There are suddenly all kinds of whispers right now that Biden and Harris want to kill each other. Biden nominated Harris because he wanted a Vice President who would be as close to him as Obama, and over years, Harris has reminded many people of Obama, including Obama. Instead, it may be the worst, most volatile relationship between a President and Vice President since Kennedy and Johnson.
Kamala Harris is apparently complaining that if she were a white male she would never get sidelined the way she is - that's a little unfair considering that she's Vice President because of a promise Biden made to James Clyburn to nominate a black woman as Vice President in exchange for his endorsement. She is also complaining that all the shit initiatives get dumped on her in an effort to prop Biden up as the good cop, and even that her Presidential prospects are deliberately being harmed to clear a way for Buttigieg as the heir apparent. Those other two complaints are entirely fair and then some.
All that was perfectly clear to anybody paying attention by late June, when Vice President Harris was sent on a political suicide mission on the US-Mexico border that probably should have been Biden's, but Biden already knew how delicate the single most divisive issue of our time is (and there's a lot of competition), so he dumped it into the portfolio of a Vice President whose entire career is built on taking flack for unpopular issues.
And yet, like the loyal soldier she's always been, she did it. And before all this is done, she'll do things like that again, and again, and again. We didn't hear a peep from the Harris camp about any dissatisfaction until the infrastructure bill was passed. Harris is a politician like any other politician who has to occasionally throw an elbow to get what she wants, but a truly selfish politician would have leaked it right away and deliberately put her boss's most important initiative in further jeopardy.
This is the kind of unpopularity Kamala Harris has always courted, and she's gotten to where she was because she always did the jobs nobody else was willing to do. Unless (god forbid) something happens to Biden, she will not be President in 2024, or perhaps even for a while thereafter, but she most certainly has a deep future in American life, whether as a future President, or Supreme Court justice, or Governor of California, or any number of other positions.
In 2021 America, it's clear that a black man can be President, it's reasonably clear that a gay man will eventually be President, and it's even pretty clear that a woman can be President as long as she's not a Clinton. We have not, however, come sufficiently far yet that a person from a doubly marginalized demographic can yet become President; because they don't just have to deal with the mistrust of other demographics, they have to deal with the mistrust of their own demographics too, who look at a women or a BIPOC person and see a fifth column who will not advance their interests.
This is the ultimate irony of Kamala Harris. She is, quite literally, the candidate of intersectionality - the theory which states, among many other propositions, that multiple overlapping minority identities lead to still further marginalization. As ridiculous as it is to say that a Vice-President is marginalized, her eminence is a laboratory by which the church of intersectionality can prove everything about its theories true, and every day, her marginalization amounts to further evidence that this flank of the theory is true. She is intersectionality's best argument and best ambassador, and yet all its believers who have reason to love and support her past the rest of us rarely gave her the time of day - in their minds she betrayed people of color by being a prosecutor and betrayed them further by prosecuting so many marijuana crimes. And the people who seem most unwilling to forgive her for it are white.
People more interested in ideology than politics don't like context, and the mere fact of being a prosecutor is to so many an unforgivable sin. Yet as a prosecutor, she did so much more to antagonize the Right. She never sought the death penalty, she let all kinds of homicide cases resolve with plea bargains, she created units for hate crimes AND environmental crimes, and in terms of marijuana prosecutions, actual sentences to prison were much less common, and usually related to more serious charges.
Politics is about getting things done, and literally nothing gets done by keeping your nose clean. Good policy only gets done when people who are willing to step into the void and act. You can only do what's right by wading into a situation that's wrong.
Once she became Attorney General, she did it all again. A person with Presidential aspirations knows better than antagnize America's five largest banks all at once, and yet in the wake of the Great Recession, when they offered the State of California a relief package of $2 to 4 billion dollars, she simply left the table. By leaving the table, she got $18.4 billion dollars in relief! Plus an additional $2 billion after the fact.
And if that wasn't enough, she followed it with a homeowner bill of rights that held banks accountable for unjust forclosures and landlords accountable for irresponsible maintenance.
And if that wasn't enough, then came the legal brief to the Ninth District Court to lift Proposition 8, the ban on Same Sex Marriages, which was by no means foreordained at the time.
And if that wasn't enough, there were all the times she took on every major drug gang and cartel from the Tijuana Cartel to the Mexican Mafia, Neustra, Nortenia, the Crips. Imagine the threats to her safety after all that.
And if that wasn't enough, she was the first Attorney General to institute mandatory police training for procedural justice and implicit bias. She was the first AG to require police to wear body cameras. She required the entire law enforcement apparatus of California to gather, divulge, and publish every available statistic about shootings, injuries, and deaths inflicted by police.
And there's a lot more. So yes, Kamala Harris is the real deal. What she proved on the state level is how much more gets done when you engage with the dirt, and you get those things done which people only pontificate about wanting to change when they operate from privilege. If Kamala Harris does not become President, whether in the next few years or the next few decades, the loss is the entire world's and the entire future. She's exactly everything a great leader is supposed to be.
Arthur Schlesinger defined a great President in four words: 'Idealistic Ends, Realistic Means." Far more than Obama ever did before he was President, Kamala Harris proved over and over again to have both the vision to see what the future needs and the pragmatic knowledge and willpower to get it done. And whether we realize it yet, she will prove that as Vice President again and again.
So far, America does not deserve her, and neither does the Democratic Party, and she most certainly does not deserve us.
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