Andrea Widburg puts the Kamala Harris choice into its correct perspective.
Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris to be his running mate shows the shallowness of the Democrats’ talent pool. Biden handicapped himself by explicitly pledging to ignore men and then implicitly bowing to the demand that his female choice be black. However, it’s still somewhat shocking that, out of all the black, female, Democrat politicians in America, the best he could do was Kamala.
What’s most striking about Kamala is that, like Barack Obama, she has nothing in common with the American black experience. Despite her slamming the race card on the table, the only thing she shares with the generic “black vote” is skin color.
Kamala did not come from a family that has traveled through generations of the American black experience. There’s no history of Southern slavery, no Reconstruction, and no being part of the endless variety of post-Reconstruction stories. Some blacks struggled through the Jim Crow South, some reveled in the Harlem Renaissance, some roped cows in the Wild West, some were part of the single biggest American migration when they moved to the upper Midwest, some embraced the middle class, and some got sucked into the undertow of the underclass. Each is an American story.
Kamala’s bio, by contrast, brings her closer to me: like me, she’s a first-generation immigrant who is the child of very educated parents (although her upbringing was more affluent than mine). Her mother is a high-caste East Indian breast cancer scientist, while her father is a Jamaican-born economist who is an emeritus professor at Stanford. Like me, Kamala grew up in liberal enclaves that were anything but racist (although Kamala also spent many years growing up outside the U.S. in Montreal).
Other than that, the only differences are that her skin is dark and she’s a leftist, while my skin is light and I’m conservative. And I never slept my way to the middle the way she did. But other than that…
Seattle Sam
Democrats say they must win back white working-class voters in Ohio, PA, MI and Wisconsin. How exactly does Kamala do that?
Schill McGuffin
I think the Dem’s chief concern in picking a VP was backtracking from the “pro-BLM rioter” constituency they’d been drifting toward. Her DA/law enforcement background is perceived as doing that, while being a “woman of color” satisfies those check-boxes, and hopefully doesn’t annoy the far-Left too much.
Actually, I believe some of their other short list options were also of that background, so I’m not sure what gave Harris an edge over them other than name recognition and a head start on general vetting. She didn’t exactly set the world on fire in the primaries — her excuses about pot use just heightened her obvious hypocrisy, and her inability to respond effectively to Gabbard’s attacks bodes ill for her facing any scrutiny going forward.
The Dems are convinced that they can get by in this election just running as “Not Trump”. They perceive Harris as the “play it safe” option to that end. They may yet pull this off, but it’s still a long way to November.
Timothy Denton
Kamala Harris lived in a pleasant upper middle class enclave in Montreal called Westmount. Her school was a few blocks from my house. Montreal’s English speaking enclave is no more exotic than Shaker Heights.
David N Johnson
Yesterday the word was “Black.” Today, it is “Person Of Color.” Her great-great-grand daddy was a slave trader in Jamaica and her mother is from India. The jokes write themselves, but we dare not say them.
Lee
PJ Media hot the nail on the head as to why her: $$$$$$. She’s the biggest raiser of moolah by far when compared to other women politicians.
bob sykes
Don’t gloat.
Harris can be sold as a law-and-order candidate in a summer of riots. She is not AOC, or Tlaib, or Omar.
Also, during his announcement of her, Biden was Presidential, composed, alert, authoritative–no sign whatever of confusion or dementia. If he can maintain that pose for a debate, he is the next President of the US, very shortly to be succeeded by Harris.
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