From 2019: Kamala Harris articles
David Shasha
Senator Kamala Harris on the Road to the White House: Notes and Resources
It might be a little early to begin talking about the ever-expanding field of Democrats running for the 2020 presidential election, but with all the depressing news that is going on with Trumpworld criminality, it would be good to find something positive to talk about.
When browsing the front table at Barnes and Noble recently, I quickly skimmed the new book by California Senator Kamala Harris:
https://www.amazon.com/Truths-We-Hold-American-Journey/dp/0525560718
Her story is indeed extremely compelling, as we learned at a Politics and Prose book event moderated by Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart, held on January 9th at George Washington University, and broadcast on C-Span’s Book TV:
The event took place in the first days of the Trump Shutdown, but before Ms. Harris’ official announcement of her presidential candidacy:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/kamala-harris-2020-781990/
Harris had already emerged as a politician of significance for her memorably tough questioning at the Rapist Kavanaugh confirmation hearing:
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Kamala-Harris-Kavanaugh-White-House-FBI-speech-13285239.php
She brought the same energy and passion to her questioning of Mueller-hater Bill Barr:
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/kamala-harris-william-barr-confirmation-mueller-13535981.php
And just as she was getting out of the campaign starting gate, the attacks came – but mostly from the Hard Left rather than the Hard Right.
There was this very harsh Op-Ed in The New York Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/opinion/kamala-harris-criminal-justice.html
Lara Bazelton, the author of the critical assessment, teaches Law at the University of San Francisco, in Harris’ backyard:
https://larabazelon.com/about-me/
Harris appears to be as bad as Roy Cohn!
Even worse was this screed from the Afropunk website:
https://afropunk.com/2019/01/kamala-harris-has-been-tough-on-black-people-not-crime/
This critique is likely what we will be getting from the Ta-Nehisi Coates/Black Lives Matter/Garveyite Separatist crowd; a dismissal of Harris as a very willing and ambitious stooge for a corrupt criminal justice system.
I have discussed the Coates Garveyite Separatism problem in the following articles:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/coates/davidshasha/7r-J6K9j27Q/e9jnzDmZUF8J
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/coates/davidshasha/BvD7ZQLD3rY/bCTELxU8DwAJ
The New Separatism has created new and very strange alliances between Left and Right in their attitudes towards Trumpworld.
Perhaps we can call it the “Kanye-Kaepernick Dialectic”: two men on opposite sides of the Separatist divide. Neither appears to vote. It is just about the Hate America and nothing else.
This, I suppose, is the New Activism and its contempt for process:
https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/14/sport/49ers-qb-colin-kaepernick-explains-why-he-didnt-vote/index.html
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/kanye-west-trump-support-231601
Let us all rise for the YEEZUS – MAGA Hip-Hop stooge of Daddy Trump and the White Racists:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/yeezus/davidshasha/IMWRMcpTU7o/L3-bQCxbAQAJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/yeezus/davidshasha/VV6i0BPjYbs/1zBy3GBWBQAJ
The iconic image of West wearing his beloved MAGA hat along with a Kaepernick shirt speaks volumes about the current mess:
https://www.ebony.com/entertainment/kanye-west-wears-maga-hat-with-colin-kaepernick-sweatshirt/
Sadly, Trump has exacerbated this Separatism for his own nefarious ends, and built his Alt-Right movement on its racist values.
We could see this in the Charlottesville tragedy and its pathetic aftermath:
As we have sadly witnessed, many have willingly entered this demonic hell.
Kamala Harris is seen as an enemy in the Hate America world, whatever side of that world you are on politically.
Indeed, the Afropunk piece goes so far as to incorrectly smear her as a supporter of the Death Penalty; an ironic assertion given how the Right has chosen to go after her:
It is the perfect confluence of anti-Harris hatred.
She is a card-carrying member of Black Lives Matter for Breitbart, and an enemy of Black Lives Matter for Afropunk.
The following piece from The Intercept puts an emphatic signature to the Hard Left critique:
The Hate America crowd is unlikely to support any Democratic Party candidate for president; preferring instead to create absolute litmus tests that are utterly disconnected from the current reality, and which shows a callous disregard for the urgent need to remove Trump from office.
Indeed, it is hard to think of a more Progressive candidate than Harris in the projected Democratic field.
Perhaps the Russia-lovers writing for Counterpunch and The Intercept would be better off in the wacky world of Putin:
It is actually an interesting dilemma for Harris to be in: She is a Bay Area Progressive – a Nancy Pelosi-style San Francisco Liberal – and yet her career has been dedicated to Law Enforcement as a public prosecutor, District Attorney, and State Attorney General:
The Pelosi-Bay Area connection is itself very important, given the current successes of the House Speaker against Trump:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/COpJ2ImePkY
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/6Lrv3_hBbag
We should also note that Harris’ family background is as a child of immigrants.
