Discover more from REACTION
Kamala Harris this week passed the Rachel Maddow test. Many readers will not have a clue what I’m talking about. Kamala Harris, 54, the Democrat California senator who has been at Washington’s Capitol for two minutes – sorry, two years! – is running for President of the USA.
Rachel Maddow is the liberal #metoo interviewer of choice who hosts her own nightly 9:00pm programme on MSNBC television. She interviewed Harris. I haven’t seen anything so unashamedly politically biased since I last watched Fox News.
The Maddow show is a phenomenon. No self-announced candidate worth his/her/its salt is now taken seriously by Democrat liberals until he/she/it has passed the Maddow initiation test. Ms. Maddow would be very good if she chose to ask tough questions. She throws softies instead, but with a clipped, rapid-fire delivery that can be mistaken for intellectual rigour. Last night she sang Kamala Harris’s praises, cooing “She has a good chance of winning in 2020” after some pat a cake exchanges.
That’s it then, Game over. Will the seven other already declared candidates politely fess up to being losers and go home? And the other sixteen possible aspirants simply not bother? Get on with the day job.
The Maddow Hellespont show, where Democrat candidates are meant to sink without trace or pass through the jaws of interview unscathed, has rapidly established itself as this primary season’s equivalent of the 19th century debutante ball. You have not “come out” unless you have been presented at the Maddow court. But, so far no-one has actually sunk. How Ms. Maddow has acquired her tiger reputation is a mystery. More pussycat.
The problem is, that watching these smarmy rights of passage you can’t help feeling, “Why is Rachel Maddow not the candidate?” So far the queen has seemed infinitely more electable than any of her subjects. Anyone for Fiona Bruce as Theresa May’s replacement?
But Ms. Maddow is not a candidate. Kamala Harris is. So, what’s she done to get there? Harris has written two vacuous books, “The Truths We Hold” and “Smart on Crime”, held office as District Attorney for San Francisco from 2004, then as Attorney General for California from 2010, until elected to the Senate in 2016. In a field which will boast many nonentities, she is clearly overqualified by today’s standards. She is also by background this season’s Barack Obama – but claims she isn’t – a bit too coyly for my liking.
In a rapidly crowding race of Democrat aspirants – likely to top out at around 24 – her combination of excruciating writing ability, political shenanigans in the prosecutors’ posts she has held – traditionally impartial – and her chameleon-like ability to identify with every wacko who shakes her hand, gives her a huge advantage. Use of office for political ends is the Democrat way. It’s also arguably the Republican way. They just aren’t so hypocritical.
She is a woke candidate. I stumbled across this word “woke”, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed and at first thought it was a misspelling. It’s not. Nor is it the past tense of the verb “wake”. It’s a political term of African American usage meaning “remaining alert to political injustice”. And it’s everywhere in this primary campaign. On the Democrat side if you’re not a woke candidate, you’re toast. Presumably, unwoke toast.
Here’s a helpful tip for the unwoke. In the coming long-haul primary race brace yourself, before the nightly Rachel Maddow show, with the ideal “Woke Candidate Cocktail”. Take a large ego; strain in a career of achieving absolutely nothing; add a shot of caring about issues, a splash of sympathy with “victims” – any old victim really, but especially anyone convicted of whatever criminal offence; spike with a massive measure of self-regarding hubris. Down it in one and you may just understand what’s going on.
In this Democratic primary race all you really need to run is the right emoji. Place yourself at the head of a cheering interest group. All this “having done stuff”, even for a nanosecond, is nothing compared with the ability to emote.
Mind you, Senator Harris is pretty good at that, too. Her gushing “transparency” is almost beyond parody. She claims her most testing election yet was against some nerd in a high school election. Who believes any of this piffle? And, what’s her point? Perhaps that the future leader of the free world and custodian of potential Armageddon clashed with her nemesis in Grade 2, emerged victorious, so can face down Putin and Kim Jong Un? Impressive.
Or, maybe she thinks it makes her subsequent, determined crawl up the greasy pole seem more “ordinary,” and that is a good thing. I’m lost. It just makes her look, well …. odd.
She is often disarmingly honest. Her incantatory trope is that she’s running for office “because she can”. There’s nary a word about what office is for – apart from satisfying her perpetual need for self-elevation. Bring on the psychiatrists.
