Misogynoir, Ideology and the Big Picture
For VP Harris, some nasty challenges. And some awesome opportunities.
The attacks against Hillary were steeped in misogyny to be perfectly sure, but they were also enabled by a 30-year character assassination campaign against both Clintons by the right. Obama's race in a way was a superpower defense, because bald racist attacks immediately provoked a backlash from both black and white people. So the right quickly pivoted to other Scary Black Man tropes, including that his pastor declaimed "god damn America" from the pulpit, which led to Obama's Philadelphia address on racial issues. Obama was no Scary Black Man; he spent his entire life being the Unthreatening Black Man, entirely in the mainstream.
Obama let himself be a political Rorschach inkblot; progressives glommed onto him as their avatar, but from his first foreign policy address I recognized him as a neoliberal Washington Consensus guy, ideologically not much different (if at all) from Bill Clinton. When the more overt Scary Black Man stuff didn't stick, they reverted to painting him as a hyper-liberal "Marxist." Despite not going after the financial meltdown perps and stocking his financial team with Wall St. insiders whose Austerity-mindedness prolonged the recovery from the Great Recession for eight long and unnecessary years, that image did stick and hobbled Obama's ability to work with Republicans. Joe's presidency was much more legislatively successful. Joe learned from this experience and told the inflation spooked neoliberals to go eff themselves.
This is why Bernie sings Joe's praises as a true man of the working class and has yet to give a full-throated endorsement to Kamala (though, like with Hillary, he's campaigning for her).
The revolting, sexualized misogynoir attacks on Kamala stick not at all with millennials and gen z and will only bind them more tightly to her. But it's an interesting question when we come to Kamala's ideology. She didn't run as a hard leftist for CA AG; this was years before "woke Soros prosecutors" was a thing. She did decline to recommend the death penalty for a cop killer and while DiFi didn't like that, being opposed to the death penalty on both moral and prudential grounds is a fairly mainstream Democratic position. She caught far more hell from the left for being hard on the parents of truants and this earned her the progressive epithet of "cop."
It would have been more natural in the '20 presidential primary for Kamala to run in the center lane with Joe, Pete, Amy and Corey, but she chose to run in the left lane with Liz and Bernie, and I think this was her campaign's fatal mistake. The cringey aspects of her demeanor made it clear she wasn't fully comfortable with this, while taking strong positions on every marquee progressive issue, saying supportive words about (though not fully endorsing) Defund The Police, endorsing a fracking ban, going after Big Fossil, advocating the Green New Deal, attempting (and failing) to hammer out a credible concrete plan for Medicare-For-All. GOP oppo is looking at this as an embarrassment of riches. But it's unlikely to stick very much.
Millennials and gen z take these "too liberal for America" positions as gospel (about time!), not to mention old-school liberal boomers like Yours Truly. I'm a pragmatic voter in general elections but a left-liberal in primaries and I do what Rick Wilson says you're not supposed to do, which is obsess over issues. I love it when primary candidates come out with 10-point plans. Kamala's failure to impress Bernie and Liz-leaning progressives may turn out to be a blessing in disguise, now that she's secured the nomination. VP Harris, more comfortable with the big picture than the devilish details, is articulate and intelligent enough to be able to frame these positions (or her current ones) in an unthreatening way that voters of all ideological stripes can understand.
Hi Bob
I recall you were worried about going against Allan Lichtman's prediction that Joe would beat Trump; today I saw him interviewed and he's all in on Kamala winning in November.
So things are certainly sorting themselves out.
Right now, on top of everything going our way, we have Trump self-destructing - he can't help himself. And DF Vance is another gift that just keeps on giving. Yesterday he claimed that Joe's return of the Russian prisoners was a testament to - wait for it - the strength of Donald Trump.
Can't wait for that Sept debate. It might be the most-watched TV in history, and Donnie's pooping his pants already.