Dave Neese’s Provocations: Lady with a shank
Say what you will about Kamala Harris — and Republicans, of course, are — the lady knows how to fashion and use a shank. Ask Joe Biden.
In the Democratic primary, when all the candidates were ganging up on poor Joe, Kamala was the one who went straight in for the kill.
No dilly-dallying on her part. She unsheathed her racism shank and went to work.
Oh, she didn’t exactly say, in so many words, that Joe is a racist.
In fact, she was careful to say she doubts he is.
Then she proceeded to imply otherwise. That’s how adept the lady is with a shank.
Some Biden backers at the time felt that the weapon she resorted to was more like a machete. One Biden campaign aide denounced her attack as “outrageous.”
But it must be said in all fairness to Kamala that she was well within the mainstream of the Democratic Party’s rules of discourse when she let fly with her innuendoes of racism. It’s a rare day in politics when suspected racists aren’t rounded up and perp-marched before the media.
Racism, racism, racism. It’s the all-purpose, everhandy denigration these days. It’s the tar brush that’s guaranteed to leave an indelible mark on your foe.
Once smeared with the insinuation, how do you ever prove you’re not a racist? The insinuation puts you on the defensive — as poor Joe found out.
It’s a standard, go-to tactic in Democratic circles today to hint, without actually saying so, that any who dare to doubt your policy prescriptions are irredeemable, Klaverncleaving crackers — toothless, terbacky-dribblin’, Deliverance-style, cretin stereotypes.
White supremacists. Thus in a candidate debate Kamala proceeded to characterize Joe in terms that cast him as being of the same low ilk as South Africa apartheid architect Hendrik Verwoerd or Alabama segregationist Bull Connor.
She portrayed poor Joe as a composite redneck, as an all-rolled-into-one, textbook bigot. Although — again — she didn’t say it in so many actual words. The trick is to suggest it, not say it.
Poor Joe was left standing there on stage, stammering and bleeding. He finally managed to mumble a few lame words in his own defense.
Kamala, he objected feebly, had made a “mischaracterization of my position, across the board.”
Sorry, Joe, too late. The shank had left its mark.
A moaning, wailing media Greek chorus at the time dramatized its conclusion that poor Joe surely would never be able to survive the vivisection number Kamala had done on him.
And he very nearly didn’t. But he did survive. And Kamala didn’t.
She became one of the first candidates to fizzle and flop in the Democratic primary.
Whereupon she whined that she had been the victim of her party’s seething prejudices against females and people of color.
Her own party! Democrats! A reactionary gang of lowly racists and male chauvinists!
Although Joe prevailed over her, you’d think he’s surely still smarting over the shank job Kamala did on him. Unless, perhaps, as Republicans keep suggesting, his dwindling cognitive faculties have mercifully spared him the terrible memory of the savaging he suffered at her hands.
Kamala started out with a shiv thrust that’s become a familiar maneuver in Democratic knife politics: She accused Joe of having once uttered “hurtful” words. Ah, yes, “hurtful.” The worst kind of all.
“Hurtful” words, being of a highly amorphous category, are virtually impossible to defend yourself against when they’re attributed to you.
Kamala put on her best, vulnerable, fairer-sex, damsel-in-distress pout when she used the word. “Hurtful.” Oh boo-hoo. Sniff, sniff.
Joe had been cruelly hurtful in telling how, as a senator, he’d gotten along even with the Senate’s notorious segregationist Democrats in cooperating to get things done.
Kamala still was not yet finished with her victim after carving an “R” on his forehead, an “R” standing for . . . well, you know what for.
She went on to say that Joe had hurtfully opposed racial busing as a way to integrate schools, a charge that implied he’s really a closet Kleagle, along the lines H.L. Mencken described in “Sahara of the Bozart.”
Well, now, in fact didn’t many people — black and white — oppose busing? Yes indeed they did. But that fact didn’t deter Kamala. She proceeded to shank poor Joe over busing anyway.
She declared: “There was a little girl in California” — sniff, sniff — “who was part of the second class to integrate her public school. She was bused to school every day. And that little girl” — boo-hoo — “was me.”
Kamala delivered the rehearsed line with just the right amount of emotion, with a slight tremor in her voice.
Poor Joe was left standing there exposed, the Orval Faubus or Lester Maddox of Kamala’s tear-jerker anecdote. Kamala then proceeded to twist in the racial shiv.
“Do you agree,” she demanded, “that you were wrong to oppose busing in America?”
A flustered Joe finally muttered, nonsensically: “I did not oppose busing in America. What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education.”
