No turning back.
Let’s finish the job.
We’re committed to voting to reelect #BidenHarris2024. pic.twitter.com/GMHUyhiECM— KAMALA NATION (@KamalaNation) October 31, 2023
Our Major Media is finally, reluctantly, accepting that not only will President Biden be the Democratic nominee in 2024… he won’t even give them a new buzzy chewtoy by dumping Vice-President Harris for some shiny new model. This has led to a spate of Very Serious Profiles, some good, some… questionable, all designed to be mined for oppo ads over the next year. (Said miners better tread carefully, because the Vice President has many supporters and they keep receipts.) Here’s a few stories I’ve seen most often bobbing up on political social media…
President Biden on Vice President Harris’s leadership on the toughest challenges facing our nation:
“Kamala is my partner in all of it” and “her advice and counsel are invaluable.” pic.twitter.com/cJVbK0W1hj
— Rachel Palermo (@RachelEPalermo) October 30, 2023
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“Kamala Harris had not been on the national stage for that long when she entered the White House,” @elainaplott tells @loracorkelley in the Atlantic Daily. “As one of her former aides told me, narrative is a very difficult thing to change.” https://t.co/s0mR3kvULV
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) October 12, 2023
Elaina Plott Calabro, at the Atlantic, on “The Kamala Harris Problem”:
On a Thursday morning in April, I met with Vice President Kamala Harris at Number One Observatory Circle, the Victorian mansion that, for the past two and a half years, she and the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, have called home. She can be a striking presence when she walks into a room, with a long stride and an implacable posture that make her seem taller than she is (about 5 foot 2). By the time I saw Harris at the residence, I had already traveled with her to Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles, and Reno, Nevada, as well as to Africa, trips on which she had carried herself with ease and confidence.
Ease and confidence have not been the prevailing themes of Harris’s vice presidency. Her first year on the job was defined by rhetorical blunders, staff turnover, political missteps, and a poor sense among even her allies of what, exactly, constituted her portfolio. Within months of taking office, President Joe Biden was forced to confront a public perception that Harris didn’t measure up; ultimately, the White House issued a statement insisting that Biden did, in fact, rely on his vice president as a governing partner. But Harris’s reputation has never quite recovered…
… Redefining what power looks like has been the theme of every chapter of Kamala Harris’s political career. She is the U.S.-born daughter of immigrants—her mother a cancer researcher from India, her father an economist from Jamaica. As Biden’s running mate, she became the first woman, first Black American, and first South Asian American to be elected vice president. Before that, she was the first South Asian American and only the second Black woman to serve in the U.S. Senate. Before that, she was the first woman, Black American, and South Asian American to serve as attorney general of her native California. Before that, she was the first Black woman in California to be elected as a district attorney.
But after nearly three years in office, the symbolic fact of Harris’s position has proved more resonant than anything she has actually done with it…
Republicans may offer a mandatory “God forbid” when raising the prospect of some presidential health crisis, but they are already pushing the idea that “a vote for President Biden is a vote for President Harris.” They are doing so in large part because they see her as a more inviting target than the president himself: a woman of color whose word-salad locutions turn themselves into campaign ads, and whose outspoken advocacy on social issues makes her easier to paint as an ideologue lying in wait…
The Biden administration has every incentive to embrace Harris. Why does addressing preparedness seem so difficult? Harris has affirmed that she is ready, if need be, but there’s a limit to what she herself can say. It’s not unusual for a president, any president, to take pains to demonstrate his vice president’s readiness for the top job, if only by regularly referencing their closeness—the notion that the person is briefed on everything and has an opportunity to weigh in on major decisions, even if the fingerprints aren’t always visible. And no president comes to the Oval Office with every necessary skill. Harris is an uncomfortable fit in the vice president’s role, whatever that is, and she cannot speak or act independently; the job makes every occupant a cipher. But she has been a successful public servant for more than three decades. She ran the second-largest justice system in America, in a state that is the world’s fifth-largest economy. By virtue of her position, she is among those who represent the future of her party, and she represents its mainstream, not its fringe. Of course Kamala Harris is ready for the presidency, to the extent that anyone can be ready. This should not be hard for her own colleagues to talk about. Not talking about it leaves the subject open for political exploitation—by opponents whose own likely candidate makes the idea of readiness absurd.
And yet the topic is treated as a trip wire. In a brief conversation after an abortion-rights rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, on the first anniversary of the Dobbs decision, I asked Harris herself: Had she and Biden discussed how to address questions about her readiness to step in as president, should circumstances ever require it? “No,” she said. And that was the end of the conversation.
Believe it or not, the piece is mostly positive — there’s a lot of great stories in it! Yes, it’s long — that’s why I’m sharing it so y’all have the chance to read it over the weekend.
======
Y’think, NYTimes, this could be because you and other national press haven’t covered her? pic.twitter.com/ShhX2DWGTZ
— Jeff (Gutenberg Parenthesis) Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) October 10, 2023
The FTFNYTimes, on the other hand — well, when they sent Astead Herndon “In Search of Kamala Harris”, you know they weren’t looking for positive stories…
All the conditions seemed right for a chance to reset the narrative.
At the Munich Security Conference in February, amid rising international angst about Russia’s war in Ukraine, Vice President Kamala Harris led a delegation of Americans, including around 50 lawmakers from both parties. She spent her first day in Germany in seclusion, preparing for the next 48 hours: meetings with European leaders the first day and a keynote speech the next in the ornate ballroom of the Hotel Bayerischer Hof. When she emerged, head high and shoulders back, Harris exuded what her staff members have argued is a particular comfort with her role on the international stage. There, they say, she is respected…
As I scanned the crowd from a balcony in the ballroom, its makeup was a visual reminder of the shattered glass ceilings in Harris’s wake. They were nearly all men; she’s a woman. They were nearly all white; she’s Black and South Asian, a first-generation American from the Bay Area.
