BIDEN OFFERS A LESSON IN HUMILITY AND SERVICE AND HARRIS A MASTER CLASS IN ETHICS AND PROFESSIONALISM

 For the past fifty-two years, Joe Biden has distanced himself from other politicians in taking the moral high ground at the service of his country and democracy. Elected to the Senate when he was barely thirty, his long political career has been bookended by personal tragedy—the deaths in 1972 of his first wife Neilia and their infant daughter Naomi in a car crash a month after he became a senator, and the death of his rising-star politician son Beau of brain cancer in 2015, when, as the incumbent vice president, Joe Biden was first considering running for the presidency—a dream quashed not only by his son’s tragic death but also by a call from then-President Obama for him to stand down in deference to Hillary Clinton.

In both cases, Biden put country over self, overcame his own immense personal sorrow, and concentrated on how best to serve his country. Biden has been, over the years, the embodiment of John F. Kennedy’s dictum: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” In the first case, the junior senator became famous for commuting by train between his home in Delaware and his job in Washington as a means of taking care of both the business of government and his duties to his two surviving and motherless children, Beau and Hunter. In the second, he put aside his grief and the sting of his former boss’s having passed him over in favor of Clinton, and threw his hat into the ring for the presidency in the 2020 election, with the well-placed conviction that he and his long experience in government would be sufficient for him to defeat Donald Trump after Hillary Clinton lost her bid to do the same in 2016.

In hindsight, had Obama thrown his support behind his vice president in 2016, perhaps this would have been President Biden’s second term in office rather than his first, and we would not have had to witness the chaos and disarray into which the political arena has been thrown by questions regarding his age, health and suitability for continuing as president. More importantly, perhaps Donald Trump would have been a mere flash in the pan and the US would not have had to endure the dire consequences of his narcissistic, authoritarian machinations and his clear and present threats to democracy. But we’ll never know. Maybe, however, this is part of the reason that former President Obama is being so circumspect this time around.

Once again, this past weekend, we saw President Joe Biden put his country and party before his own personal wishes and goals. Despite his burning desire to remain in office for another four years and continue the job he had started, as well as staving off the unmistakable threat to democracy of another Trump presidency, he faced the hard and painful fact that he had, because of his age and failing acuity, lost the confidence of many Democratic voters and Independents, as well as of many of even his staunchest supporters within the party itself. In light of this, he seems to have clearly seen that his continued candidacy might well bring another victory for Trump and end up being the death knell for American democracy as we know it. As such, he last Sunday withdrew his bid for a second term and threw his full support behind his vice president, Kamala Harris.

While Harris has been something of an enigma and, for some, a disappointment as vice president, one could make the case that she is largely misunderstood. The vice president is a politically savvy person of truly superior intelligence, as she has clearly shown throughout her political career in California—both as a firebrand prosecutor and as state attorney general—and as a Senator for that state. Personally, I see her as a very sharp and capable poker player as well. 

A case in point. During the presidential primary debates for the 2020 election, as Joe Biden’s rival on the debate stage, she did the unthinkable and challenged him on his stellar record as a civil rights activist. She made it personal as well as political. Harris challenged Biden, saying that she wanted to make a point on “the issue of race.” She then prefaced her remarks by saying that she didn’t believe him to be a racist, but quickly went on to criticize him for making “very hurtful” statements about how he had worked with segregationist senators in opposition during the nineteen-seventies and eighties to a federal busing mandate.

Biden had made his comments in the context of his being someone who knew how to work across the aisle in Congress as a means to an end, even when in general disagreement with the other lawmakers’ politics. But Harris demonstrated that politics were about more than policy victories. They had real consequences that affected real people. And to bring the point home, she said, “There was a little girl in California who was a part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”

The statement caught Biden off guard and forced him into a half-truth when he countered saying his stance was being mischaracterized, adding that, “I did not oppose busing in America. What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education.” In the days that followed, the statement was fact-checked repeatedly and found to be false. In point of fact, the record showed that Senator Biden had been a staunch opponent of busing on principle, and not simply when ordered by the federal government. The exchange had served Harris well and showed her to be a force to be reckoned with.