Her mother came here from India, her father from Jamaica:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris#Early_life_and_education
She graduated from Howard University, perhaps the most prominent of the Historically Black Colleges:
https://magazine.howard.edu/categories/alumni-profiles/kamala-harris-california-attorney-general
It is clear that she is a brilliant legal mind, something that reminds us of Barack Obama, but her depth of practical management experience and her lengthy record of achievement in the Law Enforcement community clearly separates her from the 44th president. Her extensive professional record speaks to a much deeper reservoir of accomplishment, compared to Obama’s thin resumé when he got to the White House.
In the Capehart interview we learned of a shouting match she had with J.P. Morgan Chase head Jamie Dimon during the Mortgage Crisis that was decimating America:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/26/kamala-harris-has-complicated-history-with-wall-street.html
This particular story stood out among many vivid narratives, largely because it speaks to the fire in Harris’ belly and her fearlessness and effectiveness as a leader. It speaks to the multi-dimensionality of her activist bona fides, as well as to her very deft Pelosi-like confrontational style.
As the campaign continues, we will be seeing a lot of her cheerful demeanor and her fulsome toothy smile; but it is when she turns fiery and serious that she is the most affecting and inspirational.
And a good deal of this fire comes from her family background.
Her father and mother were both part of the Civil Rights Movement back in the day. They met at UC Berkeley, and eventually became a pair of extremely accomplished academic professionals. Her father taught Economics at Stanford, her late mother was a cancer research scientist.
They have both been profiled in their native countries’ media in connection with their famous daughter:
https://www.jamaicaglobalonline.com/kamala-harris-jamaican-heritage/
Harris is very much a child of the Post-Colonial, and she is quite conscious of these historical ties and their links to American identity and cultural pluralism in the 21st century. She is a devoted integrationist who is proudly part of the system, but unafraid to speak truth to power and uphold the core concerns of Progressivism.
Unlike Obama, raised in Hawaii by his White mother’s family, Harris has traveled extensively in the Post-Colonial world and is truly cognizant of the many complexities of that history and its cultural ramifications.
C-Span also broadcast her very raucous inaugural campaign rally in Oakland that was attended by more than 20,000 supporters:
The rally reconfirmed the joyfulness and optimism that she projected at the GWU book event. The dynamic setting that was the inverse of a Trump Fascist rally: Where Trump has consistently used his campaign-style events – truly inappropriate for a sitting president – to present a White Supremacist ethos in an authoritarian modality, Harris’ hometown celebration focused on her own personal story with a vigorous presentation of Progressive policy issues.
Watching the rally, we could very clearly see the cultural pluralism and ethnic diversity of the crowd and the way that Harris so effortlessly inspired them.
It was a FOX News nightmare; not a monocultural, monolingual, recherché revanchism, but an accurate reflection of what multi-cultural America actually looks like at the present moment in our history.
Watching the event, it was hard for me to think who would better represent our democratic values, and who is better qualified to take on the New Fascism and its deplorable journey to a racist American past.
The day after the Oakland campaign rally, CNN broadcast a Harris Town Hall in Des Moines, Iowa, moderated by Jake Tapper:
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/kamala-harris-town-hall-iowa/index.html
Here is the full video of the event:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4LBQiYWhKs
We must keep in mind that Iowa is the home of newly re-elected arch-racist Congressman Steve King and a loyal Trumpworld nexus:
It is therefore important to note that the Town Hall audience was filled with professional types and college students who were largely in sync with Harris’ Progressive values.
But, as I indicated earlier, the initial questions took sharp aim at her controversial prosecutorial background; showing us that the Hard Left is very hard at work seeking to undermine and hamstring her for being part of the Law Enforcement community.
So, as she was smoothly plowing through the usual political concerns – healthcare, immigration, education, environment, guns, militarism, gender, economic justice, and free trade – the event was carefully framed by her past history as a public prosecutor.
It is clear that this will cut two ways: many Americans will see her legal experience as a net positive, others further to the Left will see it as a net liability.
But one thing that she said in response to the attacks struck me: she made it clear that there are some people on the Left who would prefer that there were no prosecutors altogether.
I was taken by the defiant courageousness of the response, and the fearlessly vigorous defense of her record. It is this fearlessness and courage that she couples with a very calming message of unity, predicated on the bedrock idea of a shared American value-system that is not idle rhetoric.
