This was Biden’s response: “No, I haven’t taken a test. Why the hell would I take a test? Come on, man! That’s like saying you, before you got in this program, you’re taking a test whether you’re taking cocaine or not. What do you think, huh? Are you a junkie?”
Had that answer come from President Trump it would have been blasted, virtually nonstop, as blatantly racist. But the Biden campaign was basically allowed to brush off the query as “preposterous” rather than address the appropriateness of the words spoken by Trump’s Democratic challenger. Besides the matter of relatively low-key media coverage of Biden’s over-wrought objections to a perfectly valid question posed to a 77-year-old presidential candidate, it raises another serious political issue: How many more insults will Black voters take from Biden in the interest of defeating Trump? And at this point, wouldn’t a failure to select a Black woman as his running mate be the ultimate insult? Biden’s credibility as Barack Obama’s friend and vice president can go only so far.
“He’s making us all nervous,” said Joyce Ferriabough Bolling, a media and political strategist, about Biden’s recent gaffes. “I think some of his responses are just plain sloppy.” And Ferriabough Bolling knows sloppy and what it’s like to clean it up. She was Jesse Jackson’s New England press secretary when Jackson was running for president in 1984 and referred to Jews as “Hymies” and New York City as “Hymietown” during a conversation with a Washington Post reporter. Today, she defends Biden the same way she defended Jackson — saying she knows “what’s in his heart,” no matter how awkwardly those feelings may be expressed. In contrast, she said, “Trump doesn’t make gaffes”; in other words, he’s as racist as he sounds.
But Ferriabough Bolling has her forgiveness limits, too. Last May, she chided Biden after his “You ain’t Black” quip to Charlamagne tha God, cohost of the radio show “The Breakfast Club.” As she wrote in a Boston Herald column, “You definitely don’t want black folks to feel taken for granted and so disillusioned that they sit out the election.” And she still worries about that, especially with young Black voters.
During that convention of Black and Hispanic journalists, Biden also made some waves when, in response to a question about engagement with Cuba, he said, “Unlike the African-American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community, with incredibly diverse attitudes about different things.” For that, he’s also forgiven, on the same essential grounds that he’s not Trump. Or as Jeffrey Sanchez, a former state representative and longtime Biden supporter, put it, “He’s not the shell of a human being that’s in the president’s office right now.” Sanchez — now a senior adviser at the public affairs firm Rasky Partners — said he applauds the discussion of diversity in the Black and Latino communities, and that Biden’s record of fighting for health care and economic justice is what matters.
An answer Joe Biden gave in the Houston Debate might come back to haunt him.
Biden had been performing effectively throughout the first half of the debate, then the subject turned to the matter of race and inequality, and moderator Linsey Davis posed this question to Biden:
“In a conversation about how to deal with segregation in schools back in 1975, you told a reporter, “I don’t feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather, I feel responsible for what the situation is today, for the sins of my own generation and I”ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.” You said that some 40 years ago. But as you stand here tonight, what responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?”
There was a smile (some called it a “smirk”) on Biden’s face as he listened to the question. And he answered her this way:
“Well, they have to deal with the “look”, there’s institutional segregation in this country. From the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Redlining banks, making sure we are in a position where, look, you talk about education. I propose is we take the very poor schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the $60,000 level. Number two, make sure that we bring in to help the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home, we have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are “I’m married to a teacher, my deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. Make sure that every single child does, in fact, have 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds go to school. Not day care, school. Social workers help parents deal with how to raise their children. It’s not like they don’t want to help, they don’t know what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television, excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the make sure that kids hear words, a kid coming from a very poor school, a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time we get there.”
The post-debate commentariat pounced on the “record player” comment, noting that it suggested a lack of familiarity with more modern-day devices, like the eight-track tape or Walkman. It was viewed mostly as a proxy for his age, a self-inflicted wound from a candidate stuck somewhere in the 1970s technologically.But by Friday morning, attention had begun to shift to the broader and far more culturally fraught implications of what Biden was saying: Did he mean that black parents depended on an army of white people with degrees to help them raise their kids?
Anand Giridharadas, an author and editor-at-large at TIME magazine, helped trigger a Twitterstorm about the nature of Biden’s comments. “Right now, somewhere, in some newsroom, some brilliant journalist ought to be pitching a big analytical story parsing Joe Biden’s statement and explaining why it was so troubling and ignored by so many people. It is a textbook example of the racism that is still respectable.”
There’s some anecdotal evidence that other journalists are already on the case. New York magazine writer Rebecca Traister wrote:
“Yes. Syntactically this reminded me of the viral Miss Teen USA answer from years ago. But the substance of what he was trying to say was much worse.” Journalist David Rothkopf wrote: “This is an important and accurate thread. I don’t believe Joe Biden is a bad person. I just think this once again reveals that he is not of this era or suited to lead for nearly the decade ahead.” New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie joined the thread as well, while also noting the meandering nature of Biden’s words.
At the risk of stating the obvious: Biden’s lead in the polling rests in substantial measure on his enormous strength in the African-American community. It is why he is far ahead in South Carolina (where black people cast the majority of Democratic primary votes), while doing much less well in Iowa and New Hampshire. It is why sustaining that strength is crucial to his chances; over the past decades, no Democrat has won the prize without winning the lion’s share of the African-American vote. Eroding that support is crucial to the hope of Trump, which is why Kamala Harris went after him back in June on his self-proclaimed ability to work with Southern segregationists.
And it suggests that if the Twitterstorm gains salience over the next several days “if his comments are interpreted as cluelessly condescending at best” it poses a serious danger to his prospects.
For those troubled by Biden’s sometimes cringe-worthy statements, Sanchez said, “Look where he puts his heart. I have faith in him. I have faith in what he’s done and what he’s going to do.”
