What did I think about Kamala Harris?

I searched these pages to see what they (I) have said about Kamala Harris. Her name appears in thirteen — and now fourteen — posts. From a January 2, 2019 post:

The last thing Democrats need to do is to turn the 2020 presidential election into a battle between oldsters. Such a battle will do little to spark voter interest and much to spark parody. Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren: no. What the Democratic Party needs is a candidate who offers a sharp contrast to Donald Trump not only in policy but in affect. Sherrod Brown, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke: yes.

On January 27, 2019, I was happy to see that Harris was running. And on August 12, 2020, one day after Joe Biden named Harris as his running mate, I wrote, “she will (almost certainly) make a great nominee for president in 2024.”

[And, yes, there was a “How to improve writing” post about campaign e-mails, which were certainly not written by Harris.]

Kamala Harris asking questions

In The Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin writes about yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing: “Most members on the committee spoke too much, argued too frequently and failed to pin down Barr on key facts. There was one exception to the political demolition derby.” That was Senator Kamala Harris (D-California). Here she is:

Complete exchange between @senkamalaharris and Attorney General William Barr. pic.twitter.com/EzydIr8twh

— CSPAN (@cspan) May 1, 2019

Close reader, careful listener, persistent questioner. Also presidential candidate.

Something Kamala Harris said

I wrote it down as soon as I heard it: “Our democracy is as strong as our willingness to fight for it.” That was Kamala Harris, speaking this afternoon in Troy, Michigan.

No endorsements

Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, nixed the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris.

And now Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, has nixed that paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris.

Shameful. And shameful.

*

I unsubscribed from the Post after writing this post.

[But the real trick will be trying not to buy from Amazon.]

Cleanup on aisle 45

Kamala Harris: “What we have done is clean up Donald Trump’s mess.”

*

Donald Trump: “They’re eating the pets.”

*

Kamala Harris: “World leaders are laughing at Donald Trump.”

*

Donald Trump, about offering an alternative to the Affordable Care Act: “I have concepts of a plan.”

Responses and non-answers

Lawrence O’Donnell’s commentary on yesterday’s Trump “General News Conference” is worth watching in full. O’Donnell points out that most of the questions — mostly inaudible, as there was no microphone for the press — were wasted questions, silly, pointless, and that Trump’s responses (most glaringly, to a question about mifepristone) did not constitute answers. And that Kamala Harris’s speech yesterday received little or no airtime from news networks.

Here is a Trump non-answer of my choosing, his response to a reporter who asked for his “constitutional analysis” of Kamala Harris’s replacing Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket. The full question is impossible to hear, but I did make out the words “constitutional analysis.” I have made slight corrections to C-SPAN’s transcription (which — guess what? — doesn’t include reporters’ questions):

We have a constitution. It’s a very important document and we live by it. She has no votes and I’m very happy to run against her. I’m not complaining from that standpoint. And I hate to be defending him, but he did not want to leave. He wanted to see if he could win. They said you’re not going to win after the debate. They said you’re not going to win. You can’t win. You’re out. And at first they said it nicely and he wasn’t leaving and then you, you know it, you know it better than anybody. Wait a minute. So, uh, when you think about it, they said at first they were going to go out to another vote, they were going to go through a primary system, a quick primary system, which it would have to be, and then it all disappeared and they just picked a person that was the first out. She was the first loser. Okay. So we call her the first loser. She was the first loser. When, uh, during the primary system, during the Democrat primary system, she was the first one to quit and she quit. She had no votes, no support and she was a bad debater, by the way, very bad debater. And that’s not the thing I’m looking forward to, but she was a bad debater. She did it — obviously a bad job. She never made it to lowa then for some reason. And I know he regrets it. You do too. He picked her and she turned on him too. She was working with the people that wanted him out. But the fact that you can be, get no votes, lose in the primary system, in other words, you had fourteen or fifteen people. She was the first one out. And that you can then be picked to run for president. It seems, seems to me actually unconstitutional. Perhaps it’s not.

How’s that for constitutional analysis?

