Election Watch 2024: Week 2

Kamala’s Smart Moves; How Trump Became White; What the Left Gets Wrong About Josh Shapiro; Weekly Feminist Feels and More

Kamala Makes Two Really Smart Moves

My husband will tell you that every time I heard Joe Biden—and virtually every other Democratic politician and left/liberal leaning broadcaster—tell voters that “Democracy is on the ballot” I groaned. And I’d say some version of:

“I wish they’d stop saying that word as though of course people will know what they’re talking about. Most people heard and read that word so many times in grade-school when they were forced to memorize some arid definition from a textbook that it’s about as meaningful as ‘amber waves of grain.’ I bet if you asked a bunch of people on the street, in the diner, or in the barber shop what any of these big ‘rousing’ abstractions—Democracy, Anti-authoritarianism, ‘The Soul of America’ —mean, you’d get a lot of searching, struggling responses.”

Kamala Harris and her campaign made a really smart move when they exchanged invocations of “Democracy” for “Freedom”—and actually gave concrete examples.

Yes!!

It’s high time we grabbed “Freedom”—a watch-word of the Civil Rights movement—back from the clutches of the GOP and Mel Gibson and made it our own again. And with a campaign soundtrack of Beyoncé’s song, no less. Yes!!

Another smart move was how Kamala responded when Donald Trump made an utter ass of himself at the annual meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists, where he questioned Harris’s race, saying, “She was always of Indian heritage…I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black and now, she wants to be known as Black….All of a sudden she made a turn and she became a black person…And I think someone should look into that…”

Kamala’s smart move was to leave the outrage to surrogates and social media. Husband Doug Enhoff called Trump’s remarks “a worse version of an already horrible person.” White House Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called them “repulsive” and “insulting.” And numerous commentators, tweeters, and meme-makers corrected the record on Harris’s lifelong identification as Black.

That evening, MSNB commentators were all atwitter, eagerly awaiting how Kamala would deal with Trump’s remarks. But at her campaign rally after Trump’s appearance that day, she was cool, unruffled. She began: “This afternoon,” (pause; boos from a knowing audience)…“Donald Trump spoke at the annual meeting of the National Associations of Black Journalists” (long pause; wry look from Harris; more boos and some laughter.) Then, she shook her head: “It was the same old show.” Pause. “Diviseness and disrespect.” Harris didn’t even bother to respond to Trump’s specific comments about her “Blackness.” She brushed Trump’s performance off as though an annoying fly had landed on her gorgeous shoulder.

With apologies to Kamala for the comparison, it reminded me of that disarming moment during the second presidential debate of 1980, when Ronald Reagan was equally dismissive of his opponent, incumbent President Jimmy Carter:

Poor Jimmy Carter. Such a wonderful man. And I’m sure that Roger Ailes, who helped prep Reagan for the debate, gave him that line to pull out at the right moment. It became a signature, oft-repeated putdown. But more deeply, it helped establish Reagan as a happy, confident camper—not like those deadly downer Democrats, who never seemed to learn that in the television age, personality can matter as much—or more—than policy. And a well-aimed but cheerful putdown can work wonders for a campaign.

I remember wishing during the disastrous “debate” between Trump and Biden that Biden had been able to send a similarly terse, deflating poke at Trump’s stream-of-lies-and-incoherencies. His big mistake—especially considering how ill he was feeling—was to respond to Trump as though he was actually to be taken seriously.

Of course, Kamala does take Trump seriously. He’s a very real danger who managed to get himself elected once before and has to be fought hard lest it happen again. But taking his chances in November seriously doesn’t mean Kamala has to respond to every insult and insanity as worth rebuttal. Treating him like a pest is occasionally far more effective—and Kamala seems to know that. It’s among her super-powers. She knows how to get under his skin. And that’s when he loses it.

How Trump Became White

You don’t really think, do you, that Donald—though he is indeed an ignoramus about many things—doesn’t know that there are mixed-race people in the world? Of course he does, just like he knew Obama was born in the United States. He’s just using that “became Black” thing to insinuate that Kamala is exploiting Blackness for political advantage. You know, the way she got to be VEEP as a “DEI hire.” And Elizabeth Warren used her Indian heritage on job applications.

Leaving aside the ridiculous lie that Kamala “decided” to be Black at a certain point in her life, it’s true that ones race isn’t a biological “fact” as much as a combination of social/historical attribution, upbringing, and identification. My daughter has a Black biological father and a white biological mother. Biologically, she’s mixed race. But she’s always been Black by virtue of how the world sees her and treats her, what she identifies with, how she’s been raised, and what she deeply feels herself to be. (She also identifies as Jewish, even though she’s “mixed” there too.)

