A contrast that couldn’t be sharper

A tool typically used by retailers to illuminate the differences and highlight perceived superiority or shortcomings in competing products is to compare and contrast. Grocers do it. Car companies do it. Politicians do it. This week, as presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden introduced Sen. Kamala Harris of California as his vice-presidential running mate, the comparing and contrasting came fast, furious and sometimes funny.

Bruce Heyman, former U.S. ambassador to Canada, was quick off the mark, tweeting: “I can guarantee the CanadaUSA relationship will be100-per-cent improved with #BidenHarris2020.”

So, too, was American journalist Virginia Heffernan: “Are there two more different Americans than Mike Pence and Kamala Harris?”

In fact, the reaction of U.S. President Donald Trump to the announcement, his demeaning comments and snarling demeanour, his desperate peddling of divisive rhetoric, along with the usual tepid echo from his vice-president, provided about as stark a contrast for American voters as it is possible to imagine. So let’s do a little comparing and contrasting.

The demographics In the season of Black Lives Matter, as the country recovers from the public killing by Minneapolis police of George Floyd, Kamala Harris meets the moment. She is smart, seasoned, savvy and tough.

But what makes her candidacy historic is the fact she is a biracial woman – the daughter of a Jamaican father and Indian mother. Harris’s parents – Donald Harris and Shyamala Gopalan — came from opposite ends of the Earth to meet on the streets of America during civil rights protests, protests that continue to this day in a rising of what Harris called a “coalition of conscience.” As Biden said, little girls of colour around the country, looking at the nominee and her family, “maybe, just maybe, see themselves for the first time in a new way.”

The smiles, the laughter One of the great voids in American life in the past four years has been laughter, kindliness, expressions of fondness. Trump does not laugh. Pence wears a frozen rictus on his face. Their followers are given to sneers, vituperation or rage. Compare that with Biden, who radiates optimism and sunniness and Harris, who has a smile that lights up a room and, said one tweeter who knows her, “the best laugh in the business.”

The civility While Biden and Harris promised to lead America in pursuit of its best ideals, Trump managed to combine both racism and sexism in a single comment during his news conference afterward, saying Harris “was probably nastier than even Pocahantas to Joe Biden.”

“Pocahantas” is the slur he uses against Elizabeth Warren. “Nasty” is the term he uses on women he feels threatened by. To compound his sexism, Trump tweeted that “the ‘suburban housewife’ will be voting for me.” Which is likely not the way most women residing in the suburbs describe themselves in an era in which both spouses work outside the home.

The maturity In choosing Harris, Biden shrugged off the insults she had aimed his way during the Democratic presidential contest. Trump suggested this somehow spoke ill of Biden. Biden thought otherwise. He picked someone because, not despite the fact, she criticized him in debate. He wanted someone who would “tell me the truth, challenge my assumptions, ask the hard questions.”

Adults know that to have relationships in a world of imperfect mortals demands the capacity to forgive. Adults know the best of friends are those who tell the truths that are hard to say and hard to hear. The nurturing of old grudges and resentments, as Trump has done all his life, indicates a lack of emotional intelligence. A need for constant praise suggests a toxic narcissism or deep spiritual hole at a person’s core.

Charlottesville, Va. Biden’s selection of Harris as running mate came three years after the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., when neo-Nazis chanted anti-semitic slogans and a woman was killed. Biden said that was the moment he knew he had to join the Democratic race in order to battle Trump for the soul of America. “It was a wake-up call to all of us that day.”

It was an event, however, that Trump described as having “fine people on both sides.” On its third anniversary, to amplify that odious view, Trump called Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon conspiracy theorist who won a Republican congressional primary in Georgia, “a real WINNER” and “strong on everything.”

The record and the verdict In all, Biden and Harris, in their first appearance together since the ticket was announced, framed the election that is only 80 days away as a referendum on Trump and his failures – especially on confronting a coronavirus pandemic that has left more than 160,000 Americans dead, shattered the economy, left schoolchildren and their parents in a state of anxiety and uncertainty about classes this fall.

“The case against Donald Trump and Mike Pence is open and shut,” Harris declared.

Biden said Americans face existential questions in November.

“Who are we as a nation? What do we stand for? And most important of all, what do we want to be?

The contrast could hardly be clearer.

One of the great voids in American life in the past four years has been laughter, kindliness, expressions of fondness