Had Biden and Harris been different people than they were, it could have ended there, with Harris returning to the Senate and Biden going on to be president of the United States. Instead, however, it seems clear that Biden respected Harris for challenging his largely deserved record as a champion of civil rights and highly likely also felt it was better to have her in his corner than as a challenger. Or perhaps he felt the best way to heal the blow she had dealt him on race relations was to choose her—a highly capable woman of color—to be his running mate—the first woman, the first black and the first Asian in history to ascend to the vice presidency of the United States. Whatever the case may be, it is clear that Biden chose her because she was the most capable to serve in the post. The points he gained in race relations and ethnicity issues were an added perk, and it turned out to be a match made in heaven.

Of course, all of that is anathema to the openly racist and sexist MAGA Republican leadership. Just forty-eight hours after Joe Biden withdrew from the race and threw all of his support behind the vice president, Harris has come under both racist and sexist attacks. The GOP dog whistle for these attacks as voiced by Texas Republican Senator Chip Roy, for instance, is DEI. Many of us would have to rush to the Urban Dictionary to even know what the initials stood for—diversity, equity, and inclusion. Used in the best sense of the term, DEI refers to policies which seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who have historically been underrepresented or subject to discrimination on the basis of identity or disability. But in the mouths of MAGA racists like Roy, it becomes a racist and sexist epithet.

Tennessee GOP Representative Tim Burchett got even uglier a day after Biden backed the VP, not only calling her “a DEI hire”, but also recalling that President Biden had said he would pick a black woman as his running mate and wondering aloud, “What about white females? What about any other group?” This could no longer be referred to as a “dog whistle”. This was venturing to say the blatant racist part out loud. And by mentioning white “females”, he was also seeking to lower the status of women to their gender identity rather than seeing them as persons or individuals of equal weight in government and all other walks of life.

On X, Burchett tweeted: “The incompetency level is at an all-time high in Washington. The media propped up this president, lied to the American people for three years, and then dumped him for our DEI vice president.”

Doubling down when questioned by CNN’s Manu Raju, he said, “Biden said he’s gonna hire a Black female for vice president. What about white females? What about any other group? When you go down that route, you take mediocrity and that’s what they have right now as a vice president.” He reiterated on questioning by Raju that he believed Kamala Harris to be, basically, a token black as vice president, saying, “One hundred percent she was a DEI hire.”

Ex-president Donald Trump himself piled on at his Doral Golf Club in Florida, saying that “If Joe had picked someone halfway competent, they would have bounced him from office years ago. But they can’t because she’s their second choice.”

There is really no way to see any of this as any less shocking and egregious than it clearly is. But the impropriety of this sort of racist and sexist talk is rendered even more ironic and hypocritical considering that Trump’s own pick for the VP slot, J.D. Vance, has all of about five minutes of political experience. And his only claim to fame is of having been a failed hedge fund manager and having written a book about his hillbilly upbringing that caught on and became a bestseller. Somewhere along the line, he met up with far-right-wing tech-billionaire Peter Thiel, who became his political mentor and financial backer, and the rest is history—five minutes of history.

Trump clearly picked Vance because he was sure to appeal to the former president’s far-right, white, evangelical base, not because of any political or technical skill sets he brought to the table. So questioning the current vice president’s political background and acumen seems quite rich coming from Trump, whose own pick is so incredibly incompetent to serve. Especially if the Trump ticket should win the election only to have something happen to Trump while in office that requires his vice president to stand in for him. If Trump was, is and always will be a government outsider who plays everything by ear and based on his gut, Vance is a total novice, who basically hasn’t the slightest idea how the world works.

It seems that in the ever more authoritarianized and dominant MAGA wing of the GOP,  Vice President Harris’s career as a renowned, high-profile prosecutor, as the attorney general of the most populous and most politically and economically powerful state in the union, as a senator for that state, and as vice president to a man who has had one of the longest and most storied careers in American politics are insufficient credentials to keep the Alt-Right from characterizing her as anything but “a black female” and “a DEI hire.” Fortunately, Harris’s stellar education, long political experience, maturity, poise, ethics and intelligence are far more than enough to render such characterizations ridiculous. This is especially true considering the incredibly dubious credentials of the two men she and her ticket-mate will be running against—one a convicted felon and insurrectionist, and the other an absolute newbie in the world of politics.

In short, a prosecutor running against a criminal should make for an interesting election.