For both Cassie and Kamala, being Black is neither an arbitrary “decision” or a genetic determination. All of us who have taught those courses that the Republicans want to see thrown out of the curriculum know this.

We also know what Trump for sure doesn’t realize—that “white” isn’t a genetic category either. One of my favorite essays to use when I was teaching at LeMoyne, a small Jesuit college in central New York where many of the students were Irish Catholic and Polish catholic, was James Baldwin’s 1984 “On Being White and Other Lies.” In it, Baldwin writes—way before “critical race theory” became a thing—how various ethnicities and nationalities (and skin shades) became “White” when they settled/immigrated to America, and embraced their place (and privileges) in a culture that divided people most fundamentally into “Black” and “White” (rather than through the multiplicity of cultural and biological differences) and distinguished themselves from those defined—and subjugated—as Black.

For immigrants, Baldwin writes, becoming white was often “the price of the ticket” to becoming “American.” Before that, we were Germans, Italians, French, Polish, etc. If we were Irish or Jewish, our parents or grandparents may well have found refuge in America precisely because they were not “white” in the eyes of other Europeans. It’s not always easy. In America, they may have had to deny and erase all markers of their former status. As Adrienne Rich writes:

"Change your name, your accent, your nose; straighten or dye your hair; stay in the closet; pretend the Pilgrims were your fathers; become baptized as a Christian; wear dangerously high heels, and starve yourself to look young, thin, and feminine; don't gesture with your hands.... To assimilate means to give up not only your history but your body, to try to adopt an alien appearance because your own is not good enough, to fear naming yourself lest name be twisted into label."

At LeMoyne, before reading Baldwin and Rich, I’d go around the room and ask every student if their family name was ever something other than it currently was. Virtually all of them who weren’t Native-American in origin reported a chopped-off “ski”, “alli”, “itch” or some other Anglicizing/de-ethnicizing transformation or translation, done by officials at Ellis Island, given to their ancestors by slave-owners (I don’t recall any of those students—the minority at LeMoyne—knew what their “original” names were,) or adopted voluntarily, in the interests of being more acceptable. That, apparently, was the case with the Drumpf family:

I don’t know the circumstances around which or why “Drumpf” became “Trump.” But the family sure wasn’t going to have “Drumpf” on a skyscraper.

Baldwin makes the additional point that continuing to participate in the “lie” that one is “white” within a human world divided hierarchically into white and Black is at the root of a crisis in white leadership:

“Because they think they are white, they are looking for, or bombing into existence, stable populations, cheerful natives and cheap labor. Because they think they are white, they believe, as even no child believes, in the dream of safety. Because they think they are white, however vociferous they may be and however multitudinous, they are as speechless as Lot’s wife— looking backward, changed into a pillar of salt. However—White being, absolutely, a moral choice (for there are no white people), the crisis of leadership for those of us whose identity has been forged, or branded, as Black is nothing new. We—who were not Black before we got here either, who were defined as Black by the slave trade—have paid for the crisis of leadership in the white community for a very long time, and have resoundingly, even when we face the worst about ourselves, survived, and triumphed over it. If we had not survived and triumphed, there would not be a Black American alive. And the fact that we are still here—even in suffering, darkness, danger, endlessly defined by those who do not dare define, or even confront, themselves is the key to the crisis in white leadership.”

This is a difficult passage, and I don’t claim to understand it completely. But I think it’s applicability to Donald Trump, as exemplified throughout his life but hatching out in especially blatant, ludicrous, and repulsive form as he confronts the triumph of Kamala Harris (whether or not she wins the election, she is triumphant over him in every way) should be clear.

What “Progressives” Get Wrong in their Attacks on Josh Shapiro

Of course, I have no idea who Kamala Harris will pick as her Vice-President. And I’d be happy with any of the six (or is it now three?) remaining candidates. At the beginning, I was hoping for my own Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, who is a wonderful man, a great politician, and would bring a unique Christian/Southern/liberal profile to the ticket. I won’t go into all his virtues now, though. I’ve deleted Beshear from my imaginings of him as VEEP because we need him much more in Mitch McConnell’s seat in the Senate.

In any case, I’m not here to predict or to pick a favorite. I’m here to complain about and correct the “discourse” surrounding Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania. I use the term “discourse” because anti-Shapiro sentiment is not one single thing, but a cluster of objections, unconscious associations, and just plain mis(or in some cases dis)information. Taken all together, it’s ugly and disturbing—and if Shapiro is chosen, must be countered in the strongest possible terms, lest those that imagine themselves “progressives” muck up the works the way they did in 2016.