In Munich, it was another case of what could have been. Harris’s stilted delivery of her speech caused the international audience to miss certain applause lines. Her chief of staff, seated in the front row, tried to start some clapping herself, but the members of the Biden administration in the audience only tepidly joined her efforts. Harris returned to Washington a day earlier than originally scheduled. Later, the reason for the switch became clear: President Biden was secretly traveling to Kyiv. The impact on the vice president was all too familiar. Her three-day trip to Munich, intended to be a showcase, would be largely ignored…
By this point in the interview, the window that was slightly open when Harris sat down felt as though it had been firmly shut. Over the weeks that followed, the vice president’s aides would repeatedly postpone the second interview that had been agreed to for this article. But here, while I still had the chance, I wanted to try once more to get at this important question: Maybe people are yearning for something policy can’t provide — not just a fancy speech, but a more forcefully declared vision.
“What’s the disconnect then, between all that and it translating to more Black votes?” I asked, pressing further.
Harris refused to entertain the scenario. Instead, she had a question for me.
“Why don’t you talk to me after 2024?”
Herndon says he spent eight months working on this cover story, which gave him infinite chances to… collect all the most petty, derogatory, deeply uninspiring anecdotes any horserace media tout could want. One hopes he was adequately compensated, because he’s unlikely to be welcome at some venues after this…
Kamala Harris’ allies pushed back against her critics in a buzzy New York Times Magazine profile published today, casting her as a crucial asset to Biden. https://t.co/I0XEcLOBp8
— Axios (@axios) October 10, 2023
Critiques of VP are rarely about her actual job performance. They tend to be hit jobs by people INVENTING STANDARDS & JUSTIFICATIONS to dislike her because they hate that a Black woman is second in command. Just call out the misogynoir and move on.
— Michelle_BYoung (@michelle_byoung) October 10, 2023
Caitlin hits the nail on the head. Also idk what staff person no one is looking at felt the need to offer their two cents here. The comment is unnecessary, tone deaf and the opposite of how staff should conduct themselves. https://t.co/jazdXVmdJA
— Symone D. Sanders Townsend (@SymoneDSanders) October 10, 2023
“Inordinate amount of time on her hair…” is a dog whistle for ‘nappy’.
I hope the staffer is fired post haste— Survivor Extraordinaire (@FrenchRainez) October 10, 2023
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**ICYMI**@JamesPoliti: “More than a dozen current and former administration officials, US lawmakers and Democratic strategists who have been interviewed believe Harris has not been given the political credit she deserves for her performance so far.”https://t.co/ooVX5YpQQ7
— Herbie Ziskend (@HerbieZiskend46) October 29, 2023
The Financial Times tries to explain our Vice-President for their not-American audience:
… US president Joe Biden has not only doubled down on Harris as his running mate heading into what is expected to be a tough re-election campaign, possibly involving a rematch with Donald Trump, but he is counting on her for the critical task of helping drive turnout…
More than a dozen current and former administration officials, US lawmakers and Democratic strategists who have been interviewed believe Harris has not been given the political credit she deserves for her performance so far.
They attribute much of her unpopularity to a combination of the hyper-polarised US political environment, the struggles that any vice-president faces in shining through as second-in-command, and her willingness to take on politically difficult causes and assignments early on in her tenure such as the root causes of immigration from Central America.
Meanwhile, they say Biden’s commitment to Harris has been unwavering. The president has featured her prominently in his re-election campaign launch and dispatched her to win support for the campaign at big fundraising events. Behind the scenes, insiders say, he counts on her advice for key decisions and their relationship is as close as the one he had as vice-president under Barack Obama…
Until recently, Harris’s political potential had been somewhat muted by circumstances largely beyond her control. At the start of the administration, the vice-president’s ability to travel widely was curtailed by Covid restrictions, as well as the need to stay in Washington to cast tiebreaking votes on key legislation and confirmations in the Senate, keeping her somewhat hidden.
But she is now more free to set her own schedule and criss-cross America to defend the administration’s policies, and take the fight to Republicans on political and social terrain that is more friendly to Democrats, even with swing voters…
Molly O’Rourke, a Democratic pollster at Hart Research, says she does not see evidence that Harris is harming Biden’s prospects of re-election. “The reality is that voters don’t know much about her but when they hear about her record, the reaction is quite favourable,” she says. “Her unfavourability or her negatives, are with voters who were never going to be gettable or in a reachable audience for Biden anyway,” she adds.
Over the summer, O’Rourke conducted a survey for Emily’s List Action, the political wing of the advocacy group supporting abortion rights, among voters leaning towards Biden but not fully committed. The share of those who said Harris was “ready to be president” jumped from 54 per cent to 70 per cent once they learned more about her, says O’ Rourke.
One former aide said Harris’s appeal ran deep within the Democratic base. “She is the face of the America that we are becoming. There are a bunch of people who look up to her,” they say…
======
And a final, succinct summary from Peter Hamby, in Puck, back in mid-September — “Kamala Swap Fan Fiction”:
… Biden’s party is, to put it mildly, not run by dice rollers. Biden’s own political instincts are cautious, institutional, and generally risk-averse. His whole bet on 2024 is that the same safe and boring formula that won him the presidency—a bulwark against Trumpian chaos—will work once again. Why would Biden suddenly mess with that calculation and potentially shatter the fragile Democratic coalition that voted him into office in the first place? Beyond the math, it would be an ugly spectacle. Abandoning his own vice president heading into re-election would only make Biden look weak, indecisive and petty…
Harris is currently on a “Fight For Our Freedoms” college tour focused on those very issues, and her team has been eagerly sharing clips of big crowds greeting her on campuses, especially at HBCUs. (Side note: I’m not confident that Gretchen Whitmer would be packing the rafters at Hampton University). Those images speak to a big reason Biden won’t be ditching Harris: Democrats need Black voters and young voters to show up next year to keep the White House. Both groups like Harris. Her approval rating among Black voters is at 71 percent, and higher among Black women. Sure, those numbers could be higher, but they’d definitely be lower for a new running mate with no national profile, replacing the country’s first female vice president of color.
