DEMOCRACY'S LOSS: AN ELECTION POST MORTEM

 

More than forty-eight percent of Americans who bothered to cast votes in the presidential election last Tuesday are in varying stages of shock, mourning, anger and dismay. And yes, the US remains pretty much a fifty-fifty country in terms of the split between those backing Donald Trump and everyone else. This was clearly a punishment vote against the Biden administration and in keeping with people’s perception (as opposed to the actual fundamentals) of the economy. But it was also, I can’t help thinking, about racism and sexism.

That said, this was obviously no ordinary election between two normal everyday candidates with somewhat different points of view about policy. This was, and remains, the most consequential election since the Civil War, when democracy triumphed over sedition. Unfortunately, the result is just the opposite this time. The candidate placed in charge by the will of the majority is a man who violated the Constitution, sought to subvert a former electoral process and refused to submit to a peaceful transfer of power—for the first time in American history. Obviously, with the backing of a hijacked Republican Party, he is now being rewarded for his consistently bad behavior. And you can bet that these next four years will be even worse than anything we have ever seen from him before. Be advised: It will cost democracy and Americans dearly.

But perhaps democracy isn’t anything the majority cares about any more. This was, unquestionably, a free, fair and democratic election. But the result has placed a repeatedly confessed autocrat in charge. So, maybe this will be the last free and fair election the United States ever has.

Perhaps people just care more about the price of gasoline and eggs than they do their inalienable rights. Maybe they care more about controlling what other people do with their bodies and whom they love than they do about guaranteeing individual rights (everyone else’s, but, in the end, their own as well) and the sanctity of the rule of law. Maybe they care more about their children’s “education” being based on their own subjective “beliefs” than they do about their learning the proven facts and science of how the world and the beings and systems in it function. And almost certainly, it is more important to them to have a white male chauvinist in charge, no matter how morally and ethically flawed he might be, than to embrace the sexual and ethnic diversity that is, whether they like it or not, the United States of America.

That said, each person votes his or her conscience, or, perhaps, better said, his or her immediate to short-term convenience, and that is the general idea behind representative democracy—even when the outcome may well damage democracy beyond repair. What the majority seems to have failed to do in this case is vote with the future of the US as we know it in mind.

A survey run by the Associated Press seems to bear this out. While six in ten of the one hundred twenty thousand people surveyed indicated they were fearful of what Trump might do in a second term with no guardrails, many of them said they were voting for him anyway. Indeed, more than half indicated that, while they were hoping to keep drama to the minimum, they were also bent on seeing substantial change in the way the country was being governed. More telling still,  three out of ten—not coincidentally, I surmise, about the proportion of the population made up of Donald Trump’s most fanatical cult-followers—said they were hoping to see “total upheaval” in the way the country is run.

But from a strictly liberal independent viewpoint, there’s a lot of accountability to go around for Tuesday’s presidential election outcome. And here, I take full responsibility for the theories that I’m about to posit. They are, indeed, mine, and the product of my own critical thoughts and ponderings.

The person least to blame for this election outcome is Kamala Harris. The vice president did an astonishing job, in just one hundred seven days, of galvanizing Democratic support, uniting left and center in the party, raising record funding, exciting the Democratic base, choosing a vice presidential candidate with wide popular appeal, and introducing herself to an American public for whom she was a largely unknown figure. She also went on an incredibly brief and inhumanly extenuating journey of both battleground and other key states in order to carry her message of domestic peace and democracy directly to the people. For any unprejudiced observer, it was hard not to see her performance as nothing short of extraordinary. And hopefully she will not disappear from the leadership of the party once her term in office ends.

The person most to blame for this election outcome is Joe Biden. From the outset, after snatching the primary from a highly competitive Independent, Bernie Sanders, Biden had said that he would be a transitional leader. And yet, he failed to seize propitious opportunities to make it clear that he would be a four-year president. Many in his party insisted that he was “the only Democrat who could beat Trump” (again). In hindsight, that belief on their part was exactly that, “a belief” with no real basis in fact, since, by the midterms, his popularity was already languishing, and by shortly afterward, very real concerns were arising about his physical fitness and his mental acuity.
The mid-terms, or slightly thereafter, would have been the time for him to announce that he wouldn’t stand for another term, thus permitting the party to run a primary race and establish a public consensus for choosing a candidate. I blame both the party and First Lady Jill Biden for pushing him to go for another term when both she and the party leadership couldn’t help but see, early on, what became public knowledge during the president’s absolutely disastrous performance in his only debate with Donald Trump.

