Unpacking the rise of Kamala Harris that leaves a choice between ‘lesser of two evils’
With the stepping-back of President Joe Biden from this year’s race for the White House and his replacement with Kamala Harris, yet again Christian voters in America must choose between the lesser of two evils. One thing is certain, however. If Americans elect Harris as their first woman president on November 5, she will owe The post Unpacking the rise of Kamala Harris that leaves a choice between ‘lesser of two evils’ appeared first on Catholic Herald.
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With the stepping-back of President Joe Biden from this year’s race for the White House and his replacement with Kamala Harris, yet again Christian voters in America must choose between the lesser of two evils. One thing is certain, however. If Americans elect Harris as their first woman president on November 5, she will owe her historic victory to one thing above all: Biden’s disastrous debate performance of June 27.
Democratic strategists had artfully demanded an early head-to-head between Biden and former president Donald Trump to remind voters of what they believed to be the former reality TV star’s evident unsuitability for office. But the ruse backfired spectacularly.
While Trump was on his best behaviour, keeping his grimaces and outbursts to a minimum, Biden, aged 81, could not disguise his mental and physical incapacity. He walked like a zombie onto the stage and waved to an imaginary audience. In answer to the moderators’ simple questions he blanked, misspoke, confused subjects and garbled sentences.
Trump looked on, amazed. After one particularly incomprehensible utterance from Biden, Trump summed up what the television audience of nearly 48 million were all thinking. “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump said. “I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”
Biden’s implosion alarmed both Republicans and Democratic leaders alike. For months Trump’s people had made fun of Biden’s senility; his losing his train of thought; his stumbles and falls; his getting so lost when in public that others, including President Macron of France and Barack Obama, had to take him by the arm and lead him back.
Now Trump’s strategists were alarmed at the prospect of the Democrats switching to a younger, more eloquent candidate who would show up Trump’s own age – he’s 78 – verbal flubs and mental deficiencies.
Democratic leaders were both appalled and angry at Biden. While they had portrayed Trump as a vain, blustering, inarticulate, lying half-wit with a thin grasp of reality, who always put his personal interests before those of his party or the nation, Biden’s abysmal debate performance had revealed that their own candidate enjoyed the same damning character traits as Trump.
They furiously complained that a small group of White House staff had, to protect their boss from criticism and to maintain the immense personal power they enjoyed advising the president, disguised from even top Democrats in the House and Senate the extent of Biden’s infirmity. Chief culprit was Biden’s wife, Jill, who acted as the president’s principal gatekeeper, and bolstered her husband in his vain belief that he was fit enough to mount an energetic presidential campaign.
But what to do? Biden, the incumbent president, had easily won the Democratic primary race against all comers. And, according to the Democratic Party’s rulebook, it was up to him and him alone to decide whether to resign his candidacy and allow another Democrat to run against Trump. And Biden showed no interest in standing down.
While acknowledging he had “had a bad night” at the debate, he aggressively threw down the gauntlet to those who demanded he step aside to challenge him at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August.
“I know how to do this job,” he declared. “When you get knocked down you get back up.”
Democrats who feared losing to Trump if Biden held on to the nomination described trying to persuade him to give up as “like telling grandad he was no longer fit to drive and should hand over the car keys”.
Biden eventually conceded that if the opinion polls showed he could not beat Trump, he would reconsider his position. And before long the polls obliged. Once neck and neck with Trump, and with a narrow edge in the dozen or so marginal states that hold the key to the electoral college that decides presidential elections, Trump slowly gained the lead. And Biden fell behind in all the marginal states except one. As one top Democrat put it, Biden’s catastrophic debate performance took its toll. “The voters could not unsee what they had seen,” he said.
The Democrats now faced a boisterous and divisive convention in Chicago, the same city as the bloody and violent Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 which put an end to Hubert Humphrey’s bid to succeed President Lyndon Johnson.
Then Biden made a critical decision. The vast war chest he had garnered to fund his election campaign would be forfeit if not spent by him or his vice-presidential pick, Kamala Harris. In 2020, Biden had chosen Harris, a former California public prosecutor, to balance his ticket. As an old white man, of Irish descent, the “rainbow coalition” logic of Democratic politics demanded he choose a more diverse sidekick. Harris was not only a woman but her father was of Jamaican-American descent and her mother was born in Madras, India – both of them distinguished American academics.
After winning the White House, Biden had shown little interest in giving Harris anything useful to do. She was assigned to negotiate with countries whose citizens headed for America across the Mexican border, to try to stem the growing tide of immigrants before they set off, but it proved to be Mission Impossible. And when the Supreme Court removed the 50-year-old federal guarantee of a woman’s legal right to an abortion, Harris became the chief cheerleader to establish abortion as a right nationwide.
So it was a surprise when Biden threw his weight behind Harris, who is now 59, as his successor. Some suggest spite as his motive and that he remains sore at being bounced out of his candidacy by Democratic leaders who were pressing candidates of their own. His once close friendship with the ringleader of those moving to nudge him aside, Nancy Pelosi – the formidable former leader of the House – has turned frosty.
The Democrats’ candidate switch has seen a swift swing in the polls in favour of Harris. She now holds a narrow lead in overall votes and a small lead in the marginal states. She has momentum, speaking to overflowing rallies wherever she goes, and is in receipt of an avalanche of dollars in her campaign coffers, mostly from individuals coughing up $20 a time.
Harris has been canny in her vice-presidential pick. Tim Walz, the former conservative 60-year-old plain-speaking governor of Minnesota, instantly changed the tenor of the attacks on Trump. While Biden had tried to persuade voters that the return of Trump would invite dictatorial tendencies that threatened American democracy, Walz simply described the views of Trump and his Make America Great Again supporters as “weird”.
Trump’s choice of vice-president, by contrast, is JD Vance: a former member of the US Marine Corps, in which he served as a combat correspondent, a best-selling author and who is now a senator from Ohio. Walz, like Harris, is an unashamed progressive in favour of abortion and legalised marijuana and is against the selling of rapid-fire assault weapons. Vance, like Trump, is opposed to same-sex marriage, gun control, legal abortion and US aid for Ukraine.
So how are Christians approaching the impending election? The culture wars that began with a resistance to the social changes of individual tolerance that emerged during the Sixties have entered mainstream politics, with the powerful evangelical movement of Christians transforming themselves into anti-woke “Christian Nationalists”.
Christians who favour tolerance for individual rights and personal choices will most likely vote for Harris. But Christians who applaud the outlawing of abortion and believe the Founding Fathers were wrong to have insisted in the Constitution on a strict division between church and state will probably vote for Trump.
Time will tell.
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This article appears in the September 2024 edition of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click HERE.
The post Unpacking the rise of Kamala Harris that leaves a choice between ‘lesser of two evils’ appeared first on Catholic Herald.