To Ferriabough Bolling, “Anything is better than Trump. And Biden is better than most because of his relationship with Obama.” Still, an insurance policy beyond he’s-better-than-Trump would help. “With all the gaffes lending themselves to various interpretations, a woman of color as vice president becomes a necessity, especially in this climate,” said Ferriabough Bolling.
Biden wouldn’t be where he is without Black voters. Representative James Clyburn helped set up the South Carolina primary win that resurrected Biden’s candidacy and turned him from loser into nominee. Once he said he would choose a woman as a running mate, several smart, accomplished, and politically savvy Black women made the short list. After much jockeying, the reveal is said to be imminent. If a Black woman isn’t the final choice, Biden will have a lot more explaining to do.
And answers like the ones he gave last week won’t be so easy to forgive and forget.
Biden has some resources to deploy here. His embrace of Barack Obama, and the former president’s obvious affection for him, may insulate him from the criticism. And he has an army of African-American allies, who see him as a fighter for racial justice going back decades. Whether they jump to his defense, or begin to create distance, will be a sign of whether this is a passing firestorm or something much, much worse.
Kamala Harris, also known as “Hillary Clinton in blackface” from the comparison between Harris and Clinton, “#BlackHillary” trended , “light-skinned Hillary”; Black Lives Matter movement and other critics have trolled her on Twitter with the hashtag #Kamalaisacop; advocates for criminal justice reform say her office was part of the problem, not the solution; Harris violated defendants’ constitutional rights by failing to disclose they knew about the tainted drug evidence in her crime lab scandal that resulted in the dismissal of over 1,000 drug cases; laughed when she said she smoked marijuana, yet opposed recreational pot while she convicted over 2000 people for having marijuana; oppossed independent investigations of police shootings; opposed racism in the legal system and the mandatory use of body cameras by police: California reduce its prison population by 33,000 inmates Harris argued in court that releasing them would drastically reduce their prison labor pool (seriously!); there were 600,000 truant students in elementary schools, she passed a law making it a criminal misdemeanor for parents or guardians of truant children that could face a $2000 fine or up to one year in jail; She’s shut down websites of sex workers and prosecuted those involved, then moved to decriminalize sex work in a “massive shift; authored numerous policies that disproportionately harmed Black and Latino defendants; fake feminist! who is Jamaican/Indian who identifies and passed as a black woman.
˜I believe them”: From supporting Biden’s sexual assault accusers to policing, where Kamala Harris has clashed with running mate
“I believe them, and I respect them being able to tell their story and having the courage to do it”
Is it just me or are WE ALL supposed to just be “Thooopid” and act as if ALL the insincere, fake, scripted and repeated apologetic excuses from Joe Biden for 47 years of “selling out” and the “please overlook my lies, fraud and corruption” from Kamala Harris’ “humping her way to POWER” (how old was Willie Brown when they were “screwing” and wasn’t/isn’t Rock Harmon gay?) Are the TRUTH of Biden vs Harris clashes and their political records supposed to just disappear?
Mr. Trump’s campaign has been keen to highlight the former US vice-president’s political baggage from a long career as a Washington insider – and tar him as out of touch with the mainstream of the modern Democratic party.
Joe Biden announced Kamala Harris as his running mate for the presidential election, but his pick of the California senator comes after the pair have sparred multiple times over differing views and EACH HAS THEIR OWN POLITICAL BAGGAGE!!
Although Mr Biden has since formerly said he holds no “grudges” against his running mate for what she’s previously said against his campaign, her past remarks have still dominated the news cycle.
The Independent has rounded up the four key moments Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris have clashed ahead of being named on the same presidential ticket.
Mandatory School Busing
Kamala Harris went out swinging against Joe Biden during the first Democratic presidential debate.
The California senator saw her chance to fluster the former vice president, who was leading among all Democratic candidates, and she found Mr Biden’s weakness: his past Senate record on mandatory busing in the 1970s.
Biden’s Work with Bigoted Senators on Segregation and Busing
Senator Kamala Harris raised his past work with bigoted senators, and his previous opposition to a policy combating segregation in schools.
He said she had “mischaracterized” his position, insisting he had entered politics to champion civil rights.
Harris pilloried Mr Biden for having recently reminisced about working with two Democratic senators who favored racial segregation.
Turning to him, she said she did not believe he was a racist, but added: “It was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country.”
She also took him to task for working “with them [racist senators] to oppose bussing” – a policy of driving white children by bus to majority-black schools and vice versa, in the mid-1970s.
The policy aimed to undo the negative effects of Jim Crow-era racial segregation. Segregation of public schools was outlawed in 1954, but the racial inequality it fostered persisted.
“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me,” Ms Harris said during the debate while targeting Mr Biden for opposing mandatory busing.
Mr Biden bristled: “It’s a mischaracterization of my position across the board. I did not praise racists. That is not true”of his position in the Senate, but it went down as the most contentious moment between the politicians during the presidential campaign.
He also said he was only against bussing being mandated by the federal government, but had no problem with it at state level.
The comments thrust segregationist policies onto a national stage, and Ms Harris again repeated her criticisms against the former vice president at the following debate.
“Had I been in the United States Senate at that time, I would’ve been completely on the other side of the aisle, and let’s be clear about this: had those segregationists their way, I would not be a member of the United States Senate,” she said. ‘so on that issue, we could not be more apart.”
Insults Black voters take from Biden in the Interest of Defeating Trump
Had the many, many racial insults come from President Trump it would have been blasted, virtually nonstop, as blatantly racist. But the Biden campaign has basically been allowed to brush off the query as “preposterous” rather than address the appropriateness of the words spoken by Trump’s Democratic challenger. Besides the matter of relatively low-key media coverage of Biden’s over-wrought objections to perfectly valid questions posed to a 77-year-old presidential candidate, it raises another serious political issue: How many more insults will Black voters take from Biden in the interest of defeating Trump? And at this point, the ultimate insult is Biden’s reliance on any credibility as Barack Obama’s friend and vice president can go only so far!
