Hot ticket
Good news I think, Biden’s choice. He’s such a lousy choice himself, he needs an exciting companion on the ticket. I know people have qualms about some of Harris’s work as a prosecutor, but I think she’ll rock it anyway.
Once a rival for the top job, the California senator of Indian-Jamaican heritage had long been considered the front-runner for the number two slot.
The former California attorney general has been urging police reform amid nationwide anti-racism protests.
…
Mr Biden had faced mounting calls to pick a black woman as his running mate in recent months as the nation was convulsed by social unrest over racial injustice and police brutality against African Americans, a key voting bloc to the Democratic Party.
What a good thing there were several highly qualified black women with relevant experience to choose from.
I’m chuffed. It’s nice to have a bit of good news for a change.
Out here in a deeply Red part of a Blue-ish state, I’m not sure that’s good news. I fear a huge backlash from what my neighbors have been viewing about BLM, and I wish the Dems could think strategically instead of reactively.
The one advantage to having Biden as the candidate is that he knows how the Executive Branch is supposed to work, so he’s less likely than the other candidates to be overwhelmed by all the vandalism the current occupier of the WH has committed, and he’s more likely to have a workable plan in place that he can implement from his first day in office.
At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.
As for Harris, I’ve seen some criticism of her for being a cop lover, but on the other hand that could blunt attacks on Biden for being soft on crime.
Anyway, I’m cautiously optimistic, but the best possible outcome would be the destruction of the Republican Party as we know it, followed by the split of the Democratic Party into two halves. Call them the Bidenites and the Ocasio-Cortezians. (I’m dreaming.)
Biden said ages ago he was going to pick a black woman as his running mate. I think that was cover, to help bring up the profile of the other qualified candidate and to remove any controversy about his eventual selection (his intended selection all along).
Harris was my favorite in the primary, and I’m beyond thrilled she’s the VP candidate. She’s got both electoral and executive experience, and would be ready to step in if Biden had a stroke.
The criticisms of Harris have been mostly from the left: she was a prosecutor, she put people in jail. The Republican Party can’t criticize her from the left, though. Her experience, in fact, blunts their likely avenues of attack. “The Democrats support lawlessness!” “Okay, how many lawbreakers have you put behind bars? Zero? That’s what I thought.”
I do look forward to her making mincemeat of Pence in a debate. She is such an intelligent, strong woman. I can see her energizing the Democratic base. The backbone of the Democratic Party is black women. Now they get to vote for one of their own. Turnout will be through the roof.
Intelligent, strong, and not to put too fine a point on it, charismatic. In a perfect world that wouldn’t be part of the equation, but boy do we not live in that world.
I have a huge problem with Kamala Harris’ gender pronouns in her twitter bio. Anyone stupid enough to put gender pronouns in their twitter bio does not deserve my vote. Sorry, I’m going to vote against Donnie Dipshit, but I’m not voting for the old white dude and the trans-cult sympathizer. Susan Rice was the better choice, it keeps getting worse.
I think it was Harris all along and the rest was playing to constituencies in the diverse Democratic Party. Biden of certainly knows how important getting out the black vote is this election and while I know some are not enamored of him, Biden is no dummy. As for the record Harris has as a prosecutor, I think it’s a net gain with the voters Biden is targeting, namely white suburban voters, voters who could also make the difference in down-ticket Senate races and hopefully giving the Democrats a hugely needed trifecta in controlling the government. Harris isn’t a radical, and is someone they’re comfortable with. Meanwhile, her being a black woman is a plus with blacks and women and doesn’t risk alienating them. That, and of course the fact that Harris can do the job of being President, being a veteran of the Senate herself.
Sorry for the potential editing, I am distressed. :P
Why would he pick a trans-cult pronoun promoter? Susan Rice was the obvious best choice, but Kamala and ger pronoun politics is better? Show me how.
Re charismatic, Harris was the only candidate in the debates that for me passed the (stupid, meaningless) beer test.
