Day 154…
The presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden finally announced who is going to join him on the ticket as his running mate: Kamala Harris.
The decision was a long time in coming. It was starting to seem like it was too long in coming. The endless discussion about who it would be was getting to be tedious. What would this person add to the ticket? What about that person? Who helps the party the most? Enough already.
Former Vice President Biden had already told us that he was going to choose a woman. In light of the Black Lives Movement sparked by the brutal murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police, it also seemed likely that he would choose somebody of color.
Kamala Harris was born in 1964 in Oakland, California.Her father, Donald Harris, is Jamaican and is a Stanford University emeritus professor of economics. He claims to be a descendant of a slave owner named Hamilton Brown who was a Northern Irish sugarcane planter. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, is Indian and is a breast cancer scientist with a doctorate degree in endocrinology from UC Berkeley.
Kamala Harris identifies herself as American.
She graduated from Howard University and then UC Hastings College of the Law. In 2003, after working in several DA offices, she was elected district attorney of San Francisco. In 2010 she was elected Attorney General of California and then re-elected four years later. In 2016, she was elected to the US Senate representing California along with Senator Dianne Feinstein.
She came to broader attention in the country due to her public passionate and pointed questioning of such current Administration appointees as US attorneys general Jeff Sessions and William Barr and Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Last year, she announced that she was running for the Democratic nomination and campaigned until December when lack of funding forced her to withdraw.
Strategically, this announcement may have come at almost the perfect time. We needed it.
Total cases of COVID-19 have just gone past the 20 million mark worldwide. Here in the United States our case numbers have now risen well above 5 million people. As of this morning 164,545 Americans have lost their lives due to complications arising from the virus.
That there has been no concerted attempt whatsoever on the part of this Administration to contain and control this pandemic is by now old news. What seems to be somewhat different these days, however, is the diminishing attention the President is getting for his ongoing, often ridiculous, pronouncements.
In response to the President’s recent executive stimulus actions, Republican Senator Ben Sasse from Nebraska referred them as “unconstitutional slop”. In a bi-partisan show of support, Speaker Pelosi agreed calling them “absurdly unconstitutional”.
The President’s request for his likeness to be added to the Mount Rushmore monument in days past would have sparked a national conversation between his supporters on the right and his outraged opponents on the left. Instead was largely ignored. There were the usual memes produced - one changed the faces on the mountain to those of the President, along with sexual offenders Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Cosby - but really, the whole travesty was just waved away.
The announcement of a strong, experienced and seasoned Democratic ticket comes at the precise moment when our current lack of leadership seems to be having its worst effect.
As schools reopen at the frantic urging of the White House, reports are coming in about a rise in case numbers among children. One report says that case numbers among kids have risen 90% in the last month. A student was suspended in a Georgia school for posting a picture of a hallway crowded with maskless kids between classes. Now nine students in that school have tested positive for COVID-19.
The Big 10 and Pac-12 college football leagues have just cancelled their fall and winter game schedule because of their inability to control safety because of the spread of the virus.
The most visible event involving supporters of the current Administration was a giant motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota that was expected to attract northwards of 250,000 people. Chilling pictures from that event show massive crowds, none of them wearing masks, all crammed in together, partying, on the streets of that small town.
At about the same time, Florida broke its own record for the most COVID-19-related deaths in a single day yesterday with 132 victims.
Georgia saw its largest single-day increase of deaths with 137 people perishing there.
Two weeks ago, business Herman Cain who ran for President in 2012 passed away from the virus after attending the President’s indoor political rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma and not wearing a mask.
Meanwhile, the Republican-led Senate is holding up decision-making in regard to extending aid to the 31 million Americans who are currently job-less. The Democratic-led House has passed a stimulus bill, but it has stalled in the Senate. As the Senate dithers around, the country suffers.
It is into this landscape, that this energizing announcement comes. It seems to be perfectly timed.
The President seems a bit at sea following it. In the same breath he is trying to claim that not only is Senator Harris too tough on crime but also that she wants to undermine the nation’s police departments. He clearly is at a loss. He thinks she was “nasty” to Kavanaugh.
I take a great deal of comfort reading liberal friends’ comments that Kamala Harris is the safe choice for the Democratic ticket in the 2020 Presidential election. If an educated biracial Black and Asian female candidate can be seen to be the safest choice that Joe Biden could make as a running mate, then there is hope for us as a country yet.
Let’s be clear, like all of us, Kamala Harris is not a saint. She is a human being.
She has made mistakes and we will all hear about them ad nauseum over the next months. Once the White House gets its incoherent messaging somewhat together all of those mistakes, big and small, will be magnified and distorted beyond recognition. Senator Harris has already been out there in this environment. I think she’s ready.
It is good to be home in New York.
I dropped the rental car off way uptown in Washington Heights then walked all the way back home down through Harlem. Like any summer day, people were out on the streets, A few hydrants were open to provide a cool spray of relief from the heat.
Small groups of folks were playing dominoes in shady areas. For the most part, people wore masks. They had them down while they were playing, but when somebody got up to go somewhere, they pulled them back up.
“I am so ready to go to work” is how Senator Harris responded to Vice President Biden in their taped phone conversation yesterday.
Good, because, the rest of us are too. There is a lot to do before November - mainly we need to convince everybody out there to do their civic duty and VOTE. The time for change is long overdue. We all deserve so much better than what we are getting.
I am SO ready to get back to work. Five months without an industry to work in has made me realize how much I need it. This Administration has demonstrated time and time again that they are not going to get us there.
While I make no secret of my political leanings, this is probably one of my more overtly political posts. To be fair, the announcement was a big deal and deserves the attention. More than that, though, for the first time in a very long while I felt something different.
I didn’t realize how much I was missing it until yesterday.
The feeling rushed in like the waves I spent last week fixated on.
It was Hope.
H❤️PE is just the beginning
a change is gonna come....
already in the mix
My work now is to continue to take the best care of myself
and watch what happens
xx
We feel a sense of hope here too, Richard. We have all been analysing the hilarious interview with the Aussie journo who interviewed Trump last week. We’re all in love with this guy’s father, Norman Swan, who provides expert advice daily on the Coronavirus.
Keep on with your political posts - although your persuasion is clear, they are factually based and so well done.