Five days and counting

yet there are 100 to go

As we have discussed occasionally, I am not a big fan of certainty in predictions. I admit, I probably do it more than I even realize but fear it does not hold up when systematic exploration. Perhaps it is that I know I make mistakes so I know others do as well. But, it is also definitely that political conditions change: people abandon their political parties for the other side, car accidents occur, Krakatoa erupts again to set off eighteen months of ash destroying crops which creates nation-wide emergencies, or the Commanders win the Super Bowl. Any or all of these things disrupt what are too frequently neat little story lines.

Britain handles that by betting on the topic. I am sure some bookie in Cardiff, Hammersmith or Salline takes bets on the date Prince George, second in line to the throne, becomes an uncle because British bookies take bets on everything. Not only is this a lucrative but it also opens the door to Britons being interested in a wider array of questions because it gives more betting options, or (more relevantly for today’s topic) public policies and personalities. I suspect people made lots of money on betting that the Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton, a.k.a. David Cameron, would return last November as Foreign Secretary seven years after misjudging the Brexit referendum. I sure did not see anyone bringing him back to any political position but it happened.

Americans are getting into betting but we remain frequently gobsmacked by turns in our world. Online voices keep discussing shock that support for Vice President Kamala Harris consolidated so rapidly following President (yes, he is still president, isn’t he?) Biden’s announcement early Sunday afternoon that he was withdrawing from the race.

Are people really surprised by this? The polling over the past several months indicated Biden’s support was weakening, especially among two key constituencies from the 2020 campaign: the young and African Americans.

Young voters began voicing their discomfort with Biden’s age as soon as he took the oath of office in 2021. Many young voters embraced Bernie Sanders as their candidate in 2016 and again four years later but voted for Joe from Scranton and his African/Indian American female vice president to reject the (also) old, Anglo-Saxon Trump-Pence ticket.

My read from the beginning was that these twenty-ish and early thirty-ish voices viewed Biden solely as a transition to new faces and new infusions of energy on the horizon. They were exceptionally skeptical that Joe needed to stay until his 86th birthday, no matter how he wowwed the NATO meeting or can discuss policies fluently with reporters. When he failed to display much facility but did show age, slowness, shock at Trump’s gibberish during the debate, that was the final straw for too many.

The war in Gaza also provoked youth disapproval because many believed Biden was facilitating Netanyahu’s war against Palestinian civilians unjustly caught in the conflict. Protests against Israel’s actions manifested on college campuses were messages not merely to the Israeli Prime Minister and his cabinet but for the Biden as well. Many people compared the outbursts to the Vietnam era unrest but this time our government neither had the power to stop the Israelis nor completely shut down arms used to prosecute the war. That wasn’t the vision these kids thought appropriate for U.S. power.

Biden, who showed reluctance to embrace Netanyahu’s sprawling aspirations, became caught between a commitment to Israel and the sizable portion of his own party demanding the oppose position; he was not going to win that particular fight regardless of the position he chose. Further, his diplomacy, an instrument of statecraft premised on gradual, methodical discussions rather than brash policy steps, reinforced growing perceptions that he was too old, too out of touch, too too for the job in the eyes of millions in his own party. Biden desperately needed those voters to support his campaign with enthusiasm, a fading premise before last weekend.

African Americans saw Biden as having failed in some promises as voting rights eroded and the Supreme Court appeared an entity determined to support discrimination of a bygone era. The never-ending polling over the last year showed erosion of support for the President creeping up steadily, despite his support from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffreys and South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn. Biden vowed he could turn things around but he was simply not generating much enthusiasm among this vital constituency.

As I discussed on 10 July, these were immutable for too many people.

Yet, we stand less just past five days after he announced he would abandon the race with a candidate generating giddy excitement as she raises huge amounts of money and appears to push her opponents back on their heels merely eight days after they celebrated their anticipated “inevitable” victory at their Milwaukee Republican National Convention.

Why was Harris become such a phenomenon as her party’s nominee? Was it a coup? No, it was because she had the attributes as a person that so many voters in the United States sought in a presidential candidate.

