Kamala Harris must keep walking a
tightrope for Biden’s reelection bid
By Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post (April 27, 2023)
It is no accident that Vice President Harris appears more
than a dozen times in the video kicking off President Biden’s reelection
campaign. She played a big role in mobilizing the Democratic Party’s base in
2020 — and should be expected to do the same thing again in 2024.
As has been the case with virtually every vice president
since the nation’s founding, Harris gets a bad rap. The first duty of the job
is to avoid upstaging the president, which means surrendering any political
autonomy and never being out in front of the West Wing on any issue. Recall the
way Mike Pence always stood like a hyperrealist statue, mute and
expressionless, while President Donald Trump ranted and raved. Somehow, Pence
managed to never even lift an eyebrow.
And when vice presidents are given actual tasks, they tend
to be the impossible ones. Biden put Harris in charge of the border— at a time when there was
absolutely no possibility of getting Congress to pass comprehensive immigration
reform that might reduce the flow of would-be migrants. It was a classic no-win
situation: She could make a show of raising hopes, which then would be dashed;
or she could hunker down and keep expectations low. Either way, she was bound
to be criticized for having failed.
At times, being vice president means going along with
policies you oppose. Biden, as vice president, was deeply skeptical of the
Pentagon’s 2009 request for a “surge” of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. But when
President Barack Obama sent 30,000 additional troops, Biden did not
publicly complain.
Those are the rules, and vice presidents who break them are
blasted for going off-script or being a loose cannon. In 2012, on “Meet the
Press,” Biden surprised the nation— and his boss — by endorsing same-sex marriage. At the time, the Obama
administration's position went only so far as to favor civil unions. Biden’s
declaration, coming just a week before Obama was to launch his reelection
campaign, sent the president’s advisers into apoplexy. Harris, by contrast, has
not spoken out of turn.
She has, however, sometimes lost her
way in the wilderness of syntax. The right-wing echo chamber accuses her of
speaking in “word salad.” It is true that she often burdens her sentences with
more dependent clauses than they can bear, and verbatim transcripts of her
extemporaneous remarks can sometimes be hard to follow. But she also connects
powerfully with audiences and communicates her message, even if it might be
hard to diagram.
I glance at Harris’s public schedule every day, and one
thing that stands out is how much time she has spent on foreign policy. It is
not uncommon for visiting leaders to stop at the vice president’s residence.
Her recent trip to Africa was well publicized, but she has also become a
regular at gatherings such as the Munich Security Conference — where in
February 2022, she was the last high-ranking U.S. official to meet with
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky before Russian tanks rolled into his
country. She reportedly implored him to believe the assessment of U.S.
intelligence agencies that Russia would indeed invade.
That experience is particularly relevant because of Biden’s
age. Republican candidate Nikki Haley has already previewed the GOP line of attack. “I think we can all
be very clear and say with a matter of fact that if you vote for Joe Biden, you
really are counting on a President Harris,” she said Wednesday on Fox News,
“because the idea that he would make it until 86 years old is not something
that I think is likely.”
Fact-check: Biden is in good health, according to his doctors, and I know of no reason why he should not be expected to live through a second term. But one of Harris’s important tasks during the campaign will be to demonstrate that she is prepared to assume the awesome responsibilities of commander in chief if necessary.
Her other big task will be to energize voters around the issues on which the Republican Party has boxed itself into fringe positions that are rejected by most Americans.
Especially on abortion — and the GOP’s ongoing attempt to deny women autonomy over their own bodies — I expect her voice to be a clarion call. And, as in 2020, I expect her to inspire and motivate the Democratic Party’s most loyal voters, African American women.
As the first woman and first Black and South Asian American to serve as vice president, Harris was destined to be held to an impossible standard. Now, as the reelection campaign begins, she gets to show the talent and drive that got her there.
