Summary: Kamala Harris certainly left an impression after Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate. She launched an insurgent, buccaneering attack on front runner Joe Biden. Biden, like a great British three-decked ship of the line from the days of Nelson, sailed relatively imperturbably through the debate. However, in the days that followed, both he and Kamala find themselves undertaking damage control. It is not unlikely that Sen. Harris’ broadsides may have been a tactical, or even strategic, error on her part. By concentrating on Biden’s past, rather than on America’s future, the California senator may have unwittingly given Donald Trump ammunition he doesn’t deserve.
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There is no doubt that in the Democratic presidential debate last Thursday evening Kamala Harris sailed into battle with a kind of insurgent, almost buccaneering attack on front runner Joe Biden.
Following up on Cory Booker’s self-referential and pious attack on the quondam vice president, Kamala decided to prosecute an attack based on Joe’s opposition to mandated school busing during the 1970s.
Joe bore up fairly well under the attack, sailing imperturbably through MSNBC’s piss poor excuse for a debate like a great British three-decker first rate line-of-battle-ship from the days of the great Nelson. (Instead of relying upon the grossly overrated Chuck Todd, MSNBC might have been better advised to have retained the services of Commons Speaker John Bercow, who could probably have kept the otherwise fractious pool of Democratic presidential hopefuls in line with a few growls of “ORDER.”)
Uncle Joe’s performance was not after the style of Vice Adm. Horatio, Viscount Nelson of Burnham Thorpe and The Nile, Duke of Brontë, KG, RN, but if Biden’s performance lacked the so-called Nelson touch, it was nonetheless adequate, serviceable, and workmanlike, more after the style of Nelson’s contemporaries Sir Samuel Hood or Cuthbert, Baron Collingwood of Caldburne and Hethpool, not dazzling, but, as Adm. Of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Sergey Georgievich Gorshkov might have put it, “good enough.”
Nonetheless, in a Democratic primary that resembles nothing so much as a Hobbesian state of nature, of “war of all, against all, with life poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” Thursday night’s debate ought to have demonstrated to Uncle Joe that he needs to up his game. Though Kamala’s broadsides damaged his rigging, she didn’t score any hits between wind and water, or below the waterline. Nevertheless, Uncle Joe would profit from taking some time to reflect on lessons learned.
So, by the same token, would Kamala.
Though her attacks on Vice President Biden might play well in largely white, "progressive," Sanders-left circles in the Democratic Party, I think she may have done herself some real damage among African-Americans who remember Uncle Joe fondly from his service as Barack Obama’s vice president, and among more moderate centrist white Democrats.
By opening up the ancient, 1970s-vintage wound of mandated busing and pouring salt on it, Kamala may have unwittingly given Donald Trump a new treasure trove of ammunition against Uncle Joe if, as is generally expected, Biden remains the front runner in this endless, agonizing, circular-firing-squad Democratic primary. After all, the divisions opened up by forced busing have largely been ameliorated, or at least healed up and haired over, during the 40 years since busing was such an existential issue for so many Americans.
Of course, like Kamala, I have my own personal memories of court ordered busing in Los Angeles. I was an elementary school student when Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Paul Egly found himself overseeing the desegregation cases in which the LAUSD was embroiled at the time. Like many children of educated, pale parents, I found myself confronted with the very real possibility that if I stayed in the LA public schools, I could find myself bussed to Compton, Watts, or some other part of South L.A. County with which I was totally unfamiliar in order to meet some court mandated goal of integrating the public schools.
This, notwithstanding the fact that my little elementary school in the Cahuenga Pass, being smack dab in the middle of the entertainment industry, was one of the most diverse and naturally integrated schools in the entire district. My parents, white, liberal, and withal, of the well-educated demographic that made no bones about supporting George McGovern in 1972, found that their tolerance for court ordered social experimentation ended with their academically "gifted" son.
My, and my parents’, hesitancy about busing had little to do with racial insecurity. But it did have a great deal to do with the fact that, by the metrics of the Los Angeles Unified School District, I was indeed considered academically “gifted.” At the time, gifted kids, along with their intellectually challenged counterparts, represented no more than 4% of the student population in the LAUSD, representing about 2% of that population at either end of the spectrum.. However, as a result of federal and state mandates, together with an “anti-elitist” bias on the part of educational bureaucrats within the LAUSD, far more resources were devoted to “mainstreaming” the intellectually challenged, while the “gifted” kids were largely left to fend for themselves.
When the schools in our area of the sprawling, hypertrophic, overbureaucratized LAUSD were ordered to begin implementing "comprehensive, immediate, integration planning” for the 1973-1974 school year, my parents, seeing the writing on the wall, with all its implications for their "gifted" third-grader, took me out of the public schools, put me in an Episcopal elementary school in Studio City, and unwittingly facilitated my introduction to Conformist religion. (I’m older now, But like That Other Gay Conformist Pete Buttigieg, I’m still fabulously Episcopalian.)
Many of my parents’ ideological and doctrinaire acquaintances, still caught up in the afterglow of the 1960s, still full of wide-eyed, uncritical admiration for Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution (about which, not speaking or reading Chinese, they had only such knowledge as was filtered to them in the pages of Guoji Shudian’s propaganda periodical China Reconstructs), insisted that every aspect of the personal was political. Seeing the decision to seek private education for my parents’ “gifted,” if precocious, brat, they rushed to place the worst, most racist possible interpretation on that decision.