And twiliter, I doubt the pronoun question had anything to do with this choice.
I imagine Harris won’t be pushing pronoun declaration now. Biden’s team isn’t exactly wet behind the ears.
Kamala she/her is not a good choice, and if i didn’t desperately want Donnie Dipshit out of office, I would be bowing out of voting at all in the election. A fucking old career politician is bad enough, but now we have a pronoun promoter as a running mate. Thanks for nothing Dems, you have disappointed me very profoundly. All we needed was a good upright candidate and a descent ticket to vote for, and now we have this mysoginist bullshit? Donnie Dipshit needs to be gone, that much is clear, but the alternatives just got exponentially worse. The pronoun promoters are morons, and I can’t, in all conscience, vote for them. This leaves me with a throwaway Libertarian vote. I’m livid.
I would have preferred Warren, but Harris is good as well. And apparently not too ambitious after all.
I could maybe go along with the first part, but the Bidenites and the Ocasio-Cortezians? Please, no.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the Republican Party once Trump gets smashed in November (fingers crossed, and please VOTE). There’s debate among conservatives about whether to reform it or burn it all down and start over after Trump. I think the latter is unlikely to happen unless they start losing almost every election (which by all rights they should, but probably won’t). I guess (hope) we’ll see.
Fuck Warren, Harris, and anyone who has pronouns in their twitter bio. Fuck all of them, they will not get my vote.
Forget it Jake, it’s Twittertown.
Sorry folks, I’m pissed off at anyone who submits to the pronoun garbage, I think they are idiots. It’s misogyny and those who don’t see it for what it is are probably too fucking stupid to be in office.
The pronoun stuff distresses me, too, but I’m still voting for that ticket. I know it won’t matter here in Alabama, but I’m going to vote that way anyway. I can hope that in the future certain people will come to their senses about this issue. But in the meantime, much as it pains me to say it, there are bigger issues at stake. If there is even a remote possibility that Trump might lose in Alabama, I have to help make that happen.
Nit: Biden promised to choose a woman. There was speculation that he was likely to pick a woman of color, and a lot of informal nudging for him to do so, but he never came out and committed to choosing a woman of color.
Harris is sensible, she speaks her mind, and she knows her way around the federal government, particularly Congress. I think she’s a fine choice.
I detest the American presidency; too much power in one person’s hands, a ridiculous nationwide election for a single office, entirely too much energy spent arguing about the best way to choose not only the office holder but the party nominees for that one office. Choosing the vice presidential nominee is far superior; knowledgeable people meet and decide based on the best chances for the party.
Of Biden’s (plausible) potential VP choices, Kamala the cop (Biden/Harris 2020: Cop a Feel!) might have been just about the worst. She doesn’t bring in any voters who weren’t already on board with Settling For Biden, certainly not anyone from the left wing of the party. Why not take last cycle’s failure of triangulation as a signal that actual liberals’ votes are not guaranteed? Why not choose a running mate who bridges the divide between center and left? It’s like watching Hilary pick Tim Kaine again. The best conclusion I can come to is that the Dems really don’t care to win if they can’t maintain tight, centrist control.
Which would be fine if we had an electoral system that didn’t game theoretically entail a two party duopoly. But we don’t, and the Dems are nominally the party of everyone to the left of Rand Paul.
twiliter, while I also agree the pronoun thing is inane, I find your stated position (that you’d stay home if it weren’t for Trump being Trump) a bit short-sighted, at best. In no situation in my living memory would women be better served had (or when) the Republican candidate won over the Democrat, no matter how milquetoast the latter was on women’s issues. Declaring yourself too pure to vote for one of the choices offered is tantamount to shoving a lot of people under the bus.
You’re right, it’s going to be about more than the executive branch too, maybe I’ll get over it by Nov.
Yes, whatever you do, twiliter, please do not sit out the entire election. You’re in Georgia, it may not matter who you choose for president, but there are a bunch of other offices on the ballot in that state that are very much up in the air. Leave that one spot blank on the ballot if you like, but otherwise vote.
