Vice President Kamala Harris provides stability critical to President Biden's re-election

Echo opinion published in the Washington Post (Democracy dies in darkness) by Karen Tumulty associate editor and columnist:

NEW ORLEANS — The annual Essence Festival of Culture has grown into the country’s largest annual celebration of Black talent and influence. This year, members of the Congressional Black Caucus were there to deliver a message about the fragile moment in which President Biden and the Democratic Party find themselves.

“People are talking about ‘Biden is too old’ — hell, I’m older than Biden,” 85-year-old Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said, bringing a standing ovation. “No matter what anybody says, it ain’t going to be no other Democratic candidate. It’s going to be Biden, and you better vote!”

The congresswoman’s bluntness made it all the more noticeable that the next speaker on the program — Vice President Harris — went nowhere near the subject that is preoccupying the political world.

Harris mentioned the president only once, even as she argued for his achievements and the urgency of his reelection against an opponent who intends to “weaponize the Department of Justice against his political enemies, who has talked about being proud of taking from the women of America a most fundamental right to make decisions about your own body.”

Displaying chops developed in her years as a prosecutor, the vice president pressed the case against Donald Trump more powerfully than Biden himself has been able to do lately.

Therein lies the delicacy of her situation. Should Biden step aside, something he has vowed not to do, putting Harris at the top of the ticket presents the quickest and most logical way for Democrats to regroup. Some polling also suggests she might fare slightly better against Trump, which is why his campaign is already organizing a full-scale assault against her.

Biden doomsday scenarios are everywhere, except in the vicinity of Harris. She has been the most loyal — and effective — of Biden’s allies in this fight. In a combative interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper just minutes after the debate, she didn’t cede a millimeter: “I’m not going to spend all night with you talking about the last 90 minutes when I’ve been watching the last 3½ years of performance.”

That line, which Harris delivered extemporaneously, has since become the backbone of the Biden campaign’s talking points.


Through most of the past three-plus years, though, Harris herself was kept backstage. She was handed impossible assignments like tackling the root causes of migration in an administration that showed no interest in doing anything about the border.

Air Force Two touched down in New Orleans on Friday night just moments after the broadcast of Biden’s prime-time interview on ABC. That interview did little to stop the fallout from his disastrous debate performance. As the vice president emerged from the plane, she was caught in a downpour, punctuated by thunder and lightning. I wondered: Was this a random weather event or an omen?

President Joe Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris

It was not until the overturn of Roe v. Wade that the White House recognized her value as its messenger on the suddenly salient issue of abortion — a word that Biden still has trouble bringing himself to mention. Harris’s travel schedule accelerated dramatically. This year so far, she has gone on the road more than 60 times by her staff’s count.

When Biden picked Harris as his history-making running mate in 2020, the first Black woman ever to share a major party ticket, the two knew each other primarily as adversaries. The California senator’s own campaign for that year’s Democratic nomination had started with promise but collapsed before the first votes were cast in Iowa. She was overly cautious, too deliberate, brimming with policy proposals that never quite added up to a rationale for her candidacy.

Given Biden’s age, Harris was always going to be an issue in this campaign. During the Republican primary, it was a rare appearance at which Nikki Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, would not declare: “A vote for Joe Biden is a vote for Kamala Harris.”

Conservative commentators mock her laugh. Trump mispronounces her first name. And in a recently surfaced video, he called her “pathetic” and “so f---ing bad.” (Maine Writer - WOW❗😮 the Biden campaign should latch on to that evil venom and turn it around....IOW "Trump is so f----ing bad❗)

But watching her over the weekend, I saw an assurance that was absent when Harris was running in her own right four years ago. Were she to do it again, now or in 2028, I’d bet she would be harder to caricature, less easy to demonize than Republicans believe.

Harris concluded her appearance here with a message to the younger women in the audience.

“You are on many occasions in your life going to be in a room [where] you will be the only one that looks like you or has had your life experience,” Harris said. “And what I demand of you is that you always walk into those rooms with your chin up and your shoulders back.”

“I will beseech you: Don’t you ever hear something can’t be done. People in your life will tell you, ‘Oh, it’s not your time. It’s not your turn. Nobody like you has done it before,’” she added. “Don’t you ever listen to that. I like to say, ‘I eat “no” for breakfast. I don’t hear “no.” ’ ”

This may or may not be Kamala Harris’s own time. But if the call comes, we know what her answer will be.

What will Rep. Kevin McCarthy say about racism, antisemitism and white supremacy?

