Full disclosure, I don’t really care that a former President paid a porn star for sex. I don’t care that his wife had just given birth to their son at the time. I don’t even care that he stole classified documents and refused to return them, that he shared US nuclear secrets with random visitors to his golf course. It’s more concerning that he attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election because he lost and has never figured out how to accept his many, many, many personal defeats. Sure, all of these things are concerning, but let’s be honest, the guy is a lifelong con artist and these things are all par for the course.
Does that mean I’m voting for the guy in November? Absolutely not. You could remove Walt Disney’s brain from cryogenic freeze, put it in a bottle and run that bottle for president against the con artist and I would very happily vote for the pickled brain. The root of my discontent with the Republican Party’s candidate is not all the crazy things he’s done, but rather the way the legal system has bent over backwards to prevent him suffering the majority of the consequences and the additional fact that this lifelong criminal is the one they chose to run for the most important job in the world.
Actually, one thing bothers me even more. It’s one thing for a misguided political party to run a critically flawed candidate who will almost certainly take a wrecking ball to The US Constitution (see: Project 2025), but it’s much more troubling that there are millions of Americans who can’t wait for their chance to vote for the guy. It reminds me of an old Star Wars quote: “So this is how Democracy dies; with thunderous applause.”
Fortunately, we have a better, rational option.
I don’t know how much there is to the media frenzy surrounding President Joe Biden’s age and its role in his decision to pass the torch to VP Kamala Harris. I’ve seen many examples of “news” outlets creating stories and repeating them until they become reality and that may well be what happened here. The media has insisted on dwelling on Biden’s age instead of focusing on his accomplishments. Whether it has been fighting for women’s rights, working to curb America’s gun violence addiction, passing bi-partisan legislation to begin working on America’s failing infrastructure or pushing us toward a more sustainable energy future, Biden’s administration has had many unqualified successes (for more examples, click here!).
The American people don’t really have a way to gauge Biden’s mental acuity because investigative journalism is mostly dead. Everything is click bait now, and misleading headlines and rumor-driven “reporting” make it hard to know the reality of many situations. We only have ourselves to blame. We aren’t willing to pay for news any more, so news outlets can’t pay experienced, knowledgeable journalists. Instead we get glorified bloggers and so-called influencers who make a bunch of noise and often detract from the national conversation. Our willingness to click on this garbage and lend it credence has perpetuated and magnified the problem.
Regardless of how we got here, here we are, and with Biden stepping down the fight against fascism has a new champion. Harris stepped into the spotlight in Milwaukee and delivered her first public remarks since getting the nod from President Biden and she did not disappoint. One of the most quoted and notable sections was where she, a former prosecutor, talked about taking on a Republican candidate who has been the subject of many prosecutions of late.
“In this campaign, I promise you I will proudly put my record against (Donald Trump’s) any day of the week,” said Harris. “As attorney general of California, I took on one of our country’s largest for-profit colleges that was scamming students. Donald Trump ran a for-profit college that scammed students. As a prosecutor, I specialized in cases involving sexual abuse. Well, Trump was found liable for committing sexual abuse. As attorney general of California, I took on the big Wall Street banks and held them accountable for fraud. (Applause.) Donald Trump was just found guilty of fraud on 34 counts.”
Whether the collective news media (and especially the right-wing crazies) in this country actually intended to force President Biden out of the race is open for debate, but the result is the same, nonetheless. Republicans may have officially bitten off more than they can chew here. Biden is an old school gentleman who pulls his punches and generally has a reserved approach. He also had to overcome a severe speech impediment that made him, at times, hard to understand. His performance at the recent debate between himself and Donald Trump was discouraging, to say the least. One one side you had a man lying so much that fact-checking was a daunting challenge. On the other, you had a man who appeared to adle-brained to speak in complete sentences. Biden redeemed himself a few days later in an address at the UN, but the damage was already done.
What we have now is a whole new campaign. Kamala Harris is a young, powerful and outspoken candidate who appears poised to rise from Joe Biden’s proverbial ashes like a Phoenix emerging from its own transformative pyre. She has spent the last four years essentially interning under the single most experienced public servant in American history. Now, like those Olympic torch bearers headed for Paris, she looks poised to ignite a new fire of progressive action in this country. Better yet, she may have the power to unite the factions of the Democratic base to stand up to the lunacy of the modern Republican dumpster fire.
She will excite women, she will excite people of color, and perhaps most important, she has a decent shot at getting young people to actually show up at the polls. Beyoncé has granted permission for Harris to use her song “Freedom” on the campaign trail and it looks like the unofficial Harris anthem might be Chappell Roan’s “Femininomenon,” which my 13-year-old daughter has been playing non-stop since the Harris announcement was made.
This is what’s been missing from the 2024 Presidential race. Until now we’ve seen two old men with apparent mental difficulties, one with difficulty articulating, one with difficulty discerning fact from fiction. Kamala Harris changes all of that. Now we have someone who looks like and speaks to many of the disenfranchised parts of the electorate and actually cares about leading in a way that benefits a broad majority of Americans. She’s running against a glorified cult leader who looks to stoke anger and resentment among his devoted followers. They aren’t enough to elect him President, and with Harris potentially unifying the rest of the country against him perhaps we can put this immoral minority back under the rocks from which they emerged.
-B
Ishmael's Legacy 