But still, even after that, he dragged his feet, hunkered down and refused to go until the party made it clear that he had to, for the good of the movement. To his credit, he resigned the race with patriotism and understanding. But it was too little, way too late.   

The Democratic Party basically threw Kamala Harris to the lions. Democratic leaders sent her on a kamikaze mission, on which, it must be said, she did incredibly well. Indeed, putting aside the perennial vagaries of a controversial Electoral College system, Harris has swept better than forty-eight percent of the popular vote with little left to report. This was true despite the inescapable handicap of being an incumbent VP, who had to try to convince people that she was her own woman without challenging the authority of her boss or disavowing any of his policies. A VP with the character of a Donald Trump would have thrown the president under the bus during such a campaign. It speaks very highly of her ethics and respect for the office of the presidency that she refused to do that. But apparently, in today’s world, ethics are a liability that costs one dearly.

Women and minorities must live with the fact that they voted against their best interests. Or didn’t vote at all. Democrats and, in particular, Joe Biden, have generally done well with African American voters. In Biden’s case, this is not only because of his career-long work in the field of civil rights and justice, but also because he was vice president to the country’s first black president—and one of its most popular presidents in US history. Black voters were a big help to Biden in defeating Trump in 2020.

But that trend didn’t carry over to this race. At least not with men. Despite the fact that Kamala Harris would have been the second black and first woman president of the United States, Trump managed to double his support among African Americans this time around. It appears that this was due, almost entirely, to young African American males trending toward the so-called “bromance”—men’s preference for a flawed old white guy over a woman, and especially a black woman—that the Trump campaign enjoyed.

In other words, a large contingent of black, and especially young black,  men preferred to vote for an aging white man with questionable mental acuity, and with provable ties to and sentiments toward white nationalist and white supremacist groups than to vote for a dynamic woman of color of a younger generation who clearly had their best interests, their history, and their struggles in mind. I can only conjecture that this is a question of sexism, the choosing of a male, even against their better interests, over an empathic female. Perhaps many of these black male voters (along with their fellow white bromance voters) cast their ballots in a conscious effort to ensure that women, their women, were not further empowered or inspired to greater militancy in favor of women’s causes. Perhaps the Handmaid’s Tale nature of Trumpian politics and its goal of very apparently disenfranchising women seemed appealing to them. Indeed, they may well have liked the idea of “protecting” women “whether they like it or not.”

But they weren’t the only ones  voting against their better interests. Trump made significant gains as well among Hispanic voters. Part of that was, of course, based on fears fueled by the Trump campaign of a sharp swing toward the left. A segment of Latino voters, made up of the Hispanic diaspora from so-called “socialist” countries such as Cuba or Venezuela are vulnerable to buzzwords like “socialist”, “communist”, “leftist”, etc. That’s understandable. Their families suffered hunger, penury, prison and torture in countries claiming to be socialist.

It is very hard—believe me, I’ve tried—to get people from those origins to focus on the success of liberal politics throughout the West. Theirs is a kneejerk reaction that knows no middle of the road. Left is bad. Right is good. They often fail to understand, for obvious reasons, that the Castros, Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro were never socialists. They were always totalitarians, dictators, despots who wrapped themselves in a red flag, in the same way that other former Latin American strongmen like Paraguay’s Alfredo Stroessner, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet or Argentina’s Jorge Rafael Videla wrapped themselves in the flag of capitalism and Western Christianity. So those folks are pretty much always a lost cause for Democrats.

But this time, Harris bled votes among other Hispanic populations as well. And particularly among Hispanic males. Why did so many Latinos break with the Democrats? A number of pundits seem bent on trying to convince us that, “It’s the economy, stupid.” But having my own hands-on half-century of insight into Latin America, I think it’s more than that. The economy may be a factor, or at least an excuse. But I can’t help thinking that much of the shift came when it became clear that the Democratic candidate would be a woman. In other words, never underestimate the power of machismo among Latin males.

