With Biden running, you ask: What about Kamala Harris? It’s complicated . . . | Opinion
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I, too, have a bone to pick with Vice President Kamala Harris.
But it’s not the one Florida Republicans are desperately trying to shove down my throat in response to my column on President Biden’s announcement that he’ll run for a second term. Better to choose the oldest president in history — a pulse will do, thank you — than Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis, I argued.
Enter the whataboutism argument to Biden’s 2024 run: But Biden is keeping Harris on the ticket! What about Kamala, you ask?
It’s a loaded, problematic question to begin with — a not-so-veiled round of the disproportionately acerbic criticism levied against the vice president from Day 1, largely because she’s a woman.
And a Black Democratic woman at that, walking a path no woman has before.
The opposition will giddily vote for a shameless scoundrel who tried to steal a presidential election and a vindictive autocrat spending millions of Florida taxpayer dollars fighting gayness. But never for a level-headed vice president, a former U.S. senator and California State Attorney, a strong woman with family roots in the Caribbean serving Biden with steadfast loyalty.
Harris hasn’t shined in a way they like, quashing the human and civil rights of minorities and forcing women to give birth like retrograde DeSantis. Her crime: championing Biden initiatives, presiding over the Senate, where she has gotten Biden’s appointments confirmed, and tackling the role of southern border czar with diplomacy instead of mounting scandal-provoking media shows at each step to say, “look at me, strongman here.”
No, no one is considering Harris may have played a key role in the off-the-beaten path Biden administration measures like setting up processing centers in Latin American countries to discourage the dangerous trek to the border.
A second term for Biden-Harris
Her mere existence scares the beeswax out of grown men like Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker, who describes a second Biden term with Harris as apocaliptic.
“We would be forced to wake up everyday of a Biden second term wondering if this is going to be the Inauguration Day for Kamala Harris, the accession to the top job of the embodiment of vacuity,” writes Baker.
Vacuity: Nothingness. Void. Barrenness.
Am I the only woman who sees a load of misogyny?
He is forced to wake up with her. Imagine the struggle.
White British man using big word to express how wronged he would feel by the specter that a Black woman would find herself in charge of the White House. Imagine the horror.
He can’t even bring himself to credit Kamala Harris for her own rise.
Harris helped deliver the nation from treasonous Trump — and the team has stayed on a center course, not pleasing to the Democratic Party’s left enclave and a threat to the Republican right, which has unified in the extreme corner created by Trump and being normalized by DeSantis.
But she gets no credit.
Unlike for her 48 predecessors, staying in her vice presidential lane isn’t good enough.
Former Vice President Mike Pence is about a dud of a vice president as they come. He had one shining moment: His 11th-hour refusal to block Biden’s election certification. All he did was do the right thing, but he’s heroic in everyone’s eyes.
Pence, who couldn’t articulate a single intelligent policy thought recently at an annual fundraiser hosted by the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition, is considering a presidential run. No one is coming after him, Baker-style, as if their lives depended on his erasure.
Different treatment for Harris
Harris, however, is a lightning rod for the petty.
She’s either too girly or not girly enough, her beauty both hindrance and asset. Airbrushed official photographs of male politicians are just portraits; hers fake model material. Though her classic wardrobe isn’t getting the Hillary Clinton pantsuit treatment, people constantly inspecting what a woman in power wears sets us apart from men.
Only DeSantis’ gaudy white boots after Hurricane Ian evoked such derisive commentary.
A disagreement between two male political allies is a difference of opinion.
Harris’ alleged distancing from Massachussetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren — the alleged basis an unreturned phone call — is treated like a cat fight, given endless “news” stories on several media outlets and national television.
Nothing to see here.
However, there was plenty to see with during Harris’ recent visit to Miami to discuss climate change at a time of historic flooding. But who talks about anything other than singer Gloria Estefan, who wore a flower in her hair and 1970s platform heels, getting to interview Harris on stage?
Maybe that Harris popped into an arepa bar.
Waiting for powerful Harris
So, this is where I have a bone to pick with Harris: Who is in charge of her publicity? Because they’re reinforcing the view that she’s lacking depth, so feeding the right-wing machine a persona even Democrats are questioning.
When will the real, pre-Biden Harris re-appear?
When she became the nation’s first female vice president, I exhaled.
Finally, a woman had broken one of the thorniest of barriers: Americans’ prejudice against female political leaders.
I had been waiting for this since I cast my first presidential vote in 1984 for Geraldine Ferraro. For this young woman, new mother and newbie journalist, Walter Mondale, at the top of the ticket, was an afterthought. The veteran congresswoman was the election’s main event.
Thirty-six years later, Madame Vice President stood alongside Biden — serving under the oldest elected president.
And I keep waiting to see in action nothing less than the able inquisitor who impressed me during Senate Judiciary Committee meetings. But the ghost of a Hillary Clinton deemed too abrasive seemed to have swallowed the tough Harris — and brought out a woman trying too hard to be liked.
Whoever media-trained the prosecutorial instinct out of her, whoever silenced the skill I saw displayed during her questioning of Supreme Court candidate Brett Kavanaugh ought to be exiled from the business.
Playing second-in-command, being underestimated and seen as an ethnic appointment are burdens. Everyone second guesses, including other women and alleged allies. Hit the bull’s-eye, and criticism comes on even stronger, often accompanied by the assaulting B-word and C-word.
No, it didn’t take long after Biden’s announcement for the Kamala Harris whataboutism, rooted in sexism and racism, to show up.
Harris has done a no-win job without the respect due — and in high heels she doesn’t even need.
Harris being one step away from the presidency isn’t a thing to fear, but to behold.
