There is hardly any other woman in the United States who is so loved and extolled by liberals and democrats, like Kamala Harris, the former California attorney general, whom Joe Biden chose as his vice.
She's so, and so is she. Both the woman (and this is already a big plus) and non-white (some go so far as to write directly - black, coming in completely from unbreakable trump cards, but, as we will see below, this is not entirely true). And a fighter for social justice. And kind: when she was the Attorney General, she refused to demand the death penalty for police killers a couple of times. And progressive: while working in California, she forged relationships with Silicon Valley bosses so that many of them sponsored her presidential campaign (even Steve Jobs's widow noted).
“Harris is smart, single-minded, prepared and fearless,” says The Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capeenhart, breathless with delight. "She thinks Donald Trump has reasons to be afraid of her."
And yet, not everyone in the Democratic camp is delighted with the choice of Sleepy Joe Biden. This became clear already on the first day of the Democratic Party convention, which opened on Monday in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in a new, "pandemic" format: face-to-face meetings were reduced to a minimum, with the main emphasis on two-hour virtual video calls.
After the speeches of the representatives of the family of the criminal Floyd (however, now it is probably more politically correct to say "St. Floyd of Minneapolis") and the defector from the Republican camp John Kaysick (Trump's unlucky rival in the 2016 elections), the former main rival of Biden in the primaries "nutty professor Bernie Sanders and Former First Lady Michelle Obama. Sanders dutifully rattled off everything he was asked to say ("The future of our democracy is at stake. The future of our economy is at stake. The future of our planet is at stake. We must unite, defeat Donald Trump, and elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as our next president and vice president.) Friends, the cost of defeat is so high that it’s hard to imagine ”), but Michelle Obama disappointed me a little. That is, she also, of course, urged everyone to vote against Trump and for Joe Biden, but she did not mention Kamala's name at all. Rumors immediately spread that Michelle herself had hoped to get the post of vice president and now she was terribly offended. Her assistants had to explain to reporters that Michelle's appeal was recorded strongly in advance, a week before the convention, and she simply did not know whom Biden would choose as her mate.
The explanation came out, as they say, "for a thin one," and not everyone believed him. “Want to take a nap? - Donald Trump ironically commented on the incident at the Democratic convention, speaking to his supporters on Monday. - When you listen to a pre-recorded speech, there can hardly be something very incendiary. But even this kind of speech can be improved by recording several takes beforehand.
Trump, apparently, was very pleased with Biden's choice. He called Harris "the most liberal person in Congress" and said that she is perhaps even more socialist than Bernie Sanders.
According to the US President, Harris "wants to raise taxes and get rid of the Second Amendment" to the US Constitution, which guarantees the right to acquire and carry firearms. In addition, she "wants to reduce military spending", is "against hydrocarbons, she is against the production of hydrocarbons by hydraulic fracturing." “I'm not sure the country wants this,” concluded Trump.
Politically active Americans are also somewhat perplexed, remembering the vicissitudes of the recent Democratic primaries.
“Seriously, I don’t understand this universal love for Kamala,” writes one such activist. - She is an immoral, unprincipled opportunist who will do and say anything that will help her succeed. Two months ago, she claimed that Biden was a racist and rapist, and now she is his best friend? "
Indeed, the fact that Harris was among the presidential candidates at the beginning of the current campaign and harshly criticized Sleepy Joe, those journalists and experts who are now scattering compliments to her, prefer not to remember. The opposite is also not remembered: less than a year ago, the Democratic Party establishment did everything to prevent Harris from reaching the final of the internal party selection. That is, of course, they did not spread outright compromising evidence on her, but they carefully drowned in order to clear the way for Biden. And this despite the fact that at the beginning of the campaign she was predicted a bright future, considering it “potentially one of the strongest candidates in the 2020 elections”.
“One of the strongest candidates,” who, according to analysts at FiveThirtyEight, performed best in five key constituencies - African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Millennials and Democratic leftists - was forced to abandon the struggle even before the primaries began. Officially - due to a lack of funds in the pre-election fund (apparently, sponsors from Silicon Valley did not help). But now few people remember that before that one of the Democratic candidates, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, literally smeared Harris on the wall during the debates in Detroit. Then Gabbard dumped on the public a lot of unsightly facts about Harris's activities as Attorney General of California: how she hid from lawyers the information about the innocence of their clients, and how she kept people in prison when there was no evidence proving their guilt, and then , as gave real terms to teenagers caught with marijuana.