Sexual assault allegations against Mr Biden
In April 2019, prior to Mr Biden entering the presidential race, reports surfaced of the former vice president inappropriately touching women.
When asked by reporters, Ms Harris said she believed the women who spoke out against her now-running mate.
“I believe them, and I respect them being able to tell their story and having the courage to do it,” she said.
Multiple women accused Mr Biden of inappropriately touching them, including one Nevada politician who said the former vice president came up to her at a 2014 campaign stop and kissed the back of her head. This encouraged Mr Biden to release a video addressing the allegations against him.
‘social norms are changing. I understand that, and I”ve heard what these women are saying. Politics to me has always been about making connections, but I will be more mindful about respecting personal space in the future. That’s my responsibility and I will meet it,” he said.
Then Tara Reade, a former aide to Mr Biden, came forward about allegations of sexual assault when he was a US senator, all of which he has vehemently denied.
Ms Harris, who was a potential vice president candidate at the time, was asked about the allegations, saying Ms Reade “has a right to tell her story”.
The attack prompted Harris” sharpest spike in the polls, but she soon faded and ended her campaign in December.
Harris, 55, has several potential advantages as a vice presidential candidate. She is a woman of color “” her mother was born in India, her father in Jamaica “” which could help Biden connect better with the Democratic Party’s base. As a senator and former attorney general of the nation’s most populous state, she may be seen as more prepared than some to assume the top job.
One downside is that deep blue California is in the bag for Biden in the November election, so Harris wouldn’t deliver a home-field advantage in a swing state.
Harris also weighed in Friday on allegations by former Biden staffer Tara Reade, who said Biden sexually assaulted her when she worked in his Senate office in 1993.
Reade said Biden “pinned her to a wall in a Senate building, reached under her clothing and penetrated her with his fingers,” according to the New York Times. Last year, Reade was among several women who said Biden had inappropriately touched them or invaded their personal space. Reade made the assault allegations in a podcast interview.
Biden has not personally addressed the allegations, but his campaign has denied them.
Harris said the case raises “a bigger structural issue, frankly, which is that women must be able to speak without fear of retaliation.”
The senator said she could “only speak to the Joe Biden I know. He’s been a lifelong fighter, in terms of stopping violence against women.” She pointed to his lead role in passing the Violence Against Women Act in the Senate in 1994.
“The Joe Biden I know is somebody who really has fought for women and empowerment of women and for women’s equality and rights,” Harris said.
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) said Tuesday that she believes women who say they felt uncomfortable after receiving unwanted touching from former Vice President Joe Biden.
“I believe them and I respect them being able to tell their story and having the courage to do it,” Harris said at a presidential campaign event in Nevada.
“He’s going to have to make that decision for himself. I wouldn’t tell him what to do,” Harris said.
Several women have come forward to allege that Biden has touched them inappropriately.
Former Nevada state lawmaker Lucy Flores, a Democrat, made the first accusation last week in an essay in New York magazine’s The Cut. Amy Lappos told the Hartford Courant that Biden also touched her inappropriately at a 2009 fundraiser in Connecticut.
Biden has not commented publicly on the accusations, when in response to Flores’s allegation he said in a statement that he has “offered countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort.”
“And not once “never” did I believe I acted inappropriately,” Biden added. “If it is suggested I did so, I will listen respectfully.”
Medicare for All
Another prominent debate moment between Ms Harris and Mr Biden happened when discussing the American healthcare system.
This was a point of contention among many of the Democratic candidates at the time, with voters able to draw a distinct line between those who were for a plan like Medicare for All, which Ms Harris supported, versus those like Mr Biden who wanted to expand on the Affordable Care Act.
After listening to voters, Ms Harris devised her own Medicare-for-All plan that would take 10 years to implement and involved slowly transitioning every American over into a single-payer system.
“I listened to the American families who said four years is just not enough to transition into this new plan, so I devised a plan where it’s going to be 10 years of a transition. I listened to American families who said “I want an option that will be under your Medicare system that allows a private plan,”” the California senator said during a debate after changing her plan multiple times throughout her campaign.
Mr Biden, who has been a proponent of keeping private health insurance for those who want it while expanding on the Affordable Care Act, disagreed at the time.
“Well, my response is that the senator has had several plans so far. And any time someone tells you you”re going to get something good in 10 years, you should wonder why it takes 10 years,” he said.
“If you noticed, there is no talk about the fact that the plan in 10 years will cost $3 trillion. You will lose your employer-based insurance. And in fact, you know, this is the single most important issue facing the public.”
Bringing more Police to the Streets
In 2002, then-Senator Joe Biden penned an op-ed for the Delaware State News that reacted to the rising national crime rate, which was happening for the first time in 10 years. What was his solution to the rise in crime? More police on the streets.
“What works in the fight against crime? It’s simple ““ more police on the streets,” he wrote. “Put a cop on three of four corners and guess where the crime is going to be committed? On the fourth corner, where the cop isn’t. More cops clearly means less crime.”
This was during the “tough on crime” era of the Democratic party in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Now Mr Biden stands as a presidential candidate of a major political party during a time in the country where there is a nationwide call for police reform. Although his views have likely altered since that op-ed, Mr Biden did state he was not for the ‘defund the police” movement taking over on the far left of his party.
But his running mate has said she would be for “reimagining” police in the US.
“I think that a big part of this conversation really is about reimagining how we do public safety in America which I support which is this: we have confused the idea that to achieve safety, you put more cops on the street instead of understanding to achieve safe and healthy communities,” Ms Harris said.