House Republicans have a lot of explaining to do!

Where is Rep. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy? He has some explaining to do!

Echo opinion published in The Washington Post by Karen Tumulty:

HELLO? Ya'think? No one is buying the idea that Donald Trump’s dinner last week at Mar-a-Lago with antisemite and white nationalist Nick Fuentes was some sort of aberration — even if Trump’s claim is true that Fuentes showed up unannounced in the company of rapper (and fellow antisemite) Ye, formerly known as Kanye West.

That Trump would meet with bigots and conspiracy theorists was very much on brand for someone who sees loyalty to himself as the only character trait that matters. Trump, after all, claimed moral equivalence (“very fine people on both sides”) between the neo-Nazis who chanted in Charlottesville that Jews would not replace them and a group of counterprotesters, one of whom was murdered.

Which means things like the Mar-a-Lago dinner are surely going to continue to happen as Trump forges ahead with his bid for the GOP’s 2024, presidential nomination. 

And, with each instance, the far-right extremists who spew hate will continue nudging their way from the fringes into the mainstream of the (growing old!) Republican Party.

In the wake of the GOP’s disappointing performance in the midterm elections, it is plainly self evident that the party has a “Trump problem.” 

But, there is a deeper problem, and that is the (growing old and older.....!) Republican Party itself.

Republicans cannot move past Trump, as long as they cannot bring themselves to confront him and, by association, the element he attracts. This is not the party that had the fortitude to purge the hateful John Birch Society from its ranks in the mid-1960s. 

As former Republican National Committee spokesman Doug Heye put it to me, today’s Republicans still think they can “outrun the crocodile.”

(Can somebody cut and paste the statements made by Utah Senator Mitt Romney and former  New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to give "dummy come alive" Rep. McCarthy as a rubric for his own statement?)

Since the dinner became public over the weekend, we have heard plenty of prominent Republicans denounce antisemitism, as though that is anything other than basic human decency. Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who is reported to be considering a presidential bid of his own, tweeted that antisemitism is “a cancer” and declared: “We stand with the Jewish people in the fight against the world’s oldest bigotry.”

Republicans cannot move past Trump, as long as they cannot bring themselves to confront him and, by association, the element he attracts. This is not the party that had the fortitude to purge the hateful John Birch Society from its ranks in the mid-1960s. 

As former Republican National Committee spokesman Doug Heye put it to me, today’s Republicans still think they can “outrun the crocodile.”

Since the dinner became public over the weekend, we have heard plenty of prominent Republicans denounce antisemitism, as though that is anything other than basic human decency. Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who is reported to be considering a presidential bid of his own, tweeted that antisemitism is “a cancer” and declared: “We stand with the Jewish people in the fight against the world’s oldest bigotry.”

Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel issued a statement: “As I had repeatedly said, white supremacy, neo-Nazism, hate speech and bigotry are disgusting and do not have a home in the Republican Party.”

But depressingly few were willing to even mention Trump himself.

One welcome exception was outgoing Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R). who told CNN: "I don’t think it’s a good idea for a leader that is setting an example for the country or the party to meet with an avowed racist or antisemite. 

And so it’s very troubling, and it shouldn’t happen. And we need to avoid those kinds of empowering the extremes. And when you meet with people, you empower.” 

Another was Trump’s own vice president, Mike Pence, who said on NewsNation: “President Trump was wrong to give a white nationalist, an antisemite and a Holocaust denier a seat at the table, and I think he should apologize.”

Come January, there will be fewer Republicans left in Congress willing to speak out when Trump does what he keeps doing. That in itself is a testament to where the party has positioned itself with regard to the crocodile, given how many of those who did take issue with him were either wiped out in Republican primaries this year or chose to retire.

And those who have followed Trump’s example in associating themselves with extremists and their ideas will have more clout within the institution. Earlier this year, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) spoke at a conference organized by Fuentes, later claiming (as Trump has about last week’s dinner) that she didn’t know who he was; House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy has promised, if he becomes speaker, to restore her committee assignments, which the Democratic-controlled House stripped the Georgia congresswoman of in 2021 because of her incendiary comments.

Meanwhile, don’t expect much by way of correctives to be offered as the GOP gets ready to elect its next party chair in January. McDaniel, who was handpicked by Trump to run the party after the 2016 election and who has been a model of obeisance to him since, has indicated she plans to run for another term.