There’s one more big rejoinder to the Dump Kamala takes: Democrats like her. Columnists might not agree, but a big majority of Dems—84 percent—say they’re either satisfied or enthusiastic about Harris as Biden’s running mate. Why would Biden blow that up for someone new, untested, unvetted? Remember, in elections, running mates are typically just hype people. They get some initial attention, and then go about doing the work of rallying the party base. They let the nominee set the message and steer the ship. Right now, barring any major screw-ups, Harris is doing precisely the thing she should be doing—nourishing the core constituencies Biden needs to get re-elected…
A decade ago, Obama’s less-than-beloved former chief of staff, Bill Daley, confirmed that some Obama advisers had discussed dropping Vice President Biden from the ticket ahead of the the 2012 election, a nugget that had been reported in Double Down, the tell-all book about that race by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. Daley told CBS News that Obama was never approached with the idea, but he said some Democrats around the White House had looked into it. They had even polled the proposal.
But, Daley said, “the research that was done confirmed the fact that it was not an issue voters cared about or thought should be done.” That line rings true today. For incumbents, voters render a verdict on the president, not the vice president. And if Democrats do have an opinion one way or the other on Harris, it’s that they want to keep her on the ticket.
Alison Rose
Short chicks, represent!
Thanks for compiling these, AL. Will definitely give them a read when I need a break from the bleak book I’m reading. But I’ll just say:
Golly gee, that couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that the news media left, right, and center has had a grand old time making sure it couldn’t recover…
Also, her reputation was never in need of “recovery” among people with brains.
HumboldtBlue
AL, ya gotta find a way to use this photo of Joe and Kamala.
kindness
Racism & misogyny. That’s why the Village Elders think they can treat Kamela like a chew toy. The Village Elders may have barrels of ink to hawk their takes on it but the average citizen isn’t buying it. Especially not Democrats. And that seems to have stuck in the Village Elders craws.
Scout211
And TFIG spends just the right amount of time on his . . . whatever that thing is on top of his fat head!?
Yeah, that staff person who leaked that insult should be fired. Hair, make-up, clothing stylists, etc., are always a crucial part of a person’s team (especially females) who are in the public eye to the extent that a Vice President is. For this person to criticize VPOTUS for doing everything that even Trump does daily to be in the public eye and photographed constantly, is just making sh*t up to find a criticism. And yeah, it’s a definite smear of her not-blonde hair.
Chris
This after four years of writing “THIS is the day Donald Trump BECAME PRESIDENT!!!” fluff pieces every time Trump so much as said “excuse me” after farting.
(Not that he ever actually said “excuse me” after farting, but he meant it; you could tell. He’s the kind of man who would say that sort of thing. It’s one of his endearing, human, qualities, the thing that makes you want to have a beer with him. Anyways, so what if he didn’t say “excuse me” after farting? Have we really become such a feminized culture of brainwashed wokes that we can’t even fart without saying “excuse me”? No doubt the liberal elites in New York and Washington find this horrifying, but in the rough and honest working-class culture of Middle America, when a real man farts, he doesn’t apologize. It’s a sign of weakness. Anyways, THIS is the day Donald Trump BECAME PRESIDENT!)
Chris
@kindness:
As bad as the treatment of Hillary Clinton in 2016 was, what dug home the “it’s always misogyny” thing for me even more was the absolutely frantic scramble after the election to find a new chew toy now that they weren’t going to have Hillary Clinton to kick around anymore.
They tried to make it Kirsten Gillibrand for a while, but it simply wouldn’t stick because no one except politics junkies knew who the fuck she was.
Then they tried to make it Chelsea Clinton, on the strength of “she wrote a children’s book so she’s running for President!” But then her run for President stubbornly kept failing to materialize.
Then they tried to make it Elizabeth Warren. But of course she didn’t win the nomination, so that wasn’t on.
Thank God, Kamala Harris… well, also didn’t win the nomination. But she won the Vice-nomination, so close enough!
And throughout it all, there was always the theme of “Hillary Clinton’s going to run again!” never quite disappearing.
geg6
I think she’s doing a fine job and exactly what she should be doing. I’ll be happy to vote for her next year and again in four years. I’m not one of her original fans but she’s grown in me.
trollhattan
@Scout211:
Hey now, ever enter a cotton candy sculpting competition? Harder than it looks, let me tell you.
In Texas they use fiberglass insulation instead, which is a whole other level of complexity.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
It’s obviously misogyny…I mean, nobody talked about Joe Biden when he was VP…except when he said BFD and a few other gaffes. Nobody worried that he was a gaffe machine and how would that play in the Presidency, or whether he had some constituency out there he was drawing to the ticket or how popular he was or wasn’t. And…you can say the exact same thing about Mike Pence. Dick Cheney is a special case. Al Gore got chew toyed a lot once he was running to replace Clinton but before that nobody much thought about him. Then there was Dan Quayle…another “special” case.
Hungry Joe
Oh, for the glory days of Mike Pence, Dick Cheney, and Dan Quayle! Now, THOSE were Veeps we could be proud of.
And they’re all well over 5’2”. So there.
Chris
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
Sarah Palin (never a VP, but a VP candidate) attracted a fair amount of ridicule. But that was about 100% self-inflicted.
One has to be 1) a woman and 2) a Democrat for it to apply.
MisterDancer
Thanks Anne!
The situation that leaps out to me before reading these long pieces: Joe “Big Fuckin’ Deal” Biden knows really damn well how critical a good relationship with your Veep is, how valuable that other person’s insight can be. I think we’ll see a very robust foot forward put for Harris, as the electioneering gets into full swing.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Hungry Joe: I mean I kind of feel bad for making that Dan Quayle joke because he’s an intellectual titan compared to the Tommy Tuberville and there are many more of his ilk in positions of power these days.
Matt McIrvin
Calling out any woman in politics for “spending an inordinate amount of time on her hair” is an automatic foul. Because you know the shit she’d get if she didn’t.
Jeffro
Here, snooze media, lemme help you out:
The (Blessed) Narrative for 2024 is, “Dems delivered and are unified; the GOP and its bloated orange leader are falling apart right before your eyes.”
If you need a follow-up or second narrative to explore, give “A new American majority is finding its voice on reproductive rights, gun safety, climate change, and the many benefits of unionization” a try. It doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker, but it’s what’s going on.
You’re welcome!
dc
I hope the staffer with the hair comment is one of the people nipped by Biden’s dog.
Alison Rose
@Matt McIrvin: And especially a Black woman. It’s a very coded snipe, and it’s gross.
