Kamala Harris, Joe’s Veep

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I would have preferred Val Demings. She’s a female of color, articulate, and experienced in Washington… alas, without much name recognition. Instead I got Kamala Harris—a female of color, articulate, and experienced in Washington, and, come to think of it, with big-time name recognition. So I guess I’m happy with Joe’s VP pick.

Had it been lightning rod Elizabeth Warren, the Black community would have felt slighted and totally bummed out, and I would have had to endure a lengthy fall of listening to the Orange Genius talking about Pocahontas.

It’s apparent that the Trump camp hasn’t given much thought to petty things like how to stop the spread of COVID-19, but when it comes to important things, things like the election, I was pretty certain that they’d been deep in thought. I assumed that the Republican brain trust had been putting together a broad array of talking points and attack lines for each of the most likely Democratic Veep candidates, feeding them to their front man ripe and ready for when Biden made his announcement.

So at the Trumpster’s press conference yesterday right after the VP choice was made, I was expecting the Commander-in-Chief to have been prepped with a litany of her failings, a veritable cornucopia of shortcomings. So I listened to Trump closely and I learned:

Kamala is against fracking. Yes, all you coal miners in Pennsylvania who are listening, she is trying to embitter your lives with her constant anti-fracking rhetoric (frack you). Implied, but not said, Kamala may even buy into that silly left-wing belief that we should care about the planet. Can you believe it, her anti-fracking bias was one of the first high-profile complaints that came out of Trump’s mouth.
In the spirit of it takes-one-to-know-one (or is it that people who live in glass houses should constantly throw stones), the President noted that Kamala is nasty. She was nasty and disrespectful to Pocahontas in those debates (but who cares, she deserves it), and she was nasty to old Joe himself. If there’s one thing that Joe could learn from me, Trump knows, the first thing you should do with anyone who disagrees with you is to toss that nasty person out the door.
But worst of all, Harris was nasty to that highly respected, always sober jurist, Brett Kavanaugh. Innocent as the day is long (in late December), poor Brett was subject to constant harassment by that nasty lady—how dare she confront that poor, innocent protector of women’s rights.
Kamala, she’s a threat to us all. She’s the one with the far left agenda, who wants to take away all your medical care and even your military rifles. Worst of all, she is soft on crime (“Ooops, I guess they forgot to tell me that mostly she’s been criticized for being too tough on crime”).

While Trump was bumbling around at the podium, others were doing their dirty work, providing the public with straight-out lies. Case in point, this morning the Republican machine accused Harris of calling Biden a racist. This was corrected by the most unlikely of sources, Neil Cavuto of Fox News, who actually noted that this assertion was correct except for the fact that Harris had spoken the word NOT before she said “…a racist.”

So, 24 hours after being selected by Joe Biden, it looks as if the Trump campaign is throwing things up against the wall and hoping some will stick, for Kamala as well as Joe. The VP selection isn’t a daring pick, nor is it a safe one. I’ll simply call it a solid pick. Joe found the one person who had the most pro’s and the fewest con’s. Anyway, Beau liked her, and she’s pretty likely to give old Mike Pence a run for his money on the debate stage.

The Biden campaign will not rise or fall based on any donation that will ever come out of my pocket. Still, I’d been waiting to see what Joe would do on the Veep front before reaching for my wallet, and, in the belief that every little bit counts, my credit card is out.