore up the “white leftist” flank of the party lolReport
Nah, considering polling showed Warren voters going 96-0 for Biden and Bernie voters 85-4 for Biden, Harris was picked, because she’s a good bridge to the future of the party – liberal, but not a socialist, younger, but not a Millennial, and more reflective of the makeup of the party than other possibilities.
Biden for 4 Years + Harris for 8 leaves plenty of time for the AOC’s and other more left-wing members of the House to mature, become better politicians, and for the under-40 vote, which is far more left-wing than the over-40 vote, to become a more dominant part of the population.Report
“Biden for 4 Years + Harris for 8”
nah, it’ll be Biden for “two years and a day” and then Harris for ten…Report
We’re gonna see a *huge* rollout of Trump ads with that very message: “Biden’s old and may die any day now. Do you want Radical Socialist Kamala Harris as POTUS? (dun-dun-dunnnn).”Report
Considering polling currently has voters seeing Biden & Kamala has more moderate than Trump & Pence, I don’t see the issue. If the VP was Bernie or AOC, there’d be an argument….but that’s not how things are right now.
https://morningconsult.com/2020/08/13/kamala-harris-vp-polling/Report
Of course you don’t see the issue. You’re a Dem voter. 🙂Report
That poll was of all voters, Stillwater.
Not Democrats.
Yes, they’ll call Kamala a socialist who’s the secret President in waiting.
You know who else they would’ve said that about? Anybody, including Joe Manchin!Report
So you agree with me that they’ll run these ads, right?Report
It would be hilarious to see them run full page “SOCIALIST!!” ads in the WSJ alongside the “Wall Street Sighs in Relief” headlines.Report
I remember how we all thought it would be hilarious if Trump won the 2016 primary….Report
I think they would run ads calling the Democrat’s socialist if they ran a ticket of Joe Lieberman and the disembodied corpse of Scoop Jackson.Report
We’re not talking about ads calling Dems socialists, though. We’re talking about ads warning against Kamala being Potus because Biden doesn’t finish his term.Report
I would say that would be unfair except Bernie and Warren were the number #2 and #3 picks of Team Blue so it showcases where their head is at.Report
“Secret President in waiting” is the job of the VP.
Basically it’s Lincoln’s greatest failure in terms of showcasing what not to do. I think that it’s great that Biden picked a moderate.
I’m not convinced she has the experience to be President on day one (which is a stronger possibility than normal but whatever) but she may be as good as he could pick given the constraints he’s working under.Report
Double PostReport
And more reasons to like Biden’s pick:
Report
Whew, what a relief.Report
Good for her!
{{Hillary 2.0}}Report
Breaking news that may reshape Harris as Veep pick. Biden’s pick is in serious trouble and yet another sign of his failing cognition. It is being widely reported that Harris might not be eligible to be veep based on the circumstances of her birth. Apparently her parents were some sort of immigrants and she was born in the coastal enclave of Oakland.Report
Well done.Report
Her long-form birth certificate shows that she was actually born in the People’s Republic of Berkeley.Report
As a follow-up – new CBS/YouGov poll says that only 1% of Democrats are angry about Kamala Harris’s selection, voters overall approve of the Harris pick 54-29, 66% of Democratic voters are glad Biden selected Harris to be his running mate, and has already to an 18% surge in support among Hispanic’s.Report