Last week, I said on Twitter that I wanted Sen. Kamala Harris to be Joe Biden's pick for a running mate because I wanted her out there for the next couple of months prosecuting Donald Trump's administration in the public space. Several responses were along the lines of "No, fuck you, she should be attorney general, dick, so that my favorite Democrat can be VP!"
There are a few reasons I thought Harris-as-AG was a dumb idea. First, no Attorney General has ever gone on to become president. (Robert Kennedy may have, but, well, we'll never know.) And Harris obviously is eyeing the presidency down the road. More importantly, though, is that, as Biden's vice presidential nominee, she will have an incredibly high profile, and in a media environment that too often ignores Democrats and especially Democratic women, she can go out every day and make Donald Trump and Mike Pence cry and it will have to be covered. That will shake some shit up.
I hear every complaint about Harris, and, in another time, it might be enough for me to get upset about it and question Biden's judgment or get angry at the marginalization of the true left of the Democratic Party or whatever, but, sorry, no, fuck that. "Kamala is a cop," you say? Well, she's not and never has been, and I've got a stack of bodies that'll be topping 200,000 that makes me just not give a shit about the questionable aspects of Harris's record as Attorney General of California. Did she ignore a pandemic and cause the economy to crash and refuse to do anything to help while people died, starved, and lost their homes? No? Then who the fuck cares. (And she's been very strong on the environment, violence against women, financial exploitation of the poor, and more, along with being anti-death penalty, so let's just say there's more than enough to mitigate other shit. She's way more progressive than the more-liberal-than-thou gatekeepers say.)
Besides, there are a shit-ton of truly liberal Democratic candidates running at all levels, from school board on up to U.S. Senate. Get behind them and get them elected. That's what will move the whole party to the left. Look at someone like Cameron Webb, running for Congress in Virginia, and who has a chance to pick up a GOP seat. You can use that amazing lefty energy to have a long-term effect on the Democratic Party.
In her speech today at the event where Biden introduced her as his running mate, Harris went right at Trump, laying the failure of this nation to combat the coronavirus right at his wobbly feet. "The case against Mike Pence and Donald Trump is open and shut," she offered before listing the utter failures of this failed group of failures failing us every day, finally coming back to the response to COVID-19. "When other countries are following the science, Trump pushed miracle cures he saw on Fox News." What was doubly awesome about that remark is that the speech was being broadcast on Fox "news," who finally got a small taste of what it's like when Trump screeches, "Fake news!" at CNN.
In perhaps the most cutting moment, Harris said that Trump "inherited the longest economic expansion in history from Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and then, like everything else he inherited, he ran it straight into the ground." That is some hardcore, go-for-the-jugular shit right there. It attacks the entire mythos of Donald Trump as a Successful Businessman when he is a rank loser who couldn't have done a goddamn thing without his daddy's money and still fucked it all up. And she did it with a calm, rational voice, not like the ranting hysterics of the man she's slicing and dicing.
You can tell that Trump is shitting himself over Harris because she is everything that he has feared his entire life: a strong Black woman straight from Central Casting who won't take shit and who will get high ratings every time she kicks him in his voluminous ass. He's gotta desperately play all the tropes, from the racist "angry" Black person to the woman who is "nasty" and "mean," which means not subservient to men like Trump. Shit, they're even rebooting the Willie Horton ads from 1988. What the hell else is he gonna do but break out the hits like this is still the 1980s and the suburbs are still a generic white paradise and aren't filled with middle-class people of all races who support things like Black Lives Matter and think Trump is an obscenity?
The Trump campaign is caught on Harris between trying to rile up the left with the aforementioned issues and calling her a "radical" who "has abandoned her own morals in an attempt to appease the socialist mob seeking to destroy America. Biden and Harris' disastrous proposals of defunding the police, increased taxes, job-killing policies, and opening our borders are just a few of the many ways they would destroy America." All you can say to Trump is "Motherfucker, you already destroyed America. You burned this shit down. Why would we re-elect you so you can piss on the ashes?"
Today, Biden and Harris offered more sympathy for families and loved ones of the Americans who have died of coronavirus than Trump has offered since the pandemic hit this country. They offered more hope in the form of realistically looking at the crises that Trump has created than in all the bullshit, pointless, delusional happy talk from the president and his administration. And Harris and Biden and their staffs look more like America than the KKK meeting that shows up at every Trump event.
Harris can prosecute the case against Trump and Pence starting now, and that's perfect. She can hurt them over and over. She can do it with confidence and charisma and cold, hard facts. We need that. We need them wounded again and again. We need Americans to feel ashamed to vote for these GOP dickscabs. That's why we need Harris now, not later as attorney general. When she's elected, Harris can lead a commission that exposes all their crimes. In fact, having her as vice president would help assure that Biden doesn't let it all slide just to move forward, as he and Obama did with the Bush administration's crimes. Harris the prosecutor knows that you can't let that shit go unpunished.
Yeah, the choice of Harris was entirely expected and not remotely surprising, and, goddamn, it felt good to have something go the way it's supposed to go. That can be really fucking energizing and get you ready for what's next. It makes you feel like "Yeah, maybe we can do this."
