Where’s-Waldo Biden surprised a good number of my political friends (and me) and picked Kamala Harris to run with him against Trump (and, many speculate, to be President should he not complete his term). Given her unlikeability and her spectacular (and well-deserved) fall from grace during the primaries, she seems like an odd pick.
Even more so, if considered from the context of the over-policing that the Black Lives Matter movement stands against. Harris is the poster child for over-policing and over-incarceration, aggressively prosecuting the ‘quality of life’ transgressions that turn poor and minority communities into revenue sources, that pit police against those communities, and that increase the probability of tragedies like Eric Garner’s death.
As my friend and frequent blog contributor E.D. Nicholas posited:
Maker of over-incarceration picks manipulator of over-incarceration.
It’s a giant middle finger to BLM. As political writer Shikha Dalmia noted, Harris styled herself as a “progressive prosecutor” who ‘wants to save you not from the bad guys but yourself,’ and who did so vigorously and with little regard to the (often poor and black) lives she trashed. She resisted criminal justice reforms, and ‘fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.’
But, this may be the (cynical) point of Biden’s selection. It reeks of pursuit of the “law and order” vote, given that the swing voters, i.e. suburban soccer moms, are fearful of the lawlessness that’s going on right now.
And, lest we forget, Biden’s record on criminal justice is decidedly not copacetic with BLM or the reform movement in the wake of the George Floyd killing. He authored much of the structure that led to an explosion in incarceration of minorities. His efforts to walk those back with his current campaign platform clashes, wildly, with his picking Harris.
Is Biden selling out his black supporters, the ones who rallied to him in South Carolina and gave him the momentum to overtake Sanders and eventually win the nomination, in pursuit of voters who have not been nearly as loyal to him and his party?
It would seem so.
This would rest on the presumption that the black vote is either fully locked up, or sufficiently irrelevant in the swing states to weather such a betrayal. And, perhaps, on the expectation that a press corps that’s vastly invested in beating Trump will whitewash all of this on his behalf.
But, as we all know, Biden’s a career politician, so disappointing his constituents is just another day at the office.
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