Kamala Harris’s vinyl

From May 2023, Kamala Harris leaves a D.C. record store. With Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald’s Porgy and Bess, Roy Ayers’s Everybody Loves the Sunshine, and Charles Mingus’s Let My Children Hear Music.

[Billboard identifies the Mingus LP only as “a record.”]

Joe and Kamala

I’ve had to remind myself several times today: it’s not just that Donald Trump* lost; it’s that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won. As I watched them speaking tonight from Wilmington, Delaware, I kept thinking of them as Joe and Kamala. I’d never before thought of a president and vice president as a pair of first names. Barack and Joe? Uh-uh.

The best way I can explain it to myself: after the psychopathy and sycophancy of the past four years, the sight of well-adjusted, apparently authentic humans prepared to assume positions of leadership is nothing less than giddying. They’re just like us, sort of, but with a great deal more courage.

Hurry, January. Joe and Kamala are ready.

She’s all that

Radical socialist, or tool of Wall Street? For Donald Trump*’s supporters, Kamala Harris is both.

In truth though, Senator Harris is an excellent choice for vice president. She is much better known than her Senate colleague Tammy Duckworth. Her tough, persistent questioning of William Barr and Brett Kavanaugh is well within recent memory, offering a powerful demonstration of what it means to speak truth to power — even if the speaking is a matter of asking questions. And she will (almost certainly) make a great nominee for president in 2024. I especially like the note of reconciliation in her presence on the ticket: she criticized Biden sharply at the first Democratic debate; Biden asked her to run with him; she said yes. As the song says, Let’s work together.

Related reading
“Harris’s Approval Rating Soars After Trump Reminds Nation How ‘Nasty’ She Was to Kavanaugh” (The New Yorker)

Uh-oh

Donald Trump is having what he calls “a General News Conference” at 2:00 p.m. (EDT). I cannot imagine that his advisers have advised that. But the mess his campaign is in? He alone can fix it!

*

1:10 p.m.: He cannot bring himself to say “Kamala Harris.” It’s just “someone else,” “Kamala,” or “she.” Tim Walz is just “a man,” who is “heavy into the transgender world, heavy into lots of different worlds.”

1:17 p.m.: “I think she’s crashing.” (Projection.)

1:26 p.m.: Captain Queeg is at the microphone.

1:34 p.m.: With noticeable sniffs.

1:42 p.m.: “The Minnesota gentleman.” He cannot say the name.

1:45 p.m: In other countries, the government has encouraged people to buy guns, and crime has dropped 29%.

1:46 p.m.: Walz is now “her new friend.”

1:50 p.m.: That’s all, folks. I’m done.

[Fifty splatterings from the Trump Truth Social account as of 10:28 (CDT) this morning. It’s meltdown time.]

I feel sorry for Daniel Dale

Oh, the work of a legit fact-checker. My fact-checking of Mike Pence can be much more casual. No. No. No again. Nope. False, I’m afraid. Uh-uh. No, not that one neither.

*

Kamala Harris was impressive. Though Pence seemed to be using up more time, CNN clocked the candidates as virtually equal. I think Harris was able to turn Pence’s endlessness against him: she waited as he went on and on, then insisted on time to respond, and, in so doing, had the last word in a number of exchanges. I believe that rhetorical strategy is known as rope-a-dope.

Psst, David Brooks

I wasn’t going to make this post. But after reading David Brooks’s baffling appraisal of the speech Joe Biden gave last night, here I am.

David Brooks didn’t like the speech. In The New York Times he writes, “I was hoping for something in the spirit of the Harris campaign — ebullient and joyful.”

I noticed ebullient twice in Brooks’s comments during PBS’s coverage of the DNC last night, each time pronounced /EB-yə-lənt/. As Garner’s Modern English Usage notes, that’s a common mispronunciation.

Has David Brooks latched onto this word for use in talking and writing about Kamala Harris? If so, I hope he gets it right. (Perhaps Jonathan Capehart can clue him in.) I will be listening and watching.

[I left a comment about ebullient on the Times piece. Maybe Brooks will see it.]

“False balance” in the NYT

Margaret Sullivan, a former public editor of The New York Times, writes about “an ugly case of ‘false balance’” in that newspaper. It’s in a story about Kamala Harris’s and Donald Trump’s plans to increase afforable housing:

The story takes seriously Trump’s plan for the mass deportation of immigrants as part of his supposed “affordable housing” agenda.