Gretchen
Every time they bring up Biden’s age I think that I’m completely comfortable with Harris taking over if he should have some health problem. That’s the VP’s job, and she’d be good at it. I was excited when he chose her, and she’s done well in the role ever since.
Jay C
Gee, whatta shocker! VP Kamala Harris isn’t getting a lot of positive press from the “mainstream” media?
Shouldn’t be much of a surprise: her boss doesn’t get much of it, either. Just IMHO, Joe Biden is as effective and competent a President as the country has seen in quite a while (even never-minding the comparisons with his historic-levels-of-incompetence predecessor): but relying on the “MSM” for coverage, one would never know it. That the country’s official #2 would also get overlooked isn’t that much of a stretch….
Brachiator
This is, of course, because “narratives” are typically bullshit. Once the lazy political press decide on an angle for a story, they never cut it loose. It doesn’t even matter whether or not the public have rejected the narrative pitch. The media will simply blame the public for not understanding how important the narrative is.
With Harris, they keep coming back to her introduction to the nation as VP. I even ran across a recent story referring to her as “Kamala the cop.”
The only good part of this nonsense is that it has come up again early in the campaign, so there’s lots of time to deal with it.
What drives me nuts about this is that the reporter doesn’t begin with what Harris’s strengths might be, but again regurgitates early negative perspectives. It’s good to know that the piece gets better, but the negative opening affects how some readers may deal with the rest of the story.
The bottom line is that you can’t really know how a VP might do as president. It’s enough for me that she has Biden’s confidence.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Chris:
Amen. It IS always the misogyny.
trollhattan
@Jay C:
Last time the poli-press went “Whee!” over a California politician, it was Ahnohld. Before that, Saint Ronny. VPKH is very, very Californian and it can be argued whether that’s a net plus or minus. I have thoughts.
unctuous
The media and especially the media barons are profoundly misogynist and always have been. It is and always has been a Good Old Boys network and has always been a bulwark of wealthy white patriarchy and privilege.
Just ask yourself who owns these media outlets, and why they own them, the motives many are noting here.
As Citizen Kane showed, their motivations are often vindictive (even when it harms their own self interest), petty, childish, selfish, vain and vainglorious, and above all, power hungry.
Same as it ever was, since before Randolph Hearst and continuing on with Elon Musk.
gvg
I don’t remember those supposed problems in the first year of Harris’ vice presidency. I think the media takes it more seriously that even people who follow politics do.
I sort of doubt the supposed staffer who leaked about the hair actually exists or was on Harris staff. Could be someone else’s staff. If anyone said it, it was both misogyny and racism.
Actually, I do recall a lot of sniping on vice presidents, including male ones. Of course, we have had some…special ones lately. But the vindictiveness against Gore was always uncalled for. They don’t like Democrats, or women, but I don’t think they like vice presidents either. Pence didn’t get as much attention because Trump was getting it all. However, he would have with a more normal President.
trollhattan
FAFO, Trump attorney edition, a continuing series.
Matt McIrvin
@gvg: I remember a lot of meta-stories about “why are the media giving Kamala Harris negative press?” which themselves became negative press.
gene108
Obama and Biden have a good relationship from their time working together. Seems like Biden and Harris have a good working relationship.
Trump wouldn’t mind if some very not nice things happen to Pence.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@trollhattan:
These MAGAts really do think they can bully anyone and get their way. I want to see more resources in cyber-crime investigations. The people issuing these threats need to have the long arm of the law smacking them down hard.
Mike in NC
Our news media sucks. They want the chaos and stupidity of Fat Bastard back so badly they can taste it. People are whining about inflation and grocery prices. Apparently the January 6 attack on the Capitol was no big deal, and besides he was a genius businessman because he tells us that himself! Half the imbeciles in this country are convinced we’re in a deep recession when that’s complete bullshit.
Scout211
@trollhattan: I read that earlier this afternoon. The part that was funny to me was the part where Trump’s attorneys were criticizing all the notes that the law clerk was passing to the judge and they called it “co-judging” like it was a suspicious act.
They must be remembering that episode of Law and Order where the law clerk was managing the whole trial for a judge with dementia. She typed on her computer the script that the Judge should follow and decisions he should make, which transferred to his computer.
So this courtroom smear by Trump’s attorneys was not only for the law clerk but for Judge Engoron himself, for “needing” the law clerk’s assistance.
Also they want her disbarred for too many political donations to Democrats.
They are using so many distracting courtroom antics that one might wonder what case they actually have in defense of their client.
Alison Rose
@gene108:
Obama and Biden: “A big fucking deal”
Biden and Harris: “My partner in all of it”
Trump and Pence: “Go ahead and hang him, he sucks”
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
I hate it when the M$M make themselves the story, and then act like they’re just passive observers.
Narrative = Editors and publishers huffing their own farts… and then reporting about it!
Betty Cracker
We see Biden-Harris ads on TV a fair amount, and Harris is always featured prominently. Also, I know I’m not the only FL Dem who appreciated the VP’s pushback against the DeSantis admin’s “black people benefited from slavery” nonsense and anti-queer bigotry. She traveled here to let us know the Biden-Harris admin sees us. That’s important.
Jay C
@Scout211:
[Jay inserts I.A.N.A.L. disclaimer HERE]
None.
Tx.
Brachiator
@trollhattan:
During the California recall campaign, a Los Angeles Times political columnist would regularly lecture voters about how they were stupid and should be duty bound to leave Governor Gray Davis in office. Other news outlets didn’t quite no what to make of things. The national press mocked California and the recall circus.
Governor Arnold got mixed reviews as governor. The press loved to jump on him when he faced opposition to his proposals.
sab
@gvg: I agree. This is an invention. No one on Harris’s staff would have said that.
I am an over the hill white woman and I have always known that one of my huge professional advantages was my hair. I have Elizabeth Warren hair: short, boring, sensible, effortless, apolitical. I spend less than five minutes a day on my hair and it always looks okay. Women with more complicated hair may look better and more stylish but at a huge time cost. Black women in America don’t have a boring, sensible, effortless, apolitical hairstyle choice. Every choice is a statement, and most choices are timesinks.