“That’s how I think about this,” she added. “You know, in many cities in America, over one-third of their city budget goes to the police. So, we have to have this conversation, what are we doing? What about the money going to social services? What about the money going to helping people with job training? What about the mental health issues that communities are being plagued with for which we”re putting no resources?”
Biden on Social Security
Joe Biden has repeatedly advocated for cuts to Social Security, not to protect and expand it.
Biden’s mixed record of support for the US government’s social welfare program for retirees has been a theme as reform of such so-called “entitlement” programs has long been a political bugaboo for candidates as well as elected officials, and Mr Biden’s decades-long career has laid bare this point. A senator before his stint as vice-president, Mr Biden argued that Social Security should be subject to government austerity. “When I argued that we should freeze federal spending, I meant Social Security as well,” he said in 1995. “I meant every single solitary thing in the government. And I not only tried it once, I tried it twice, I tried it a third time, and I tried it a fourth time.”
When challenged on this record on the campaign trail, Mr Biden has flat-out denied backing Social Security cuts. His campaign has said that, if elected, a President Biden would expand the program, paying for it through a tax on the wealthy.
Biden on Abortion Rights
“Joe Biden in the past has voted for what is called the Hyde Amendment, that said that women could not use Medicaid dollars in order to protect their reproductive rights and get an abortion.
An exit poll analysis by the political forecast website FiveThirtyEight found that white women were the single largest voting group that turned around Mr Biden’s campaign fortunes.
Given the importance of female voters, it is hardly surprising that Mr Biden’s votes on reproductive health would be scrutinized. The former vice-president’s positions on abortion have “transformed” over the past few decades. As a senator in 1981, he voted to support an amendment that would have allowed states to overturn the landmark Supreme Court ruling guaranteeing the US right to abortion. As recently as last year, he said he still supported the Hyde Amendment (which forbids public money from being used for abortions), but reversed course after it became clear he was the only Democrat in the field who did so.
Abortion access is an important issue for Democratic women, but denunciation of Mr Biden’s record appears to go only so far. A YouGov/Economist poll finds that support from women overall for the former vice-president is slightly higher with women older than 45 and it is this group that votes more reliably.
‘does anybody think that Joe can go to Michigan or Wisconsin or Indiana or Minnesota and say vote for me, I voted for those terrible trade agreements?”
The anti-free trade line worked in 2016, when the same criticism of Hillary Clinton helped Trump.
Mr Biden has said he stands by his vote for the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), which critics say hollowed out manufacturing in the US. However, Mr Biden has argued that he is a “fair trader” who believes that “we should treat other countries in a way they treat us”, rather than a “free trader”.
The argument against Mr Biden looks to be less effective this time around than four years ago. According to a recent Gallup poll, 67% of self-described Democrats now say that Nafta has been beneficial for the US.
The debate has not played out in the general election, however. Trump will and has already talked about Joe’s record on trade. “Just looking at the facts – if you’re going into the heartland of America… it’s hard to make the case, when Trump has made trade such an important part of his agenda.”
Big Money
Trumps’ sharpest lines against Mr Biden have been against the former vice-president’s ties to moneyed interests. Mr Biden “bailed out the crooks on Wall Street who nearly destroyed our economy 12 years ago”.
Trump has hit out at Mr Biden for taking money from well-heeled backers.
Biden has positioned himself as a champion of the masses, arguing that it is not him, but Mr Trump who is in the pockets of Wall Street.
At one point, he said he would eschew taking money from political action committees – private groups that can donate big money to campaigns with little oversight – but was forced to reverse course when his White House hopes were looking anaemic before Super Tuesday. A campaign spokeswoman defended the decision, saying: “Those who are dedicated to defeating Donald Trump are organizing in every way permitted by current law”.
Iraq War
“Joe is going to have to explain to the American people – who are so tired of endless wars which have cost us too many lives, destabilized too many regions around the world, have cost us trillions of dollars – why he was a leader in getting us involved in the war in Iraq.
On this point, Mr Biden has conceded. “It was a mistake, and I acknowledge that,” he has said.
Given the primary season results so far, it would appear that despite voters’ mixed feelings over the war (half of Americans think it was a mistake, according to Gallup), this particular error of judgement is not costing Mr Biden much – so many people made the same wrong judgment and, politically speaking, it was so long ago.
It has been weaponized by Mr Trump given the president’s losing battle to reduce the American military footprint in the region, it could be a risky one for him – but that has never stopped Mr Trump from throwing a punch.
Biden a Career Politician- 47 years and counting!
Mr Biden then brought up his two terms as vice-president to Barack Obama, America’s first black president.
Mr Biden, 76, was also confronted on an issue he presents as one of his strengths – political longevity.
“Pass the torch” Joe Biden
Mr Swalwell said: “I was six years old when a presidential candidate came to the California Democratic convention and said, ‘It’s time to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans.’
“That candidate was then-Senator Joe Biden. Joe Biden was right when he said it was time to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans 32 years ago – he’s still right today.”
Mr Biden, who would be the oldest president ever elected, retorted: “I’m still holding on to that torch.”
He has also faced criticism for flip-flopping on abortion rights, and for calling Vice-President Mike Pence “a decent guy”.
Harris Political Baggage
Kamala Harris, also known as “Hillary Clinton in blackface” from the comparison between Harris and Clinton, “#BlackHillary” trended , “light-skinned Hillary”; Black Lives Matter movement and other critics have trolled her on Twitter with the hashtag #Kamalaisacop; advocates for criminal justice reform say her office was part of the problem, not the solution; Harris violated defendants’ constitutional rights by failing to disclose they knew about the tainted drug evidence in her crime lab scandal that resulted in the dismissal of over 1,000 drug cases; laughed when she said she smoked marijuana, yet opposed recreational pot while she convicted over 2000 people for having marijuana; opposed independent investigations of police shootings; opposed racism in the legal system and the mandatory use of body cameras by police: California reduce its prison population by 33,000 inmates Harris argued in court that releasing them would drastically reduce their prison labor pool (seriously!); there were 600,000 truant students in elementary schools, she passed a law making it a criminal misdemeanor for parents or guardians of truant children that could face a $2000 fine or up to one year in jail; She’s shut down websites of sex workers and prosecuted those involved, then moved to decriminalize sex work in a “massive shift; authored numerous policies that disproportionately harmed Black and Latino defendants; fake feminist! who is Jamaican/Indian who identifies and passed as a black woman.