First off:

If you look up the actual positions held by the candidates for Vice-President, you’ll find that they all have virtually the same positions on the Israel/Hamas war—which is also basically the same as Kamala Harris’s. They are all for a two-state solution, they all support Israel’s right to defend itself, and they all expressed horror over both Oct 7 and have strong criticism of Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war.

Despite the basic similarities, beliefs have arisen that aren’t supported by facts.

One is the belief among “progressives” that Kamala is more “pro-Palestinian” than any of her VEEP candidates or Biden. This seems to be based on atmospherics (more emotion when she talks about the destruction in Gaza,) by association (her stepdaughter, like many young people, supported “pro-Palestinian” causes), and the racist assumption that because Kamala is Black, it’s “natural” for her identify with Palestinians. (Pramila Jayapal said, in an interview with Joy Reid, that “it comes natural to her.”)

Fine. I’m sure receipts can be amassed by those who want to distinguish Kamala from Biden on Israel, for whatever reasons.

It’s harder to find evidence to support the view that Shapiro is virulently “anti-Palestine.” Yet there’s been a major stop-Shapiro push among the “left” and socialist wing of the Democrats. There’s a website and a Twitter feed called “No Genocide Josh.”

The Philadelphia Democratic Socialists have accused Shapiro of war-mongering, cozying up to Republicans, being “an outspoken supporter of the Zionist project in Palestine” (“the Zionist project in Palestine” seems to mean the intentional “ethnic cleansing” of the Palestinian population), curtailing free speech, and comparing “student protestors to the Ku Klux Klan.” There’s been a concerted effort, among the anti-Shapiro faction, to dig into the past—as far back as 1993 (when he was 20!) and an Op Ed piece that described Palestinians as too “battle-minded” to allow for peace with Israel—for evidence to support their views. There hasn’t been similar vigilante “vetting” of any of the other candidates.

Here’s what Shapiro had to say more recently (two days ago):

I always do my research. And what I discovered was that although the phrases “fiercely anti-Palestinian” and “rabidly pro-Israel” are promiscuously deployed throughout social media in “Genocide Josh” groups, in fact it’s not Palestine but anti-Semitism here at home that Shapiro has been fierce about. In the interview with Jake Tapper, for example—it’s the interview that was the “basis” for the charge that Shapiro compares student protestors to the Ku Klux Klan—it’s not the protestors “in general” that Shapiro refers to, but those that Jake Tapper has just described as wearing regalia, carrying signs and chanting slogans that are pro-Hamas (and therefore, antisemitic) and making it impossible for Jewish students to feel safe on campus. Moreover, Shapiro’s point was not to compare the protesters to the Ku Klux Klan, but to point out the double-standard that would surely have the media condemning blatant racist hate-mongering while being so complacent about overt displays of anti-Semitism.

(For the interview with Tapper, click here.)

Do I agree with Richard Torres that the “Genocide Josh” crowd is antisemitic? They deny that charge, some pointing out that Illinois governor JB Pritzker—who had been a VP candidate—is also Jewish. But antisemitism, like racism, is more “textured” than that. Symone Sanders-Townsend believes Trump, in claiming Harris “became Black,” is trying to pin “Not Black Enough” on Kamala, hoping to create negativity toward her within the “Black community.” And there are white racists who, while not using those exact words, recoil from those who are “Blacker” than more “articulate,” “dignified” (or whatever) exceptions to their race. So too, there are those Jews who blend nicely into the dominant culture, and those who are perceived as “too Jewish.”

Pritzer is much “quieter” about his Jewishness than Shapiro. I couldn’t find out much about it at all, while Shapiro publicly embraces his Judaism — “keeping a kosher kitchen at the governor’s mansion and wearing a red string around his wrist, a good luck charm his daughter got for him at the Western Wall. He grew up attending Jewish day school and got his political start as a kid raising money for Soviet Jewry.” There’s also nothing comparable in Pritzer’s profile (at least, that I could find) to Shapiro’s vocal stance against antisemitism.

Of course, no one says the words “too Jewish”—not out loud. But there are give-aways. When I browsed through some substacks on the VP selection, I found words like “overbearing”….”loud”….”pushy”….”too flashy and too loud” coming up disturbingly often with respect to Shapiro. He was also the only one among the VEEP contenders accused of being “too much of a politician.” Let’s be real: they all are politicians—or they wouldn’t hold offices, wouldn’t be contenders for VEEP. “Too much of a politician” suggests a “what makes Sammy run?”agressive ruthlessness (see also John Fetterman’s criticism that Shapiro is “too personally ambitious.”) Call me hyper-sensitive, but my stereotype-detecting radar starts beeping when I read these comments.