Nullius, I do see some differences between Tim Kaine and Kamala Harris. Besides the obvious, I think Kaine is a great guy, but wasn’t a good pick for Clinton because they’re not different enough. I would have liked to see more diversity on the ticket. Personally, I thought she should have picked Xavier Becerra. We need to deal with the fact that America isn’t all white, and I don’t think the Democrats should ever put up a Presidential slate of two white people again.
I also don’t see a lot of merit in your argument that really lefty liberals might stay home this year because Biden didn’t pick someone really lefty liberal. I don’t see that happening, not least because those who refused to vote for Clinton on purity grounds (not to mention those who went Green over Al Gore) should now be more familiar with the results of such choices. Sometimes you don’t get the choices you want, and refusing to choose is also making a choice.
I hope we are finally done with the ‘hold my breath ’til I turn blue’ wing of the Democratic Party. They’ve never helped us win in the past, and if we gave them what they say they want today it’d be another thing tomorrow. What I want from my elected representatives is good government, good policy, and progress. Speeches are easy; legislation is difficult.
I’m more concerned that regular Democratic voters might stay home this year because they’re scared of the COVID and think Biden is a sure thing, or are insufficiently motivated to go out and do that voting thing because meh. I’ve heard it said that black women are the core of the Democratic Party. I consider it a good thing to motivate the core. A lot of people will be much more excited to get their vote in now that it’s a vote for Kamala Harris too.
I also think we need to bring over a lot of people who voted for Trump, and Kamala’s steadiness and history as an AG will help reassure them. Trump will have a very hard time tarring Kamala Harris with an Antifa brush. If we want to be serious about change, the first thing we need to do is win. And this team can win.
I think Kamala Harris was the best choice Biden could have made, and I began believing that the day Kamala Harris dropped out of the race. I think she’ll be an excellent vice-presidential candidate, an excellent vice-president, and probably some day an excellent president.
I hope you guys are right, I almost e-mailed Harris to explain what some of us think about the pronouns and what they represent, then decided it was futile. She seems ok otherwise, but that pronoun thing is a huge problem.
Sack@20 You’re right of course, Georgia is a battleground state this election, which doesn’t happen often. I’ll go vote, in person, with a mask, and probably a bad attitude.
Papito
If they don’t help you win elections, how can you blame them when you lose elections? I mean, if them staying home or voting Green when it was Clinton or Gore cost the Democratic Party the presidency, it doesn’t really make sense to say that they haven’t helped Democrats win in the past.
Though the anti-third party thing the Democratic Party engages in has never exactly made sense to me. I mean, I still remember reading an editorial on CNN where the guy writing it was banging his chest trying to play privilege games with Libertarian voters.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/24/opinions/libertarian-trump-re-election-jorgensen-clinton-obeidallah/index.html
You know, those guys who give even less of a shit about that than Republicans do, in fact not giving a shit about the poor and underprivileged is their party’s central platform.
Twiliter,
I am somewhat sympathetic to your aversion to listing pronouns; when I was on the cusp of falling down the rabbit hole myself, I could not get over how deeply *wrong* it felt to announce “my” pronouns, though I could not initially articulate why. Eventually I understood that pronouns are not possessable in the way a tattoo or a hair style is — instead they are a descriptor, and a basic one at that, whose import I have always thought should be lowered instead of increased.
Yet I don’t think it’s reasonable to hold the line for voting for the President of the United States of America on the grounds that the candidate’s vice-presidential pick allowed an idealistic but foolish intern to put pronouns on her Twitter profile. The reason it is so sinister, after all, is that it’s so very easy to ask of well-meaning people who have not thought about the issue very much. As signs of solidarity go, it’s pretty cheap, indicative of a broader social pathology and the capture of institutions but hardly condemnable on a case-by-case basis. And even if Kamala Harris is a dyed-in-the-wool TRA, she is unlikely to do very much damage from her post as VP in that regard, and she is guaranteed to do a great deal of good, especially in comparison to Mike Pence.
