‘Nasty’ thoughts on Biden’s right choice
Donald Trump has often shown disrespect for women, so he did not shock anyone with what he said about U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, who was announced Tuesday as the Democratic Party running mate for Joe Biden.
Trump dipped into his bag of mean-spirited words and pulled out one of his most popular. He called Harris “nasty.”
He used the word on U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Meghan Markle; he used it on presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016. He has relied on other disparaging words to defile somebody whose politics (and gender) he dislikes.
For Harris, Trump insists she’s a “radical” leftist.
In a tweet – but where else? – he called “Phony Kamala” wrong for America.
On that point, Trump got it wrong. Despite early misgivings some progressives and liberals might have had, Harris is right for America. She is everything a second lieutenant should be – and more.
She will be a political partner to Biden, not a lapdog like the feckless Mike Pence is to Trump.
What Harris also brings to the ticket is fire, a passion not found in the low-key, staid Biden.
He won’t kick the political tires hard; Harris will. She will, if she must, overturn the damn car. She will pick a fight, ditching political protocol, when doing so serves the larger good.
Of course, everybody on Biden’s list of potential running mates had strengths and weaknesses. People like Trump can look at that as perhaps why Biden took so long, after perusing information his team of vetters gave him, to anoint Harris as the chosen one.
The choice of a running mate is behind Biden, which is why Trump and his GOP supporters began straightaway to aim their campaign cannons at Harris, the first Black woman to serve on a mainstream presidential ticket.
Harris, a former California attorney general, will have to defend her record on policing the police, a hot-button topic among Democratic critics of hers. But as her supporters have pointed out, Harris has evolved in her approach to fighting crime and in exacting punishment.
Yet no one looks at crime as a campaign priority. Not in 2020. The issues today are the coronavirus and the economy – stupid!
Home foreclosures will skyrocket soon, even if the economy takes off immediately. The more immediate concern are evictions; so are, of course, the ongoing struggles with stamping out the novel coronavirus.
Taxes, too, will be at point of contention in November, but they always are whenever Republicans go into a presidential election.
For the GOP, it has a problem: Trump’s horrific record as a despotic president. And the Democrats needed somebody on Biden’s ticket who was unafraid to deconstruct that record.
Harris fit that role.
No neophyte at high-stakes, contentious politics, Harris proved that point true during her campaigns for various political offices she ran for (and won) in California. She’s a robust debater – tough but polished; seasoned but not sullied.
She complements Biden.
Some political commentators have argued that’s also what worries Trump, who has as listless a running mate as any Republican since Ronald Reagan had Dan Quayle on his ticket.
From where Democrats sit today, they will take a person Trump calls the “meanest, most horrible, most disrespectful of anybody in the U.S. Senate” over him or Pence.