It is a sincere call for a return to civil norms and the enforcement of the basic legal protections that we need to maintain our democracy; rules that have been discarded with extreme prejudice by a lawless White House with no respect for the Rule of Law, and for the constitutional requirements of our traditional system of governance.
Kamala Harris appears at this early stage of the electoral process to be the most vibrant and thoughtful of the Democratic candidates in the projected 2020 field. It is hard to imagine a more forceful match for the degenerate Trump, or a more compassionate champion of our core American values.
David Shasha
January 29, 2019
Kamala Harris Worries the Right Wingers: With a Special David Brooks Bonus!
I have already discussed the very exciting rollout of California Senator Kamala Harris’ presidential candidacy:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/Cgl9RTS-qaM
In that article I focused on the very tough pushback coming from the Hate America Left, which has seized on Harris’ background as a public prosecutor and very vocal supporter of the Rule of Law to bludgeon her.
The latest attack came from New Yorker writer and arch-Black Separatist Jelani Cobb:
While discussing the just-breaking news of the Ralph Northam KKK Blackface med school yearbook photo on the Chris Hayes show, Cobb decided to boldly insert Harris’ record as a prosecutor into the conversation!
Northam and Harris linked together in racist malfeasance.
That is some primo anti-Harris hatred indeed.
Even the usually accommodating White Liberal Hayes, close friend of Ta-Nehisi Coates, was taken aback and mumbled something critical.
We should expect more of this viciousness from the Black Separatist Hate America crowd.
But I also took note in my original article of the initial response by the Trumpworld Right, which tried to present Harris as a Black Lives Matter radical:
How ironic!
In addition to calling her the Black Lives Matter candidate, the FOX News Trump cabal opened a new front on the attack, going after her sex life:
It did not take long for the Trumpjews to get into the fray:
The Jewish Voice has proudly shown itself as a Trumplackey media organization by re-publishing the story on Harris’ relationship to former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.
The Trumpgutter is providing us with real results!
The Trumpjews carry the mantle for their hero!
Yet another approach to attacking Harris can be found in the following post from Townhall:
The article calls Harris an “Authoritarian”; just the sort of thing that the Right Wing Trump Authoritarians like to do, as they use projection as a means to duplicitously deflect from their own crooked malfeasance and their neo-Fascist ideology.
Trump-style projection is indeed the order of the day on the wacko Right:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freud-lives/201807/the-projector-in-chief
The following paragraph in the Townhall article brings together the Hard Left critique of Harris the Prosecutor with a truly hypocritical Right Wing flourish:
It is unsurprising that Harris openly bragged about having "a huge stick" as a prosecutor in San Francisco who threatened poor parents with jail time in an effort to craft social policy that was not within her bailiwick. You can imagine what kinds of things she would have in store for personal freedom if she could brandish the huge stick of the executive branch. Her despicable actions during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings offer us a taste of how effortlessly she embraces abusing the process and her power to get her way.
Townhall is now very concerned with “poor parents” – so long as that concern is meant to undermine Harris and her Progressive ideas.
It is all about the vaunted Right Wing definition of “Personal Freedom”; which, as we have learned all too well, means the “Freedom” of elites to oppress the downtrodden and keep all their ill-gotten cash.
Those same “poor parents” that Townhall is so deeply concerned about would be helped immensely by Harris’ Medicare for All proposal – a proposal attacked by Townhall Trumpsters like Stephen “Club for Growth” Moore:
https://townhall.com/columnists/stephenmoore/2018/10/23/medicareforall-n2530902
Indeed, “Personal Freedom” is very much in the eye of the beholder!
We should recall in this context that the Right Wingers want people to have the Freedom to Die:
Let us never forget the Tea Party chants of “Let Them Die!” at a Republican presidential debate back in 2011 when we consider the Medicare for All proposal.
That is the Republican idea of “Personal Freedom” that Harris threatens.
So, I suppose that we will see a good deal of this hyper-partisan ideological confusion as Left becomes Right and the Right becomes hysterical.
There is perhaps no better example of this confusion than the response to Harris from our dear friend David Brooks.
As we have seen recently, Brooks has been pointedly going after the Liberals and not Donald Trump.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/hbpHLp4Ps8A
He wants us to know that he is very upset with the “Call-Out” culture:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/xjDYz5VHJlA
And in his defense of the Covington Catholic High School racists, Brooks decided to once again go full Jonathan Haidt and lament all this Liberal nonsense:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/beoLJaoDawA
But the moral apoplexy of his column “Kamala Harris, Call-Out Star” made my heart proud:
His PILPUL seems to have gotten the better of him!