So hold your nose if you must, but if you do not want to spend the next four years with Mike Pence in the Naval Observatory, pull the lever for Biden/Harris.
I think the whole pronoun thing arises out of the belief that the only way to win is to appeal to youth. Never mind that the youth are much less likely to vote than older people (but will often vote once they become older people). There is also the mistaken view that the youth is a monolithic culture that are all tolerant, woke, and engaged. Nothing could be less true, unless it is the belief that the Baby Boomers are a monolithic culture that single handedly caused everything bad on the planet, starting with the extinction of the dinosaurs. (Not too much hyperbole in that last statement; I have seen Boomers blamed for things they could not possibly be responsible for).
If you spend your time appealing to youth who are not likely to vote (though Obama did manage to inspire them in his first campaign), but lose the older voters who are likely to vote, it seems to me you aren’t doing yourselves any favors. But I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong before (though rarely about elections; I have called all the elections in my adult life correctly except 2008, when I apparently overestimated the impact racism would have on the election).
Seth@24 I can tell you I sure wasn’t feeling reasonable about it yesterday. I’m going to have to talk my way down from the pronoun thing being the hill I die on. It just irks me how women have to endure this ongoing situation from the likes of the trans-cult, and how few people see what the pronouns mean, which is nothing like equality or solidarity, but more like caving to some twisted ideology. I can understand how if someone wants to be non-binary or trans or some other gender alternative want to express their pronouns for clarification, but we don’t *all* have to submit to that part of their ideology. However innocuous pronouns seem to be, even a casual investigation shows they are no such thing. They are not the authority on anyone but themselves, and I reject their redefinitions.
Given the concern about Harris’ pronoun announcement, I’m surprised nobody has brought up Biden’s fierce belief that
“Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time.”
—Joe Biden, January 25, 2020
The “Biden Plan to Advance LGBTQ+ Equality“ includes gems like
and
You can see the rest at
https://joebiden.com/lgbtq-policy/#
I’m voting for him nevertheless, but this is one reason I’d rather it was another candidate.
That’s so especially maddening coming from Biden when he’s always been so baaaaaaaaaad on feminist issues. Women, meh, let’s ruin their lives the way he did his bit to ruin Anita Hill’s, but men who say they are women oh that’s a whole different thing. Ugh.
50 years of feminism passed him by, but hot new smokin’ trans rights, sign him up!
The most annoying thing for me on the choice of Harris for the VP slot is the wave of punditry on whether she will appeal to white people, especially white working-class men and middle-class women.
The base of the Democratic Party is black women and the party relies on their votes while ignoring their concerns and needs. Nobody ever thinks that black women need to be courted because their vote is taken for granted. I don’t know if that was the reasoning behind her selection but I hope it excites that base anyway.
And people need to stop with the Kamela is a cop bullshit. It’s being used by the Russians as a weapon against her and it’s unfair and untrue to say this about her. She was heavily criticized for decisions such as not seeking or supporting the death penalty for a man who killed a cop.
She was AG for California and AG’s have to follow the law, not their personal feelings. Barr is an AG who has decided that his judgment overrides laws he disagrees with depending on his political ends. AG’s who go off-roading are not desirable. There’s plenty of things Harris can be criticized for. But let’s not mouth right-wing and Russian talking points.
It’s not so much Biden’s fault as the fault of the Democratic Party itself… he’s the generic Democrat and he adopts the party’s positions. Hopefully that cancer can get excised before it metastasizes in the way it has for Labour.
This goes to a fundamental discussion about tactical voting as an algorithm; i.e. voting for “the lesser of two evils”. How do we identify the lesser? It is, in my experience, nearly always determined by reference to what policies could be implemented or ceased by those who are in office between the conclusion of this election and the next. (This includes judiciary appointments.) So
Under this explication, I think the best way to characterize the tactic is as a greedy algorithm. That is, we proceed by making the optimal choice at each step. For example, we usually make change via greedy algorithm. We start with the largest coins available, shifting to smaller ones as we go. If we want to make change for $0.41, we start with a quarter. Then, since we can’t fit another quarter, we add a dime, then a nickel, then finally a penny. It’s a simple, easy process that gives the optimal solution by choosing the best option available at each step.