*****
The 2022 midterms are the most important of my lifetime
By Eugene Robinson
in The Washington Post (October 10, 2022)
In four short weeks, the nation
faces the most important midterm elections of my lifetime. This year, the
choice is between our democracy as we know it—messy, incremental, often
frustrating — and a hard-edged performative populism fueled by resentment, misogyny
and racism. To have any hope of building a better future, we must make a stand
here.
It is hard for me to write those
words because one of the first things I was taught as a young journalist was to
be wary of superlatives. But the truth is plain—and painful: Democrats must
keep control of at least one chamber of Congress, and preferably both, because
the Republican Party has become a danger to the American experiment.
This is not the traditional
contest between one set of politicians favoring progressive policies and
another offering a more conservative vision. It is between a Democratic Party
that believes voters ought to be able to make those ideological choices and a
GOP that no longer believes the will of many of the American people must be
respected.
A terrifying
survey in The Post last week found that of 569 Republican candidates
nationwide for House or Senate seats or major statewide offices, an astounding
299—more than half—“have denied or questioned the outcome of the last
presidential election.”
This is not acceptable. Many
Republicans were unhappy after the close 1960 election,
alleging irregularities in the vote count in Illinois and Texas, but they
accepted Richard M. Nixon’s loss and John F. Kennedy’s victory. Many Democrats
were irate following the 2000
election, which was decided by a handful of votes in Florida and an
intervention by the Supreme Court. But they plastered “Not My President”
slogans on their bumpers and T-shirts, rather than attempting an actual
insurrection.
A party that believes only in
elections it wins cannot be trusted with power.
The Republicans who pledge to
ensure that nothing like the 2020 election ever happens again are serious.
Their bloviation about ensuring “election integrity” in the future is a front
for a more sinister agenda. The increasingly far-right Heritage Foundation has
compiled a database going back to 1982, and in all the local, state and
national elections over those 40 years can document only 1,384 “proven
instances of voter fraud,” many of them individual acts. This supposed threat
is the excuse for disenfranchising millions of Americans, whether by keeping
them from the polls or delegitimizing the votes they do manage to cast.
The rhetoric of election denial
is pure demagoguery, but with real-world menace. In at least two swing states—Arizona
and Nevada—true-believer Republican candidates who deny Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump have a good
chance of being elected secretary of state, putting them in charge of
elections. If they win and the 2024 results are not to their liking, they may
simply not accept them.
At least when it comes to
elections, Republicans still feel the need for some sort of fig leaf. In other
areas, the party has abandoned all sense of decency.
The GOP has decayed to the point
at which its leaders cannot bestir themselves even to condemn openly
racist remarks made Saturday by Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), who said
Democrats were “pro-crime” and portrayed African Americans as “the people that
do the crime.”
It is too facile to blame all of
this on Trump. True, many Republicans are paying lip service to the “stolen
election” lie because they fear Trump will turn the GOP base against them and
end their political careers. Others saw an opportunity when Trump proved that
crudeness and cruelty were no obstacle to political success.
Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) recently
recounted a telling anecdote told from the Republican cloakroom on Jan. 6,
2021, when an unnamed GOP colleague came in and signed papers objecting to the
election results. Cheney said the fellow House member muttered: “The things we
do for orange Jesus.”
That’s self-deception. Trump’s
acolytes do have a choice, if not courage or decency. Shame on them for
undermining the nation’s faith in the democratic process for personal gain.
Vital issues are at stake on Election Day. Abortion rights are gravely
threatened after the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe
v. Wade. Voting rights, especially for minorities, are imperiled. Efforts to
fight climate change and make the transition to a clean-energy economy would at
least be slowed if Republicans took either the House or the Senate.
But the overarching issue is
what President Biden calls the fight for “the soul of this
nation.” Do we continue our halting but undeniable progress toward making the
Constitution’s guarantees of rights and freedoms apply to all Americans? Or do
we reverse course?
I hope you care about the
answer. And I hope you vote.