Now, I know that the heresy hunters and purists of the Sanders
left will excoriate me as some kind of racist, largely on account of my
reluctance, as a ten-year-old, to leave what was already a diverse and
integrated elementary school seven minutes walk from my home and
familiar to me. For many hyper-liberals of my family’s
acquaintance in the Democratic Party at the time, particularly those who
did not have children, our familial decision to place me in that
Episcopal school represented a betrayal not of our principles, but of
theirs. It’s always amusing how nothing is impossible for the
person who doesn’t have to take it on him- or herself, like a number of
our more doctrinaire hard-left acquaintances who fell out with us over my
placement at St. Michael And All Angels School in Studio City.
So, if Kamala Harris can account for her elementary education by being a beneficiary of busing, I can account for my Conformist Religion by being one of those kids who didn’t want to be bussed to Compton, Watts, or somewhere else in South County.
So, for me, as it does for Kamala Harris, busing still recalls personal wounds. It still recalls the anguish that can happen when those whom one had thought friends take that Maoist route of defining as political every aspect of one’s personal life, “put[ting] politics in command.” The social and political divisions over busing in Los Angeles played themselves out over more than a decade before finally quieting down. In Los Angeles, and I expect in most of America, the fight over busing eventually gave way to other, more immediately pressing, issues. In short, the wounds of busing healed up and haired over.
It is difficult to see, almost 40 years on, what Kamala hopes to accomplish by ripping open those ancient wounds, pouring salt on them, and insisting upon relitigating them. Busing in Los Angeles, though a well intended social experiment theoretically intended to implement the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, proved to be a disaster in actual practice. While Kamala Harris may have been the beneficiary of busing in Berkeley, the benefits of busing in Southern California and elsewhere were few and far between.
Moreover, we must insist on looking at events 40 years ago in their context, and stop insisting on applying aggressively retrospective purity testing to unworkable, unsustainable social experiments set in motion by the “least dangerous branch.” There is nothing more counterproductive than retrospective purity testing, and I think it’s safe to postulate that while Kamala may experience a brief bump in the polls, she may lose the support of centrist and moderate Democrats over the long-term.
Additionally, Democrats, be they Bernard Sanders, Kamala Harris, or any other Democratic candidate stumbling over him- or herself to show his or her “wokeness,” should remember that political campaigning is largely conducted not just in the future tense, but in the future conditional tense. Moreover, by concentrating on utterances in Joe Biden’s — or any candidate’s — past, while ignoring the very real, existential threat represented by Donald Trump and his fellow travelers one runs the risk of losing not just his or her future, but the entire country’s future.
For we know of two things that ought to inform the messaging of every Democratic presidential hopeful this cycle. First, we must remember and communicate to our constituency at every opportunity the fact that Donald Trump is an existential threat to America, to peace, to democracy, to a rules-based international order, and to freedom itself. We must communicate to our constituency at every opportunity that Donald Trump is an America-destroying traitor, meriting the swift and severe pains and penalties the United States has historically meted out to those who betray it to enemies national. That’s the only politics of grievance we should be engaged in for the 2020 election cycle.
Second, we know that we are locked in an existential, even Manichaean, struggle for ownership of America’s and the world’s future. The Republicans offer us not a future as such, but an atavistic retreat to the world of 1914 or 1933, a time in which, as Winston Churchill has written, “[u]nsatisfied by material prosperity the nations turned restlessly towards strife internal or external.”
Contrariwise, Democrats know that in an expanding future, in which women hold up half the sky, and in which invidious distinctions of color, religion, race and ethnicity, sex, sexuality, and gender, have lost their power to divide and to enthrall, and in which an aroused world acts in concert to contain the existential threat of global climate change and to act as responsible stewards of what the Book of Common Prayer calls "this fragile earth, our island home," we have no choice but to overcome nameless and unreasoning fear, and to come together quickly, for our good and the good of the planet.
But we cannot attain that future if, as Kamala Harris so foolishly insisted upon doing last Thursday night, we insist upon looking backward while prosecuting a politics of ancient grievance.
I’ve known Kamala Harris since she was District Attorney in San Francisco. I was hugely taken by her insistence that we should not so much be “tough on crime,” but “smart on crime.” I thought then, and I think now, that Kamala is a very smart and admirable woman. I thought she made an effective Attorney General of California, and I have been favorably impressed with her performance as a United States senator. Thus, I was, and remain, deeply disappointed by her appeal to a politics of grievance.
That’s the kind of shit we expect from Donald Trump, not from the woman who wants to be his successor and to lead this nation back to correct and honorable government.
I had expected better of the senator whom I had supported, to whose campaign I had contributed, and for whom I had volunteered.
Girlfriend, get your shit together!
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He served two terms on the Cathedral City city council, and has a smidgen of experience in politics. He is very disappointed in Kamala Harris, from whom he had expected so very much better than a politics of ancient grievance. As a gay man, he has the right to say to her “girlfriend! Get your shit together!” The views expressed herein are his own, and not necessarily the views of any organization or entity with which he is associated. Unless you like them, in which case they can be yours, too.
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