My reflections today—and they are that rather than endorsements—result from a book club I attended night before last along with reading about the responses Harris is receiving.

At this point, it really is about who she embodies as a person rather than her politics.

She is 59, fully 19 years younger than the “junior” old guy candidate.

She is the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants. Born in California, Kamala Harris was a student desegregating a school in Berkeley when bussed from her neighborhood. She spent several years in Montreal, and attended a Historic Black institution, Howard University, before matriculating at the Hasting School of Law (now University of California, Hastings School of Law).

She and her Jewish American husband have co-parented his children from a prior marriage with his former wife, loved by the kids who they kids long ago began referring to as “Mamala”.

She is a career woman with a robust laugh, unforced but broad smile, and a sense of sincere appeal as she engages with others.

She certainly has a career as well, replete with elected experience, as a District Attorney, then as Attorney General of the most populous state, before she won a Senate race resonated particularly with women who see themselves as having experienced some of Harris’s life in their own. She is not a corporate lawyer who clerked for a Supreme Court Justice, instead a woman who acknowledged she was half-a##ed in her first (unsuccessful) attempt to pass the California Bar Exam.

It was always an imperfect match for most people but Kamala Harris appeals to millions of Americans because of what she is not: the stereotypical European white male moving up the wrungs of a ladder to a seat held for him because of his background, gender or race. Whatever she is, Harris’s background is more different than any candidate, when she is nominated formally, for the presidency ever.

That difference between Harris and other candidates is igniting a fire under millions of Americans, particularly women and African Americans proud of her ability to see someone more like them as part of the elite of the process.

Harris’s rise manifests the pent up demand in the country, especially the Democratic Party, for candidates who more closely obviously mirror the changing face of this country. No, I don’t think there are millions of Tamil-Jamaican female attorneys from Oakland waiting to vote for her but there are scads of Indian Americans excited she is on the ticket. There are millions of African American women who might have known Shirley Chisholm launched a campaign for the presidency against Nixon in 1972 but probably no more than the any other people unfamiliar with the late Congresswoman. There are women who have waited their entire voting lives to support someone who excited them. Hillary Clinton did represent that new leader for some but polarized so many others.

Harris, like her opponent FPOTUS Trump, will have 100 days to go beyond the ephemeral to offer policy options. Harris can riff off of the Biden Harris four years in office while Trump can discuss his term as well. I suspect, however, that the immutables, the characteristics, the attributes, and the age issue alone will have already made a tremendous difference well before either candidate discusses policy. Their differences are so stark that they are unavoidably clear.

In theory, I suppose we prefer that voters choose a candidate based on her/his record or policy package. I am not sure we have seen that in my lifetime, however, as we tend to need to like our politicians. With our current national configuration, that makes this a most fascinating campaign.

It was a watercolor sunrise along the Creek today.

Thank you for reading Actions today or any other day. Please feel free to circulate it if you find it of value. I appreciate you signing up and especially those of you who make a financial commitment as subscribers. I don’t have all the answers but hope to raise questions you had not considered. Actions do create consequences, even it it’s merely comparing people’s faces.

Be well and be safe. FIN

William Brangham, “A look at Kamala Harris’ legal career and political record”, PBSNewshour.org, 22 July 2024, retrieved at https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-look-at-kamala-harris-legal-career-and-political-record

Alexandra Marquez and Minyvonne Burke and Monica Alba and Peter Alexander, “Kamala Harris’ stepdaugher responds to ‘childless’ attack from JD Vance: ‘I love my three parents’”, nbcnews.com, 25 July 2024, retrieved at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/kamala-harris-stepdaughter-responds-to-childless-attack-from-jd-vance-i-love-my-three-parents/ar-BB1qCWkn

Michael Williams, Kevin Liptak, and Arlette Saenz, “Biden makes fresh appeals to Black voters, Hoping they can return him to the White House”, cnn.com, 17 May 2024, retrieved at https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/17/politics/biden-black-voters/index.html