Kamala harris

Kamala Harris is Joe Biden’s pick for vice president. Has he lost his mind? Wait, maybe don’t answer that. Still, the Biden campaign’s decision is utterly bewildering. As Politico carefully reported on Tuesday, ‘Biden called Harris "a worthy opponent and a worthy running mate", alluding to the pair’s rivalry during the earlier stages of the Democratic primary.’ Perhaps the former vice president goes by a different definition of ‘worthy’ than the ones in Merriam-Webster: ‘having worth or value; honorable, meritorious; having sufficient worth or importance’. He remembers who Kamala Harris is, right? Again, don’t answer that.

This COVID-infected campaign season has brought more than its fair share of surprises. Virtual conventions, turnover at the top of the Trump campaign, sudden swings in previously steady polls. It’s a year like no other, Still, one pillar of presidential electioneering remains: Joe Biden needs to pick a running mate.The vice presidency is a peculiar office: at once vestigial and essential. The office has few defined duties. We’ve all read the quote of John Nance 'Cactus Jack' Garner — FDR’s first VP — who described it as 'not worth a bucket of warm piss’. Yet as Garner’s successor’s successor Harry Truman showed, who a candidate picks to play second fiddle can be one of a presidential aspirant’s most monumental decisions.

Move over, Kamala — there’s a new bad sheriff in town. After the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minnesota police officer, Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s prosecutorial record is finally coming under serious scrutiny. While Harris copped a fair share of criticism during the Democratic primary for her stint locking up African Americans, Klobuchar managed to evade a similar onslaught. But now, with Minnesota in flames and her hat in the Veep ring, people are paying attention: in 2006, during her tenure as Hennepin County attorney, Klobuchar failed to criminally charge Derek Chauvin, the police officer charged with killing George Floyd.

As we inch closer to the Democratic National Convention in August, the question looms ever larger: who will Joe Biden choose as his running mate? Running mates are usually chosen to inoculate the party’s ticket from a vulnerability. in 2008, for instance, Sen. Biden was the career statesman running mate chosen to cover for Barack Obama’s inexperience. In 2016, Mike Pence was the evangelical bonafide Republican picked to help Donald Trump the outsider. Biden’s team knows he must pick someone who will act as a human shield against his biggest issue: women.

Joe Biden needs a co-president. Not just a running mate, not just a potential vice president, but someone who will be president-in-waiting should Biden win in November — the month he turns 78. The idea of Biden running for a second term in 2024 at the age of 81 is hard to take seriously. So far, this is something everybody knows but nobody is taking seriously enough. The question of Biden’s current mental acuity has become a campaign issue, but even Democrats who believe Biden is up to the job of being president in 2020 will have a tough time arguing that he’d be fit to serve a second term. In looking at the Democratic ticket this year, voters will in effect be asked to vote not just for a president but for a 2024 nominee as well.

Their blazers are bright, but their futures are not. Elite women Democrats have faced a brutal reckoning over the past five years. It seemed, as Barack Obama might have put it, that the arc of history was bending in their direction. Half the electorate are female, and feminist identity politics seemed the natural destination for America’s progressive party. It hasn’t worked out that way. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton signaled the beginning of the end for the Pantsuit Nation™. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the DC media bubble crowned her successor to Barack Obama’s Democratic party and a shoo-in for the presidency. The American electorate disagreed.

Little over a week on from the sad demise of the Kamala Harris presidential campaign, the California senator is the bookies' favorite to be the Democratic vice presidential candidate. Yes, despite her candidacy's high-point coming at the expense of Joe Biden in the first debate — shivving the front-runner for holding a stance on busing remarkably similar to her own — there have been rumblings about her being the right woman to balance his ticket. In most presidential elections, the vice presidential candidates do not matter — arguably the only one to move the needle in the past 50 years was Sarah Palin, and not in a good way. But 2020 could be different, especially if Joe Biden ends up as the Democratic nominee.

The big news on Monday this week was that latecomer billionaire presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg had ‘surged’ past Sen. Kamala Harris in a new poll by Hill-HarrisX. By Tuesday the big news was that Harris had departed the race. Was it Bloomberg’s stellar 6 percent showing that did it? Unlikely. The Harris campaign had had issues, as documented in a recent New York Times piece detailing the deep mismanagement of her campaign. One of the death blows in the piece was this line: ‘Today, her aides are given to gallows humor about just how many slogans and one-liners she has cycled through, with one recalling how “‘speak truth’ spring” gave way to “‘3 a.m.

