The Kamala Harris pick

Joe Biden has picked California Senator Kamala Harris as his Vice Presidential running mate. Harris is safely establishment, though with a more liberal streak than Biden has shown for most of his career. Progressive hero (and my former Congresswoman) Barbara Lee supported her Presidential bid in the primaries.

Vice Presidential picks generate media interest. Their actual effects on the outcome of the Presidential election is much more dubious. Lyndon Johnson in 1960 was arguably important in attracting Southern voters to the Kennedy ticket during the waning years of the Solid South, i.e., when the South generally voted Democratic in the Presidential elections. The polls in 2008 indicated that Sarah Palin's presence on the Republican ticket actually hurt McCain's Presidential bid. George McGovern's ill-fated initial selection of Stuart Symington as his running mate didn't help his 1972 campaign, but he was facing huge odds in any case.

Harris will be the first black woman on a major party ticket in the US and the first Asian-American. How capable a campaigner she will be in the general election remains to be seen. Ironically, her strongest moment during the primaries was her shot at Joe Biden during a debate over his record on busing for school desegregation in the 1970s. The Vice Presidential nominee is automatically considered a top contender for the top of the party ticket next time around. And there is a good chance that if he wins, Biden will not stand for re-election in 2024.

Obviously, Biden-Harris is a far superior ticket to the disastrous Bunker Boy-Mike Pence one. Trump and Pence have gone a long way in damaging democracy and the rule of law. They've also shown the stunning incompetence in governance and shabby corruption that are also typical features of authoritarian governments. There's no serious doubt that Biden and Harris will do a better job on the COVID-19 crisis and will not display the kind of blundering, incoherence, and shameless bigotry we've had in the Bunker Boy Administration.

One real concern I have about Harris as the VP candidate is that the single most important task for a Biden Administration when it comes to the rule of law will be to hold members of the Trump Administration who committed serious crimes in their official position legally accountable. The Obama-Biden Administration notoriously adopted a look-forward-not-backward position on official crimes of the Cheney-Bush Administration, including the torture crimes. As Don Froomkin wrote in 2011 (Is Torture In America’s Future As Well As In Our Country’s Past? Huffington Post 2011):

[Obama] But he has also repeatedly expressed his desire to “look forward instead of looking backward.” As a result, there has yet to be any accountability for the actions of the Bush/Cheney administration. And none appears forthcoming.

And without accountability — without either criminal prosecutions or some sort of official national reckoning of what took place — there’s no reason to think that the next time a perceived emergency comes up, some other president or vice president will not decide to torture again.

The de facto impunity for serious official crimes the Obama-Biden Administration gave to their predecessors was very obviously taken by Trump and the Republican Party as a license to consider themselves above the law and the Constitution. The Republicans are certainly willing to use laws against Democrats; Trump just publicly accused Obama of having committed treason. But for the Republican Party to make partisan prosecutions against Democrats and leftwing protesters while the Democratic Party adopts a policy of refusing to enforce the law against actual Republican violators is not the rule of law.

And Harris' record raises serious doubts about whether Harris is willing to enforce the law against the rich and powerful on an equal basis.

Carla Marinucci reported on charges that Harris was soft on accountability for misconduct by big banks during the mortgage crisis in New book whacks Kamala Harris’ AG record during housing crisis Politico 10/22/2019:

Kamala Harris catapulted to Democratic stardom on a narrative based on her role as California’s attorney general during the housing crisis, when she was an unrelenting adversary of big banks and mortgage lenders, and a champion of consumers.

But a new book by Pulitzer Prize-nominated reporter Aaron Glantz challenges that storyline, arguing that Harris not only allowed Steve Mnuchin’s OneWest bank to get away with foreclosing on tens of thousands of state homeowners, but then tried to bury the evidence.

The book, titled “Homewreckers: How a Gang of Wall St. Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions of Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream,’’ was published this week by Custom House.

It posits that a group of Wall Street moguls including Trump Cabinet appointees Mnuchin and Wilbur Ross, as well as White House insiders like Steve Schwarzman and Tom Barrack, took advantage of “a rigged system” to transfer billions of dollars from individual homeowners into their own pockets during the Great Recession.