Harris’ history as a prosecutor and attorney general in the state of California was a touchy subject and cause for concern long before her presidential campaign, and is being recirculated in the 2020 presidential and vice presidential debates.
“The concerns are overblown, yes, no question,” Harris told CBS News. But she was unable to escape addressing her controversial history; it took center stage during the second Democratic debates last year. When the topic of criminal justice reform arose, Harris bore the brunt of criticism from her fellow candidates, including Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.
Democratic Debate: Tulsi Gabbard Goes After the Party, Tangles With Kamala Harris | NBC New York:
Harris has failed in her views on Criminal Justice Reform (you can read her full policy on her website here) and Police Brutality in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless other Black Americans. So, let’s try to clear up this controversy. Here are the important things to know about Kamala Harris’ history as attorney general:
Harris served as Attorney General twice.
Harris’ first go-around was as the district attorney general of San Francisco. Her term lasted seven years, from 2004 to 2011. Then, from 2011 to 2017, she went on to serve the state of California as attorney general before taking on the role of Senator.
Failed “Back on Track” Initiative
The “Back on Track” initiative was one her most successful programs.
As district attorney in 2005, Harris launched an initiative to reduce recidivism among first-time drug-trafficking defendants. The program, known as “Back on Track”, lasts 12-18 months and provides its participants with a personal responsibility plan (PRP). Their PRP will consist of setting goals around employment, parenting and receiving an education, instead of serving jail time. Participants are also required to serve 220 hours of community service. Graduating from the program requires each participant to find a job, enroll in school full time, and comply with all terms of their PRP.
‘shutting the revolving door of the criminal justice system requires innovative, results-driven policies and initiatives that help offenders get their lives back on track,” Harris said.
Failed Racial Bias and Police Brutality Reform.
In 2015, under Harris’ jurisdiction as state attorney general, California became the first statewide agency to adopt a body camera program and also enforced a “first of its kind” law enforcement training. The then-presidential candidate reminded people of her work during one of the debates.
However, what wasn’t mentioned is that wearing the body camera was not mandatory for all local police officers in the state, only those working directly for Harris. According to PBS, that same year Harris warned against a “one-size-fits-all” solution. “I as a general matter believe that we should invest in the ability of law enforcement leaders in specific regions and with their departments to use [their] discretion to figure out what technology they are going to adopt based on needs that they have and resources they have,” Harris told the Sacramento Bee.
And the training Harris referred to is known as “Principled Policing: Procedural Justice and Implicit Bias.” The course totaled eight hours and consisted of ‘six areas that focus on policing approaches that emphasize respect, listening, neutrality and trust, while recognizing and addressing implicit biases that can be barriers to these approaches,” according to a press release from the attorney general’s office. According to press release, a little over 90 applicants from 30 agencies applied for the course.
Failed on Prison Reform.
In 2011, the Supreme Court demanded the state of California reduce its prison population by 33,000 inmates in the next two years due to overpopulation resulting in starvation, inhumane treatment and even death, according to NPR. However in 2014, according to the LA Times, federal judges “ordered that all nonviolent second-strike offenders be eligible for parole after serving half their sentence.”
As stated by the LATimes, most of those prisoners were working as groundskeepers, janitors and kitchen staff. Harris’ lawyers argued in court that releasing them would drastically reduce their prison labor pool (seriously!). However, Harris told BuzzFeed that she was ‘shocked” to hear their defense. “I was very troubled by what I read. I just need to find out what did we actually say in court,” she said.
Her stance on Marijuana.
In 2010, Harris was staunchly opposed to the use of recreational marijuana. ‘spending two decades in court rooms, Harris believes that drug selling harms communities,” her then campaign manager Brian Brokaw told Capitol Weekly. “Harris supports the legal use of medicinal marijuana but does not support anything beyond that.”
In 2015, at the California Democrats Convention, she called for an end to the federal ban on medical marijuana, but withheld the term legalization. It wasn’t until 2018, as Senator, that she co-signed Senator Corey Booker’s Marijuana Justice Act”.
“Right now in this country people are being arrested, being prosecuted, and end up spending time in jail or prison all because of their use of a drug that otherwise should be considered legal,” Harris said in a press release. “Making marijuana legal at the federal level is the smart thing to do, it’s the right thing to do. I know this as a former prosecutor and I know it as a senator.”
The Failed Anti-Truancy Policy
In her 2011 inauguration speech, Harris pointed out that in 2010 there were 600,000 truant students in their elementary schools alone. In an effort to remediate this issue, she passed a law making it a criminal misdemeanor for parents to allow their children (kindergarten through eighth grade) to miss more than 10 percent of school days, without an excuse. The parents or guardians of truant children could face a $2000 fine or up to one year in jail. “We are putting parents on notice,” Harris said at her 2011 inauguration. “If you fail in your responsibility to your kids, we are going to work to make sure you face the full force and consequences of the law.”
However, this policy ended up generalizing the truancy issue, placing blame on parents with circumstances outside their control. Harris has since apologized for criminalizing parents in a Pod Save America interview. “This was never the attention,” she said. “I regret that that has happened and the thought that anything I did could have led to that.”
Failed Criminalization of Sex Workers.
