By Claudel Leveille
Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes
“Kamala Harris” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY 2.0
When I read that Kamala Harris was “suspending” her Presidential campaign in a December 3rd written announcement, I was immediately struck by her clear inability to be forthright and honest. For starters, by using the word “suspend” rather than “end” she was using verbal chicanery to make it appear as if she was just putting her campaign on hold, when in reality it was completely over. Kamala’s carefully curated choice of words in the title of her announcement served as a prime example of how she failed to present herself as a genuine and honest person to the American people. From the initial launch of her campaign, she appeared to be too calculated, too duplicitous, and too glossed over to be considered a serious candidate in the 2020 race.
Within a month of launching her campaign, Kamala appeared on a hip-hop/urban oriented show called The Breakfast Club in which Charlamagne (one of the hosts) asked her if she had ever smoked weed. She proceeded to nervously laugh and claim that she did indeed smoke and “inhale” marijuana while she was in college. She might have been able to dodge a bullet had the questions about her past ended there, but they did not. Kamala was soon asked a follow-up question concerning her musical tastes, with the added qualification by Charlamagne of what her music choices were while high. She responded that she had “definitely” listened to Tupac and Biggie while smoking weed in college.
The problem with her answer was that it was a total lie. She graduated from college in 1986, and Tupac and Biggie did not become rap artists until the early 1990s. The fact that she had to lie in order to try to appear trendy and cool to urban voters was one of the first indications that she was going to flop as a candidate. If Kamala had said that she wasn’t too interested in weed and had listened to a more staid genre of music such as jazz, urban voters would have granted her much more respect. To make matters worse, Kamala had a reputation coming into the interview of being tough on drug-related crime when she was San Francisco’s district attorney from 2004-2011, and while she was the district attorney from 2011-2017. In principle, administering stern criminal justice is laudable. However, in the extreme progressive attitude currently enveloping the Democratic Party, such law and order principles are shunned. It was clear from her Breakfast Club appearance that Kamala was overly aware of the disconnect between her prosecutorial past and urban hip-hop fans who tend to dislike law enforcement. Her Breakfast Club debacle solidified and enhanced the validity of the embarrassing Kamala “top cop” meme that would plague her for the rest of her campaign.
Harris’ inability to connect with the urban demographic was damaging, but her random jaunts into authoritarian territory did her no favors in changing the narrative that she was a tough law enforcer masquerading as a lenient leftist. In a CNN Town Hall in April, Harris stated that she would “pursue executive action on gun control measures if Congress [failed] to act in the first 100 days of her presidential administration.” She would double down on that promise in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper in May. The second amendment is a hot-button issue in the United States, and naturally, a Presidential hopeful has to come forth with a platform that can appeal to more than 50% of potential voters. In threatening to overpower Congress, Kamala presented her stance on gun control in such a way that automatically alienated voters who value the second amendment, and turned away voters who object to the idea that a President can rule by decree. Kamala’s proclamation that she would wield unchecked executive power while simultaneously trying to shake off the albatross of her law enforcement background displayed Harris’ veritable lack of political skill.
Despite her missteps, Kamala enjoyed a a brief hot streak in July when she rose to her highest polling numbers (15%) after attacking Joe Biden during the first Democratic debate on the topic of forced busing. After that strong showing, Kamala Harris’ poll numbers gradually fell, and then hit a steep nosedive after the second debate (July 31st) when fellow 2020 candidate Tulsi Gabbard lambasted Kamala’s refusal to acknowledge her tough and occasionally draconian stance on crime. Instead of owning up to the fact that she had been a no-nonsense prosecutor in California and had scrupulously done her job, she ran away from her record due to the fear of alienating the reactionary progressive base of the Democratic Party. That opened an opportunity for Tulsi to eviscerate Harris, which she did. After failing to defend herself against Tulsi’s assault, Harris slid mightily in the polls. As of early December she was polling at around 3% and was no longer a favorable candidate.
In October, Kamala gained more negative press for requesting that Twitter deactivate President Trump’s account. Obviously, she was ridiculed and widely lampooned for the absurd request and rightfully so. In addition to her earlier mistake of being heavy handed on the Second Amendment, she added infringement of the First Amendment to her repertoire in her request to have Trump’s Twitter taken down. Obviously, Twitter has the ability to censor whoever and whatever they find to be offensive and they could fulfill any request to de-platform someone if they find a valid reason for it. That withstanding, Kamala should not have succumbed to her urge to shut down speech that she did not like, and especially not that of the incumbent President. Her action displayed mental weakness as a potential leader of the free world, and it foreshadowed that if she became President, she would trample on the First Amendment.
Kamala’s misstep does not mean that other Presidents/Presidential nominees have not gone down that road. In recent memory Trump (banned Washington Post from covering his events leading up to the 2016 elections), and Obama (his administration declined Fox News interviews and denied multiple Freedom of Information Act requests) both arguably did not honorably uphold aspects of the First Amendment. Challenging the press is one thing, but Kamala’s complaint about how her rival used social media was poorly timed and appeared to be especially indicative of a moribund campaign.