Meanwhile, the “macho man” to whom they lent their support is the same one who has referred repeatedly to Latin Americans pejoratively—with the latest offense being a reference from his campaign (which he failed to chastise) to Puerto Rico as a “a floating island of garbage”. But this was nothing new. Trump has long generally referred to Mexican migrants as “rapists, criminals and drug traffickers”, and to Hispanic migrants in general as coming from “shithole countries”, and as “poisoning the blood of our nation.”

Under his first administration, Hispanic migrant families were separated at the border, children were caged and later put into foster care in far-flung regions of the US. Significant numbers of those children were simply lost by the administration, and even after being deported, it took some of their desperate parents months to be reunited with those kids.

Now, one of Trump’s major campaign promises is that “from Day One” he will mount the “largest deportation operation in the history of the United States.” The president-elect has vowed that he will deport a million people—the great majority Hispanics. Experts say that to reach that massive number, the next Trump administration will necessarily have to go after people for whom Kamala Harris supported providing a path to citizenship. That is to say, people who have long been established in the Unites States and have been making a useful contribution to American society. Among others, this would include the so-called “Dreamers”—people brought to the US by their migrant parents when they were still infants or children, and who have basically spent their entire lives in American society, but who never had American citizenship or visas.

What a critical mass of Latinos for Trump have voted for, then, are situations in which members of their communities, their friends, their relatives, will face the tragedy of deportation, no matter how long they have lived, worked and thrived in American society. Their votes have given Trump a weapon that he will turn on people they know, people with whom they share cultural and ethnic ties, even people they love.

They share this dubious distinction with a segment of the Muslim community that could think of no better way to protest the admitted lack of decision by the Biden administration in taking Israel to serious task for its genocidal military operations in Gaza. In other words, Muslims who “punished” Harris—who had made it clear that her administration would take a new tack regarding the Israeli-Palestinian war, and that she would push for a two-state solution—did so by helping elect Israeli leader Bibi Netanyahu’s closest American ally, and a man who initiated his former administration, in 2016, by declaring “a complete and total ban” on Muslim immigration to the US. A ban that remained in place until Democrats sued, taking the issue all the way to the Supreme Court, where it was finally shot down.

But none of these other betrayals can hold a candle to the one Kamala Harris suffered at the hands of voters of her own gender, both the ones who voted for Trump and the ones who stayed home. The potential for a second term for Donald Trump should have been, just out of sheer self-respect, a clarion call to every gender-conscious woman to make sure that never happened. But that only emerged among African American women, who traditionally vote Democrat as a majority, but who this time came out in force and voted eighty-five percent for Kamala Harris.

Latinas, meanwhile, let her down. Although Harris still got a traditional Democratic majority of Hispanic women’s votes, she did so by about five percentage points fewer than Joe Biden did in 2020. In such a consequential election for women’s rights and Latin American migrant families, this outcome can only be seen as illogical and counterintuitive. Did that sliver of Latinas simply join their male partners in defecting to Trump? It seems likely, but we’ll never know.

White women are quite often split fifty-fifty in American elections between Republicans and Democrats. But again, this was no common everyday election. This was an election that would have given women their first president in history. Nor was that the only consideration. The female candidate in question is a campaigner for women’s rights, an advocate for the reproductive rights of which women have already been stripped by Trump, who has repeatedly bragged about doing so. More shocking still, Trump improved his election performance this time around young white women, the ones with the most to lose in the future from an administration bent on sending women back to the dark ages of nineteen-fifties American sexism. 

Blame must also be laid at the door of women who, at least in such a consequential election for their own interests, simply didn’t get off their couch and go vote. In what is a decidedly apathetic electorate, in which a sixty-six percent turnout is considered “a great success”, if non-voting women were ever going to vote, this should have been the year.