* * * * *
Eugene Robinson, The
Washington Post (October 21, 2021)
Nobody said life was fair, but this is ridiculous: Democrats are getting pilloried for struggling to do big and important things, while Republicans are being given a free pass for behaving like a horde of vandals.
This isn’t the way our government is supposed to work. Yes, the
Democratic Party controls the White House and has the slimmest of majorities in
the Senate and the House. But that doesn’t absolve Republicans from the duty to try to do what’s best for the country.
It doesn’t give any of our elected representatives the right to simply ignore
the work they were elected to do—and the GOP should be called out for putting
political gamesmanship ahead of the nation’s well-being.
Wednesday’s [Oct. 20] vote by GOP senators to block debate—not passage, mind you, but mere debate—of
watered-down legislation to guarantee basic voting rights is just the latest
example. Securing universal access to the ballot box used to be a bipartisan
cause. In blocking the bill, Republicans are “hurting their own constituents,”
as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) noted Thursday. But apparently that
doesn’t matter.
I get it. The voter-suppression laws passed by GOP-controlled
state legislatures across the country are crafted to give an advantage to
Republican candidates. The proposed Freedom to Vote Act, already watered down in a
vain quest for Republican support, would have somewhat leveled the playing
field. Yet even the few GOP senators who occasionally show a glimmer of
conscience—Mitt Romney (Utah), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Susan Collins (Maine)—voted
the party line, which was against allowing the Senate even to debate the bill.
The many Republicans who helped pass the landmark Voting Rights
Act of 1965—giants such as Everett Dirksen of Illinois, Margaret Chase Smith of
Maine and Jacob Javits of New York—would weep if they could witness what has
happened to their party.
Similarly, Republicans blocked all attempts to establish
a proper bicameral, bipartisan blue-ribbon panel to fully investigate the Jan.
6 Capitol insurrection. Pelosi then had no option but to create a House select
committee, whose important work Republicans now dismiss as “partisan.”
The thing is, we become inured to such behavior. The public has
come to expect it, at all levels of government, as if representing the needs
and aspirations of the American people were nothing but a blood sport and all
that matters is which political tribe wins and which loses. If many voters are
angry or disenchanted, who can blame them?
This is not a “both sides” situation. Republicans and Democrats
are not equally to blame, though the GOP would like you to believe otherwise.
You don’t have to support everything the Democrats are trying to accomplish to
recognize that one party is at least trying to govern—and that the other seeks
only to sabotage.
Forty years of trickle-down economic orthodoxy produced growth
and innovation but also created shocking levels of inequality. Working-class and
middle-class incomes stagnated, while the rich became richer beyond their
wildest dreams. The nation’s infrastructure was allowed to sag and rust. We
failed to invest adequately in our future.
President Biden and the Democrats are trying to begin addressing
these problems, whose existence and urgency many Republicans recognize. Indeed,
19 GOP senators (out of 50) did ultimately vote for the $1.2 trillion “hard
infrastructure” bill that awaits approval by the House. But Republicans are
forcing Democrats to conceive and pass a larger “human infrastructure” package
on their own—while under rhetorical sniper fire from the GOP.
So Democrats are having the kinds of arguments among themselves
that used to take place between the two parties—what
new programs to start, how long those programs should last, how much to spend,
how to pay for it all. Instead of participating in these important debates,
Republicans are threatening to trigger a financial cataclysm by
refusing to raise the federal debt ceiling. They have already tried this
supremely irresponsible maneuver once, and they threaten to do it again in
December.
And watch: When Democrats eventually do pass the spending
packages and Biden signs them into law, Republicans will be quick to take
credit for all the measures that are popular with the folks back home.
I am
not happy that Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) are
blocking initiatives I believe are needed. But at least they are engaged in the
process. The much bigger problem is that one of our two major parties—the GOP —
is doing nothing but throwing rocks and bottles from the sidelines.
