With the recent announcement of Kamala Harris as the VP pick of Joe Biden, many around these parts have been critical about the choice, in an absolute sense, with a variety of perfectly justifiable reasons to which one could point: her actions as DA of San Francisco, AG of California, and Senator from the Golden State provide plenty of fodder for her critics. In her defense, the reality of politics is that no matter who Joe Biden picked, he/she/xer was going to receive backlash from the opposition party. Others have criticized her on “relative” (purely political) grounds, and by that most people mean, turn the chess board around and play as the Democrats: what does she do to help Biden’s election prospects? The typical political calculation for Vice Presidential picks is that they’re supposed to add something to the Presidential candidate’s electoral prospects. First and foremost, she’s from a state (CA) that is already safely in the bag for him on election day. The next possibility is one of demographics: in the same way that Mike Pence (allegedly) made evangelical christians and probably some mainstream Republicans more comfortable with Donald Trump, he of the multiple marriages and pussy-grabbing reputation – and formerly a registered NY Democrat.

But before I answer the question of whether Kamala Harris, black politician with no Y-chromosome, brings home those particular demographics for Joe Biden, I think it’s important to understand how we got here. And I’m not talking about whether or not Joe Biden painted himself and his party into a corner when he declared months ago that he would choose a woman of color. I’m talking about much further back, to when Bill Clinton became the 42nd president of the United States.

It’s easy to forget that it has been just-shy of 30 years since William Jefferson Clinton ran for and won the highest political office in the United States. Thirty years. Of import for my hypothesis is what has happened to the democratic party over the course of those three decades. In short, what I believe most political pundits are missing is how completely the Clintons, particularly Hillary Clinton, took over the democratic party and its machinery in the years following the Clinton Presidency.

While conservatives will tell us that CNN has always been the “Clinton News Network,” even the most jaded of them would likely have to admit that they were surprised that she got not one, but two debate questions given to her ahead of time during the democratic primary in 2016. Of course, this Gramsci-like march through the institutions was helped by the steady emplacement of longtime Clinton pals on major news networks. Everyone knew that (former Marine) James Carville was the Clinton attack-dog when he appeared on the weekly news shows, but 25 years after Billy Jeff won, Wikileaks proved beyond cavil that major media outlets were having stories edited, and sometimes even written, by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The payrolls at most of the major media outlets still include (at least) a dozen former members of the Clinton entourage or political network. And this doesn’t even begin to describe how thoroughly Clinton loyalists pervade the Beltway bureaucracies.

One of my favorite examples of this is James Comey. There used to be an article available online from Salon (I believe) that came out in the early days of Hillary’s campaign explaining why James Comey was simply too conflicted to conduct the investigation into Hillary’s private email server. I can’t find it any more, no matter how hard I search. Memory-holed is the fact that James Comey’s early career was as an assistant U.S. attorney when Bill Clinton was President. So what? you say. Somehow Comey managed, as a managing Assistant U.S. Attorney in Richmond, to get assigned as deputy special counsel to the Senate’s Whitewater investigation in 1996. After that, he became the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and was in charge of the investigation into Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich (and many others, including folks from Whitewater). The Presidential pardon power may be near-total, but somehow missed by Comey and the Press was that in addition to Rich’s original crimes, his wife donated big bucks to both the Clinton library and to – you won’t believe this –  Hillary Clinton’s then Senate-campaign! “Nothing wrong here!” said Jim Comey, while he indicted Martha Stewart for securities fraud at the same time. None of this even begins to address Comey’s brother Peter being a partner at DLA Piper, the firm that both donated to the Clinton Foundation AND did the audit of the Clinton Foundation’s books. Evidently, there wasn’t a single lawyer or FBI official in all of Washington, D.C., to conduct an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server who could be considered a little less, ahem, “conflicted” or wrapped up in D.C. Swamp politics than James Comey. 

None of this even begins to scrape the surface of the Clinton invasion of the DNC. So complete was the Clinton takeover of the DNC that they still haven’t recovered. See, e.g., Terry McAuliffe, who led Bill’s 1996 re-election campaign, then became head of the DNC (2001-2005), board member of the Clinton Foundation (2004), head of Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign (2008), and later governor of Virginia (2014-2018).

Now, just what in the hell does all of this have to do with Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s VP pick? Stay with me just a bit longer.

In the aftermath of Hillary’s historic election loss to Donald Trump, Herself wrote and published a book called “What Happened.” Before the book came out, I had heard from some very well-placed sources/friends in government that Bill and Hillary had an epic blowout over the manuscript. While one may be able to compare Bill’s, uh, proclivities to a serial date-rapist, his political instincts and charisma are undeniable. I was able to find one article that nicely summarizes this rift, but Ed Klein wrote a book about the entire thing that I just don’t have the time to read. The TL;DR version:

Since their fight last summer over the book, Bill’s negative feelings about Hillary’s memoir have grown even more intense as she’s used her book tour to blame her loss on Russian hackers, former FBI Director James Comey and women who didn’t vote for her.

Klein writes in his upcoming book that Bill warned Hillary a month before the election that she was losing and that she needed to campaign in the Rust Belt states. [emphasis mine]

As I noted in an article right here on March 3 (remember back in the Before-COVID times?), the problem for Hillary’s excuse-making in the aftermath of her loss was that Rust-belt counties that had twice voted to elect a black President, and were traditional locks for Team Blue, flipped to Trump over Hillary – an almost 30% swing – and those were the crucial counties in the crucial states.

