Culture

Kamala Harris Exposed a Flaw in Joe Biden that Trump Will Exploit


As a general principle, nothing salutary follows the phrase “I don’t think you’re a racist,” save for a period or, on notably rare occasions, an exclamation point. Last year, during the Florida gubernatorial race, the Democrat, Andrew Gillum, said of his Republican opponent, Ron DeSantis, “I’m not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist. I’m simply saying the racists believe he’s a racist.” On Thursday night, during the second round of debates among Democratic Presidential candidates, Senator Kamala Harris added the conjunction “but” to that phrase as part of a withering statement criticizing former Vice-President Joe Biden’s coziness in the Senate with the Mississippi segregationist James Eastland and his opposition to busing to integrate schools in the nineteen-seventies. Eastland was impressively racist even by Mississippi standards, and Biden’s use of him as an example of people working together despite disagreements was the kind of self-own that imploded Biden’s previous two Presidential campaigns. (Amid the debacle, the House majority whip, Jim Clyburn, and the civil-rights icon Representative John Lewis made statements about Biden of the not-a-racist-bone variety.)

Harris, who commanded the stage for much of the debate, told Biden that she, as one of the first students who’d been bused to an integrating school in Berkeley, California, found his position “personally hurtful.” She then pressed him to admit that he’d been wrong forty years ago. Defensive and momentarily off balance, Biden explained that he’d taken what amounted to a states’-rights position on busing. This deepened his troubles.

The exchange was not unanticipated. (Biden, for instance, had prepped enough to know offhand that the school-busing program that Harris participated in as a child had been created by a local school board.) Yet, if Harris was sincere in her statement that she did not believe Biden to be racist, her motive for bringing it up has potentially devastating implications for the Democratic front-runner. Biden surged to first place in the polls immediately upon declaring his candidacy. His ties to the Democratic establishment and vast fund-raising hauls have conjured some of the sense of inevitability that surrounded Hillary Clinton during the 2016 primaries. Yet that perception papered over serious political liabilities on Clinton’s part. She was lacerated by Bernie Sanders during the primaries for policy positions that she’d taken twenty years earlier, particularly regarding the war on drugs. The net effect was a kind of nihilistic equivalency between Clinton and Trump in the eyes of some voters.

Biden’s record goes back twenty years further than Clinton’s time in the White House as First Lady. He was elected to the Senate in 1972, and served in the chamber for thirty-six years before becoming Barack Obama’s Vice-President. Almost invariably, Biden would be whipsawed by nearly two generations of shifting cultural mores—and opposing school busing is a particularly damaging look for him.

When Biden responded that he hadn’t opposed busing but rather opposed “busing ordered by the Department of Education,” he was using nuance as a diversion—a political ploy that fuels a sense of inauthenticity. Harris, like a weary professor talking to a student, explained that federal legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had been necessary, just as the Equal Rights Amendment is currently necessary, because of violations that occur on the state level. Biden knows this, and he should know that much of the Democratic electorate knows it, too, which makes his decision to make a states’-rights argument all the more inscrutable.

This is a particularly fraught moment for Biden to open himself up to such a line of attack. In a masterwork of cynicism, conservative critics have been referring to Democrats as “the party of the K.K.K.,” in the hopes of depressing enthusiasm among African-American voters ahead of 2020. On cue, Senator Tom Cotton, of Arkansas, tweeted, “Joe Biden & Kamala Harris are helpfully reminding Americans that the Democrats were the party of slavery, secession & segregation. By contrast the Republican Party was founded on & always has stood for the natural equality of all men & women.” This is astoundingly hypocritical, given the current Republican opposition to the Voting Rights Act, the market share that white nationalists now hold within mainstream conservatism, and the prodigious bigotry of the current occupant of the Oval Office. It also amounts to a lie of omission, in its failure to mention the sweeping political realignment of Republicans and Democrats that began in 1948 and accelerated after the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. But among the main lessons of Trumpism is that a transparently cynical and patently untrue statement can still be politically effective.

In the face of Harris’s criticism, Biden refused to concede that he’d been wrong forty years ago and instantly achieved the G.O.P.’s goal of creating another false equivalency, this time between Biden and Trump. The former Vice-President took a not-so-veiled shot at Harris later in the evening, saying that after law school he worked as a public defender, “not a prosecutor.” Given Biden’s central role in crafting the 1994 crime bill—the one that haunted Clinton—the line has limited effectiveness.

One of Biden’s biggest concerns during this election is a charismatic, biracial black politician who served briefly in the Senate before launching a Presidential bid—but not the one who trounced him on Thursday night. Barack Obama’s Presidency is Biden’s strongest argument for his candidacy. With an unpopular and divisive Republican in the White House, memories of Obama offer Democratic primary voters inspiration. Trump represents the antithesis of the country’s most decent aspirations. Biden is banking on the pragmatism of “electability”—a quality that is vulnerable to his habitual gaffes. And even at this early juncture Biden has highlighted the dissimilarities of their political styles.

For most of the evening, the author Marianne Williamson spoke at the periphery of the issues, but she was right about one thing: the coalition of voters needed to remove Trump from office will be drawn to the candidate who reminds them least of who we are at this moment and most of who we aspire to be. On Thursday, that was not Joe Biden. Kamala Harris’s unsparing sharpness and unsentimental willingness to flay Biden onstage only served to highlight that fact.



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