Well, in this election, roughly ninety-nine million potential voters just couldn’t be bothered—even when absentee and mail-in voting makes it possible to cast a ballot from the comfort of one’s own home. Of those, it’s safe to say that roughly half were women. And, logically, half of those were very likely liberal-leaning, if not potential Democrats. That means there were probably well more than twenty million Democratic women’s votes that were withheld. Even a fraction of those would have provided for the razor-close race the US was supposed to have had. Half might well have handed Kamala Harris a resounding victory despite the Electoral College. But those women simply could not be bothered to do their part.

As a candidate, Kamala Harris was a woman who was challenging a former president who has proven repeatedly to be a misogynist. A man for whom women are broken down into body parts, a man who once said,  “You know, it doesn't really matter what [the media] write as long as you've got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”  A father who, in a public interview with controversial radio personality Howard Stern, said it was okay for Stern to refer to the former president's own daughter Ivanka as  “a piece of ass” and discussed with Stern whether or not Ivanka had had breast implants (“I would know,” he said).  A man who also said of Ivanka that he would “probably be dating her” if he weren’t her father.   

 

This is a man who has demeaned and insulted women in every way possible, a court-certified sexual predator. One who had to pay millions of dollars in damages to a woman he sexually assaulted and later libeled, one who paid a hundred thirty thousand dollars to a porn star so she wouldn’t talk about their one-night stand, and, in the process of doing so, committed thirty-four felonies. The same guy who said, of young women in beauty pageants that he sponsored, that he could do whatever he wanted to them, even “grab them by the pussy,” because “he was a star.”

But these haven’t been the only occasions on which he has shown his contempt for women. Among other things, he has said:

-         “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America.”

-         To a female contestant on his show, Celebrity Apprentice, three years before he took office,  “It must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees.”

-         Of himself, "All of the women on The Apprentice flirted with me — consciously or unconsciously.”

-         Of then-Fox anchor Megyn Kelly when she was a debate moderator and took him to task, “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.”

-         Of his 2015 Republican primary rival Carly Fiorina, “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president? I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not supposed to say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?”

-         And once again, to shock-jock Howard Stern, “A person who’s flat-chested is very hard to be 'a ten', OK?”

This is the man who packed the Supreme Court with radical right-wing justices strategically placed there to overturn a half-century-old legal precedent that gave women control over their own bodies and their reproduction rights, and got the government out of their bedrooms and marriages. A man whose own wife regularly refuses to appear in public with him. This is the man women voted for over a female candidate with nothing but empathy for their struggle and their causes, one who had promised to fight for them against a far-right plan (Project 2025) to introduce a process that defies the bounds of dystopian fiction.

All I can say is, congratulations! If Trumpian women’s goal was to place their own basic interests directly in harm’s way, you couldn’t have chosen better.

THE INQUIRER LISTS REASONS LINKED TO DEMOCRACY AND RULE OF LAW FOR BACKING HARRIS

 

The Philadelphia Inquirer today officially announced its endorsement of Kamala Harris for president.

This is huge, in terms of media endorsement in a crucial swing state. The Inquirer was founded in 1847 and is one of Pennsylvania's oldest and most influential periodicals. It is also ranked among the most influential papers in the country. This fact is supported by its having won TWENTY Pulitzer Prizes for journalistic excellence since 1975.

In announcing its endorsement of the Harris-Walz ticket, the paper's editorial board pulled no punches in listing its reasons.

These are the same reason that I have voted for Kamala Harris and why I don't think this election is simply a matter of political choice or "differences of opinion".

This election is quite simply about the choice between democracy or tyranny, and my objective reasons for saying that are precisely the same as The Inquirer's reasons for throwing their paper's support behind Kamala.

Here are the reasons they gave for their endorsement:

"Voters face an easy but tectonic choice in the race for the White House.

“Will they choose the first woman or the oldest man to be the next president?

“Will they choose the prosecutor or the convict?

“Will they choose the candidate who supports restoring Roe v. Wade, or the man who bragged about overturning it?

“Will they choose the candidate with a tax plan to help the middle class or the one who wants to help the superrich?

“Will they choose the candidate who backs a tough bipartisan immigration law or the guy who killed the measure?

“Will they choose the candidate who wants to combat climate change or the one who thinks it is a hoax?

