Joe Biden, Kamala Harris And Why I Finally Feel Hopeful

As I write this, I feel a sense of hope for the first time since at least Election Night 2018. As a team, Biden and Harris look like America.

(image via Facebook)

by Bob Cesca

WASHINGTON, DC -- Throughout the past several years, this space has too often been filled with one horrible news event after the other -- how and why Donald Trump is bringing about the end of the republic as we know it. I don’t need to tell you it’s been an endlessly blazing hot plasma stream of crimes, misdeeds, and presidential conspiracies, all colliding at the same time, augmenting our national despair and mortification.

Today, as I write this, I feel a sense of hope for the first time since at least Election Night 2018. Naturally, it’s all about Joe Biden’s selection of Sen. Kamala Harris to be his vice presidential running mate. It’s absolutely a winning ticket, as well as a stellar choice on behalf of the former vice president. For the first time in a long while, it feels like we might just pull up before our nose-diving republic crashes head-first into the ground.

It sounds cliche, but as a team, Biden and Harris look like America. More than that, they’re actual grownups who are disciplined, decent, professional leaders who, at long last, offer a sense of rock solid stability following nearly four years of frenetic instability and unpredictable recklessness. This is why I feel hopeful.

I feel hopeful that millions of Americans will turn out in record numbers to vote for these leaders, enough votes to overcome the worsening corruption emerging from Trump’s desperate war room -- the cheating, the sabotage, the suppression, and the rank disenfranchisement burdening our democracy by the first fascist tyrant in the White House. The Biden-Harris ticket has the potential to slice clean through all of that madness.

I’m not getting happy yet. There’s still a real chance that the worst case scenario will come to pass. But I’m feeling more confident than I did two days ago and certainly three years ago this week when we all watched Trump supporting Nazi terrorists marching in Charlottesville, one of whom murdered Heather Heyer because she dared to protest in opposition to Confederates.

Part of what’s contributing to my growing confidence is this: At least for now, Trump and his fanboys don’t know what to say about Kamala Harris.

Trump, for example, seems to think Harris’s debate attack against Joe Biden means she’s a “vicious” woman who was “very disrespectful” to Biden. He’s repeated this a couple of times so far, and it’s totally baffling. Is anyone seriously going to switch their vote from Biden to Trump because Harris was mean to Biden in a Democratic debate more than a year ago? Why would anyone not vote for Biden because they were turned off by a criticism of Biden that most people didn’t see in the first place?

In reality, Biden’s selection of Harris shows that Biden is a much, much bigger man than Trump could ever be. Trump, a small, petty, vindictive little man, would never team up with someone who dared to challenge him on race. He’s so weak and brittle, he’s fired his own people for far less than what Harris said to Biden back in June of 2019.

Trump also said Harris’s poll numbers weren’t good, presumably making her a toxic choice. Trump himself has hired several of his former 2016 primary opponents to be a part of his team, including Ben Carson who only won nine delegates, along with Chris Christy and Rick Perry, who each won exactly zero delegates.

Fox News Channel meanwhile, jumped into the race-baiting almost right away. The line from the Red Hat propaganda network is that Kamala Harris isn’t really part African. She’s a fake African. The truth is, on her father’s side, Harris is ethnically Jamaican, but racially African given that Africans were brought to Jamaica as slaves and emancipated in 1834. Harris’s father is descended from slaves and a slave owner named Hamilton Brown.

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It’s an immensely dumb line of attack. For instance, I’m half Italian on my dad’s side. But my dad grew up in New York City, and never actually lived in Italy. By the reasoning of the racists on Fox News, I’m actually half New Yorker and not half Italian. 

Additionally, it’s blindingly racist for Fox News’s white anchors, including talking adenoid Mark Levin, to position themselves as the arbiters of who’s African or not. I’m expecting the demands for Harris to take a DNA test any day now. It’s kind of a reverse-Birtherism line. In 2008, they insisted Barack Obama was a secret African, which was disqualifying. Now, the same posse of a-holes is saying Kamala Harris is secretly not African -- also disqualifying, they say.

They’ve got nothing. They’re reaching deep and coming up dry. This gives me hope.

We still have a long way to go, and the potential for all kinds of new and horrendous tricks to beware of between now and Election Day. We should all feel free to enjoy the moment and the striking history in the making, but then it’s back to work saving the republic. Don’t get happy, but don’t lose hope. The Democrats took another chunk out of the fascist Trump regime this week, and it could very well be the portend of good news still to come.

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