#all while claiming to hold up a higher standard. there is hypocrisy in every religious community and they are not excluded

[politicaltheatre]

Inevitability

She was inevitable.

That's how a vice-presidential pick is supposed to feel, right? Like an apple finally falling from a tree.

Kamala Harris ticks off all the right boxes. She is a United States Senator, representing California. She was a presidential candidate, one of the few to damage the seeming inevitability of Joe Biden, the former vice president who has anointed her. She is black, in a country that very badly needs to see a minority back in the White House. And she is a woman, in country that has never yet elected one in a century of full women's suffrage.

We want the inevitable choice. It confirms our hopes that the top of the ticket is worthy of our vote. We also crave certainty, and like a sports team drafting to fill a position of need, choosing the right running mate seems like it should be a no-brainer. Right?

Hillary Clinton's choice, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, left a lot of American's scratching their heads. He might be smart and he might be genuinely nice, but his blandness extends to the horizon and beyond.

His counterpart, Mike Pence, is, if possible, even more bland, with the added problems of deep religious, moral, and ethical hypocrisy, fear mongering, race baiting, homophobia, and a particularly puritan brand of sexism, not one of which makes him even a little more interesting.

And yet, despite those flaws, how many times in the past four years have Americans and others around the world, in moments of quiet and not so quiet desperation, dreamed that some “act of God” wood deliver that same Mr. Vice President to the Oval Office? The idea of a President Michael Pence should scare the hell out of us, and not just because Donald Trump is one golf course coronary away from putting him there.

Pence was chosen, as so many of his predecessors were, not for his ability to step up and lead but because he had exactly two qualifications: he gave the top of the ticket credibility with a vocal minority within the party, and he lacks the kind of juice that would have put him top of the ticket in the first place.

At best, we like to think of a vice president as a kind of spare tire. You buy one to suit your short term needs and hope that you just never have to use it. That's how most have been viewed, and, if we're being honest, rightly so.

The only time we noticed them in the past was when they screwed up (Spiro Agnew, Dan Quayle), exposed the president as a weak placeholder (Dick Cheney), or, too often, when the president died.

Who among the latter rose to the occasion? Teddy Roosevelt surpassed his predecessor. Lyndon Johnson gave us "The Great Society", which included the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Harry Truman far exceeded expectations, integrating the armed forces and steering the United States out of the Second World War.

Of course, Roosevelt established the colonial system in the Caribbean and the Pacific that continues to this day. Johnson oversaw the expansion of the Vietnam War and the lying about it that, when exposed, destroyed any sense of trust in the American government on foreign policy and military action (or should have).

And Truman, he ended that war by dropping two atomic bombs, the only time in history (to date) that nuclear weapons have been used on humans and those humans were hundreds of thousands of unarmed, defenseless Japanese civilians.

Yes, those were the impressive ones. The others were worse. John Tyler, a virulent racist, later served in the Confederacy as a senator. Andrew Johnson was the first president impeached, and rightfully so. And Calvin Coolidge, so often overlooked, oversaw the complete lack of government oversight that led to the Great Depression.

Millard Fillmore and Chester Alan Arthur were, mercifully, forgettable, as a vice-president should be but perhaps not as a president should.

Harris, if elected, may well turn out to be better than all of them.

Then again, she really does have a dubious history as a city and state prosecutor to live down. At the very least, she needs to satisfy those protesting right now against police brutality how she stands with them and against her former self. Well, one of her former selves.

Her economic policy, like that of Biden, can best be described as Obama-like, which is to say that she won't ever make the kind of changes we would have had with a Bernie Sanders or an Elizabeth Warren in the White House, and which we so very badly need.

On health care, she won't damage the system Obama put in place, but neither would she make the changes necessary to help the majority of Americans get what they're overpaying for.

On foreign policy, she's a novice, but she won't go around kissing autocrat's asses like the two men in the White House now. But will she stand up to those autocrats? How? How, for that matter, will Biden, now that Trump and Pence have done so much damage to American alliances and credibility?

If they win, and that's a big if given the lengths Trump and his minions have been going to to undermine the ability of Americans to vote, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will first need to make sure Trump leaves.

They will then need to make sure Trump's supporters don't burn the country down, the way they've been trying to do to the non-violent Black Lives Matter protests.

And then they'll get to the fun part, undoing the damage it somehow only took Trump and his Republican allies four years to do.

That will mean undoing every deliberately hateful, constitution-challenging executive order.

That will mean undoing all of the Republican-led legislation - tax cuts for the very, very rich, deregulation of chemical plants, etc. - through what will hopefully be a Democratic-led Congress.

That will mean finding a way to end the still-ongoing pandemic and the economic collapse it triggered, and to do so before another Great Depression sets in.

That will mean that Kamala Harris will have to be better than any of her predecessors, far better, and not because Joe Biden is really, really, really old but because we basically need two presidents to get done what needs to get done in the shortest possible amount of time.

Not, it should be said, in a Dick Cheney-is-really-president sort of way. Not that, not ever again, please.

The worst thing we can do at this point is talk about inevitability. Hillary Clinton was supposed to be inevitable, and she bought into it so badly she blew the entire election and put us in this mess.

Is it fair to lay that blame at her feet? When she comes to claim any of it, even just the tiniest part, do let us know. She was attacked, unfairly, because she is a woman, as Harris already has unfairly been attacked, but Clinton’s unwillingness to hold herself accountable was and remains her Achilles Heel, and Americans who voted against her did so very much for that reason.

This is why Harris needs to reconcile with her past and the decisions that she made as a prosecutor and as Attorney General of California. It isn’t fair to ask her to hold herself to a higher standard of accountability than, say, Joe Biden, but she is a woman and a minority in a country that clearly still has problems with both, and she, unlike Biden, didn’t win any primaries.

That Kamala Harris feels like the right choice for Joe Biden is good, for Joe Biden. It means that he aced his first decision. He drafted well. The confidence that springs from that could the momentum he needs to win, and the United States needs any Democrat in the White House right now.

Any Democrat.

A Biden/Harris ticket sounds good, maybe even good enough to succeed where Clinton/Kaine failed. And should that inevitability happen, that another president passes away while in office, we should take some comfort that Biden didn’t choose an absolute idiot.

Now comes the hard part, making sure that this least-like-any-other of election years functions like a normal one.

Even before the pandemic, Trump and his Republican allies in Congress were pushing to defund the Postal Service. The actions Trump and his Postmaster General have taken since the pandemic hit threaten mail-in voting for tens of millions of Americans, potentially disenfranchising even more Americans than the usual gutting of the voter rolls.

However it started, today’s Republican Party has become one of winner-take-all, ends-justify-the-means politics. On the national level, at the very least, they believe that it is isn’t cheating if you don’t have to go to jail for it. Those voting for them know this. Those voting for them like it.

That, not merely encouraging people to want to vote and certainly not pontificating on the best of all possible futures, is what Biden and Harris and their surrogates need to focus on and focus our attention on.

The better teams on paper don’t always win. Sometimes, they lose badly. If we can't vote, we lose. We all lose. Right now, the only thing that feels inevitable about this election be might just that.

- Daniel Ward

#kamala harris #joe biden #biden/harris 2020 #2020 presidential election #politics #vice presidents #hillary clinton #tim kaine #mike pence #donald trump #long read #long reads #voting #vote #voting rights #voting rights act