News flash: Harris is not a remake of Barack Obama
Even the usually stone-faced David Axelrod couldn’t suppress his enthusiasm at the first rally of the Democratic presidential ticket, but he was downright Rushmore-ian compared with other giddy commentators on CNN’s panel.
I beg to differ that Vice President Kamala Harris is the second coming of Barack Obama, though that is what her campaign would like you to think. And whether her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, is the folksiest “normy,” as one commentator put it, White guy in the Midwest, news anchors ought to be able to resist the tug of Harris mania.
Poor Joe Biden, who, we should note, is still the president of the United States. What must he be thinking as Kamalapalooza takes off before the dust has settled on his shuffle off to Delaware or wherever Nancy Pelosi has stashed him. Maybe he’s in the Obamas’ basement, from which the former president once joked he wouldn’t mind running the country via a frontman or woman wearing an earpiece as a third-term president. Will Obama be dictating terms to a President Harris, whom he once complimented as “the best-looking attorney general in the country.”
The feminist guard, ever fluid in their perceived effrontery, tsk-tsked that remark, but Obama was merely saying what was obviously true. Of course, he had to apologize. Also true: Without her beauty, Harris might be joining Biden in retirement. All you have to do is imagine her spoken words coming from a less-attractive package. Or put her on radio.
I’m treading on soggy turf here, and not just because Tropical Storm Debby has dumped a couple of lakes in my yard. Speaking about a person’s physical appearance today, especially a woman’s, is verboten. “Telegenic” is the only acceptable term, as though people can’t extrapolate the meaning. Why not be bold - and honest - as Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan was in a recent column? A bad picture can’t be taken of Harris. She’s gorgeous. There.
She’s also a Big Government liberal, as her childhood friend Lateefah Simon described her during a recent NPR interview. Simon recalled Harris telling her, as she handed Simon a professional suit to wear to work: “We lift as we climb. I sent you home so you understood that this is big government, and government is not the enemy, it is the prize.”
Big Government, which Republicans since Ronald Reagan have viewed as the enemy (except when they’re running it), isn’t Harris’s best selling point when the country is facing a likely recession, and a vast swath (70 percent) of Americans can barely pay their bills. Recent polling and election history tell us that voters usually turn to Republicans when the economy is on the line.
Walz boasts that Democrats, unlike Republicans, “don’t have the Ten Commandments
posted in our classrooms, but we have free breakfast and lunch.” Which is to say Walz might be to the left of Harris and is one of the reasons Trump said “I could not be more thrilled” when Walz became Harris’s pick as running mate. But Walz will “unleash HELL ON EARTH,” as Trump also said (his emphasis). I didn’t realize vice presidents were so powerful.
The man whose assaults on democracy (and women) are too numerous to mention was referring to Walz’s expansion of state services to undocumented Minnesotans, including drivers’ licenses for all, access to the state’s publicly funded health insurance program for low-income residents, and in-state tuition for low-income students, including the undocumented. Minnesota has an estimated 81,000 undocumented residents. I suspect that if Trump prevails in November, he’ll be shipping a few thousand (or million) more to Walz’s backyard.
These observations shouldn’t be construed as an endorsement of Trump, who remains as Trumpy as ever, despite his neardeath experience at the hands of a would-be assassin. Nor of his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, erstwhile hillbilly/ Harvard law grad/hedge funder and provocateur, who, among his several foot-in-mouth feats, let the cat ladies out of the bag. As unforced errors go, this one surely has nine lives.
Good luck, America.