Photo Via Kamala Harris - Instagram
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris
The incredibly supercharged first week of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign has reignited excitement among energized Democrats united behind her to protect American democracy.
It’s stunning how quickly the party that had been in turmoil ever since the presidential debate came together to enthusiastically support Harris after Biden endorsed her after withdrawing as a candidate. But it made perfect sense. Biden chose Harris as his vice president in 2020 when the largest turnout of voters in American history elected them to defeat President Trump after a single term by more than seven million votes.
Biden knew what voters in Wisconsin and other battleground states knew because she was campaigning full-time in their states. Harris had become the Biden-Harris administration’s most effective campaigner exposing in clear terms Trump’s continuing plans to destroy equal rights for all Americans if he’s ever reelected.
Clueless Media
The national media was clueless about Harris’s campaign skills because it hadn’t started covering her yet. Every vice president in history has been denigrated by the media, but that was multiplied a hundredfold for Harris, the target of double haters as the first woman to win the job and the first woman of color.
That’s why it’s fortunate the same week Harris successfully wrapped up support from convention delegates and every major Democratic leader, the nation also saw enthusiastic crowds responding to her powerful speeches in Wisconsin and around the nation for the first time.
That showed Biden was correct to allow his younger vice president to carry his presidency’s fight forward against Trump’s destruction of American democracy. By removing the media’s obsession with Biden’s age, Harris upended the election by forcing the media to concentrate on what was really at stake—democracy’s survival.
The most important supporters who helped launch Harris’s presidential campaign like she’d been shot out of a cannon were the Black and Brown women and young voters who immediately recognized her historic national importance.
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Changing History
Growing excitement is exactly the right word to describe the feeling among Democrats emerging from fear and depression that the criminal who tried to overthrow democracy after his defeat in 2020 might win the presidency again. It’s starting to feel just like the Obama moment in 2008 when it became a real possibility a presidential election could change American history forever, this time for presidential candidates of color regardless of gender.
The Republican party did its part by openly celebrating White male supremacy at its Milwaukee convention. Republicans paired their criminal nominee Trump, a convicted felon, with Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, a felon-in-training eager to join Trump in throwing out as many millions of legally cast Democratic votes as necessary to keep the presidency in Republican hands forever.
Trump’s latest promise to supporters is that if they elect him, there won’t need to be any more elections in four years. “We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote,” Trump told a Christian nationalists’ Believers Summit in West Palm Beach, Fla., Friday.
That sounds like the same plan to eliminate the need for presidential elections Trump attempted to create on Jan. 6, 2021, by sending his violent mob of supporters to attack his own vice president and both Republicans and Democrats in Congress to prevent them from certifying President Biden’s election.
The Time is Now
If there was ever a time when Democrats needed a talented former prosecutor like Harris as their nominee to make the strongest possible case against Trump’s criminal destruction of democracy, it’s now.
Harris is off to a roaring start, but some Democrats still worry (as they constantly do) that the relentless onslaught of racist and sexist attacks by Trump and Republicans will take their toll on Harris’s candidacy. But that’s a complete misunderstanding of the racial and gender demographics of the American electorate. The truth is the last Democratic president to win a majority of the White vote was Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Johnson predicted his presidency’s support for civil rights and voting rights would drive racist White southerners into the Republican party for at least a generation. It’s been a lot longer and not just in the South.
But that doesn’t prevent popular Democrats including Obama from winning the presidency. In fact, as the U.S. population has grown increasingly racially, religiously and culturally diverse, Democrats are the only party that looks like America with broad support across all racial and cultural groups.
Republicans aren’t a conservative American political party anymore. They are Trump’s personal weapon to destroy everything he hates about America. That includes the majority of Americans.
It sure feels a lot better to be involved in the upbeat, positive Harris campaign to protect American democracy. It infuriates the snarling Trump that Harris has a beautiful laugh. His worst insult is “laughing Kamala.”
There’s nothing wrong with the joy of laughing together behind the turbocharged Harris campaign to permanently rid our politics of Trump’s hatred and anger.