Alison Rose
@Brachiator: The recall was fucking dumb. Davis wasn’t great but he didn’t deserve to be recalled, especially not for the idiotic reasons most people offered. Arnold wasn’t the worst governor ever, since he’s a Repub but not like, hard right moron Repub, but on the whole I still disliked having him in the office.
Cracks me up though that the GOP thought their recall of Newsom would work as easily as the one against Davis. Meanwhile, Newsom won without breaking a sweat. There was a NYT article recently where they referenced something that happened while Newsom was “fending off” the recall, and I was like…there was no fending required.
Chris
@gvg:
The vindictiveness against Gore I think came at least partly from the same place as the vindictiveness again Hillary: no matter how much mud they tried to sling against Bill, it never worked, even the sexpeachment that was supposed to be his big comeuppance only boosted his poll numbers in the end, so when they found other people in his administration who didn’t have quite his level of charisma and popularity, they doubled down on tearing them to pieces.
Alison Rose
@Chris: Also, Gore is a brainiac nerd, and they don’t like smart Dems who actually let people know they’re smart.
piratedan
OT: legal wheels be turning in AZ
https://blogforarizona.net/cochise-county-supervisors-chickens-come-home-to-roost-carrying-subpeonas/
the tl;dr is that when the 2020 election results were in and awaiting certification, two Cochise County Supes (R) decided that they weren’t satisfied and refused to certify, now the state AG (D) is investigating them. She was NARROWLY elected against one of the election deniers (Finchem, I believe).
bbleh
It would be SO much better if she didn’t have that, y’know, Barack-Obama-type uppityness problem.
sab
@Alison Rose: Gore picked Joe Lieberman as his VP, which confirmed every doubt I had ever had about the man and his judgment. I really had to hold my nose to vote for him, and I haven’t changed my mind since.
ETA Biden it was the opposite. Kamala Harris was second on my list, Biden third or fourth. That he liked her made me like him much more.
rikyrah
@gvg:
Let the Vice -President actually show up in her natural hair.
Yeah, I’ll wait.
I agree with the tweet that said that person should be found and fired. The pure-D racism in that hair comment was a bit much for me.
trollhattan
@Brachiator: In-state we had one set of reactions and the rest of the country was enthralled. Didn’t he announce on Leno?
Was reelected, so there was that. But, the Republican noisemakers looking to repeal Article Two withdrew vewy, vewy quietly during his first term, once they discovered the Governator was not a True Believer.
It all happened on account of Enron and that bastard Ken Lay never served a day in prison. (From dying first, but still.)
NorthLeft
I had to laugh about the “hair care” criticism. I can just imagine how the right wing nut jobs would go after VP Harris if she had more than a few hairs out of place. Spoiler alert, it would be brutal.
BTW,I hope that the staffer who made that comment resigned or was fired.
Chris
@Alison Rose:
Arnold’s an interesting case. He’s probably the last Republican elected to anything major that I actually like, both because he didn’t govern as a hard-right moron, and more recently, because he’s really gone all-in on the message that fascism is bad and the GOP is fascist.
On the other hand, he’s kind of an object study in my frustration with the “Moderate Republican” archetype: no matter how good they are, the best you can hope for is that they’ll muddle along and mostly not make things worse, as opposed to actually making things better. I mean, when was the last time we elected a Republican who was actually an improvement over the Democrat? At the national level, it hasn’t happened since before the Great Depression. At the state and local level, it could still happen for most of the twentieth century, albeit less and less as time went by, but in this millennium it doesn’t even happen there anymore.
It’s a fantasy, I know, but it’d be so fucking nice if instead of “oh, thank God, a Republican who’s good,” people started wondering “what the fuck do we actually need Republicans for, anyway?”
Geminid
@sab: Hindsight is 20/20, so I can clearly see that Al Gore should have picked Senator Bob Graham of Florida as his running mate.
Bill Arnold
@gene108:
Trump would display a genuine Trump Smile if Pence were eaten alive by sharks. “Terrible, Terrible”, while looking uncanny-valley “sad”.
sab
@Geminid: He could have picked anyone else than Joe Lieberman. Why him? I will never understand. Slimy backstabbing Clinton hating universal health hating snake in the grass.
Geminid
@sab: It was an inexplicable pick. I wonder if Mr. Gore was overconfident.
trollhattan
@Chris:
Did not grow up here and never took CA history, so I can’t comment on whether there was a worse governor than Ronnie, but if there was the entire state would have probably burned to the ground then separated from the continent in a giant seismic event.
Pete Wilson and George Deuhoweveryouspellit weren’t horrid but typical of Orange County Republican “be conservative and eliminate as much government as you can’t, just don’t be a jerk while doing it” mentality. Wilson gets “credit” for the energy deregulation that led to the Enron brownouts and the Davis recall.
His presidential efforts had all the energy of Mike Pence’s.
Brachiator
@Alison Rose:
Davis panicked and didn’t handle the recall challenge well. And unfortunately, once things were set in motion, and it looked as though Davis might lose, the Democrats chose the hack Cruz Bustamante as the Davis replacement.
@trollhattan:
A lot of regular people were enthralled, but the political media mocked the hell out of California. They even reached back to the stupid “Governor Moonbeam” derision aimed at Jerry Brown. That Arnold announced on Leno was another sign that California could not be taken seriously.
Chris
@sab:
The fact that Lieberman was picked for VP as late as 2000 speaks volumes about how much more conservative the party was not so long ago, and how much better it’s gotten since then.
CaseyL
@sab: I’ve always assumed Gore or his campaign -thought he had to do some kind of “virtue signaling,” pick someone who was not likely to have a sex scandal in their past, and someone who had attacked Clinton on the basis of the sex scandal.
It was a dumb fucking decision, and to this day I don’t know if picking Lieberman was in fact Gore’s decision, or something his consultants came up with. Quite possibly his consultants, since the consultant grift was going strong among national Democrats in the 1990s-2000s.
Looking back now, it’s not hard to conclude the consultants were saboteurs, seeing as how so many of them (*cough*Mark Penn*cough*) are now blatantly corrupt and cozy up to the GOP.
sab
@sab: And that is the upside of Joe Lieberman.