Sam Seder interviewed Aaron Glantz on this topic in 2019, Why Didn't Kamala Harris Prosecute Steve Mnuchin? The Majority Report 11/05/2019:

David Dayen wrote about the Mnuchin case in Treasury Nominee Steve Mnuchin's Bank Accused of "Widespread Misconduct" in Leaked Memo The Intercept 01/03/2017.

The PBS Newshour has a sketch of her as the VP pick, Kamala Harris’ path to the Democratic presidential ticket 08/11/2020.

They also include this discussion of how she is likely to play out as the nominee, What Kamala Harris offers the Biden campaign as VP nominee 08/12/2020. This segment strikes me as a notably sympathetic presentation. Gushing, even:

One thing to keep in mind is that Harris' political career has been based in safely Democratic and generally liberal-leaning California. How her pragmatic political approach plays out on a national scene is mostly still to be seen. Her first run for San Francisco District Attorney is worth remembering. Lee Fang covered it in In Her First Race, Kamala Harris Campaigned as Tough on Crime - and Unseated the Country's Most Progressive Prosecutor The Intercept 02/07/2019:

Many in San Francisco view the campaign as a defining moment for Harris, who carefully cultivated a base of support among police officers, domestic violence advocates, wealthy donors, and a diverse range of local officials and community leaders who had bristled at [Terence] Hallinan’s leftist politics and abrasive style.

The 2003 race stands apart from the image she has projected in more recent years. Far from the “smart on crime” mantra she touted in her successful bid to become California’s attorney general or promoting her efforts to hold corporations accountable when she ran for the U.S. Senate, Harris’s first campaign reflected familiar tactics in an era of booming mass incarceration. [my emphasis]

He also reports on a disturbing difference in Harris' approach as San Francisco District Attorney to the problems of people abused by Catholic priests in As San Francisco District Attorney, Kamala Harris's Office Stopped Cooperating with Victims of Catholic Church Child Abuse The Intercept 06/09/2019.

Establishment Democrats are sorely tempted to assume that the current surge in civil rights activism around the issue of wanton police murders of black people will automatically benefit the Democrats. And in 2020, it almost certainly will. However, highly engaged activists are a minority of voters. We saw the Democratic vote drop significantly in 2010 as the presence of an African-American Democrat in the White House energized the Republicans and Obama's studied moderation - including the ridiculous Simpson-Bowles Catfood Commission - fell short of the hopeful vision of 2016.

Even more devastating, after eight years of seeing Obama slammed around by the Republicans in Congress with no comparable pushback from the Democrats, low turnout in the key Midwestern swing states among Democratic-leaning African-American voters. Black voters may vote "defensively," as the pundits repeatedly told us in the leadup to the South Carolina Democratic primary this year. But that's not enough if they don't turn out to turn.

Politically, 2020 is a stunningly favorable year for even a Democratic ticket of Status Quo Joe the crime bill guy and Kamala the Cop. But even if Biden wins, not being Donald Trump will just not be enough for the Democratic Party in 2022 and also not in 2024, even if Bunker Boy himself heads the Republican ticket that year.

Doing something meaningful and visible to cut down on arbitrary police murders is one essential thing they need to do to avoid discouraging young voters and African-American voters. Mandatory federal reviews of questionable killings on the part of police is essential. But neither that or anything else is going to be supported by Republicans or the various police lobbies. And that means any meaningful action will require a Biden-Harris Administration to put up a real fight for it. Meaningless gestures like "more funding for bias training" are little more that a declaration of indifference in the current moment.

Making a real fight for improvement on that front will go strongly against the past political practices of both Biden and Harris which they have seen as being succesful for them. I hope the popular pressure will be enough to persuade them to jump that particular shark and take on a new perspective.

What we don't need from her in the campaign or as Vice President are cringe-worthy moments like this one of her giggling weirdly about draconian threats against parents of student with truancy issues. Kamala Harris Laughed About Jailing Parents Of Truant Kids The Rational national 01/31/2019:

Joy Reid gave Harris' selection the kind of glowing treatment we can expect to see her receive during the Presidential campaign on MSNBC, Joe Biden Picks Sen. Kamala Harris As The Running Mate To Defeat A Trump-Pence Ticket 08/12/2020: