Category: Politics

Kamala Part II

This week, Kamala Harris will accept the nomination as Vice Presidential running mate for Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee.

I was unsurprised to learn that Kamala Harris had been picked as Joe Biden’s running mate. She’s exactly the right kind of corporatist puppet to pair him with.

I can find no moral center in her history or in the behavior I’ve observed from her, other than that of establishment hack and hardline enforcer of the status quo. She will say whatever it takes to gain personal advantage, reverse any policy position, change any alliance as long as her bread continues to be buttered. Back in early 2019, she signed on as a cosponsor of Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All bill.

In the very first Democratic debate, she raised her hand when the debate participants were asked if they would give up their private insurance and replace it with Mecicare for All (a provision of the bill she sponsored.) By the next morning, she was already walking back her support for M4A, claiming she had raised her hand because she had misheard the question, and that she only supported Medicare for All if it was supplemented by private insurance.

This is Kamala Harris. This is what she does — stand for nothing, shape change to fit her sense of the prevailing winds, cowtow to the monied powers. As of this moment, it’s working for her. While the country is in the throes of buckling to the will of a creeping autocrat, the Democrats, as represented by Kamala Harris and her running mate Joe Biden, are shifting to the right, and more than this, they are working as hard as they can to disenfranchise the left wing of their own supposedly-left-wing party, standing on policy that would have been considered mainstream Republicanism not so long ago.

At this point, it seems likely that she will be the next Vice President of the US. I can’t tell you that I’m thrilled at the prospect. People will respond to this by saying “yeah, but, she’s better than her opponent.” That’s probably true, but I can’t say that I am moved by that recommendation. The Biden/Harris ticket may slow the roll of creeping fascism, but they will not stop it entirely. In my view, they are instruments of the continued advancement of corporate globalism and no antitdote to authoritarianism.

Kamala Harris will not save you.

[ND]

Kamala

Kamala

There was a time, from about a month before until just after the first debate, when I thought Kamala was a contender. I sure don’t think she is one now.

Tulsi clobbered her at the second debate, it’s true. But that wouldn’t have stopped her if she wasn’t patently phony. Consider her record as Attorney General of California, which is what Tulsi attacked her about. Consider also that she has only been in Washington during the Trump administration, which means she’s only been on the national scene since Rachel Maddow became the Glenn Beck of the center-left. Kamala’s context is, by definition, skewed.

That weird gambit she threw out there at the fourth (and most recent at the time of this writing) debate, when she tried to get Elizabeth Warren to stand with her in her campaign to get Donald Trump kicked off of Twitter was so painful, and perfectly emblematic of what’s wrong with the Democrat’s establishment wing.

She’s just shut down her operations in New Hampshire. I wish I could say that’s surprising, but it isn’t.

In my opinion, Kamala is just a failed poster child of a failed dream: that of the centrist Democrat. What is it with the Democratic party? Why do they think being obviously in the service of the oligarchs works for them? They weren’t always like this. Our only hope as a country is if they stop being corrupt.

Let’s hope they figure that out sooner rather than later.

More Tulsi Thoughts

Tulsi is about service.

Tulsi-Gibbard_tpp_2016_ap_img

I started out this cycle liking her more than Bernie Sanders, but over the last couple of months, I’ve gotten more disenchanted with her. She has some right-wing opinions, but in the main she is progressive, and she doesn’t take corporate money.

I trust her. She is something that many of the people running for president right now aren’t. She’s principled. I can imagine very few of her opponents in the current primary dropping out of the race for two weeks for National Guard duty, but she did, for the whole two weeks right before the third debate. Would Kamala Harris do that? Would Cory Booker? I have my doubts that even Mayo Pete would do it.

Though she missed the third debate (largely because she was unable to campaign) she found her way back onto the stage for the fourth debate, even though the DNC hates, hates, hates her*. While I don’t think she had the best night (it was the weakest of her three debate performances so far, in my opinion) she was still the #1 google search the night of the debate, as she has been for each debate she’s appeared in.

She may have been weak on that debate stage because she considered boycotting it. Her numbers went up in the weeks after that third debate she missed, so it seems less crucial for her to be on that stage. With the Russian bot accusation, her numbers are going up again in Iowa. She got the Hillary Hates Her bump!

Because the DNC has been so rotten to her, and because she can’t turn away from a fight, she’s been turning up on right wing media, such as the Tucker Carlson show on Fox. Because of that, she’s doing something virtually no other Democrat has managed in a long time: she’s building a profile among conservatives and independants. Because the DNC has forced her to be an outsider, she has embraced the role and is building strength in what conventional wisdom (read: the DNC) would tell us is an impossible demographic.

Considering that she’s never going to be popular with centrist Democrats, I do wonder how she plans to win enough support to prevail in the Democratic primary, but I speculate that this may not be a reason to step out of the race. She could conceivably be a strong running mate for the most progressive-left candidate in the primary, should that candidate survive. Winning influence among conservative and independent voters might make her a strong addition to a Bernie Sanders ticket.

*Another reason I like her!

Tulsi Gabbard is a Fighter: She Could Be Just What This Country Needs Right Now

Tulsi Gabbard found out yesterday that she will not be included in the third Democratic Presidential Debate, having met the fundraising requirement to be included — at least 130,000 unique donors to her campaign — but failed to meed the polling requirement of at least 2% support in four qualifying polls, only one poll from each polling entity can count: the polls must either be national polls, or they must be from one of the first four “early” states — Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, or South Carolina.

On Five Thirty Eight blog, where they aggregate polls, I counted 8 national polls and 7 polls in early states where Tulsi scored 2% or higher. The question is, why don’t more of these polls count? What criteria did the DNC use to select which polls they would use to qualify candidates? Looking at the list there are certainly some polls that are more reputable than others, certainly, but why didn’t the Emerson College poll count, for example? No one outside of the DNC inner circle knows.

Where other candidates may have used not meeting the criteria established by the DNC as a reason to drop out of the race, Gabbard seems to have only gotten more determined. She went on Fox News and spoke to Tucker Carlson about the need for transparency the same day that the debate participants were announced (yesterday, as of this writing). While some may look sideways at her choice of venue, it is clear to those of us who are watching her campaign at all closely that she would not have been able to get on MSNBC to discuss this issue. If she’d been brought on at all, the topic of conversation would likely have been “Assad apologist” beginning to end. MSNBC is not known to be particularly supportive of progressives.

Below is a clip from her appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show.