Kamalancholy
The melancholy of weaponizing misogyny after Kamala Harris saved the Democratic Party from a Michael Dukakis moment by LeAlan Jones
Dear brittle blue progressives you will be better when you do better. If you've been feeling melancholy since last Tuesday's election results. It's elevated to a much more severe condition.
“Elections have consequences,” said the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama. The same man said that “brothers” were being misogynistic for not dutifully following his lead this election cycle, and blindly voting for now failed presidential nominee Kamala Harris. She has always been the apple of his eye.
(Eric Risberg / Associated Press)
The Harris-Walz presidential campaign was failed by the men who anointed her in politics from their inability to be good mentors. Kamala's father, Donald Harris was the first misogynist to fail her political career. Being a man of Jamaican, Irish, and Indian descent, Mr. Harris has never been a political optic to solidify what Kamala's actual race is. Although the 2024 presidential cycle is over. The question remains does she have genetics that are linked to the continent of Africa?
Associated Press / Kamala Harris Campaign
Donald Harris's lack of visibility to firmly connect his daughter's African roots to her Canadian upbringing, with her undergraduate experience at the historically black college Howard University would have improved Kamala's authentic racial identity. Will Donald Harris now please emerge to set the record straight on his daughter's racial ambiguity? Now, he can't hurt her chances of being the first woman commander-in-chief.
Former San Francisco Mayor and democratic power broker Willie Brown, who is older than Donald Harris, was Kamala’s boyfriend/mentor and was the second misogynist in her political career. Mr. Brown was able to navigate his protege through her early days of government and first elections as a relative insider.
This was a benefit for Kamala to become an elected official absent of truly grinding herself into a real contender for the presidency. Had Willie Brown allowed her to face failure and develop rigor, she would have developed a resolve to overcome the political margins she was never able to overwhelm for 107 days in 2024.
Successful executive leadership is harnessing dynamic skill sets from obstacles that beat you badly and unmerciful initially. Those beatings don't become losses until you internalize them, and they cripple you. Wille and Donald crippled Kamala with their misogyny before any swing Black, Latino male voters ever knew who she was. Maybe Donald tried to explain to his beautiful, ambitious daughter the consequences of being expedient as a professional, and she likely rejected his pragmatism because her senior boyfriend Willie Brown's wisdom was in his pants.
Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post/Getty Images
Barack Obama was the next misogynist who failed Kamala Harris. Was Kamala anything like his wife Michelle Robinson, who grew up on Chicago's Southside to working-class parents? Michelle attended Princeton because her life was rooted in authentic blackness, and she competed against white privilege. The Ivy League is where you find the “best.”
Was Kamala representative of anything significant beyond her beauty when Obama supported her Senatorial run in California by saying she was, “by far the best-looking Attorney General in the Country?” Obama didn't have to apologize for his misogynistic comments nor was he expected to then.
The most significant misogynist in Kamala Harris's political career was none other than South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn. When Senator Bernie Sanders was emerging as the unlikely front-runner in the 2020 presidential primary campaign, the establishment Obama and Clinton Democrats were under serious threat of being supplanted by an authentic populist uprising within their party. They were desperate when the Sanders primary success was about to take over South Carolina.
The establishment Democrats had one option, and that was to drive a stake in the heart of the Bernie Sanders movement. Had the South Carolina primary gone to Sanders, there would have been no stopping them from earning the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. How would the establishment Democrats circumvent the ambitions of the Bernie followers?
Photo: Logan Cyrus/AFP via Getty Images
Congressman Clyburn was the answer to their challenges with the Bernie movement. Clyburn, the most powerful African-American in the state of South Carolina, cut a deal and supported former Vice President Joe Biden. This allowed Biden to automatically get the support of the consolidated Clyburn African-American vote, which turned the tide for Biden allowing him to win the 2020 Democratic nomination.
Clyburn's political horse-trading allowed him to impose Senator Kamala Harris as Biden’s Vice President and Jamie Harrison to become the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Harris had dropped out of the 2020 Democratic primary early as she was incapable of emerging from the bottom of the primary race, even after she effectively labeled Biden as a staunch segregationist.
Why was Kamala selected to be Biden’s Vice President? It wasn't her political intelligence, it wasn't her galvanizing effect on swing voters. It was her attractiveness and its effect on men in powers' misogynistic inclination to help a young, pretty face crack the political glass ceiling while they fawned like schoolboys in gym class. Political tricks had been Kamala's greatest asset in her political career until it wasn’t.
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