No plan for facing Kamala, it seems
What has become clear in the days since Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and Kamala Harris became the presumptive nominee for the Democrats is that the GOP really had no plan beyond berating and criticizing Biden for lack of health, being too old (as if Donald Trump is some vibrant young candidate), and not being on the ball mentally (again, as if Trump isn’t a hot mess by any comparison, especially against Biden). They banked everything on Biden staying in the race to the bitter end and hoping he would make another gaffe like the debate performance that they could capitalize on to give them an edge in November.
Right out of the starting gate, all they had against Kamala was a flurry of sexist, misogynist attacks. I guess there were pictures circulating of her when she was younger and out of the town or at the beach or whatever, though considering there were a bunch of Photoshopped images putting her head on bikini-clad bodies and such and trying to pass them off as real, who even knows if they had any real pictures of her. And even if they did, using the fact she might have had fun while younger and went out is hardly original or relevant.
Then came the allegations that she slept her way to the top to get where she is. They pointed to her dating San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, even though the two dated like maybe for a year and before he became mayor. Kamala Harris has served as a prosecutor, California attorney general, U.S. senator, and now vice president. I’m sorry, there is no amount of sex that is going to get you those jobs. And now the right wing has even trotted out the idea that she is a literal Jezebel.
Then the implications—no the outright accusations—that because she has never had a child she is unqualified to make any decisions related to families or children, all while mostly men in the Republican Party (who don’t have women’s reproductive systems and don’t often understand how they work) are making decisions about women’s ability to access hormones, get abortions, use contraceptives, and more.
All they could do when Joe was gone and Kamala came forward was default to gross attacks against her sexually and because she’s a women and—gasp—a childless one at that. A literal sexual assaulter is running on their ticket and one brief relationship from her past that was consensual with a man who’d been split from his wife for like 10 years if I’m reading things right is grounds for her to be dismissed from running.
It only got better when they added in racism, calling her a “DEI hire” as if (again, prosecutor, attorney general, senator and vice president) she doesn’t have a wealth of skills and experience. And “DEI hire” is just a dog whistle for saying Black and brown people aren’t qualified to be in positions of influence, authority, or power.
Race and gender attacks are all they’ve got right now. I have no doubt they will get a plan together, but this approach isn’t going to go away. It will just be added to whatever they try to do to tie her to Biden policies that their base doesn’t like. But the point is that they didn’t even consider her a factor. Despite the fact that Biden is old and she could easily have risen to president even if he had run and perhaps died or something, they disregarded her. I shouldn’t be surprised, because they chose J.D. Vance as Trump’s running mate as a PR ploy, clearly not thinking through whether he is a good choice. Because he isn’t, and he’s already causing them enough problems that people are speculating Trump will replace him soon.
I know a lot of people consider the vice presidency a joke position but it isn’t. It has responsibilities, including congressional ones, and certainly the people on the Democratic side haven’t hesitated to attack Vance on his lack of ability, qualifications, and charisma (however, y’all should have stayed away from that whole “having sex with a couch” BS; do better, especially at fact-checking before you use the same kinds of smears the other side does).
But the vice president is the one next in line for the Oval Office is anything goes wrong with the president. That they could so casually dismiss Harris and not have any standing plan in place to go after her on substantive grounds—or at least slightly substantive grounds—says a lot. Not that we didn’t already know these things: They hate women, they hate Black people, and so on and so forth.
They will rally to find more “respectable” ways to attack Kamala even as they continue to point out that she’s nonwhite and female and somehow you should find both things repellant. Republican congressional folks have already tried to get conservatives to pull back on the racism and sexism. But we know it won’t stop, because they are racist and sexist, almost every single one of them. I’m not getting overconfident, but it is reassuring that as good a job as the right wing has done to implement its plans over the past several decades, it got completely blindsided by a woman of color and is simply floundering.