But, hey, in fact didn’t the U.S. Department of Education actually not even come into existence until 1980, after busing had been all but abandoned as a school-desegregation policy?
Kamala, however, was brooking no dissent on the busing issue.
She declared: “I will tell you that on this subject it can’t be an intellectual debate among Democrats.”
So now it might be wondered: Is racial busing going to be exhumed and reinstated as the party’s favored policy? Don’t hold your breath waiting for the media to pursue that question.
It may be that Kamala felt compelled to go to her racial shank against Joe to demonstrate her bona fides as “a person of color.”
She’s not, you see, a person of African color herself. And that can be problematical in a party that obsesses over gradations of pigmentation and frets endlessly over other ancestral esoterica.
In any event, after carving Joe up as a reincarnation of George Wallace, Kamala gave her victim an even more merciless evisceration when the campaign trail led into Nevada. There she went after Joe as a creepy groper of females.
Four women associated with the Democratic Party — determined evidently to stop Joe’s nomination — had expressed their belated concerns over his “inappropriate touching.” That was the delicate term they used to describe his allegedly distressing libidinal impulses.
With lethal instinct, Kamala went right for the shank again. She eagerly endorsed the women’s ambiguous insinuations. She declared: “I believe them and I respect them being able to tell their story and having the courage to do it.”
She didn’t even bother to show poor Joe a minimal measure of mercy by adding something like, “Of course, Donald Trump has been accused of far worse.”
Put down as a suspected, loathsome pervert, the chastised Joe meekly vowed to strive henceforth to, um, “respect women’s space.”
In what’s surely the mother of all ironies, huffy women’s groups have suddenly rallied to Kamala’s pro-active defense, now that she’s on the party’s ticket.
They have put out a warning that they’ll tolerate no criticism whatsoever of Kamala that might remotely be construed as misogynistic. The media have been put on notice, although this surely was not necessary.
The suggestion seems to be that dear, sweet, frail, feminine Kamala may not be capable of withstanding the late hits and horsecollar tackles of a roughand-tumble presidential campaign, may not be up to competing on the same playing field with the guys.
Are they kidding? Kamala the Shankstress?
Given that she learned the tricks of the trade from the master of ruthless politics — from her one-time paramour and mentor, legendary California political boss Willie Brown — it’s doubtful in the extreme that she’s ever gonna need the extra protection of the harridan community.
Political pundits left and right are still theorizing on Biden’s motivations for naming Kamala as his running mate.
Some say it’s her access to big-dollar California donors, to party movers and shakers, to Wall Street.
Some say it’s her readiness to rumble, her willingness to be the ticket’s nasty answer to a nasty Donald Trump — her facility with a shank.
Yet a third theory is that she’ll be able to appeal to the intellect of the Democratic Party’s high-minded progressive set, the party’s doctoral-degree demographic, in a way that befuddled, inarticulate Joe could never hope to.
But she appears to appeal to the intellect the same way comedian Richard Pryor once said the mafia does. (He said the mafia’s way of appealing to the intellect is to tell you: “You’re a smart guy, you surely know how hard it’s gonna be to walk without knees.”)
Kamala will have the distinct advantage of bringing underworldstyle political enforcement skills to the ticket. She’ll be free of the need to fuss over obligations of restraint, this thanks to her gender.
At the same time, her male foes will be deterred from fully responding in kind, this thanks to their gender. It’s just the way things are, it’s the social custom.
Kamala’s willingness and readiness to engage in shank politics calls to mind a possibly applicable
story told of President Lyndon B. Johnson.
According to the story, Johnson was asked why he had decided to retain as FBI director the menacing J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover was infamous for his compromising files on Washington’s top political figures. Johnson is said to have replied: “I’d much rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.”
Joe presents himself as a man of simple and sincere motivations, a nonthreatening fellow incapable of guile. Maybe when
he reflected on the way Kamala had carved him a new one, he was simply afraid not to put her on the ticket.
In any case, whether it was the aim or not, Kamala brings to the ticket certain attack skills that can make sure the election is a referendum on Trump.
She can keep Trump on the defensive and in the forefront as the election’s main issue. Her attacks can chum the waters where the media sharks lurk and keep them occupied chasing down and
feeding on yummy little Trump tidbits.
All in all, whether by design or random luck, the seemingly bumbling, bewildered Joe has made a shrewd vice-presidential pick, one that just might be able to nudge him across the Nov. 3 finish line as the victor.
Providing, that is, Joe and Kamala can avoid becoming the central issue themselves. Given the abandonment of impartiality by a large swath of the Fourth Estate, that eventuality seems all but guaranteed.