Column: Think It Can't Get Worse? Yes It Can, That's Why Biden-Harris Can't Be Stopped
It seems there's no lack of opinion regarding who 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden should have selected as his running mate, a decision that became public earlier this week.
As far as this writer is concerned, Biden could’ve chosen Daniel Snyder as his running mate and I’d be no less hell-bent to cast a vote in his favor in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election given that the only other choice is going to be the incumbent and incomprehensible Donald Trump.
But as for another well-over-his head figurehead in Washington D.C. -- Snyder, the Washington Football Team owner who, in July, begrudgingly dropped the ethnic-slur-of-a nickname by which his franchise had been known for decades and is currently embattled with claims of sexual harassment alleged to have been perpetrated by several Washington team executives and personnel, clearly wasn’t on any list of Democratic vice presidential candidates. That list’s top billing would belong to someone who has represented her birth state of California as both an attorney general and senator, and, until December 2019 had herself campaigned to take a crack at the seat in the Oval Office.
The installation of Kamala Harris onto the Democratic ticket is historic as the first of its kind for a woman with either Black or Asian American roots, as Harris has of both. Still, the choice was met with a mixture of perturbation and praise Tuesday.
Without delay, criticism of her light handling of police misconduct in the last several years of her decades-long career as a prosecutor permeated various social media platforms.
People continue to struggle to square her emergence as a vociferous opponent of systemic racism and police brutality — Harris has publicly expressed frustration with the lack of charges brought against the three Louisville, Kentucky police officers who killed Breonna Taylor, and she was among a group of Democrats who introduced the Justice in Policing Act in June to, among other things, ban chokeholds, racial profiling and the no-knock warrant that resulted in Taylor’s death — with her prosecutorial past and infrequent intervention in cases involved with killings by police.
It’s a fruitless tug-of-war between two inescapable realities, really, considering what looms in the distance.
Simply put, poll dodging or punching the ticket of any candidate not named Biden come November 3rd only enhances the probability of an incumbent president who ranks among the very worse this nation has ever had continuing to make his version of America great again. That design did feature a healthy economy and a reduction in unemployment prior to the novel Coronavirus outbreak in February.
However, rampant dishonesty, subversion and blatant divisiveness were included in that package, too. In fact, after former Special Counsel for the United States Department of Justice Robert S. Mueller III found no evidence of a criminal conspiracy between his campaign and Russia a month after he was acquitted of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, this is perhaps the first time in his presidency that Trump has not been under investigation.
To be clear, while he did not conclude a crime had been committed in the 2016 presidential election Mueller didn’t exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice.
Ironically enough, Trump is deliberately complicating the delivery of mail-in ballots at a time when an unprecedented number of Americans are expected to vote by mail due to COVID-19. Under the guise that universal mail-in voting will lead to voter fraud, Trump is opposed to supplying the United States Postal Service with the estimated funding it needs to properly run the election, thereby bolstering his bid for a second term as commander-in-chief.
This is our president?
Someone who is willing to sabotage democracy in the name of sore losing.
Someone who is quick to resort to name-calling like a petulant child.
Someone who trivializes a global pandemic at every turn.
This Democratic pairing doesn’t evoke the overwhelming audaciousness of hope that Biden, then-vice president elect, and former president-elect Barack Obama did in the fall of 2008. But the Biden-Harris ticket isn’t the worst-case scenario, either.
That one has already happened.