Contrary to what many critics have suggested, Harris has also played her cards incredibly well and close to her vest as vice president. She has been there in whatever capacity the president has needed her to be, offering her intelligence, experience and hard work to help find solutions to problems the administration has sought to remedy. The rest of the time she has been a friend and close collaborator to the president, a sounding board for his ideas, treating him with utmost respect, and doing her job without ever seeking to second-guess or overshadow the office Biden holds.

In her role as vice president, she has taken a major political risk by taking charge of anything the president pushed her way. Thus, she found herself overseeing the thorny issues of COVID response, voting rights, women’s reproductive rights and civil rights in general. She was also handed the explosive package of issues surrounding the border crisis. This is the issue on which the GOP is now seeking to hammer her, despite the fact that, thanks to actions taken by the Biden administration, border crossings are significantly lower than previous highs. Furthermore, the GOP is seeking to saddle Harris with the blame for continuing difficulties at the Mexican border, when the remaining crisis is largely of the Republicans’ own doing. That is to say, Donald Trump’s doing.

It is public knowledge that the Biden administration—to a large extent thanks to the brokering efforts of Kamala Harris—managed to cobble together an historic bipartisan legislative package to effectively deal with the border crisis. But that deal never made it into law for one simple reason. Donald Trump kicked over the negotiating table, badgering his MAGA lawmakers into backing the GOP away from the deal. He made no bones about the fact that such a deal could very well prove successful, and he didn’t want to “give” that sort of win to the Biden administration, basically telling GOP lawmakers to hold off until he was president again so he could take the victory lap for a border security package created through the efforts of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the most reasonable lawmakers in the GOP.   

Most important of all, however, has been the ethical capital that Harris has displayed as VP. She has shown unbending loyalty to the president throughout recent months in which he has been increasingly criticized for what people on both sides of the aisle have seen as his failing physical strength and mental acuity. No matter how politically devastating the attacks have been, the presidency and vice-presidency have demonstrated a monolithic front against all comers. In other words, despite having a shot at the presidency within her grasp, Harris has shown herself to be of the highest political and ethical pedigree, a person of honor and loyalty despite her soaring political and intellectual acumen, and her clear desire to serve as president of the United States.

That said, however, she also has been savvy enough to have her ducks in a row if called upon to serve, and within twenty-four hours of President Biden’s decision to withdraw from the 2024 race, she had consolidated overwhelming support among nearly all major figures in the Democratic Party and had garnered such incredible grassroots support that her campaign raised an all-time record eighty million dollars in a single day. This stupendous show of support has left Democrats who were pushing for a “mini-primary” dangling, with their feet kicking in the air. And it has rendered utterly ridiculous and caricaturesque the tentative challenge by Independent (quasi-Republican) Senator Joe Machin, who said he might re-register as a Democrat and go head-to-head with Harris, whom he considers “far-left”, which just goes to show how extremely far-right he is, despite presuming to call himself a centrist.

Sadder still was Manchin’s apparent ignorance of the fact that this election has become one in which age has loomed as a major issue, with the vast majority of Americans—and especially America’s youth—feeling discouraged that they were once again being given a binary boomer choice between two men who would either be, or would become, octogenarians while in office. Joe Manchin, who will turn seventy-seven next month, falls squarely within this rejected profile as well. This also casts a funereal pall over the third-party bid of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., himself a septuagenarian, much of whose momentum has been based on the otherwise unsavory choice between Trump and Biden, especially since RFK Jr.’s campaign sounds basically like MAGA without Trump.

In the end, after months in which the shadow of an election where—despite President Biden’s extraordinary service to the country—the best voters could hope for was “the lesser of two evils,” Americans have been in a somber and hopeless mood. But with the arrival of Kamala Harris on the electoral scene, the clouds have suddenly started to lift for both Democrats and a large segment of independent voters. The political scene is being very quickly injected with a new dose of energy and promise. There is now a very genuine choice between more of the chaotic, hate-filled Trump era that we know will just be more of the same, and a new political energy led by a mature and experienced, yet still young and dynamic presidential candidate whose entire career has been devoted to democracy and the rule of law.

Suddenly, Donald Trump is the only grumpy ol’ man in the race. And MAGA’s barrage of open insults, racism and sexism demonstrates just how suddenly off-kilter and desperate they are.