In 2016, she was one of the leaders in the downfall of the classified ads website, Backpage.com. In her filings, she charged the site owners for money laundering, pimping, and conspiracy to commit pimping. A majority of sex workers used the site to find clients who needed an escort, other services, and many of them deemed it was one of the safest options to overall vet new clients. She said recently that she has “no regrets” about getting it shut down.
She’s recently spoke on matters of decriminalization of sex work, saying she supported the movement, which some have called a “massive shift.” In an interview with The Root last year, she said: “There is an ecosystem around that that includes crimes that harm people, and for those issues, I do not believe that anybody who hurts another human being or profits off of their exploitation should be free of criminal prosecution. But when you’re talking about consenting adults, we should consider that we can’t criminalize consensual behavior.”
Kamala Harris Isn’t African-American. She’s Ethnically Indian and Jamaican. That’s Not The Same Thing.
Joe Biden recently implied blacks in America are a monolith. Now, by calling his Vice Presidential pick Kamala Harris “African-American,” the media is endorsing his racist position that all blacks are the same.
While the media will continue to portray Harris as African-American, it’s important to note her mother was from India, and her father from Jamaica.
That’s not typically what people think of when they say “African-American”, but she can go around pretending to be “Black”.
And I suspect there will be a large number of African-Americans across the United States who aren’t happy with their ethnicity or race being co-opted to suit a political candidate who shares little with them.
The same for the Native Americans who weren’t so hot on Elizabeth Warren prancing around pretending to be one of them, in order to further her career.
The truth many are learning, and that many already knew, is that the left does in fact class all immigrants as one group, and they ruthlessly attack ethnic minorities who deviate and criticize the liberal plantation. I should know, I’ve been one of them.
Kamala Harris needs to be “CALLED OUT” as a race-grifter. She can’t run as an “African-American” and let true Blacks- starving for anything that remotely fashions itself as “their success”, and the Democratic Party Pimps get away with co-opting race in this shameful way.
Political activist Ali Alexander — of half African extraction himself — noted the matter over a year ago, tweeting: “Kamala Harris is *not* an American Black. She is half Indian and half Jamaican. I’m so sick of people robbing American Blacks (like myself) of our history. It’s disgusting.”
He was met with derision from white liberal reporters in the establishment media, who demanded there was no difference.
The fact the Democrats would select an Indian-Jamaican candidate and bill them as African-American in year marred by Black Lives Matter riots would usually be unthinkable.
Then you remember they continuously call men who identify as women, “women,” and allow them to “be women”.
Of course this short post is going to send the media into a tailspin as they attempt to defend Harris and steer Biden toward the White House.
They’ll call this important distinction a “racial attack,” on Harris, as they have on the past.
But don’t take my word for it.
Kamala Harris’s own father has lashed out about her race-grifting, telling a Canadian magazine in 2019:
My dear departed grandmothers, as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics. Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.
Kamala Harris’s father is slamming her for making a ‘travesty’ of her Jamaican heritage
Allen Abel: Donald Harris’s rebuke over ‘pot-smoking joy seeker’ stereotype is one thing the Democratic presidential contender is disinclined to talk about. Another is her time in Canada.
Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., speaks during a campaign event at South Church in Portsmouth, N.H. (Elise Amendola/AP/CP)
Updated on Feb. 19, 2019 at 12:40 p.m. ET to include response from Kamala Harris and details of later appearances
Eighty-nine weeks from the White House, front-running, formidable and fierce, yet publicly scorned as a “travesty” by her own father, Kamala Harris, hyper-ambitious presidential candidate and former unwilling Quebecker, paces the old stone cathedral.
We’re at South Church, founded in 1713 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on the Atlantic’s snow-flogged shore, but it could be anywhere in the 50 American states; anywhere that there are cameras and dollars and votes to be pocketed and rivals to be slandered and slain. Hundreds of New Englanders cram the prayer hall, the home of a Unitarian Universalist congregation that is based not on a single Savior, but on “Wisdom from the world’s religions which inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life.”
Like South Church, the campaign to confront Donald Trump in the 2020 election offers—at this ridiculously early but already fraught and frantic stage—a deity to suit every desire. At least two dozen Democrats already have, or soon will, enter the contest. In June, they will begin to debate each other on stages as wide as wheat farms. Next February—that’s still a year away!—the first intra-party primary elections and arcane county caucuses will begin to winnow the crop. So here we go.
Senators, congresswomen, mayors, governors, billionaires—Beto, Bernie, Bloomberg, Biden; Amy, Kirsten, Tulsi, Pocahontas; Hickenlooper, Inslee, Buttigieg, Bullock—all are in it now, or soon will be. Just as it was with the Republicans in 2016, she or he who talks loudest and most profanely is most likely to be heard above the Democratic din. At every whistle stop, in every city and hamlet, the raw odors of vanity and conceit assault the nose. But also, this time, there are coos of love and healing in the air.
Here’s another metaphor—imagine a round of pool with 25 multi-colored balls on the baize and only one corner pocket. Charge the ablest players half a billion dollars to ante up. Estimate the trillions of permutations of rebound, ricochet, angle, scratch and spin. And then try to run the table while an orange-skinned shark—call him Fifth Avenue Fats—leans over the rail, licking his lips, chalking his cue, eager to eat the winner.
Back to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Kamala Harris, a first-term U.S. Senator and former San Francisco prosecutor and state attorney general—“the best-looking attorney general in the country,” Barack Obama once called her, a career-ending slur for anyone else in these touchy times—is on her first campaign visit to the Granite State, a sliver of bedrock, ski slopes, and escaped Bostonians whose “first in the nation” primary gives it a numinous status among this country’s peripatetic career politicos. (Iowa, South Carolina and Nevada also are in the early-state recipe, with Harris’s behemoth California to join them in February balloting for the first time in 2020. Advantage, Kamala?)