Here is the complete article:
The more you learn about Kamala Harris, the more formidable she appears. She is an amazing amalgam of different elements — highly educated elite meritocrat, Oakland street fighter, crusading, rough-elbow prosecutor, canny machine pol and telegenic rhetorical brawler.
She is also probably the toughest and most hard-nosed progressive on the scene right now.
Some on the left are criticizing Harris because she was an aggressive prosecutor for years, participating in the era of mass incarceration. But as the Democratic Party has moved left ideologically, and grown more suspicious of cops and prosecutors, it has also hardened emotionally.
Democratic primary voters may decide that if they are going to take on Donald Trump, they’re going to want the roughest, most confrontational gladiator they can get. After they see how, well, direct she can be, they may decide that person is Kamala Harris.
Harris is very much a product of the highly educated progressive coastal elite. Her father is a professor at Stanford. Her mother, who was a breast cancer researcher, got her Ph.D. at 25. Harris grew up with ballet, violin, French horn and perfectionism.
She went to a prestigious school (Howard), was president of various student organizations and got great internships (Federal Trade Commission, U.S. Senate) before going to law school, zooming up the political ladder and marrying a partner at a prestigious law firm. She is famously comfortable in rooms of the very wealthy.
But in deciding to work as a prosecutor — rather than going to a law firm — Harris was immersing herself in the gritty world the rest of the achievatrons were rising away from. Working as a prosecutor put her in touch with a world in which brothers sexually abuse their 6-year-old sisters, in which a man literally scalps his girlfriend in a domestic dispute, in which parents are too financially stressed and personally strained to have the time to make sure their kids go to school.
The criminal justice system is an adversarial system, and it seems to have trained her in the art of confrontation. She developed what Benjamin Wallace-Wells of The New Yorker called an “eye for an enemy” — the ability to spot the villain in any situation.
In her memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” she describes her political campaigns as a series of hard-fought battles against tough foes. She ran for San Francisco district attorney against her former boss, whose nickname was Kayo (pronounced “K.O.”), for all the people he knocked out. But she beat him.
Gary Delagnes, a former head of the city’s police union, told Politico that he was standing at a party before that campaign when Harris put a finger in his chest and said: “You better endorse me, you better endorse me. You get it?” Delagnes interpreted that as: I’m going to be a player here. You better get on board. He went on to tell Politico: “She’s an intelligent person. She is a — let’s see, I better pick this word carefully: ruthless.”
Harris was a beneficiary of the machine of the California political giant Willie Brown, who she briefly dated. Brown appointed her to the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission, both of which paid comfortable salaries.
That association has haunted her over the years, but Harris made it clear at one forum that there is no way she’s going to bend if Brown or his allies try to influence her. “You just make them understand that if they’re going to try to hurt you, they’re going to get hurt more.”
Especially as it goes along, her book is largely a series of scenes in which she has angry confrontations with powerful people. “Get me Jamie Dimon on the phone,” she barked to her staff before having a raised-voice conversation with the C.E.O. of J.P. Morgan Chase. Her brief Senate career has been defined by a series of confrontations with Trump administration officials at various committee hearings.
She reprints long transcripts of the episodes in her book. What you see is that she seems to have no inhibitions about hitting her opponent with full rhetorical force and landing the full blow.
We in the punditocracy are generally analyzing the Democratic presidential race on ideological grounds: Which minute differences exist in the candidates’ various “Medicare for all” plans. I doubt that is how Democratic voters are thinking. Their immediate problem is Donald Trump, and the culture of shamelessness he has instigated.
To beat Trump, I suspect Democrats will want unity. They won’t want somebody who essentially runs against the Democratic establishment (Bernie Sanders); they’ll want somebody who embodies it (Harris). They’ll want somebody who seems able to pulverize Trump in a debate (Harris).
It will be interesting to see how primary voters wrestle with these questions: Is America too racist and sexist right now to elect a black woman? Or would nominating a black woman in fact be the perfect rebuttal to Trump?
But the larger issue may be temperament and toughness. Harris’s fearless, cut-the-crap rhetorical style will probably serve her well in this pugilistic political moment.
My initial take on the Harris candidacy is now being proven correct, whether it is coming from the Left or the Right.
The Republican reactionaries do not really know what to do with her. She is a truly authentic Progressive voice who is just as tough as they are. And her record as a prosecutor can truly silence them.
Brooks’ admiration is grudging, but it speaks to where the Democrats need to be in 2020.
Kamala Harris does indeed channel Nancy Pelosi, as both women are able to tie Republicans up in knots.
David Shasha
February 4, 2019
Both articles from SHU 888, April 3, 2019