Here’s some both-sidesing for you, as the paper of record describes Harris’s tax cuts to spur construction and grants to first-time home buyers, and Trump’s deportation scheme....

Stories like this run rampant in the Times, and far beyond. It matters more in the Times because — even in this supposed “post-media era” — the country’s biggest newspaper still sets the tone and wields tremendous influence. And, of course, the Times has tremendous resources, a huge newsroom and the ability to hire the best in the business. Undeniably, it does a lot of excellent work.

But its politics coverage often seems broken and clueless — or even blatantly pro-Trump.

Truncated? No

On NBC Nightly News tonight, Lester Holt spoke of Kamala Harris’s “truncated campaign.” No. Truncated is about the end, not the beginning. If you start late and run the course, your effort has not been truncated.

Merriam-Webster defines truncate: “to shorten by or as if by cutting off.”

The Harris campaign has been a shortened campaign.

Thanks, Elaine, for having your radar on while the news played.

“I accept”

“On behalf of everyone whose story could only be written in the greatest nation on earth, I accept your nomination for President of the United States”: Kamala Harris, a few minutes ago at the DNC.

And: “The future is always worth fighting for.”

And: “We are not going back.”

And: Harris is the only presidential candidate whose acceptance speech has namechecked John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, and Aretha Franklin.

[The Emhoff children, Cole and Ella, are named for Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald.]

A message to Senator Doodyhead

I left a message for David Perdue (R-GA), who was in the news this week. Here’s what I left on the senator’s contact page:

Dear Senator Perdue:

I was appalled by your recent mockery of Kamala Harris's first name. It smacked of junior-high immaturity and cruelty. The racism implicit in your mockery of an unfamiliar name was unmistakable. And yet how unfamiliar to you is Senator Harris's name anyway? You have served with her in the Senate for several years.

As someone whose name so readily lends itself to mockery — David Perdoodoo, David Doody, perhaps even David Doodyhead — you should be aware of how inappropriate such mockery is, especially when one moves beyond junior high.

Be best, &c.

[My name too. My dad and I, across the generations, both endured Ledhead. Or was it Leadhead? I never asked about the spelling.]

Extraterrestrial replaces Anderson Cooper?

[Anderson Cooper? As seen on CNN, October 23, 2024. An unaltered photograph, with my phone close to the TV.]

I passed up watching Kamala Harris’s town hall on Wednesday night, but I watched a few clips yesterday, including one in which Anderson Cooper pressed Harris again and again and again about her changed position on fracking. Yes, she changed her position. How remarkable. Get over yourself, Anderson Cooper.

But wait a minute — is that Anderson Cooper? I know it sounds fantastic (as they say in old movies), but I think he’s been replaced by an extraterrestrial of the sort that once haunted the pages of the Weekly World News. Those ETs, or “space aliens,” could not be reached for comment. But consider the fellow who took Bill Clinton on a ride in a UFO, as reported in the WWN in December 1992. The resemblance to Wednesday night’s “Anderson Cooper” is remarkable.

[I couldn’t make this resemblance into a “separated at birth” post, for an obvious reason.]

About last night

In the lastest installment of Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson offers an astute analysis of last night’s debate:

The question for Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris in tonight’s presidential debate was not how to answer policy questions, but how to counter Trump’s dominance displays while also appealing to the American people.

She and her team figured it out, and today they played the former president brilliantly. He took the bait, and tonight he self-destructed. In a live debate, on national television.

It’s Tim Walz

From The Guardian: “Kamala Harris names Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, as running mate.”

An excellent choice, making a ticket very much like Obama–Biden in affect.

Our household has been having fun reading the BigDadEnergy stuff at Threads.

FORWARD

[Art by Shepard Fairey.]

Anyone who reads Orange Crate Art regularly knows what I think about this year’s election. But I don’t want to look like The Washington Post in not endorsing a candidate. So here’s an official endorsement: the Orange Crate Art editorial board — and owner — urge readers to vote for Kamala Harris for president.

We are not going back.