Every politician who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is the height of inauthenticity. Fortunately for lovers of comedy, many politicians are too stupid and too full of themselves to notice this. Every election year, another squad marches hopelessly into the enfilade of the inauthenticity firing line. Think of Bush I visiting the National Grocers Association Convention in Florida back in 1992. Bush ambled towards an exhibit where a new type of checkout scanner was the hallowed attraction. The fancy device could read torn barcodes and weigh groceries.

Fear not everyone — there are only seven Democratic debates left this cycle. As if the prospect of a fifth in six months wasn't exhausting enough, the Atlanta bonanza kicked off after 11 hours of impeachment hearings. No wonder the spin room was more muted than usual. Host Rachel Maddow opened proceedings with an impeachment question, making the huge assumption that most viewers had watched them (they hadn't). Of the senators running, only Bernie Sanders didn't take the bait. 'We should not be consumed by Donald Trump', he said, 'we can deal with Trump's corruption, but we also have to stand up for the working families of this country.' Much of the night appeared like business as usual.

If you blinked, you probably missed it: a rather interesting 2020 presidential poll came out this week. Not one of the endless tracking polls that flood RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight – websites anxiously refreshed dozens of times per day by political obsessives. This poll in some sense offers a more illuminating picture of the state of the Democratic primary race. Reporter Tom Lobiondo revealed the results of a secret survey gauging the sentiments not of the general voting public, but the party consultant class. Democratic operative types now overwhelmingly think Elizabeth Warren will be the nominee.

Sen. Kamala Harris has been positioning herself as a supporter of sex worker rights lately. But listen closely when she talks about the issue and a different story emerges. It's a disconnect that highlights Harris's larger pattern of obscuring her positions, plans, and past. Twice when asked outright about the decriminalization of prostitution — first by Terrell J. Starr of The Root and then during a televised CNN townhall — Harris has answered in a way that's been characterized as supportive. But both times she has described her preferred system as one in which ‘johns’ would still be arrested. That is not decriminalization. Decriminalizing prostitution means neither paying for nor selling sex is illegal so long as it takes place between consenting adults.

It’s no great mystery why Tulsi Gabbard chose to focus her ire on Kamala Harris last night in Detroit. For months, Harris has gotten away with empty identity-related sloganeering and shallow performative stunts, like the one she pulled on Joe Biden in the previous round of debates – which of course was received rapturously by much of the media, leading to bogus claims of a Harris 'surge.' Meanwhile, left unexamined was the phony central conceit of Harris’s campaign: that she is a ‘progressive prosecutor’ and therefore supremely well-qualified to make the case against Trump. This mantra has long been ripe for a proper dissection, given its utter ridiculousness.

The DNC are ditching porn stars, yacht rides and Pitbull for rusty motors and the 8 Mile Road, as the Democratic primary circus rolls from one Art Deco metropolis to another. In Detroit as in Miami, 20 contenders will face each other in sets of 10 across two nights. Funnily enough, the debacle will take place in the Fox Theater, though of course CNN will be hosting. Anderson Cooper breathlessly announced which Democrats would debate each other on which night during an hour-long special Thursday. For all the complaints about Trump turning politics into reality television, the major networks don't half lean into it. Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg find themselves shunted to the undercard night with Elizabeth Warren, as they will take the stage on Tuesday July 30.

Joe Biden ran two presidential campaigns alongside Barack Obama and served as vice president for eight years, yet his decades-old position on federal busing never seemed to come up during that extensive time period. If it did, it was confined to niche left-wing media. Certainly the denizens of MSNBC or the blue-check Twitter spinmeisters seldom, if ever, evinced concern for that aspect of Biden's record which they now claim to find so morally abominable. So the onslaught of attacks on Biden, like the one launched at last night's debate by Kamala Harris, come across as having a tinge of bad faith.

Let’s be honest – the best part of primary season is seeing just how wild some of the fringe candidates are. Every election cycle throws up a few quixotic single-issue mavericks without a hope in hell of actually securing the nomination. Such campaigns are usually admirable attempts to force concessions from more viable contenders or shift the debate on some key issue or another – standard politicking. Somewhat more unorthodox is the campaign of Mike Gravel – the ex-politician who doesn’t want anyone to vote for him at all. Mike Gravel, former congressman and senator from Alaska has been politically reincarnated by David Oks, a high-school senior who is now serving as his campaign manager.