The senator’s stump speech, which she will give from 20 to 50 times a week for the next 21 months, should she last that long in the race, is heavy on her prosecutorial experience and her eagerness to take on a divisive, calamitous incumbent. Even at the pulpit, she never invokes the homilies of her multiple religious roots, or gives thanks for the support of her husband of four and a half years—a California attorney of the Jewish faith—or mentions his two college-age children by a previous marriage: a son named for John Coltrane, a daughter for Ella Fitzgerald. Domesticity, her culinary skills, the multi-cultural and bi-national aspects of her life—none is touched today. Eighty-nine weeks from the White House, the business of the campaign already is serious business.
“I plan on prosecuting the case against people who do not tell the truth,” she says to a roaring, whooping, left-leaning clientele that has been waiting in the fluffing snow for hours, snaking around Portsmouth’s preciously curated shops and its handy-crafty market-stalls, with the first balloting still a spring and a summer and an autumn and another winter away.
Then (on the need for a single-payer, government-run health care program):
“The system is immoral.”
And (on gun control):
“We should never bow down to those who have a love of money while people are dying in the streets.”
And:
“We are looking at an America today where American values and American dreams are under attack.”
But there is much more about Kamala Harris to be said, and told, and learned. As with all of our lives, there are conflicts and complications, secrets and mysteries. But unlike all but two dozen of us on this planet, she yearns to be President of the United States, and she may well succeed.
“I am a proud daughter of Oakland, California,” Harris said in January, when she formally announced her candidacy at Howard University, her “historically black” alma mater in Washington, D.C. That she considers herself to be African-American is beyond dispute—“I was born black and I will die black,” she told a radio interviewer a few days ago. Crucial to her candidacy will be her defense of her record of filling the penitentiaries of the Golden State with legions of young African-American men. But the annals of American politics reveal that personality and personal history will triumph over policy every time. So it matters deeply to the voters of all the nation’s Portsmouths not only what Kamala Harris says, but who she is.
Again: “I was born black.” Yet Sen. Harris’s mother, née Shyamala Gopalan, was a Brahmin Hindu born in Chennai (Madras), the oceanside megalolopolis of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu; and her father, raised in Brown’s Town, educated in Port Antonio and at the University of the West Indies, is as Jamaican as the sun and the sea. (Dr. Shyamala Gopalan Harris died in 2009 at the age of 70.) Just as Barack Hussein Obama is the mixed-race descendent of tribal Kenya and sunflowery Kansas, Kamala Harris, potentially Obama’s successor’s successor, is every bit as not-really-a-real-American as her desperate opponents may choose to make her out to be. Will that matter?
(For a few days in January, an asinine and racist “birther” conspiracy against Sen. Harris circulated on the Internet’s extreme right wing—namely, that since her mother was from India and her father was from Jamaica and neither of them had lived in the United States for five full years before Kamala’s birth, she could not be a “natural-born citizen” as required of the president and vice-president by the U.S. Constitution. This was patently and crudely false—Harris’s birth in California swaddled her in American citizenship the instant she drew her first breath. President Trump often has ranted against “birthright citizenship” to enflame his base, but
The Donald’s nativist ravings carry no weight in law; at least not yet.)
So far in the 2019-2020 campaign, there has not been much in the way of personal slander. None of the six or seven or eight sitting senators in the race has torn a colleague to shreds. (“That will come later,” Sen. Lindsey Graham coyly predicted to a Maclean’s reporter in Washington last week.)
But when Sen. Harris sniggered on New York City radio program that, like the sky-high Honolulu stoner Obama, she had thoroughly enjoyed marijuana—and that, unlike Bill Clinton, she had inhaled—she explained her behavior by saying, “Half my family’s from Jamaica! Are you kidding me?”
Her father exploded.
Donald Harris, 81, professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University, divorced from Shyamala Gopalan since 1972, offered this comment to the website Jamaica Global Online, whose editor, Ian Randle, shared it exclusively with Maclean’s:
My dear departed grandmothers, as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics. Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.
This was not Harris’s first incursion into the ambitions of the elder of his two daughters. (His younger child, Maya Lakshmi Harris, a prominent liberal attorney, professor of law, senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the wife of Obama’s associate attorney general, Tony West, is Kamala’s national campaign chair.) In a December article on Jamaica Global Online, the girls’ father took pains to enumerate Kamala’s Caribbean experiences and to reassert the depth of her island heritage. Yet in her new campaign manifesto, The Truths We Hold, Prof. Donald Harris disappears on Page 20 of 300, and never is mentioned again.
The early phase of interaction with my children came to an abrupt halt in 1972, Dr. Harris wrote, when, after a hard-fought custody battle in the family court of Oakland, California, the context of the relationship was placed within arbitrary limits imposed by a court-ordered divorce settlement based on the false assumption by the State of California that fathers cannot handle parenting (especially in the case of this father, “a neegroe from da eyelans” was the Yankee stereotype, who might just end up eating his children for breakfast!). Nevertheless, I persisted, never giving up on my love for my children or reneging on my responsibilities as their father.
In the United States Senate—and especially in her vehement shredding of Brett Kavanaugh (“I’m asking you a very direct question: yes or no”) during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing and Jeff Sessions (“I’m not able to be rushed this fast. It makes me nervous”) during the Russian-collusion investigations, Kamala Harris presented herself as anything but a pot-smoking joy-seeker. “There are flaws in the criminal-justice system and this system needs to be reformed,” she said at Howard U. “Instead of being soft on crime or tough on crime, we need to be smart on crime.”
Harris at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in January (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Barack Obama’s father bolted back to Africa when his son was three years old. They met only once more before Obama, Sr.’s death. But Donald Harris is very much alive. “I have decided to stay out of all the political hullabaloo,” he told Ian Randle, the editor of the Jamaican website (Donald Harris declined to be interviewed for this story). But his vow already has been broken. How much more will we be hearing from him about his daughter’s histories?