Now we get to the delivery: why is Kamala Harris the choice for VP for Joe Biden? Because just like the bromide about military leaders fighting the last war, political leaders are usually fighting the last election. It might be more correct to say that politicians (and the military) fight what they think they learned and “know” about the last election (or war). As I noted above, typically a VP choice is supposed to bring home a demographic that the party thinks it needs to win the election. Kamala Harris is the democrats’ attempt to bring home the two demographics that they believe cost them the last election: women and blacks. In this case, however, democratic hopes are being pinned on a Vice Presidential candidate who couldn’t win a single state in her own primary, whose record as a public servant involves locking up a whole lot of black people, who has all the feminine charm and appeal that Hillary did, and who is widely known to have gotten her career in politics at the lap of Willie Brown.

A reasonable person might ask if the democrats really think this little of the two demographics to whom they’re making this naked appeal. The answer is a resounding “yes” – they’ve always thought this little of the intellect of blacks and women.  Virtually every time Joe Biden opens his mouth (unscripted) he says something that reveals that is exactly how he thinks. And he just keeps on doing it. In the four years since Trump won Hillary lost, has the Democratic Party adapted and adopted different electoral tactics? The supposed mid-term “Blue Wave” that gave dems back the house may well have suggested that screaming racist!!1! as loudly as possible is a winning strategy.

And right on time(!) after the announcement of Kamala Harris as VP, the DNC operatives with bylines were out with the talking points about how anyone who criticizes KH is obviously both a racist and misogynist. It appears that the DNC is going to use the exact same losing strategy from Hillary’s presidential run with Kamala. And everyone knows Biden’s Veep pick is something more than the normal Veep, given Joe’s decaying mental state and the Media’s inability to hide it. The really short explanation for all of this might just be Maslow’s Law of the Instrument: when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So maybe when all you have is “RACIST!!1!!” that’s what you do. 

Maybe this is a winning tactic and maybe it isn’t – we’ll see in a few months – but I was curious and decided to check a metric that might indicate just how “racist” or “misogynistic” America really is. I offer it for your consideration – and perhaps hope – regarding the upcoming election.

Fifty years ago, interracial marriage was illegal in the United States. Hard to believe now, but no shit, in 1958 Richard Loving (white) and his wife (many claim was black, though she claimed she was Native American) were both sentenced to a year in jail for marrying, in violation of Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute. The Supreme Court finally corrected that bit of nonsense (to which they had contributed, I should add) in 1967. Since then, what do the numbers say? Even the Guardian’s best efforts can’t spin the numbers because of the constant rise of interracial marriages over those 50 years. Even in just the last 20 years, the U.S. Census Bureau finds a steady rise in interracial marriages. And it isn’t just in Blue cities – it’s everywhere. Indeed, Kamala Harris herself is a byproduct of an interracial marriage, which makes me wonder aloud on this site again: how much do these endless cries of racism from democratic proxies like BLM, Antifa, and the MSM fall on the ears of those same crucial Rust-belt voters that went from being Obama voters to Trump voters?

My theory is that they work exactly the opposite of how they’re intended. They may play well in the party circles that Hillary, Biden, and the DNC apparatchiks travel, but two things come to my mind. First, it seems irrefutable to me that blacks were marginalized and shut out of popular American culture for many, many years, but since somewhere in the 1990’s, in everything from pop music to television to movies, blacks are vastly statistically over-represented in American culture. And I’m not saying that as a pejorative; indeed, quite the opposite. For example, make a list of the funniest/best 25 comics in US history – now note how many of those are black. It’s waaayyyyy more than 1 in 8 or 1 in 7, that’s for certain. Eddie Murphy did a bit in Raw where he absolutely ripped Italian Americans and their love of Sly Stallone as Rocky. Did it cost him professionally? Not one whit. Now make a list of the 25 best guitarists in U.S. history. My list has more than half of with “oppressed” as the best guitar players ever: Robert Johnson, Jimi, the Three Kings (Albert, B.B., and Freddie), Buddy Guy, and on and on. Now do virtually any popular U.S. sport (except those racist Canucks and their ice hockey!). You’ll begin to see my point. Do female vocalists as yet another example.

White kids from the 70s forward have grown up idolizing black men and women across a huge swath of the American cultural landscape and while those kids may be Marxists by education, they sure as hell aren’t racists. And I expect they’re being told that there are racists everywhere else, that schtick can only keep up when there are, well, some actual racists prevalent in large enough numbers to keep up the appearance. Hence the constant fake hate-crimes that the MSM keeps trying to sell the public on.

Second, I’m reminded of a conversation I had with my best friend’s younger brother around race some years back. For context, my best friend is a (white) thirty-year cop, and – I feel compelled to note – perhaps the best possible human being by constitution and abilities to be a police officer. His younger brother – I’ll call him Karl – had a child with a mixed-race girl (black and white parents) when both were quite young. He was “into” black pop culture from the time he was very young and even had an invite to be a backup dancer for MC Hammer’s show waaaayyyy back in the day (yeah, no kidding – white boy could dance.) Anyway, we were talking about race issues once and Karl quipped to me: “Racism? For my generation? Bro, the best golfer in the world is black and the best rapper is white. We’re over it.”

Submitted for your consideration.