Kamala Harris
Kamala Devi Harris (born October 20, 1964) is the Vice President of the United States. Previously, she was the junior U.S. Senator from California. She is in the Democratic Party but, unlike Joe Biden, has never claimed "I am the Democratic Party."
In the 2020 Presidential campaign, where the combined ages of Biden, Donald Trump, and Mike Pence exceeded a thousand years, Harris was uniquely "youthful". She is surely less likely to nod off during, say, an enemy nuclear attack than any of the grand-dads. Harris is now just a heartbeat away from the top job, and it is no coincidence that the Biden campaign enlisted a large squadron of food tasters to start work on January 21, 2021.
Negritude
First things first: Harris is, to use the currently acceptable vernacular, as black as the ace of spades, or as black as it would be if it were the color of a Milk Dud. She is a woman, to boot, and thus a "woman of color". She has virtually all the boxes checked, except that she does not cross-dress, is in an apparently stable heterosexual marriage, and even states on Twitter that her Preferred Pronouns are "she" and "her" (though, in debates, they are "me" and "mine"). But the Democratic Party has overlooked all that.
Joe Biden took hell from the feminists during the Democratic primary campaign, and countered by promising to nominate a woman as his running mate. Later, when black people demonstrated, Biden painted himself into a smaller corner by promising to nominate a "woman of color", a promise that limited the candidates to five. (Chiropractors were also dissatisfied with Biden's nomination, but fortunately they did not conduct public protests, or Biden might have left the two-spot entirely vacant.)
Harris's dark skin is a product of her father (from Jamaica) and mother (from India). Consequently, despite having no heritage in Africa, she is sure to have instant appeal to African Americans, who will view her as a respite from white folks in Washington, who are racist (all of them). In fact, Harris's closest encounter with African Americans during her tenure as a California prosecutor was jailing them, if their kids skipped school or if they smoked marijuana. She does have a nexus to Negro slavery, but only that her family on her father's side used to own some. Nevertheless, the old saw tells us that no one lost an election by overestimating voter intelligence, a metric on which African Americans are continually striving for equality.
Kamala Chameleon
Harris's career as a district attorney took off when she began "working under" Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. High-profile appointments to the Unemployment Appeals Board and Medical Assistance Corporation followed the no-profile appointments with Brown.
In 2002, Harris was elected D.A. of San Francisco, and in 2010 California Attorney General. She pursued these law-and-order offices with the same zeal that her eventual running mate, Joe Biden, brought to his signature Crime Bill that cracked down on crack cocaine. No one knew that by 2020 fashions would have changed so drastically the base would expect every candidate to promise to dismantle police departments, smile and nod at looters and rioters, and refuse to utter the words "law and order" during a debate.
U.S. Senator
In 2016, Harris was elected to the U.S. Senate. She compiled a voting record resembling that of Bernie Sanders, though Sanders, to continue to be invited to parties back home in Vermont and the subsequent games of Meat Bingo, has to accommodate gun rights. This leaves Harris as the most extreme-left member of the Senate, and an odd running mate for career centrist Joe Biden.
Harris sat on the Judiciary Committee, which reports on Presidential nominations for judgeships. Harris rose to national prominence during the hearings on Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court. The hearings were extended when it came out that a teenage Kavanaugh spiked punch bowls and organized a series of gang-rapes at parties, according to a woman who was victimized on each of the dozen occasions she returned to the venue, despite being several years older than, and living in a different city from, Kavanaugh. Management of this case fell to Harris — Cory Booker unavailable after his "Spartacus moment" — and she prosecuted it successfully, if what one wants is for her party to reduce its 49–51 Senate minority to 47–53.
Harris got an encore during the 2020 campaign, as Trump stubbornly insisted on exercising near-lame-duck power to fill a Supreme Court vacancy with Amy Coney Barrett. Harris promised that Barrett's Catholicism would not be at issue, only her Catholic bias. Judiciary had given Barrett hell in 2017, but Harris reprised the case against her — actually, the Kavanaugh case, asking her in front of her kids whether she was a perv. It went so well that committee Democrats held a victory party, while committee Republicans held the vote.
Campaign for President
Hillary Clinton's defeat in 2016, and especially her three-year tour to sell her autobiography, I Lost and It's Your Fault, prompted a majority of Democratic National Committee members to visit her and remind her she had sworn she would never run again. The 2020 nomination seemed wide open, even wider than the 2016 Republican race that foisted Trump on a baffled nation. With it evident that "anyone can win", Harris joined a 25-person pool of office-holders, billionaires, self-styled comedians, and accomplished homosexuals to seek the Presidency.