Martin
Winning hearts and minds:
JaneE
Kamala Harris has been good at every office she has held, IMO.
Maybe it is about time to remind the younger generation of Eisenhower’s retort when asked about the important contributions of his VP to the administration “Give me a week and I’ll think of one.”
It wasn’t that long ago that the most important job the VP had was breaking ties in the Senate. They weren’t required to fill a VP vacancy until the 25th amendment, that is the middle of the 1960’s . Before that the Senate chose a president pro tempore to preside in the absence of the VP.
There is a large segment of the US population (very often members of the Republican party) for whom no person of color can possibly do an adequate job as an elected official, no matter what the office. It should not be too much to ask that the so-called news media not spread their bigotry. Criticizing her for not fixing problems that none of her predecessors, none of the prior presidents, and none of the prior congresses managed to solve, even though they existed before she was born, does seem just a little bit much.
sab
@Chris: No, it speaks to Al Gore’s extremely bad political judgment. It was always very very bad. Probably why Clinton chose him. Not actual competition. Just another Southern pol.
ETA Also Biden ( good at his job) v Clinton ( insecure at his job)
Geminid
@Martin: Israel did admit responsibility for the attack on the ambulance. They also said it was carrying Hamas fighters.
Jeffro
Re: Gore 2000 and Clinton 2016
I sometimes wonder if Democratic candidates suffer from an excess of caution. Supposedly the Veep nod doesn’t do much, but both of these picks left the base rather flat
SiubhanDuinne
@Hungry Joe:
Yeah, and I’m pretty sure Cheney, at least, didn’t spend hours each day fussing with his hair.
ETA: Just typing Cheney’s name makes me realise afresh how much I do NOT miss Chris …. gosh, I actually can’t even think of his last name … Tweety, anyhow. Because he never missed an opportunity to tell us that the correct pronunciation was “Chee-ney,” not “Chay-ney.”
ETA2: Chris Matthews.
trollhattan
@Alison Rose: Yup, it reminded me a lot of the Meg Whitman campaign against JB 2.0. She dropped tens of millions over many months and…crickets from Jerry. Dems with too much time on their hands used those hands pulling out their hair at the looming threat of Governor Billionaire Lady taking charge.
Jerry bides his time. I think he campaigned about twelve minutes prior to crushing her.
Newsom recall was a galling waste of money. Two-hundred million to conduct the special election. Bastards.
CarolPW
@trollhattan: Ronnie fucked up the U.C. system big time, and it still has not recovered. The U.C. system could once give you the equivalent education in scholarship, if not in eclat and connections, to the Ivies, with no cost other than housing. For that ruination alone Ronnie gets the worst award. My folks got to California in covered wagons, and all of my degrees are in the U.C. system so I have opinions. He was elected in my sophomore college year.
Geminid
@Jeffro: Tim Kaine was a solid Vice Presidential candidate. Hilary Clinton almost won, and if she had people would be talking about what a good choice Tim Kaine was.
Ed. Another Senator, Sherrod Brown, might have helped the ticket more. I don’t know who else would have been better than Kaine, though.
Ruckus
@Alison Rose:
I don’t get this concept other than it’s the same concept that women can’t do some things that men can. Well president and vice president is about making decisions and being an actual human being. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris sure seem to be rather proficient at the tasks at hand. How many men still do the things that they got credit for decades ago? Lift that barge, tote that bale has been pretty much gone for a few decades and most men that I’ve known for the last 30-40 yrs haven’t been doing any barge lifting or bale toting or are even capable of it.
SiubhanDuinne
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
I think most people, when they think of Dan Quayle (though why anyone would want to do such a thing I could not possibly say), remember the “potatoe” moment. Not me: I will always remember his causing a nine-days’-wonder of a story by taking Murphy Brown, a fictional character TYVM, to task for having an abortion. Oh wait, after checking my notes, I see that she didn’t have an abortion. She had the baby. That’s why Dan Quayle lost his shit.
JaneE
@Alison Rose: Arnold’s election campaign was based on his promise to repeal the reversion of the state car tax to its original value. The law cutting the vehicle value tax allowed that if the state ran deficits again, the governor should revert the tax to its former value. Arnold cancelled that and guaranteed the state would have a giant deficit ($4-6B) for the foreseeable future.
Financial irresponsibility of the first order and bankrupted more than one city. It wasn’t even a real tax increase, it was the original rate being reinstated because the surplus that allowed the reduction wasn’t there anymore. It may have been legal, but it was definitely the opposite of what was promised when the law originally passed, and probably very much against the intent of the law.
He may not have been as bad as some, but cutting revenue to cripple the government is standard GOP as is ignoring laws he didn’t like, however moderate he sounds today.
trollhattan
@CarolPW:
I’ll leave this here:
Shorter bastard Reagan: “Can’t take a joke, hippies?”
Ruckus
@CarolPW:
Aww, ronnie. Seemed like such a shitty human being to me. At least I saw him for what he was – see above.
Dad was a year old and came to LA in a horse drawn wagon about the time that cars actually could be bought, well over 100 yrs ago, and too expensive for the common man. But few cars were being driven very far, no gas stations in the outback, not much in the way of roads – dirt trails yes but roads? Only in the cities. Mom was born in Los Angeles, as were my siblings and I, and at the same hospital.
Citizen Alan
@sab: One of my most depressing thoughts about the state of race relations in America was when I concluded that Barack Obama probably could not have won the election in 2008 had his wife and daughters not kept their hair straightened. A big puffy Afro on either of his daughters let alone Michelle would have driven “Independents” to McCain.
Splitting Image
@SiubhanDuinne:
Yup. The furor was that the slutty bitch had a baby outside of wedlock.
Having an abortion would have been wrong too, of course. And shame on her for not giving up her career to be a full-time mother. When these assholes really get going, they don’t leave women with too many good options, do they?
trollhattan
@SiubhanDuinne: Vacant-noggined pretty boy to give some yoot appeal to ancient GHW Bush’s Yet Another Old Guy campaign. Quayle earned every clobbering he received by being shallow and mean.