Will someone please tell Senator Harris what happened to Hillary, the “Me, Me,” entitlement, glass ceiling candidate of 2016? You remember. It didn’t end well.
We know what she thinks from her books. Or, do we? Try a couple of quotes for size. Honestly, these are only random gems plucked from a rich seam that glitters in an inexhaustible supply.
“So all of this is to say, my sisters and brothers, that we are tired as women to simply being relegated to being a particular constituency or demographic”.
“Especially when they say we might be the only one like you in that room. We know we will always be in that room together.”
This is psychobabble of the highest order. But, supporters seem to lap it up because, apparently, it’s “inclusive”, puts her “on their side”. Cue David Cameron, “We’re all in this together”.
Despite the cloying rhetoric, in office Senator Harris has proven time and time again that she is really on the side of the union vested interests that support her campaigns. For example, as Attorney General she used her political clout unashamedly, bowing to the demands of the Service Employee’s National Union, when in 2015 she blocked the rescue of a Catholic hospital network by Prime Healthcare, whose non-union labour policies the Union opposed. The hospitals folded, leaving the pensions of thousands of workers in jeopardy.
She is highly partisan, having no scruples about trying to force the disclosure of the identity of her opponents’ donors – a move eventually thwarted by the courts. And she shot to national prominence for grandstanding during the Senate inquiry into Russian election interference, during a contentious exchange with Attorney General, Jeff Sessions when she would not come to order. She repeated the floorshow during the Brett Kavanagh Supreme Court nomination hearings.
Here, in her own words, is how she saw her role as prosecutor:
“The job of a progressive prosecutor is to look out for the overlooked, to speak up for those whose voices aren’t being heard, to see and address the causes of crime, not just their consequences, and to shine a light on the inequality and unfairness that lead to injustice. It is to recognize that not everyone needs punishment, that what many need, quite plainly, is help.”
If you believe prosecutors should be caped crusaders, Senator Harris is your candidate. Some, a depressingly diminishing number in the US, believe that was a corruption of her non partisan office.
Her rise to prominence goes largely unaddressed in her books. It was not fuelled by the grit that won her that celebrated high school election. Legendary Willie Brown, Speaker of the California State Senate from 1981 to 1995, then Mayor of San Francisco, with whom she had a relationship, appointed her to a variety of state offices, which proved her runway to higher office. Keeping it in the Democratic family, so to speak.
Can she stand out in a crowded field? She can just now, but its early days. There are two declared look-alike candidates to watch, Senators Amy Klobucher and Kirsten Gillibrand.
Insomniacs, queue up now to view the redoubtable Rachel Maddow “one on one” with Senator Klobucher, the senior Senator from Minnesota. Then, turn to a hobbyist nerd video on paint drying and spot the difference.
The National Review recently published a “Twenty Things You Didn’t Know About Nancy Klobucher”. Well, I’ve read them – and they needn’t bother you, save intriguing number 11. Apparently in 2011 Justin Bieber raged that she should be locked up for sponsoring a bill that would make profiting from the illegal streaming of copyrighted material a felony. If the things you know about Senator Klobucher are more earth shattering than that, mea culpa for flippancy.
Kirsten Gillibrand, the junior senator from New York, campaigns in the same style as Senator Harris, feeling people’s pain. But, do watch her fumbled attempts to “listen” to voters in Iowa where she hopes to gain a lead in the early caucus. There is a very funny “must see” two-minute clip of her on YouTube, lecturing a benumbed voter about her views on – well, everything politically correct, especially “listening”. Hectoring Hillary has nothing on her.
As other nonentities enter the race Senator Harris will likely see many of them off in the debates – but a “big gun”, perhaps the resolutely humourless Senator Elizabeth Warren, will prove more challenging.
And, surviving the Trump destruction machine will not be easy. When the vast phalanx of Democrat candidates is finally assembled he will reprise his successful Tweet strategy during the 2016 Republican primaries, of picking them off, tagging each with withering epithets that stick for the duration of the campaign.
Who can forget “Little Marco”, or “Cheating Hillary”? Count on Mr. Trump to be non presidential. He will defy convention, crashing the Democrat primary party, making it his own battleground. The woke Senator Harris is in for a rude awakening.
Subscribe to REACTION
Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.