However, greedy algorithms have limitations. Because they only consider the very next step, what the procedure determines to be the “optimal” choice is not guaranteed to be the choice that gives the optimal solution. A classic example problem for which a greedy algorithm is not guaranteed to find the optimal solution is the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), in which we try to find the the edges on a graph such that the total length of those edges is minimized and all points are connected. A simpler yet similar problem is finding the largest/smallest path on an n-ary tree. In both cases, the greedy algorithm finds a solution, but that solution can be and often is a suboptimal solution.
My favorite example is hill-climbing. In this, there is a series of hills, and we begin at a random point amid them with the goal of finding the highest point. For simplicity, let’s put it on a 2D plane. A greedy approach would be to compare our current location (f(x)) to the next point in each direction (f(x-1) and f(x+1)). If we’re already higher than either side, we’re done. If not, and one side is higher than the other (i.e., less evil) move there.
This algorithm makes intuitive sense, but is nowhere near guaranteed to reach an optimal solution. Given sufficient complexity, it is nearly certain to produce a suboptimal solution. In fact, it is as likely to produce a maximally suboptimal solution as it is to produce an optimal one. To see this, imagine that we start on middle of the right slope of the lowest hill. We check left and right, and we see that left is higher, so we move there. We keep moving left until we get to the top of this hill, where we see that both left and right are lower than where we are. Now we’re stuck at the worst possible solution.
There are ways to modify a greedy algorithm so that it can find the optimal solution, such as simulated annealing, but that’s beyond the scope of a comment on a blog post. Suffice it to say that escaping the trap of local maxima requires willingness to make a choice that does not satisfy the greedy criteria. It means we have to be willing to move down the hill.
We’re all familiar with the idea that it’s possible to win the battle and lose the war because of it. Its corollary is less intuitive but not less true: it is possible to lose the battle and win the war because of it. A plausible story might be that because the team spent all its resources on winning last year’s title, they’re now stuck with too-old players and are one of the worst in the league. Alternatively, because the other team tanked last season, they were able to pick the best player in the draft, and now they’re unstoppable for the foreseeable future.
Back to voting. Every time we vote for the lesser evil, we make a greedy choice. Every time we vote for the lesser evil, we weaken any game theoretic incentives for the lesser evil’s party to provide us with a choice that is anything other than a lesser evil. If they don’t have to, they won’t. And every time we vote for the lesser evil, we may not lose, but we don’t win, because winning is the election of someone furthers your interests. Thus, the result is strictly increasing shittiness.
A simple game that represents the relationship between voters and parties is bartering (whether for a house, a car, or a chicken). You offer a price; the vendor, a counteroffer. This repeats until you both agree on a price and goods. What is the vendor’s leverage? The ability to refuse to sell you the product. What is your leverage? The ability to refuse to buy the product.
What would happen if you knew that the vendor absolutely had to sell you the product, no matter the price? You’d have no reason to raise your offer and every reason to lower it.
What would happen if the vendor knew you were absolutely going to buy the product, no matter the price? He’d have no reason to lower his offer and every reason to raise it.
What would happen if a politician or political party knew you were absolutely going to give them your vote, no matter their platform? They’d have no reason to adapt their platform to meet your needs.
The power you have in a negotiation derives from the ability and willingness to walk away. Politics is no different, only more important.
Every voter who held his or her nose and voted for the lesser evil was not only helping you win, they were giving you want you wanted. A little reciprocity wouldn’t hurt, one would think, but it’s gotta flow all one way.
Political concessions for me, but not for thee. Sounds fair.
Dammit, I was trying to avoid being snarky, but I’m not sure how to express that without a bit of snark.