The high point in this campaign was Harris's admission to the prime-time presidential debate (rather than relegation to the second-tier debate broadcast after everyone's bedtime). Bafflingly, Harris spent less time touting her own capabilities than trying to take out the candidate then in the lead — none other than Joe Biden, whom Harris called a segregationist and a perv. She landed lethal blows, until the Democratic Party contrived to induce all the other candidates to inexplicably drop out just before a major state election date.
But the lethal blows took their toll on Harris, too, on the overrated scale of likeability. Harris was polling only seven percent in her home state of California, and spending most of her time insisting that what she had said the day before was not to be taken so literally, when she realized there was a higher calling; namely, do anything other than continue to burn cash and credibility.
Selection for Vice President
Parties must select their nominee relatively early in the election year (especially if not "democratic"), and early in 2020, America was simply humming along. (Then, see Coronavirus.) Speculation is that Biden, resting on his laurels in his Wilmington, Delaware basement except for daily ordeals fighting off Canada geese during the trip to the mailbox, was chosen because of his expendability. The inevitable loss would not harm the Democratic strategy nor himself as a future Party asset.
Likewise, many viewed Harris as a low-risk candidate for Vice President, as her term in the Senate lasted through 2022, time enough to do whatever she was going to do anyway, and to survive the additional things she would have to do on behalf of the Biden/Harris ticket.
Little did anyone know that the 2020 election would not so much be about the Democratic Party's platform or candidates, as about Donald Trump — with the active encouragement of Trump — which was the worst thing that could happen to Trump. Democrats wound up wondering: Whom could we have nominated, if we had thought we could win?
During the campaign, Biden reintroduced Americans to sudden-onset dementia most starkly since Ronald Reagan's second term. Trump's rambling, exaggeration, and repetition were outdone by total Biden brain-freezes. A corps of paramedics traveled with Biden, always ready to apply an emergency teleprompter. Both Biden and Harris started making Freudian slips such as referring to "the Harris Administration featuring Joe Biden" though it was too late to redesign the lawn signs.
Harris was unable to distract from these slips. She was the second major Democrat to profess a love for rap music (after John Kerry) but the only rapper she was able to name was Notorious R.B.G. She did finally prove she was an ardent fan of Tupac Shakur, though not at any time he was both alive and rapping.
Eligibility to serve
The U.S. Constitution requires that the President be a "natural born citizen" — whereas Harris's parents were overstaying their visas when they dropped her. Such "anchor babies" are a lock for welfare and continual residency for relatives; the Democrats call them "Dreamers" and lavish them with promises — but not the Presidency, not usually.
Fortunately, the Constitution is not supposed to mean what it says. This has already been established in the cases of:
- John McCain, naturally born in Panamá, where his father was stationed;
- Ted Cruz, who had a Yankee mother though she was comfortably hanging out in Canada;
- Barack Obama, who assured the publisher of his autobiography he was born in Kenya;
- Trump, who believed that, and thus must have been born on the Moon.
Prospects
Harris's dark skin may have made the difference in 2020, considering Hillary had had no such back-story in her 2016 campaign; her only "race" had been to delete documents and smash phones. Harris was endorsed by influential Democrats such as Obama, Whoopi Goldberg, and Jesse Jackson.
Harris's possible role in reducing Democratic influence in the Senate is long forgotten, as Trump outdid her after his own 2020 loss — and the Georgia encore, which saw the Democrats grow to 50–50 in the Senate — ironically, giving Harris the Constitutional power to break all its ties (except the ugly one Mitch McConnell wears).
Harris will lead America into either a new Utopia or Hell, depending on whether you listen to Mika Brzezinski or Rush Limbaugh. She could be up for what Biden's spokeswoman calls a "noble" peace prize, given that Obama's Nobel in 2009 set the precedent that you could win merely for what you might achieve.
Kamala Movin' on up?
In July 2024 Joe tottered away from the presidential race against Donald Trump. Does Kamala has the momentum to win? Obama says "Yes She can". Yes, indeed, but only if YOU back her, singing all day long her campaign song: Walzing Kamala. It's YOU American votes who can make her Madame President!
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