“Will they choose the candidate who upholds the peaceful transfer of power or the one who summoned a violent mob to attack the U.S. Capitol?

“Will they choose the candidate who stands up to Vladimir Putin or the one who said Russia could do ‘whatever the hell they want?’

“Will they choose the candidate who champions education, health care for all, and sensible gun safety laws, or the person who wants to close the U.S. Department of Education, repeal Obamacare, and told supporters after a school shooting to ‘get over it?’

“Will they choose the candidate who supports the working class or the one who is anti-union and opposed raising the minimum wage?

“Will they choose a woman of color who wants to unite the country, or a man with a history of misogynistic, racist, and divisive comments and actions?

“Will they choose the candidate who supports LGBTQ rights or the one who wants to roll back protections for the gay community?

“Will they choose the candidate who will uphold the presidential oath, or the one who was impeached twice for high crimes and misdemeanors, profited from the White House, dangled pardons to cronies, and was indicted four times?

“This baker’s dozen list could go on, but the choice is clear and obvious.

“Vice President Kamala Harris wants to help all Americans.

“Donald Trump wants to help himself.

“That is why The Inquirer endorses Kamala Devi Harris to be the 47th president of the United States.”

Amen!

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/editorials/a/endorsement-president-kamala-harris-democracy-20241025.html

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.   

 

WHAT BIDEN DID WRONG

Ever since last week’s Democratic debates, I’ve found myself arguing with other liberals—mostly Democrats, but also a few moderate Republicans and the occasional independent like myself—about what, if anything, former Vice President Joe Biden did wrong in answering California presidential hopeful Kamala Harris who took him to task for his stance on the issue of busing back in the 1970s. Let it be clear that, in common with unabashed segregationist politicians of the day, Joe Biden was a staunch opponent of busing, even if by association, and for clearly different reasons than those of racially prejudiced members of Congress. And, at the very least, when challenged in these first debates, he didn’t seem to have a considered and thoughtful response for those whose misgivings Senator Harris was voicing.

Busing sparked widespread protests on both sides of the issue.

Busing, for those too young to remember it, was a federal government attempt to forcibly integrate schools around the country but particularly in the Deep South, where, despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was designed to end the sad tradition of racial discrimination that had virtually assured African Americans of second-class citizenship since the end of the Civil War, the best that America had to offer continued to out of the black community’s reach. The policy consisted of federally imposed the busing of students—at first black students only, but later whites as well—from their natural school districts to other districts where schools were either all white or all black.

The idea of busing was to lower the social and cultural barricades that had, from time immemorial, divided the black and white communities. The creators of the policy clearly felt public schools were the place to do this first, bringing young people together, regardless of race, where they might learn to empathize with one another and to live, learn and work together in peace and harmony. More importantly, it was an attempt to ensure an equal education for all, since, frequently, black school districts didn’t get anywhere near their fair share of funding, their fair share of infrastructure or their fair share of educational resources.

But the busing policy was controversial. Although its intentions were noble, its effects were checkered. Yes, in many cases, like that of Senator Harris, apparently, it was a fine opportunity for a better education than she would have had in her own district. But in other cases, like those of a few people I communicated with on the social media this past week, it meant that certain middle-class white kids, who were in school districts that did indeed benefit from the best that America had to offer in public education, ended up being bused to formerly all black schools that were chronically strapped for resources of all kinds.

Furthermore, while the policy was meant to increase social harmony between the races, it often had the opposite effect, because blame for busing was laid at the door of the minorities who benefited from it rather than at those of the three branches of government that were implementing the policy. And this resentment included that arising from schoolchildren of both races having to spend an inordinate amount of time daily commuting by school bus from their home districts to other school districts simply in order to ensure that the schools they attended had “the right mix” of blacks and whites to appease the federal government.

Harris takes on Biden about busing during the debates.

As Senator Harris pointed out in the debates, however, when local communities—in this case, state and municipal boards of education—refuse to do what’s right and what the Constitution and the rule of law require, then it’s time for the federal government to step in and assure that no one’s civil rights are abused. And that was the purpose of busing, no matter how heavy-handed a policy it might have been.

