POLITICS ILLUMINATED

The “Most Important Election in Your Lifetime” Just Raised its Stakes

Let’s hope the odds aren’t rigged for the house like they are in Vegas

I’ve got a little news flash for the people who stopped reading and watching the news since that dark morning of November 9, 2016.

We’ll skip over the part where you began to wonder if the current toxic agent infecting the White House is more of a threat to this country than a pandemic on its way to killing 300,000 Americans by December.¹

We’ll skip over the part where the Democrats rejected the two best people who could turn this country around in Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. But you knew that was coming, didn’t you?

And we’re going to skip over the part where the afterthought candidate who failed to gain any traction at all in 1988 and 2008 somehow became the Democratic nominee. This was an event so historically unlikely you’d think it was a pitch for another shitty NetFlix movie.

No, the news here is in the hope that three could be a charm for women in the executive branch of the most powerful nation in the world.

(Sorry, but you can’t count Sarah Palin as an actual candidate. Kevin Hart is not a pro basketball player because he gets to play at the NBA All-Star celebrity exhibition.)

Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee for Vice President, as Joe Biden desperately seeks to excite the young voters of this country with a fresh new political face.

Will the nomination of Kamala Harris for Vice President change the future of this country?

If the Democrats lose in November, Harris becomes another historical footnote, joining Geraldine Ferrarro and Hillary Clinton on the list of glass ceiling casualties.

But if Joe Biden wins, we are looking at anywhere from four to sixteen years of Harris on the national stage, so it’s worth examining the question from four different perspectives.

1. Optics

Putting a black-Indian woman in the position of next-in-line to become president is a wonderful symbolic action to restore faith in the American Dream.

And given the terrible record of the American Dream over the last 40 years, even a placebo is a welcome respite from the never-ending destruction of the middle class.

Could her selection motivate every person of color and every woman to vote for the Harris-Biden ticket? I hope so because our country needs to stick a pin in that infected Oval Office and drain out all the puss.

If you think Black Panther meant something to black audiences in 2018, imagine the ripple effects for people of color, women, and immigrants when they see Kamala Harris presiding over the Senate deliberations and joint sessions of Congress.

Better yet, imagine 2024 or 2028 when Harris will be the de facto Democratic candidate for President.

While actual young people may laugh at the idea of a 55-year-old woman being paraded around as a talisman for millennials when you look at these pictures, can you really tell me she doesn’t look like a breath of fresh air?

2. Policy

Our lives will radically improve once Herr Drumpf is removed from office, along with all his toadies in the Senate, but the question is “how much?”

If you think the new leadership is going to push the boundaries and establish policies that fulfill our progressive wish list, you haven’t been paying attention. (Okay, it’s not going to be as bad as a Ramsay Bolton kind of “you haven’t been paying attention,” but there will be no unicorns and rainbows soon, either.)

Remember that guy Obama?

He fell short on so many of the dreams I had for him when I did volunteer work on his two presidential campaigns. But think of the progress that was made,² even if it was only moderate progress. Here are six of the biggest ones.

• A national health care system that helped 20 more million people gain health coverage while protecting people with pre-existing conditions from the real “Death Panels,” aka for-profit health insurance companies
• Prevented a second Great Depression, even though many of the bailout recipients were the CEOs who caused the original mess.
• Killed Osama bin Laden and ended the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
• Repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”
• Support federal recognition of same-sex marriage
• Protected DREAMers from deportation

And that was “a big fuckin’ deal,” to quote our ready-for-late-night-standup-comedy presidential nominee.

3. Values

Like Obama, Kamala Harris is not the radical leftist operative as her opponents will paint her.

As a Californian, I’ve been aware of Kamala Harris’ political career since she ran for Attorney General. Here’s a description of her from SF Weekly³ which has covered her career:

In her San Francisco and Sacramento days, Harris carefully weighed public opinion on sensitive issues, angering activists across the political spectrum looking for more decisive action. She exhibited an uncanny ability to avoid ideological boxes, to skirt the terms of difficult debates. She was wary of the media, at times even secretive, and yet would also put herself in vulnerable situations in public, sometimes getting herself into hot water in the process.

She is a charismatic, brilliant, and driven person, but she is still a politician.