P.S. Shapiro has also been criticized for supporting school vouchers (while also advocating, btw, for full funding and enhancement of public schools.) His own kids go to private Jewish school, which may explain something about his policy—and may, in today’s climate, absolutely be the best place for them.

Feminist Feels

I loved it so much when Kamala Harris, as Trump began to sound like he was backing out of debating her, responded:

“If you’ve got something to say…[pause]…Say it to my face!” (She’s really expert at inserting pauses.)

It also made me sad that Hillary hadn’t felt able to say that (or something like it) to Trump, when he stalked her on the debate stage. She recalls, in What Happened:

“Now we were on a small stage and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces. It was incredibly uncomfortable.  He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled/It was one of those moments where you wish you could hit pause and ask everyone watching, 'well, what would you do?' Do you stay calm, keep smiling and carry on as if he weren't repeatedly invading your space or do you turn, look him in the eye and say loudly and clearly, 'Back up you creep, get away from me. I know you love to intimidate women but you can't intimidate me. So back up."

Clinton went with the first option. Later, she reflected that perhaps she had "over-learned the lesson of staying calm, biting my tongue, digging my fingernails into a clenched fist, smiling all the while, determined to present a composed face to the world."

At the time, it seemed to me a double-bind of the sort Hillary (and female politicians in general) continually had found themselves in. One didn’t want to be seen as having an “outburst”: over-emotional, too sensitive, unable to take things in stride. A hysterical woman. But because Hillary had learned so well to keep her emotions in check in order not to be dismissed that way, she was perceived as overly controlled and unspontaneous.

That was how I “defended” Hillary in 2017 when my older sister Mickey, who had come to my New York book talk, proposed that perhaps Hillary had made the wrong choice. “Don’t you think she should have confronted him? Maybe if she had, it would have turned things around.”

“She couldn’t win, either way,” I’d said. But now, like Hillary herself, I wonder.

In 2019, when 2019 Presidential candidate Kamala Harris was asked by a reporter what she would do if Trump stalked her in a debate, she said she’d turn around and ask “What’s wrong with you? Why are you being so weird?” (Yes, she did “weird” there, before it’s current (and getting a little old) branding.)

The fact that we now have a woman candidate for president who—for a variety of reasons—can go there is thrilling. And makes me long for my sister, because she would so love what’s happening now. We Klein girls had a father who grew up on the streets of Brooklyn and knew how to street fight with words And Mickey, who was 8 and a half years older than me, knew that side of “Yosh” before it got battered into depression and resentment. She was a big fan of “shpritzing,” as she called feisty pokes.

I want her back, sitting on the couch beside me, shouting her delight every time Kamala Harris talks back to Trump.

How I wish Hillary could have turned around and shpritzed the stalking Trump. How I wish I’d given my sister’s Mickey’s comment the thought it deserved. How I wish I’d done this every time my sister spoke. How she would have hooted with delight at Kamala’s rise. How I miss her.

Etcetera

‘“Just wait. We haven’t defined her yet.” Poor Trump, unfortunately, he’s used up a lot of those already, and is resorting to recycling (“Lying Kamala”) and playground sticks and stones. Plus, Kamala Harris doesn’t lend herself well to being “defined.” And she’s got a huge social media band that is on the look-out and is going to expose and pre-empt their “definitions.”

J.D.Vance: “I’m sympathetic to the view that like, okay, look here, here’s a situation – let’s say Roe v Wade is overruled. Ohio bans abortion in 2022, or let’s say 2024. And then, you know, every day George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California. And of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity – uh, that’s kind of creepy.”

I hate to resort to cliches (sorry, George Orwell), but isn’t Vance the gift that keeps on giving? Besides confirming that he is a proponent of a national abortion ban (if you needed that confirmation) it’s so delightfully racially “evocative” to speak of Black women being “transported” across states. That boy is a genius at offensive metaphors and images.

Vance’s comments were reported by CNN. Almost immediately, Kamala Harris’s campaign posted audio of the remarks on X.

They are on the look-out, J.D., and they’re young and have great eyesight.

Note: “Election Watch 2024” will be a regular weekly feature of BordoLines. If you missed last week’s:

Media Watch: Election 2024 Week 1