“Greatest Generation” has finally shuffled off with Bush our last WWII veteran pres, even if Dole gave it one last go.
SiubhanDuinne
@Splitting Image:
As we used to say in the South, Can’t win for losin’.
CarolPW
@trollhattan:
After Kent State my mother told me she would disown me if I protested the war (and I already had and continued to do so). We eventually got over that but knowing one’s mother thought one was pretty much free game for bullets if one protested (and my realizing that she was probably simultaneously terrified that it would make me free game for bullets) was the perfect example of how her parents had fucked her up.
sab
@Citizen Alan: Nonsense. Everyone looked at Michele. Nobody looked at those kids ( cute as buttons.)
Citizen Alan
@sab: The moment I finally decided to vote Nader (Sorry! Sorry!) was when Gore told a reporter that he supported the death penalty because of its “deterrent value.” Which, setting aside the absolute bullshittery of that statement, was also morally depraved. Because I know that Al Gore wasn’t dumb enough to believe that shit, and so I could only conclude that he was willing to support the death penalty even if it didn’t have a deterrent effect simply because the alternative would have been to see the GOP demagogue the issue like they did with Dukakis.
(Relatedly, I supported Bill Clinton wholeheartedly, a part of me will never forgive him for making such a big production out of the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a man so mentally disabled that he didn’t eat the dessert that came with his last meal because he was “saving it for later.”
But I got over it. Because I accepted the reality that in this bloodthirsty sadistic nation, the only way we’ll ever get rid of the death penalty is to elect enough “tough-on-crime” Democrats who then turn around and appoint anti-death penalty jurists to the Supreme Court.
SiubhanDuinne
@Ruckus:
Interesting that both Patti Davis and Ron Jr. turned out to be decent, thoughtful, compassionate people. Given their parentage, I wouldn’t have predicted that, but I’ve ended up admiring both of the kids.
Chris
@Splitting Image:
Back when I was way more into religion and not nearly as cynical about the right yet, the way they viewed women with babies out of wedlock was one of the earliest red flags about them.
Because look, if your abortion politics were about being “pro-life,” then those women should be your fucking heroes. Sure, having sex outside of marriage might be a sin, but everybody sins. The fact that they chose to have a baby instead of aborting it means they’re taking the consequence of the sin and doing the right thing per Christian doctrine (well, at least those Christians’ doctrine), even though it’s going to completely upend their life and represent a massive commitment and even though in many cases they could have had the abortion instead and avoided all that trouble. If you were actually pro-life and Christian, you’d build a statue to every one of those people and hold them up to the rest of us as paragons of how we should be living.
The fact that they’re instead treated like they’ve been bitten by a vampire is a pretty big sign that it isn’t actually about “life.” Or even about sin, really.
Geminid
@Jeffro: This does raise an interesting question: what was the Democratic base in 2016? Who exactly was not enthused by Tim Kaine, and were they in fact the Democratic base?
There was an interesting experiment the next year in Virginia. Former Tom Perriello ran as a “Progressive” against Ralph Northam the “Moderate,” for the Governor nomination. Northam won and it wasn’t very close. Fairfax County, in “liberal Northern Virginia,” went 60-40 for Northam.
Northam had a good reputation among Black Virginians, as Tim Kaine had. Northam was also supported by abortion rights groups because he had proven himself to be a strong supporter of woman’s right to choose. I think his victory illustrated who was in fact the Democratic base
Ed. Of course, this was only Virginia. But aside from the unusual number of civilian federal government and military employees, Virginia is fairly typical of blue states and some purple states, with a large number of Black voters, college grads, and first and second generation immigrants.
Citizen Alan
@Geminid: Hindsight?!? I was saying that in real-time!
Burnspbesq
@sab:
Judge Chutkan seems to have found one.
Citizen Alan
@Geminid: The pick itself wasn’t inexplicable. It was an intentional Fuck You to Bill Clinton, the man who picked him for VP, because he mistakenly thought that Americans actually gave a shit about Clinton getting a blow-job and so Independent voters would reward him for repudiating his own boss. Not inexplicable. Just fucking stupid.
Citizen Alan
@Geminid: Were there no viable VP choices from Pennsylvania or Wisconsin (two of the states she narrowly lost that tipped the EC)?
beckya57
As others have said, this isn’t mysterious. Every Dem female who’s come close to the WH has gotten viciously attacked. I keep shaking my head over the support for Whitmer: if she declares for 2028 she will be destroyed posthaste too. I concluded after 2016 that I wouldn’t see a female president in my lifetime, and that opinion hasn’t changed. (Haley on the GOP side has gotten comparatively glowing press, but the current GOP isn’t going to nominate a woman, so that’s irrelevant.)
Geminid
@Citizen Alan: Maybe Senator Bob Casey Jr. of Pennsylvania. He won reelection in 2018 by over 600,000 votes.
Casey might have been considered “too moderate,” though.
Geminid
@Citizen Alan: I probably should have said “inexplicable by conventional ticket-balancing standards.” Al Gore was a thinker, and he may have over-thought his VP pick
Princess
I think Harris is a perfectly fine VP, so much so that there’s a part of me that can’t fully compute the criticisms of her. I also low-key think that the parts of Biden that we didn’t expect on policy and are more to our taste here than what we did expect, are down to her. I think she’d be a fine president and she’s fully qualified.
The hair thing is vile. It’s also a heads you win tails she loses thing because if readers blame the staffer, the question is, why does she have that terrible staffer. I remember when Michelle Obama appeared at an event in Chicago in 2008 with natural hair tied back and we loved it because we knew it meant she trusted us enough to appear like that so she could spend more time with her girls and less time fixing her hair.
Princess
@Geminid: Kaine was a fine choice and one of Hillary’s biggest mistakes was that she used him really badly during the campaign. He was basically an afterthought after the convention, and that was exemplified by the fact that in her great big election post mortem book she gave him about a page and a half. Biden did much better with Harris
Kay
Yay! It’s spreading. Good job.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@rikyrah: Yeah, she should show up with an Angela Davis afro and see how they like them apples. Of course, I have never had an afro (nor am I black), so I don’t know how much maintenance one requires. I DID have long, frizzy hair during the 60s long straight hair era, and things were better after I discovered Curl Free, but putting my hair in huge rollers and avoiding any hint of humidity all through high school was a gigantic PITA.