In all fairness, Senator Harris has, since the first debates, said that, given the chance, she wouldn’t necessarily impose busing today. She told those questioning her on the topic that busing was “just one of the tools” in the array of possibilities for desegregation, implying that there were others that might be just as effective. But are there? The de facto re-segregation of public schools that we’re seeing today would tend to indicate the contrary.  

The crux of this matter lies in two responses from Facebook friends of mine this past week. One argued that “schools are all the same” in each state or municipal district, depending on who has authority over them from one area of the country to the next. Another argued that her white middle-class daughter had been bused to “a crappy school with broken windows” in a largely African American district. Although both of these responses were meant to be arguments against busing, they are both arguments that might just as easily have been employed to support busing. First, schools might all be the same on paper—in terms of curriculum, standardized testing, etc.—but in point of fact, they often are not, in either broad or specific practical terms. Second, the fact that a white mother’s child might have been bused to “a crappy school with broken windows” is clearly unfortunate for the child who was in a better school before, but it underscores the argument that all schools are not the same at all, no matter how they may look on paper.

An underlying idea of busing was, indeed, to equalize schools from one district to the next, with bused African Americans usually getting a better education and educational experience than they would have in their home districts, and with the presence of numerous members of the relatively privileged white majority in formerly all black school triggering a movement to bring the schools up to the same standards enjoyed in formerly all-white public schools. The main point of the busing policy was that there was a virtual Apartheid in US education. And something—anything necessary—had to be done to wipe out all vestiges of the country’s racist past, beginning with education.

But no one should get the idea that de facto segregation was only a problem in the South, where it was purposely and stringently maintained. Indeed, segregation was a fact of life in many major cities in the North as well. This was because the boundaries of many school districts were also those of all-black or all-white neighborhoods, which was why court orders backed the landmark Supreme Court decision known as Brown v Board of Education by imposing “forced busing” on such cities in the North as Boston, Columbus (Ohio), Detroit and Wilmington (Delaware), as well as on West Coast cities like San Francisco and Pasadena.

Racial segregationists James Eastland and Herman Talmadge

Recently, Joe Biden boasted about having sought the support of infamous and perennial southern Democrat segregationists James Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia for the anti-busing bill that he co-authored back in the 1970s, when he was a junior senator from Delaware. He qualified his statements by making an argument for civility. More specifically, he told the audience at a New York fundraiser that, back then, “At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything, (but) we got things done.” He then went on to talk about his once chummy relationship with the two segregationists.

This was like waving a red flag in the faces of many, particularly southern, African Americans. When challenged by Kamala Harris during last week’s debates, Biden backpedaled after the California senator asked him to admit he was wrong to have opposed busing, telling her that he hadn’t opposed busing, but rather, busing imposed on municipal and state authorities by the federal government. Neither Harris’s challenge nor Biden’s rebuttal got to the real crux of the issue, however. It was, perhaps, out of line for Harris to seek an apology from the former vice president for opposing busing, which he clearly saw as an erroneous policy. Rather, she might well have taken him to task for making a virtual pact with the devil (radical southern segregationists) to try and achieve his anti-busing goal. Conversely, Biden should have known better than to have qualified the kind of busing he was against when, in the age of Internet, it is so easy to review what his stance actually was. And the fact is that Biden was a staunch anti-busing advocate, who espoused, for whatever reason, an absolutist position that was in no way different from that of the segregationists whose support he eagerly sought and received.

In other words, back then, Senator Biden’s opposition to busing was in no way qualified. And the record shows that he was not merely “civil” toward Southern Democrat segregationists, but was in lockstep agreement with them on the issue of busing. In his own words during Senate debates at that time, “I don’t feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather,” and he added that busing was, “a liberal train wreck.”

In 1977, Biden joined Senator William Roth in sponsoring the proposed “Biden-Roth” amendment, the purpose of which was to prevent judges from ordering wider busing to achieve integrated school districts. In arguing against busing in 1975, Biden said, “I oppose busing. It's an asinine concept, the utility of which has never been proven to me. I've gotten to the point where I think our only recourse to eliminate busing may be a constitutional amendment.” Clearly, back then, he wasn’t qualifying his opposition to busing as federally imposed versus voluntary busing. His campaign was against busing, period. And he unsuccessfully sought to impose a constitutional amendment to ban it. 