After months of dwindling support from Democratic voters who did not consider Kamala to be a viable candidate, she dropped out of the race in early December. In the wake of defeat, Kamala and various media figures who supported her campaign offered pitiful excuses to explain her exit. For instance, on MSNBC, Al Sharpton alleged that people had higher expectations for Harris because she is a black woman. He also stated that Kamala Harris was “taken apart” and “treated badly” by the press due to the fact that she was held to a “higher standard” as a black woman. Of course it was an absurd opinion, considering that all the Democratic candidates had been heavily scrutinized and “taken apart” by the media regardless of their skin tone. One might add that the media (especially the left-wing media) probably wanted Kamala to succeed because of her skin color. Furthermore, Kamala started her campaign favorably with positive media coverage from outlets such as the Atlantic before making her own mistakes that would lead to her demise. If one were to take Sharpton’s ridiculous line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, then one would be left with the determination that failed Democratic candidates Kirsten Gillibrand and Beto O’ Rourke must have been held to an even higher standard than Kamala since they both dropped out of the race before she did. Kamala’s exit from the 2020 race had nothing to do with her skin color and gender, Democratic voters did not support her enough. End of story.
Even before she dropped out of the primary, Kamala was prepared to use her race and gender as bulwarks against the grim reality of her mediocre platform. In an interview with Axios, she complained that the United States was “not ready for a woman of color to be President.” For some reason, people like Kamala Harris who obsess over race and gender cannot seem to fathom that millions of Americans cast their votes based on a candidates’ ideas and character traits rather than on their external features alone. A candidate with outstanding ideas but poor charisma would probably lose any kind of election. Likewise, a candidate with a fantastic personality but terrible ideas would probably lose any given election. External characteristics such as being female/male or black/white do factor into modern American elections but they are not the primary factor among serious voters in a country that has elected various genders and ethnicities into several other levels of public office.
“Kamala Harris campaign rally” by Kent Kanouse is licensed under CC BY 2.0
In her statement of capitulation, Kamala probably made her most preposterous justification to date by claiming that since she was not a billionaire, she could not afford to fund her campaign. Not only was that explanation childish, asinine, and just downright droll, but that farcical excuse was dead on arrival. Out of the fifteen candidates that remained in the field at the time of her exit, only 2 of them were billionaires. That begs the question: how were the other thirteen funding their campaigns if they were not billionaires? Furthermore, it was extremely hypocritical that Harris would fuss about financing a campaign when just at the beginning of the year she tied the record held by Bernie Sanders in 2016 for the most donations raised in a day ($1.5 million) following a Presidential announcement. As much as Kamala tried to deflect blame from herself, the truth was that as the excitement that she had at the beginning of her campaign fizzled away, so did the money supply.
The Democratic Party has arguably become more obsessed with race, sexuality, and gender than ever before in their history dating back to 1824. Left-wing pundits journalists lamented the fact that a political party that derives pride from being as racially diverse as possible heads into 2020 without a leading black or Latino candidate. All of Democratic front-runners are white men and women. Six out of seven candidates who qualified for the 6th Democratic Debate on December 19th were white, with Andrew Yang, a Taiwanese-American, being the only exception. In one of the most egregious moments of the evening, the moderator Amna Nawaz asked Andrew Yang about being the “only candidate of color” on the stage. Yang offered an equally ridiculous response claiming that it was both an “honor and a disappointment” while also alleging that he “missed” Kamala and Cory Booker. About a decade ago, it would have been considered taboo to ask a question about a presidential candidate’s ethnicity on a debate stage. But ten years later, racial progress in politics has ostensibly reversed course. A candidate’s race should not matter to people who simply want to elect a leader that they believe would do a good job in office. But for the current Democratic Party, racial and gender “equity” are more important than the ideas that the party’s candidates propose. Accordingly, the Democrats blamed Kamala’s failure to advance beyond the primary on racism and sexism within their own party rather than on the plausible explanation: her unappealing personality and radical platform.
Before concluding, it should be noted that Kamala’s race and gender did not prevent her from climbing the social ladder to become one of the most successful politicians in California. Racism and sexism did not prevent her from becoming the first black woman to be elected district attorney in California in 2003. Similarly, racism and sexism played no role in 2010 when Harris was elected attorney general of California becoming the state’s first female, the first African American, and first Asian American to hold the position. Never mind the fact that Kamala Harris has the distinction of being the first Jamaican/Indian female Senator from California United States history. Is it an irrelevant fact that she and her lawyer husband are worth a few million dollars? What about the fact that a cursory look at Kamala’s background and upbringing reveal an outstanding education and elite lifestyle.
In sum, Kamala Harris was a victim of her own party’s ideology. The more moderate Democratic Party of the 1990s is virtually gone. She could not keep up with its increasingly radical trajectory while remaining true to her character. In a Democratic Party that has become transfixed by race, gender, and sexual orientation, it remains ironic that they cannot seem to apply their utopian ideal of inclusion to their own party’s primary. It is likely that Kamala Harris believed that her gender and skin color would have awarded her a first-class ticket to become the Democratic nominee for President. To her great chagrin, however, she discovered that being a “woman of color” was not enough to win an election.
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