I cut it short after college, and there was a period when I didn’t brush my hair, but instead wetted it down every morning so it would be curly all over and not mashed down in the back and used a hair pick.
Since I went white, I have lost my curl, and now just have thick hair with “body”. I have finally achieved a no hassle hairdo: I depend on a good, short, haircut, and I too spend about 5 minutes a day on my head. I continue to be astonished at how good black women I see on TV look (Joy Reid, I’m looking at you) when I know what they are dealing with. Of course, I have heard there is some (very understandable) wig use in the black community :-)
Geminid
@Princess: I followed VP Harris’s participation at the Munich Security Conference in February of 2022. This was at a critical time, right before Russia invaded Ukraine. She struck me as very competent both in her address to the conference and in the one-on-one “sidelines” meetings with various allies.
I had to search for the reporting though, because the “national” media ignored her. That has often been the case with the Vice President’s representation of our nation in foreign countries.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@trollhattan: Pete Wilson also gets the credit for killing the Republican Party in CA. In pursuit of reelection as gov (which he won, BTW), he was involved with that racist proposition against Latinos which turned Latinos away from the Rs permanently and we are now basically a one-party state.
Splitting Image
@Citizen Alan:
The obvious choice from Wisconsin was Russ Feingold, but if the Clinton campaign tapped him for VP, they would have conceded the Senate seat Feingold was trying to win back. Similarly, Sherrod Brown might have helped the national ticket, but the Dems would have lost the Ohio seat. The Dems seem to have felt they had more room to spare in Virginia, which was probably true.
This sort of thinking misses the point a bit, in my opinion. Balancing the ticket regionally was only standard practice when everybody on every ticket was a white male. The black guy and the woman had to put reassuring white men on their tickets and “balance” them that way. Biden worked out better than Kaine did, that’s all. Obama and Biden weren’t sandbagged in the last week of their campaign by the head of the FBI though. Comey does his fucking job and the what-ifs would be very different.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@CarolPW: You sound about my age. My undergrad diploma from Berkeley was signed by Ronnie (ugh).
m.j.
The only debate worth watching will be the vice-presidential debate.
I may take a day off work just to watch it live the night before.
Chris
@beckya57:
Republican women get held to a completely different standard in any case. Just by being Republican, they’ve proven that they’re “safe” women.
MomSense
@beckya57:
It’s not all women, just that woman but said about EVERY woman.
Hoppie
Really like the portmanteau “misogynoir”, which I had never seen before.
CarolPW
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):
I dropped out and started over in Community College, went back and got my bachelors diploma signed by Gov. Moonbeam in his first year of his first term. If I had been a bit more prompt getting my Ph.D. Jerry would have signed that too, but alas it was Deukmejian.
Soprano2
@Mike in NC: They seem to believe that if they got TFG back as president all the prices would go back to what they were in 2019. It’s nutty, is what it is.
Lyrebird
I love so many comments here!
And from the unnecessary no let’s call it tendentious polling and making an issue where there isn’t one to the racism plus misogyny crap about her hair… I totes agree it’s the media pouting and making this all about themselves. Fine if the world weren’t on fire and if they weren’t making things worse.
I have seen a meme of a Black woman who purses her lips, picks up her purse, and gets up to leave. I don’t want to coopt, so I wouldn’t embed it even if I could, but thhat’s how I feel when some major news org is picking at Madame VP’s reputation. Eff off, is the other expression of how I feel about it!
Maybe it’s a sign that they got the dern memo that we are NOT changing (ETA: presidential) candidates just to make their lives exciting, TYVM.
Ruckus
As someone who has been a boss, in my own company and in the military, I learned long ago to look at a person’s work efforts and not the way they comb their hair. What do they bring to the effort, because all the crap that matters to the press is exactly that, crap that they try to make important, to give themselves some sort of a boost.
What does the person someone works for think of the job they are doing?
What is the result of the job someone is doing?
Is it satisfactory or is it better than that?
I’ve employed/had people work for me, quite a few people over the years, and there are 2 questions I ask.
1. Can they accomplish the job?
2. Do they give the job the required effort?
After that it is all BS. In this case she does the job like every other job she’s had – very well. She’s smart, she’s effective, she knows the work and does it well. If necessary she could replace the person ahead of her in line. I can think of some in this job before her who didn’t met those qualifications.
wjca
Has anybody asked Gore why?
lowtechcyclist
@JaneE:
To get bipartisan on this subject, “Whatever Became of Hubert?”
And it goes without saying that Spiro Agnew had no policy role in the Nixon White House.
I think Jimmy Carter was the first President to give his VP any role at all besides making the occasional speech and breaking tie votes in the Senate.
wjca
Pretty much the same. What frustrates me is that, decades later, the damage still hasn’t been fixed. Or even seriously addressed. For the last three decades Republicans have been an irrelevance in our state government. So, what’s the hold up???
Bill Arnold
@Geminid:
Were they wounded, or healthy?
Rule 29. Medical Transports
RevRick
Saw the results of a Pew/Navigator poll on Dkos about Congressional favorability ratings. The generic question yielded the predictable results that Dems suck, but Republicans suck more. But then they asked people to rate their own named Representatives in swing districts. This resulted in a huge shift. The Democratic Representative was given a +9% rating. The Republican Representative, on the other hand, was underwater at -10%.
Going into 2024, the Democrats will enter the election buoyed by positive feelings about their performance. The Republicans will be carrying an anchor.
RevRick
@wjca: Lieberman had the reputation of being a straight arrow, and thus presented a contrast to the supposed loose morality of Clinton’s administration.
Jackie
TIFG gets 2 1/2 weeks to threaten and slander potential witnesses and prosecutors in DC’s J6 trial as an appeals court granted a stay of Judge Chutkan’s gag order again.
Geminid
@Bill Arnold: Yes, that is an important distinction: whether the ambulance was carrying healthy fighters or wounded ones.
But I wanted to point out that the accurate assertion that Israel had admitted that they had destroyed the ambulance left out the other half of Israel’s admission of responsibility.