IN MY SOLITUDE

My wife and I just returned from three days off the grid on Mt. Lemmon, where it rained every afternoon and the highs were in the 70s.  It’s 109 in Tucson as I write this.  Point being, I’m playing catch up here.  Apologies if some of my comments are old news by now. 

We heard the news about Kamala Harris as we were leaving home; ironically, as soon as we hit the road, the man Harris will replace next year (that would be Mike Pence) managed to delay us for 20 minutes while his motorcade crossed town.  Kamala Harris has never made me late, even for a minute, so on that basis alone, she’s the superior candidate. 

I wasn’t surprised that Biden chose Harris, but apparently the Trump campaign was; they’d focused their opposition research on Karen Bass.  At least in the first 48 hours after the announcement, Trump and his Fox enablers were scrambling to find an appropriate demonization narrative.

As of this writing, they’ve tried two angles of attack.  I knew they’d play the race card, but I wasn’t expecting an outbreak of Birtherism.  Harris, they insist, isn’t really Black, or at least not really of African descent.  Why?  Her father is Jamaican.  Where did all those Black Jamaicans come from?  Who knows?  The answer is lost in the mists of time.

But wait – maybe she’s not really Indian either.  After all, she pronounces her name differently than some Fox commentators think appropriate.  (This from the Trump-humpers who brought you “Thighland.”)  And somehow, all of this means that an American senator, born in California, isn’t eligible to run for Vice President. 

Seriously, who’s going to find that argument persuasive?  Hardcore MAGA-QAnon types, I suppose, but they were in Trump’s camp already.  Republicans are clearly spooked, and they’ve reached the whistling-past-the-graveyard stage of electioneering.  But intentionally or not, they’re demonstrating how deep-seated their racism is.  The white people’s party claims the right to decide who’s authentically Black and who’s not.

Besides which, the “she’s not really Black” argument would seem to undercut their second angle of attack, which Donald Trump rolled out on Fox and Twitter.  In Trump’s mind, a specter is haunting suburban housewives, and it’s Kamala Harris.  Like a latter-day pied piper, Harris will lead millions of welfare queens and MS-13 members out of their tenement slums into the toney suburbs.  It’s the first step towards sharia law and mandatory gay marriage, especially in swing states.

Republicans have been playing this game in one form or another for fifty years, and it helped them elect Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.  But again, apart from the usual Deplorable suspects, which voters are going to be persuaded by this argument?  Suburbs aren’t nearly as homogenous as they were back in Nixon’s Silent Majority days. 

The truth is, Donald Trump isn’t looking well.  I’m not convinced he’s going to debate Joe Biden.  He can’t handle obvious softball questions from sympathetic Fox personalities.  If he can’t read from a script (and sometimes even when he does read from a script), he gets sidetracked, rambles, repeats himself, and stumbles over words. 

Apart from Harris’ qualifications, which I think are just fine (for VP or the top job), one thing I like about the Harris pick is that she really gets under Donald Trump’s skin, which means he won’t be able to keep himself from spouting racist and sexist garbage.  Powerful women clearly freak Trump out, especially if they’re minorities.  Except for his aspirational sex partners, Trump wants women to be like 50s sitcom wives.  He imagines himself defending Donna Reed and June Cleaver against the Mongol Hordes.  

But over and above the anachronistic “suburban housewife” terminology, current polling suggests that most women can’t stand Donald Trump.  And I’d be willing to bet that his latest rants against Harris, AOC, and Nancy Pelosi (“nasty,” “angry,” “not even a smart person,” “she yaps,” and “mad woman”) won’t turn that around. 

Trumpian rhetoric is simply a window onto the racist, sexist id of Trump and his followers.  But I’d argue that his comments about Kamala Harris are also an attempt at voter suppression.  Maybe they think if they can convince Black voters that Harris isn’t one of them, they’ll vote for Kanye West.  Certainly they hope they can find a message that will persuade white progressives to stay home or vote Green.  Oh, and Kamala’s also a cop.  But she’s a cop who’ll let criminals take over the suburbs.  Talk about heightening the contradictions. 

With 80 days to go, I’m convinced that the Biden/Harris ticket would win a fair election.  I’m not as convinced that we’ll get a fair election, as witness Trump’s admission that he’s defunding the Postal Service to limit voting by mail.  I have a feeling they jumped the gun; it would have made more sense to begin trying to shut down the Postal Service in October.  By giving away the game in August, Democrats have a chance to stop this clearly illegal effort to rig the election.  It appears that the near universal outrage has had an effect, as the USPS inspector general (one of the IGs Bill Barr didn’t get around to firing) has launched an investigation.

That’s a good start, but the Biden/Harris campaign needs to devote significant effort into anticipating and foiling Republican attempts at vote fraud.  The next 80 days (and probably beyond) are likely to get ugly.