Lots of talk about Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) being Joe Biden’s pick for vice-president. I’ve added a few links below my commentary this morning that you can peruse at your leisure. There are lots of people smarter than I am who know her background and rise through the political ranks to where she is today—a chance at being a heartbeat away from the presidency of the United States.
And while everyone, including me, is looking at Joe Biden’s slow cognitive decline, I do have to give the man credit. As far back as a year ago he was saying that he wanted to have a woman or a person of color as his running mate. And, by golly, he persisted. In March of this year, he promised during his debate with Bernie Sanders that he would “pick a woman to be my vice president.”
If you listened to that clip, Biden also promised to appoint the first black woman to the Supreme Court because, “it’s required that they have representation now” and that his cabinet, should he become president, would “look like the country.” (I assume he’s eliminated members of Antifa. But, you never know, since Democrats refuse to denounce their violence.)
So Biden promises he’ll pick a woman to run on the ticket as his VP and immediately begins to be pressured to make her a black woman, presumably because of the role that blacks played on his road to the nomination (if you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black!). That pressure increased exponentially after George Floyd, a black man who died while in the custody of Minneapolis police, roiled the nation over race relations and police violence.
Several women of color were on a list of possible picks and, by mid-July, Biden said “four black women” were on his shortlist for vice president.
When he announced Kamala Harris as his pick on Monday, I noticed that he didn’t mention that he’d made good on his promise. “Hey, look—I kept my promise and chose a woman! And not just a woman, a woman of color!”
Instead, he tweeted this:
I guess the message is it’s okay to virtue signal about people of color in the abstract, but not okay to make a show of it when you’re talking about someone specific. Then it must be shallow and unimportant. Or, as America’s newspaper of record put it,
“My woman-ness and my black-ness are by far my two best qualities,” said Harris. “As it turns out, I’ve been qualified to run for VP since birth!”
We live in an era when someone’s color and sex are considered the most essential qualifications (actually, the first is their ability to draw votes), followed by character and ability. We’re retreating from the declaration of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in August 1963: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
Kamala Harris has a lot of baggage that comes with her, especially concerning her character and ability, which you can read more about below. But in this day and age, she’s got what counts: her chromosomes and her skin color.
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Links courtesy of Ace of Spades HQ:
5 Things to Know About Biden’s VP Pick, Kamala Harris
FLASHBACK: Biden Running Mate Harris Said “I believe” Biden Accusers
Kamala Harris an underwhelming VP pick by Joe Biden: Goodwin
Report: Kamala Harris’s Ancestors Owned Slaves, Too
Kamala Harris Isn’t African-American. She’s Ethnically Indian And Jamaican. That’s Not The Same Thing.