Then-Sen. Barack Obama’s 2008 run, a traditional identification play, emphasised the history-making potential of electing the nation’s first Black president. Nobody knew or cared a lot about Obama’s coverage positions, and he didn’t trouble to share them. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 bids had been coverage arguments centered round a succinct set of points: scholar mortgage debt, the minimal wage and well being care. The truth that he would have been the primary Jewish president was scarcely seen.
If I had been one of many Democratic strategists advising Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 marketing campaign for president, I might concentrate on an identification play emphasizing her race and gender over a run a few set of insurance policies. Which is strictly what she’s doing. “The longer the Harris marketing campaign can painting her as a cultural phenomenon,” The New York Occasions reported on July 31, “the longer she will keep away from articulating particulars of her coverage agenda that would divide her help. … For now, the Harris staff intends to skip a number of the conventional markers of a presidential bid. Whereas Ms. Harris launched a bunch of coverage papers throughout her 2020 marketing campaign — a few of which she has since disavowed — this time she plans to solid herself as a coverage extension of Mr. Biden’s administration.”
“I believe we’re three weeks from realizing whether or not she will ascend the Obama ladder to the place it’s about her and never any particular insurance policies she has,” Rick Davis, marketing campaign supervisor for John McCain in 2008, instructed the Occasions.
If Harris can get elected with out making coverage guarantees, good for her. However we, as particular person voters, have totally different pursuits than she does.
“I’m together with her,” a Hillary Clinton marketing campaign slogan shortly adopted by Harris supporters, is strictly the other of what consultant democracy is meant to be about. She must be watching our backs. A politician must be there for us, combating like hell to enhance our lives.
Simply as Harris is trying to do now, Obama ran as a rock star, lengthy on charisma and quick on specifics. Progressives and different leftists who gave him their votes shortly discovered that being younger, Black and funky sufficient to take pleasure in weed is not any assure {that a} candidate will govern any higher or in another way than a boring previous white man. As president, Obama did precisely what a Republican would have achieved. He refused to codify Roe v. Wade (he known as abortion rights “not the best legislative precedence”), granted full immunity to Guantanamo torturers, despatched tens of hundreds extra troops to the shedding wars in opposition to Afghanistan and Iraq, used assassination drones 10 instances greater than Bush and supported the army coup in opposition to the democratically elected, left-leaning president of Honduras.
Obama’s determination to bail out Wall Road however not Fundamental Road after the 2008-09 subprime mortgage disaster prompted pissed-off progressives to kind the Occupy Wall Road motion in late 2011. True to right-wing kind, Obama had his Homeland Safety Division accomplice with Wall Road banks, actual property corporations, native police and the FBI to ruthlessly crush lots of of Occupy encampments in violent coordinated raids.
Obama continues to be a rock star. However he gravely wounded the Democratic Occasion. Obama-ism led on to the shock success of Sanders’ rebel 2016 marketing campaign — and the intraparty schism that allowed Donald Trump’s shock win.
Let’s not get fooled once more. If the left-leaning Democrats who comprise nearly all of the social gathering’s voters need to keep away from getting conned into supporting one other DINO like Obama, they need to insist upon a transparent and coherent coverage agenda for a primary Harris administration. “She shouldn’t be Trump” shouldn’t be sufficient. Neither is “we’d like a Black lady president.” By these requirements, we may have elected former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
We don’t know almost sufficient about Harris’ stances on the problems. The little we now have discovered to this point on issues like Gaza (she helps Israel), common well being care (she’s in opposition to it) and the long-frozen minimal wage (she doesn’t discuss it) doesn’t give a lot purpose for optimism from a leftist perspective.
It’s been greater than two weeks since she grew to become the Democratic standard-bearer. But she nonetheless refuses to provide any press conferences — one thing each candidate and each president must do one year a 12 months — or interviews with reporters. Just like the senile President Joe Biden, each phrase she utters in public is learn off a teleprompter.
If she received’t inform us what she thinks, and we don’t like what she says, she shouldn’t get our votes.
Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.
