Kamala Harris stands with the corporate democrats who are committed to austerity and imperialism. No one needs to wonder what she will do should she become president. What did Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden do? President Harris would follow in their ignoble footsteps.
“People have said if you look at for example the whole, remember the whole, the heat that ended up around the bend the knee and Colin Kaepernick. Many smart people have said it actually was not a thing. The Russian bots started taking that on.”
Kamala Harris on the Breakfast Club, July 12, 2019
Voters in the United States who feel compelled to choose between political duopoly presidential candidates are once again faced with two terrible choices. Donald Trump is the known quantity, a former president and a man of very limited intelligence. So much so that he recently confused Willie Brown with Jerry Brown. He is unsuited for anything other than what he did most of his life, promote himself as a business success when his companies filed for bankruptcy on six occasions. In 2016 he rallied white peoples’ feelings of grievance, pretended to be a champion of working people and won an electoral college vote due to his opponent’s arrogance and incompetence. When he lost the election for a second term in 2020, Trump insisted that he hadn’t and encouraged a mob to enter the Capitol and stop the electoral college election certification.
Kamala Harris is the current Vice President who stepped into the role of presidential candidate and Democratic Party nominee when Joe Biden’s physical and mental frailty became so obvious that the rich donors who put him in office decided to take him out of the race. Her campaign consists of little more than repetition of typical party talking points and a lot of good press from corporate media. In this case “good” means no journalists to speak of. The New York Times coverage consists of stories about vibes, joy, and the wonders of Kamala’s once derided laughter.
As a presidential candidate in 2020 she won no delegates and dropped out of the race before she could be embarrassed by a bad primary loss in her home state of California. Yet she became Biden’s running mate and ultimately vice president, a job for which she was spectacularly unsuited.
Harris became known for having a stunning inability to speak intelligently unless she was in front of a teleprompter. When unscripted she would often blurt out that young people are very stupid or gibberish about not falling out of a coconut tree. “Everything is in context. My mother used to… she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’ You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
The coconut tree line was rightly dismissed as nonsense coming from a woman who has enough self-awareness to know when she sounds silly who then laughs to cover up her discomfort. Yet the embarrassing flub has now been turned into a campaign slogan. If nothing else Harris demonstrates how the state and its partners in corporate media can work together and turn a vice president who is perceived as a joke into a credible candidate for the top job if that is what the oligarchy wants to happen.
The kindest thing that one can say about Harris is that she wouldn’t be the first mediocrity to become president of the United States. After all, Joe Biden was never thought of as being smart during his years in the senate and yet he became vice president and then president. He still sits in the Oval Office, and is not even in his right mind. Harris word salads and laughter at odd moments will join Reagan stammering, Bush 43 malaprops, and Trump fantasies about event crowd size as proof that anyone with the right political connections and money can in fact assume the highest office in the land.
It is striking that at the moment U.S. proxy Ukraine sends troops into Russia and Israel is again instigating a U.S. attack on Iran, that KamalaHarris.com says nothing about foreign policy or domestic policy either for that matter. One can donate, volunteer, and buy merchandise, but what you can’t do is find out where Harris stands on the issues.
Eventually her site will show a neo-liberal and imperialist wishlist that adds fake concern about women’s rights or voting rights or something else democrats claim to care about but don’t fight to achieve. Policy information is not shown because Harris stands for nothing but a continuation of the status quo. She is a careerist who was helped along the path of becoming a district attorney, attorney general of California, a United States Senator and then presidential candidate by rich white people. Her climb up the ladder came without ideology or serious thought on any issue.
How could anyone claim that the reaction to Colin Kaepernick’s very principled stance against police killings was the result of Russian bot activity? A cynical and unserious person would make such a statement. A person so shallow that she would think those words would be acceptable cannot be taken seriously as a change agent or a harm reducing “lesser evil.” If Kamala Harris becomes president it will because she avoids talking about anything that voters need or want. The whole point of buying politicians is to make sure they do not represent the people. Sometimes we end up with an intelligent person like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, and sometimes we get a lesser light intellectually. The end result is the same, immiseration at home, and death around the world.
One of the issues that brought Biden’s campaign to an end was public protest over the ongoing U.S./Israeli genocide in Gaza. If it continues, Harris’ shot at the white house is also in jeopardy. While in Selma, Alabama where she and other politicians go to pimp off of memories of the liberation struggle, Harris stated that she supported a six-week pause in the Gaza killing spree. “And given the immense scale of suffering in Gaza there must be an immediate ceasefire for at least the next six weeks, which is what is currently on the table. This will get the hostages out and give a significant amount of aid in.”
She merely restated Biden administration policy. The U.S. can stop the war crimes any time it wants, instead the government pretends that a six-week pause in the fighting that it controls is a reality and not a fake effort meant to quiet discontent.
When Harris was interrupted by Palestine solidarity protesters in Detroit she acted like a frustrated teacher trying to tame an unruly class. “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” The routine didn’t go over well and three days later a change in tone appeared. “I have been clear: now is the time to get a ceasefire deal and get the hostage deal done.”
Campaign wordsmithing notwithstanding, she may as well have stuck with the first statement because she makes clear that she will not change U.S. policy towards Israel. On the same day she claimed to want a ceasefire, the Biden and Harris administration announced another tranche of aid for Israel totaling $3.5 billion with an additional $20 billion allocated the following week. In case there was any doubt where she stands, her National Security Adviser made it clear. “She does not support an arms embargo on Israel.”
Kamala Harris is an opportunist in over her head but who has decided she wants to be president. She has a history of actions and statements that speak for her. She is an establishment democratic who is beholden to the party’s donor class. Of course that is a description of every president. All one needs to do is pay attention to what they say.
Margaret Kimberley is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents. You can support her work on Patreon and also find it on the Twitter, Bluesky, and Telegram platforms. She can be reached via email at [email protected].
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