Her stances on legalizing marijuana and Medicare for All have “evolved” in step with the political landscape, as did Obama’s views on same-sex marriage.

Without a doubt, she will be a strong advocate for women’s rights, but I wouldn’t expect her to go after big corporations the same way she went after the banks during the financial meltdown in 2009.

According to the Washington Post⁴:

“Wall Street isn’t scared of Harris in the same way they feared the more iconoclastic Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders who pledged to break up the big banks.”

She is a much more comfortable fit for Biden than Elizabeth Warren, our country’s best advocate for financial reform and fixing our rigged economy. (Sigh, I love Elizabeth Warren but knew she had no chance to win the Democratic nomination.) And if she wins the White House in the next four or eight years, her flip flop on medicare for all doesn’t give me a lot of confidence that she’ll be pushing hard for the more extreme parts of Bernie Sanders’ agenda.

Still, I would take five straight terms of Obama incrementalism over the roller-coaster-without-seat-belts we have been enduring for the last four years.

4. Diversity and Division

The selection of Harris is going to be the cultural equivalent of Ragnarök for a large part of white America.

Kamala Harris is the ultimate triple threat straw man for the right-wing echo chamber: black, female, and a child of immigrants. If you think Republicans played dirty with Obama and Hillary, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

This election may be the last great push by the Republican party as it is currently constructed to stay relevant on a national level. While the population of non-Hispanic Caucasians will dip below 50% in 2045,⁵ the change in demographics in many key electoral states is going to tip the scales.

Since the 1980s, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Virginia have gone from reliably red to swing states to blue. Assuming the traditionally blue rust belt states return to the norm (Trump won Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — and the electoral win — by 100,000 votes), it will be impossible for the GOP to win the White House without even more massive efforts in voter suppression (but they are getting better and better at it —look at Georgia, 2018).

Things will get worse for the GOP as states like Arizona and Georgia have become vulnerable. Arizona elected Democrat Krysten Sinema in 2018, and challenger Mark Kelly has a small lead over his opponent, Martha McSally in the polls for the current election.

In response, the Republican party will do everything in its power to misinform you into making bad choices, annoy you into not voting, or take away your rights if they can’t stop you with the first two courses of action.

In Georgia, the 2018 race for governor in Georgia was decided by .4% in a state that has “been really good about making Jim Crow 2.0 seem reasonable,”⁶ according to Carol Anderson, the author of One Person, No Vote, an exhaustive review of modern voter-suppression efforts.

Brian Kemp, the Republican candidate for governor, refused to resign as Secretary of State before the election, and used the full power of his office, as he carried out mass purges of the voter rolls and put 53,000 voter registrations on hold, nearly 70 percent of which were black voters.⁷

As bad as you think the Russians are, the greatest threat to Democracy comes from within, through propaganda, voter apathy, and the latest methods of voters suppression.

Even though it sounds like a broken record, this is the most important election of your lifetime if you are young, a person of color, or an immigrant.

One more right-wing Supreme Court Justice appointment will form a legal roadblock to progress for the next 20–30 years. Just look at the composition of the current Supreme Court.

This court already gutted The Voter Rights Act of 1965, which has allowed Republican-controlled states to party like it’s 1899.

Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, “Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves and the only way they could do this is by not voting.”

He was wrong.

We already live in a place where people who want to vote are being prevented from doing so.

FOOTNOTES

¹From NPR, Aug. 6, 2020:

By Dec. 1, the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 could reach nearly 300,000. That’s the grim new projection from researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

²From Washington Monthly, “Obama’s Top 50 Accomplishments, Revisited,” January/February 2017

³From SF Weekly, “Looking Back on Kamala Harris’ Record in California,” Aug. 11, 2020

⁴According to the Washington Post, “The Finance 202: Kamala Harris pick earns praise from Wall Street — and anti-Wall Street crusaders,” Aug. 12, 2020

⁵From Brookings, “The US will become ‘minority white’ in 2045, Census projects,” Sept. 10, 2018

⁶From The Atlantic, “The Georgia Governor’s Race Has Brought Voter Suppression Into Full View,” Nov. 6, 2018

⁷From Vox, “Voter suppression really may have made the difference for Republicans in Georgia,” Nov. 7, 2018

⁸Wikipedia, Voting Rights Act of 1965