At the same time, as everyone is well aware, Harris is now in favor of legalizing marijuana, and when a journalist once asked her if she smoked weed in her youth, Harris looked at him like an idiot: “Are you kidding me? Half of my family is from Jamaica! " Kamala then made her father, a professor of law at the University of Berkeley, very angry, who said that his late parents and grandmothers were "turned over in their graves" by such words.
It is not for nothing that Donald Trump, who is known to give apt, offensive nicknames to his political rivals, immediately called Kamala Harris Phony, that is, "fake."
This is what she is. And although behind the thundering stream of flattery and praise, pouring out now on Harris from every liberal iron, it is difficult to hear the quiet voices of skeptics, they still sound.
For example, here is the story of how Harris casually betrayed the memory of her mother, a Tamil woman from India. In her book and in an article in The New York Times, Kamala wrote with pathos: “There is no title and honor on earth that I will value more than the opportunity to say that I am the daughter of Shyamala Gopalan Harris. This is the truth that I value the most. "
However, when it came to completing the US Census questionnaire (there is a line of ancestry there), Harris did not hesitate to abandon her Tamil-Indian heritage and describe herself as "African American", citing her father's Jamaican roots. At the same time, Kamala's father Donald Harris, who emigrated from Jamaica in 1961, divorced her mother when Kamala was seven years old, and practically did not communicate with her daughter. However, the most piquant moment in Harris's biography is that, according to an article written by her father in 2018, he (and therefore Kamala herself) is a descendant of the famous Jamaican slave owner Hamilton Brown.
It would seem, well, what's wrong with that? You never know who had grandfathers and great-grandfathers? But no. In today's United States, a country with BLM rampant on the streets and a black slave lineage as a powerful competitive advantage, having a slave-owning great-grandfather is a great sin. Practically indelible. And conservative publicists such as Mark Levine or Dinesh D'Souza have already started pecking at Kamala, claiming that her genealogy does not allow her to "claim the African American experience of a descendant of slaves."
Quite different songs are heard from the opposite camp. The Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capeenhart, quoted above, admits that he takes his breath away with excitement at the thought of what a wonderful choice Biden made: “African Americans and, in particular, black women have saved Democratic candidates in elections more than once since Trump took office, and they saved Biden's campaign. By not only entrusting black women with such a historic role, but also opening up the prospect of becoming the first female president and second black president of the United States, Biden rewarded their loyalty and decades of thankless and ignored work to help make this country freer and more just for all. It's enough to give you a lump in your throat. "
But, judging by the results of opinion polls, not all American voters share Capeenhart's enthusiasm.
These polls suddenly showed a sharp drop in Biden's rating, which has lost almost all of its advantage in recent weeks.
More recently, the gap between Biden and Trump was estimated by the US sociological services in double digits. For example, a poll conducted by CNN in early June showed 14 points in favor of Sleepy Joe.
From August 12 to August 15, CNN conducted a new poll, and its results became a bolt from the blue for Democrats: Biden's 14 points advantage dropped to four nationwide (50 for Biden, 46 for Trump) and, even worse, to one point in 15 states that will ultimately determine which candidate gets the most electoral votes. In these 15 states - Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin - Biden gets 49% support and Trump 48 The difference, frankly speaking, is within the statistical error. It should be especially unpleasant for Democrats to look at Florida, which, along with the states of the Rust Belt, decided the fate of the 2016 elections and may decide the fate of the 2020 elections.
The CNN poll was conducted after Biden announced the selection of Kamala Harris as his vice president. CNN's director of polls Jennifer Agiesta explains that the American voter has a "slightly positive" opinion about Harris - the opinions are roughly evenly divided with a slight margin of plus: 41% of respondents say they have a positive view of her, 38% - negative. And this is not a very valuable acquisition for Biden's rating.
Besides, Harris is from California, and those from this most liberal state are not the most respected people in the Midwest, where the main battle for the White House will unfold. And the fact that the vice president under Sonn (or Senile, as Trump also calls his rival) Joe is almost certainly the president after a year or two, is well understood by both Democrats and Republicans (according to polls, almost 60% of Americans believe that Biden does not will sit to the end of his first term if he wins the elections).
Kamala Harris's choice, influenced by the raging black street, can already be called unfortunate for Biden - and very successful for Trump. For the president of the United States, it would be much more dangerous if the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, was running for the post of vice president - she could very well pull off the votes of voters of the Rust Belt, which is critical for Trump's victory. But Whitmer is white, and this is a big minus in America groaning under the heel of BLM. So the demands of political correctness once again prevailed over political expediency.
And that's bad news for Sleepy Joe.
The author's point of view may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.