Biden used an argument that no white man ever should have uttered to justify his stance, arguing that “The new integration plans being offered are really just quota systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos, or whatever in each school. That, to me, is the most racist concept you can come up with. What it says is, ‘In order for your child with curly black hair, brown eyes, and dark skin to be able to learn anything, he needs to sit next to my blond-haired, blue-eyed son.’ That's racist! Who the hell do we think we are, that the only way a black man or woman can learn is if they rub shoulders with my white child?”

Junior Senator Joe Biden sought an anti-busing amendment

Had a black or Chicano politician said the same thing to argue for equal education, it might not raise an eyebrow. But coming from the then-young senator from Delaware, it smacked of hypocrisy since, clearly, the schools blacks and Chicanos were attending weren’t, in their majority, anywhere near equal to white schools. And because it came from the lips of a white politician it sounded more like advocating the “separate but equal” argument used in South Africa, for instance, to justify the nefarious Apartheid policy that sought to maintain white supremacy. Biden’s amendment bill lost by a small margin in Congress but the Delaware senator continued to be an outspoken opponent to busing as a desegregation policy.

Reverse discrimination suits by white victims of busing’s adverse effects were what eventually spelled the broad demise of the policy. But had Joe Biden thought out how he should respond if (or rather, clearly, when) the issue was broached in the debates, he might well have seen what happened to busing as similar to what happened to Obamacare following the administration in which he served in a key role for eight years. More to the point, busing (like Obamacare) was an imperfect policy. But it was a start, a first step in the right direction toward desegregation, but one that was struck down (also like Obamacare) with nothing viable to replace it.

This is verifiable by virtue of the fact that, even today, desegregation of American schools is on a sharp downturn, and has been ever since busing—which, again, was not replaced by any other viable policy—came to an end.  According to an article about the failure of desegregation by The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb, “To the extent that the word ‘desegregation’ remains in our vocabulary, it describes an antique principle, not a current priority. Today, we are more likely to talk of diversity—but diversification and desegregation are not the same undertaking. To speak of diversity, in light of this country’s history of racial recidivism, is to focus on bringing ethnic variety to largely white institutions, rather than dismantling the structures that made them so white to begin with.”

But that article was written in 2014, two years before the beginning of the Trump era, which has set civil rights back by decades, set political correctness aflame, promoted a far-right mentality fraught with nativism and tribalism and scared the president’s base with boogeyman stories about the rise of American minorities and the danger of disenfranchisement faced by the traditional white majority. We are again, in other words, faced with a resurgence of potential segregation and discrimination against people of color, whether African American or Hispanic. And despite the idea of diversity rather than integration, within a panorama of growing re-segregation, studies show that traditionally white schools continue to be the least culturally and racially diverse of all.   

I’ve heard both sides of a debate by Democrats and other liberals over the last week about whether or not Biden should apologize “for opposing busing.” Personally, I think that this argument seeks to answer the wrong question. The fact is that Biden, in his early senatorial days, was a staunch opponent to busing no matter how he tries to spin it now. But he felt that he had valid reasons for opposing it because, in his eyes, it was a policy that violated states’ rights and brought undo hardships to those affected by the policy.

To my mind, however, the stance for which he should offer a mea culpa is that of having enlisted the help of some of the most notorious racists in Congress to try and get an anti-busing bill that bore his name passed. And he might also want to admit that he was remiss in not helping find some way of promoting integration other than forced busing, if, as he says, he wasn’t for segregation, but merely against the negative effects of federally imposed busing.

This is an issue that won’t die. Mainly because Vice President Biden has failed to address it adequately when it came to the fore in the debates—as he should have expected it to. And this one issue has clearly hurt him badly in public opinion polls. If Biden hopes to take back the ample ground he lost to Kamala Harris in the first debates, he needs to own this issue and deal with it effectively. If not, he can expect his position to continue to deteriorate in the run-up to the 2020 elections.