*****
Opinion: The
cold truth about Republicans’ hot air over critical race theory
By Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post (June 28, 2021)
Republicans’
hissy fit over critical race theory is nothing more than an attempt to rally
the party’s overwhelmingly White base by denying documented history and
uncomfortable truth.
This manufactured controversy has
nothing to do with actual critical race theory, which, frankly, is the dry and
arcane stuff of graduate school seminars. It is all about alarming White voters
into believing that they are somehow threatened if our educational system makes
any meaningful attempt to teach the facts of the nation’s long struggle with race.
The Republican state legislators falling over
themselves to decide how history can and cannot be taught in schools — and
blowhards such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who warn that children are being
taught “every White person is a racist” — know exactly what they’re doing. They seek to create a
crisis where none exists in hopes of driving up GOP turnout in next year’s
midterm elections.
It’s a cynical ploy. But a party willing to
pretend — even now — that Donald Trump might somehow have won an election he
lost clearly embraces cynicism as its core identity.
It is unclear whether the GOP’s focus on
denying the reality of our racial history will have any impact at the ballot
box. Schoolchildren will suffer, however, because teachers will be forced to
keep them ignorant of relevant facts and perspectives. And all Americans will
suffer if Republicans succeed in squelching the long-overdue reckoning with
race that many of us believe the nation sorely needs.
GOP politicians have especially taken aim at
the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which provocatively explored the relationship of slavery to
the nation’s founding. Perhaps this is because many Republicans already see the
Times as a nest of villainous “elites.” Perhaps it’s because the 1619 Project
was led by a Black woman, Nikole Hannah-Jones, whom Republican strategists
believe they can demonize. Or perhaps it’s because the project tells so much
truth.
Was slavery key to the colonial economy at the
time of the Declaration of Independence? Clearly it was, and one of the many
charges the declaration leveled against King George III is that he “has excited domestic insurrections amongst us” — seen by historians as referring to a proclamation in
Virginia offering freedom to slaves who joined the British army. The
declaration also slams the king for his passive support of the “merciless
Indian Savages” who resisted the White settlers’ efforts to more westward and
take more of the Indians’ land.
Was slavery written into the Constitution? The
word itself does not appear, but the Constitution never would have been
ratified without the famous compromise that allowed states to count only
three-fifths of their enslaved populations for the purposes of apportioning
seats in the House of Representatives. The charter specifies that “free
Persons” and indentured servants be counted in full, leaving only slaves to
constitute the “all other Persons” who are subject to the three-fifths
limitation.
Was slavery just a Southern phenomenon? Not at
all. Slavery wasn’t outlawed in New York until 1827,
and the last 16 enslaved Black men and women in New Jersey didn’t obtain their
freedom until 1865.
Moreover, the entire young nation benefited economically from the
plantation-style slavery practiced in the South, which gave the mills of New
England raw material to work with and the nascent banking center of Wall Street
a thriving enterprise to finance.
Didn’t the Civil War and the 13th, 14th and
15th Amendments deal once and for all with the problem of racial oppression in
this country? Of course not. Reconstruction was cut short, and the states were
allowed to establish a system of Jim Crow segregation that endured for nearly a
century. Black Americans were systematically robbed of land and wages, denied
access to capital, confined to substandard housing, and denied educational
opportunities When some Black communities overcame these obstacles — as
in Tulsa, Atlanta and a host of other cities — White mobs burned and smashed those communities out of existence.
These are all undisputed facts. This is the history
that has, until now, been ignored or played down. Teachers who expose their
students to such truths are not being “woke” or convincing impressionable young
minds that the nation is “irredeemably racist,” as Cruz has alleged. They are performing an essential task of
education: contextually explaining where we’ve been so that we can understand
where we are and where we need to go.
This nation can be redeemed — but not without
first acknowledging the need for redemption. The Republican Party is trying to
prohibit that acknowledgment, and is doing so for short-term political gain.
The flap over critical race theory is just another scam from a party that
believes in nothing except the unprincipled pursuit of power.
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