Kamala Harris: Joe Biden’s running mate was unpopular in the primaries, so why has he picked her now?
There’s no doubt Kamala Harris is a capable candidate – the real question, writes Alan Jones, is what does this woman who might be a heartbeat away from the White House really stand for?
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Am I missing something?
Can you imagine the outrage if Donald Trump had said that he was going to choose a Vice-Presidential running mate and that person must be white and male?
All hell would break loose.
Joe Biden has announced the Californian Senator Kamala Harris as his Vice-Presidential running mate, having said previously that the candidate must be a woman of colour.
In fact, many Democratic leaders spoke emphatically that they were hoping Joe Biden’s “pick” would break new ground by elevating a woman of colour.
Earlier in August, a hundred prominent black men released a strongly worded open letter warning Joe Biden that not picking a black woman would cost him the election.
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I might add, Biden has also pledged to pick a black woman as his first Supreme Court nominee, should he be elected President.
No-one is disputing that Kamala Harris has ability.
But how is Kamala Harris empowered by knowing that she has won the gig because she’s black and because she’s a woman?
And what is the definition of sexism and racism if this is not, other than to say, hypocrisy may be writ large again.
This is a major political party in the United States, lurching to the left and obsessing over a person’s identity and skin colour.
I thought the left was the side that used to tell us to look past someone’s skin colour and socio-economic background: Didn’t Martin Luther King Jr say, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character”?
Now the radical Democratic left are obsessed with labelling people based on their skin colour and gender. Kamala Harris will now be viewed by American voters as only being in her position because she’s a woman of colour.
How this helps her, I have no idea.
But, at a time when monuments and statues are being ripped down because of some past association with slaves, a repugnant development by any reckoning, where the omissions of the past must be visited on someone in the present, Kamala Harris is the descendant of an Irishman who owned a slave plantation in Jamaica, according to her father’s lengthy ancestral summary.
Kamala Harris’s father is no dunce.
He’s a Stanford University economics professor.
He revealed in 2018, “My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother, Miss Crishy (nee Cristiana Brown), descendant of Hamilton Brown, who is on record as a plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town.”
A research archive of Jamaican records indicates that, at one point in 1817, Hamilton Brown owned scores of slaves, the majority brought in from Africa. Where this puts Kamala Harris in relation to the left and their strident campaign to condemn anyone with any past association with slaves, no one knows.
There has been a lot of talk about reparation for slavery. That is, payments to the descendants of slaves.
As a Californian Senator, Kamala Harris has been asked many times whether she supports “some form of reparations for black people”.
Of course, she said she did, but then the nice two-bob each way answer, reparations “mean different things to different people”.
The left who are salivating over her candidature are understandably silent on this.
But one wonders how other Democratic candidates for the Presidency are feeling today when, among the final 15, Kamala Harris was in the bottom three who pulled out way back in December last year.
She could not raise support within her own Democratic constituency, yet she’s now a heartbeat away from the Presidency. It is no wonder American Democrats didn’t want her.
She was advocating, among a raft of left-wing nonsense, overturning President Trump’s ban on transgenders in the military and she co-sponsored a Bill that would force public schools to allow biologically male athletes, who identify as transgender, on girls’ sports teams.
I have to confess, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t think that women and men, where sensible, should be treated equally. But there are also differences that have to be acknowledged.
You wouldn’t think of conducting, in tennis, an Australian singles championship and shove the men and the women into the one tournament and say may the best person win.
But equality must mean we all play by the same rules. That means, professionally, people must be appointed on merit. Which prompts the question, why couldn’t Kamala Harris rely on her skills and her education to climb up the career ladder?
It was clear from the Democratic primaries that she was unable to do that.
It’s not her colour or her gender that will win or lose votes but rather what she stands for. The frightening thing is that Biden is 77.
If he were to win in November, he will be 78 when he is inaugurated next January, the oldest person to be sworn in as President for the first time.
Concerns legitimately exist around Mr. Biden’s cognitive capacities.
Kamala Harris would be no more than the proverbial heartbeat away from becoming the leader of the free world if anything happens to Mr. Biden.
Her nomination, therefore, demands very close scrutiny. This is a woman who tweeted in June that people should contribute to the Minnesota Freedom Fund to help post bail for those arrested during the rioting and looting.
Defund the police but fund the criminals. And she calls herself a moderate!
What would a radical stand for?
As one writer said, given the short shelf life of Biden, should they win, this election really is about Kamala Harris.
She has acknowledged, during a radio interview in February, using marijuana in her youth and jokingly said, “Half my family is from Jamaica. Are you kidding me?”
The business about drug taking is a nightmare for many parents and young people who believe they have to win peer group approval by indulging in something that they have been encouraged by their family to avoid.
Every instrument known to man has been used to try to warn young people of the danger of drug taking leading to drug addiction; perhaps the answer is to decriminalise all of this so that we can know where the drugs are coming from and monitor those who are using them.
But that’s a story for another day.
Nonetheless, we have a Vice-Presidential candidate here, the daughter of a Jamaican-born Stanford Professor, virtually implying that if you come from Jamaica, it’s axiomatic that drug taking is a natural consequence of your birth.
The professorial father wasn’t impressed.
Professor Donald Harris sent a statement to Jamaican Global online seeking to categorically dissociate himself from the remarks of his daughter.
“My dear departed grandmothers…..as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now. To see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not, with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and, in the pursuit of identity politics…..speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family. We wish to categorically disassociate ourselves from this travesty”.
What do they say, fathers know best!
Good luck America!
I think you’ll need it.