There is grumbling in the party about McDaniel’s win-loss record, with South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem telling Fox News: “I don’t know a party that can continue to lose like we have and keep their jobs.” But none of them talked-about alternatives — who include defeated 2022 New York gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin and MyPillow chief executive and leading election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell — represent a turn away from Trump.

So Republican leaders should quit deluding themselves about the possibility of moving on from the former president, who continues to bring the worst people into their fold. They are along for the ride — even as it takes them over a cliff.

Republicans are politically impotent

Republican leaders slam Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's Holocaust comments, but don't call for punishment

"fear...the painted devil"...Lady MacBeth, Shakespeare

Maine Writer:

Kevin McCarthy- The dummy lives!  He's alive, he's alive!

Charlie McCarthy

Opinion echo published in The Washington Post by Karen Tumulty

Dr. Victor Frankenstein would understand what House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is feeling as he watches his party’s own creation careen across the political landscape, leaving wreckage and mayhem at every turn.

When a trove of lunatic social media postings that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) made before she was elected to Congress came to light in January, McCarthy invited her to his office for what his spokesman described as “a conversation.”

As a supporter of the QAnon movement, Greene had spread conspiracy theories that included claims that the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas and the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, were hoaxes and that Hillary Clinton mutilated and murdered a child during a satanic ritual. She also endorsed calls for the murders of federal agents and her Democratic colleagues, including giving a “like” when a commenter on her Facebook feed suggested that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) might be removed with “a bullet to the head.”

In a closed Republican caucus held shortly after her talking-to by McCarthy, Greene apologized, claimed she no longer believed in conspiracy theories and got an ovation from her colleagues.

The minority leader expressed confidence that she had learned her lesson and predicted that Greene would hold herself to a “higher standard” now that she was a lawmaker and not a private citizen. Nonetheless, the full House, which has a narrow Democratic majority, voted to strip her of her committee assignments.

Greene, however, continues her bottom-feeding ways, apparently feeling even less constrained now that she has no actual policymaking responsibilities.

In April, it came to light that she had made tentative efforts to set up an “America First Caucus,” which was to be focused on promoting what a draft platform described as “Anglo-Saxon political traditions.”

The most recent controversy she has generated came during an interview on a conservative cable network. She claimed that Pelosi’s requirement that masks be worn in the Capitol, where many House Republicans refuse to say whether they have been vaccinated against the coronavirus, echoes the treatment of Jews under the Nazis.

“You know, we can look back in a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second-class citizens — so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany,” Greene said. “And this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.”

For those latter comments, McCarthy denounced Greene more sternly than he had before, saying “her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling.” His statement was echoed by other top Republicans in the House.

Greene defiantly turned on McCarthy, and retweeted a post by a fan who called the minority leader “a moron,” as well as another word that won’t be repeated here. Though Greene later deleted her tweet, she had made her point that she was not chastened.

This predictable response merely underscored how impotent GOP leaders are in dealing with a figure who thrives on being outrageous and offensive. And along the way, she has raised millions — $3.2 million, to be precise, in the first quarter of the year — in contributions from tens of thousands of people who apparently share her views.

There was a time when Republicans might have stopped this creation of theirs, but it was back when she was still in the lab — or, in this case, running for her party’s 2020, nomination in a reliably red congressional district. Then-#FormerGuy Donald Trump singled her out as a “future Republican Star” and “a real WINNER.”

Though McCarthy denounced the pattern of racist and antisemitic comments that Greene was known even then to have made, he remained neutral in the primary runoff that all but guaranteed she would be joining the House Republican Conference in January. The minority leader’s fear of alienating the Trumpian voters who inhabit the more fetid corners of the Republican base was greater than his sense of duty to the institution that Greene now dishonors.

What all of this has shown is that Republicans must do more than simply denounce Greene. It is time for them to, at a minimum, rally behind censuring her. A resolution to do so is being drafted by Rep. Bradley Schneider (D-Ill.). Republicans should also kick her out of their caucus, as Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) has proposed.

Anything less makes hollow Republican leaders’ efforts to portray Greene as merely a fringe player among their ranks. They created her, and they continue to elevate her.

This is the consequence of seeking power without regard to what else it may bring. To borrow the subtitle from Mary Shelley’s famous novel, Marjorie Taylor Greene is the fruit of Republicans’ own efforts to become the Modern Prometheus*.

*Prometheus is one of the Titans, the supreme trickster, and a god of fire. In common belief, he developed into a master craftsman, and in this connection, he was associated with fire and the creation of mortals.