And then there is the Canadian/Québécois chapter, another blank page in the candidate’s life.
Shyamala Gopalan of Chennai and Donald Harris of Brown’s Town met and married on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley amid the seething ferment and sexual electricity of a social and cultural revolution. Shyamala—the daughter of a man who had crusaded alongside Jawaharlal Nehru in the campaign for India’s independence from the British Raj—had graduated from the University of New Delhi. At 19 she was confronted with an existential choice—to weigh millennia of expectations and an arranged marriage against emigration and a new life of laboratory science and freedom to choose her own love.
Swept up in the Bay Area’s white-hot protests for equal rights for blacks, Shyamala chose the side of the oppressed minority, and weaned her girls on chanted slogans, justice marches and home-drawn picket signs.
“These were my mother’s people,” Kamala writes in The Truths We Hold. “In a country where she had no family, they were her family—and she was theirs. From almost the moment she arrived from India, she chose and was welcomed to and enveloped in the black community. It was the foundation of her new American life.”
Then, suddenly, Shyamala Harris—scientist and single mom—turned her back on the struggle and flew away. Again, from Kamala’s book:
When I was in middle school, we had to leave. My mother was offered a unique opportunity in Montreal, teaching at McGill University and conducting research at the Jewish General Hospital. It was an exciting step in advancing her career.
It was not, however, an exciting opportunity for me. I was twelve years old, and the thought of moving away from sunny California in February, in the middle of the school year, to a French-speaking foreign city covered in twelve feet of snow was distressing, to say the least. My mother tried to make it sound like an adventure, taking us to buy our first down jackets and mittens, as if we were going to be explorers of the great northern winter. But it was hard for me to see it that way. It was made worse when my mother told us that she wanted us to learn the language, so she was enrolling us in a neighborhood school for native French speakers, Notre-Dame-des-Neiges—Our Lady of the Snows.
It was a difficult transition, since the only French I knew was from my ballet classes, where Madame Bovie, my ballet teacher, would shout, ‘Demi–plié, and up!’ I used to joke that I felt like a duck, because all day long at our new school I’d be saying ‘Quoi? Quoi? Quoi?’
“By the time I got to high school, I had adjusted to our new surroundings,” she later concedes. And then not another word about Westmount High, about Montreal, about Quebec in the parlous hour of the first independence referendum, about her own coming-of-age.
“Let me begin with a simple statement: Indonesia is part of me,” Barack Obama said in the Bahasa language in Jakarta in 2010. (He lived there from age six to 10 with his mother and her Indonesian husband.) So Canadians may wonder, how much is Quebec part of Kamala Harris, if at all?
The morning after the whoop-fest at the old seacoast Universalist church, the junior senator from California speaks to a far more restrained gathering at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics on the campus of Saint Anselm College in Manchester, an hour inland. The affair is called “Politics & Eggs” and it has been attended by every presidential candidate since the days of the black-and-white photograph. Yes, even Donald Trump came here, and Donald Trump almost never speaks to the unfiltered public.
Manchester, the phrases that brought down the temple in Portsmouth barely ripple the pond. Harris’s tripwire pledge of “Medicare For All” garners only silence; the words “Kavanaugh,” “Trump,” and “Green New Deal” are never even uttered. There are at least 20 other Democrats yet to hear from, and 50 weeks before the Granite State primary for all of them to be heard.
When the breakfast concludes, a Maclean’s reporter approaches the candidate and asks about Quebec in 1980, how—if—a high school student’s exposure to the crucible of ethnic, linguistic “identity politics”—the very words her own father abjures—affected her values and her views.
“It was certainly very significant,” she responds. “It was about people wanting to be recognized, wanting equal treatment for their culture.”
“Were you a Oui or a Non?” the candidate is asked.
“It was a very significant moment,” says Kamala Harris. “But I was too young to vote.”
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How many insults, excuses and fake apologies are Black Voters supposed to take from Joe Biden as he risks alienating Black voters after race remarks? 
Kamala Harris, also known as “Hillary Clinton in blackface” from the comparison between Harris and Clinton, “#BlackHillary” trended , “light-skinned Hillary”; Black Lives Matter movement and other critics have trolled her on Twitter with the hashtag #Kamalaisacop; advocates for criminal justice reform say her office was part of the problem, not the solution; Harris violated defendants’ constitutional rights by failing to disclose they knew about the tainted drug evidence in her crime lab scandal that resulted in the dismissal of over 1,000 drug cases; laughed when she said she smoked marijuana, yet opposed recreational pot while she convicted over 2000 people for having marijuana; oppossed independent investigations of police shootings; opposed racism in the legal system and the mandatory use of body cameras by police: California reduce its prison population by 33,000 inmates Harris argued in court that releasing them would drastically reduce their prison labor pool (seriously!); there were 600,000 truant students in elementary schools, she passed a law making it a criminal misdemeanor for parents or guardians of truant children that could face a $2000 fine or up to one year in jail; She’s shut down websites of sex workers and prosecuted those involved, then moved to decriminalize sex work in a “massive shift; authored numerous policies that disproportionately harmed Black and Latino defendants; fake feminist! who is Jamaican/Indian who identifies and passed as a black woman.
Mr. Trump’s campaign has been keen to highlight the former US vice-president’s political baggage from a long career as a Washington insider – and tar him as out of touch with the mainstream of the modern Democratic party.
Insults Black voters take from Biden in the Interest of Defeating Trump
Two additional women, Caitlyn Caruso and D. J. Hill, 
Joe Biden recently implied blacks in America are a monolith. Now, by calling his Vice Presidential pick Kamala Harris “African-American,” the media is endorsing his racist position that all blacks are the same.
Now Truth, News Now! 