By Terry Manning
I’m like Michelle Obama in not understanding why people are hesitant to vote for Kamala Harris.
The hesitancy, if not pervasive, is persistent, so I just had to find out for myself: Why?
True, some of the people who are speaking out against her, are actually speaking out against the Democrat Party. Like the video I saw last week of a Black preacher saying he couldn’t vote for a party that supports LGBT or transgender procedures, and that God would judge him (and us, he implies) for doing so.
That tracks with the intended audience. I have said for years that the African-American community in this country is one of the most conservative in many ways and that if Republicans had any sense, i.e., could stop being so damn racist, they could make some real inroads.
What the pastor failed to mention, was that the only other viable option (sorry, third-party supporters, we’re talking political reality) is that voting against the Democrat Party or not voting at all is essentially a vote for the Republican Party. And the candidate for that party assaults women, attacks immigrants, lies, cheats and steals. But I guess God won’t judge anyone for voting to support that, right?
Back to Harris. Here are the main critiques I found.
“We don’t need a woman president.”
To which I respond, “Seriously?” We have had 46 presidents of the United States and an overwhelming majority, 46 in fact, have been men. For the most part, they have done decent jobs. We have been lucky in that some of the higher-regarded presidents have served in our lifetimes.
It’s a tough job, but it’s not a job that can’t be done by a woman. The Pew Research Center found a third of the 193 United Nations members have had a woman as leader. The first was in 1960 in Sri Lanka. Of the current 13 women in charge, nine are their country’s first female leader, including Mexico.
“We don’t know enough about her.”
Well, her biography is readily available to anyone who has a computer, tablet, or smartphone and can use their thumbs to type her name into Google, or any other search engines.
Politically, she served as an attorney general and later U.S. Senator for the state of California before announcing a bid for president in January 2019. She was tabbed to be the running mate of future President Joe Biden and has served for the past four years in his White House.
Harris has a website (it’s her name with dot-com at the end) that coherently spells out her beliefs and her policy platform. Good luck finding a coherent version of that for some other people in the race.
“They gave her that nomination.”
This one seems to come from the same people who said Biden was too old to run for re-election in the first place. Among Republicans, this was a safe argument to help get their guy back in office. Donald Trump is still trying to force Biden back onto the ticket because he thinks he can beat him more easily than Harris.
Quibble as you will over how Harris got the nomination, but I have enjoyed the truncated election cycle. I wish we could do it all the time. Did you know in France campaigns are regulated to limit the amount of airtime they can purchase? And that there is a complete media blackout the weekend before the national vote? I’ll gladly swap political ads for more “Fanville”!
“When she was a prosecutor, she targeted Black men.”
That one has been thoroughly debunked. In fact, Harris was praised for her work to seek alternatives to imprisonment for offenders especially those connected to drug charges. She’s even said she supports legalizing marijuana moving forward. That will help a lot of people, especially in a community that is disproportionately prosecuted and sentenced for recreational drug use.
But I did find something.
When Harris ran for president in the 2020 election, before she was picked by Biden, she had to suspend her campaign amid rumors of a headquarters in upheaval. Her California campaign director wrote in her resignation letter, “This is my third presidential campaign, and I have never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly.” Pretty tough stuff.
Turns out most of the problems were attributable not to Harris, but to her campaign manager Juan Rodriguez. And the director who resigned added in her letter: “I still believe that Senator Harris is the strongest candidate to win the general election in 2020.”
I compare that to the dozens of former members of the Trump White House, who have rallied against him. Or the hundreds of Republicans across the country who have said they will break with their party to vote for Harris to become president.
There are no former supporters of Harris who are now calling her a threat to democracy or a closet fascist.
So in the grand scheme, what is the case against Kamala Harris? There isn’t one.
Terry E. Manning is a Clemson graduate and worked for 20 years as a journalist. He can be reached at teemanning@gmail.com.
