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It’s Okay to Fall in Love, But We Have to Fall in Line

 

They like the fact that this is a young Black woman squaring off against an old white guy. They like that she's going to all just talk about abortion. And they like the fact that she was a prosecutor and he's a felon. They like that framing.

   JesseWatters, Fox News host

 

I couldn’t have said it better. Watters, the current occupant of Tucker Carlson’s old time slot, was trying to sound smarmy and insulting — his default setting — but when you see his words on the page, you realize he’s reading the situation with uncanny accuracy.

Hell yes, we like that framing. More, please.

The rollout of Brand Kamala was superb. A marketing coup of the first order, I was agog. Before we’d even absorbed that Biden was stepping aside, the websites were up, the lawn signs were printed, the merch was available for purchase, and there she was, ready for her closeup. A star is born.

It was as smooth a launch as I’ve ever seen, and to think it was cobbled together in less than two weeks shows a lot about what the traditionally fractious Democratic Party has become, in the face of what it perceives as a real threat.

The old cliché that "Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line" was just obliterated. Not that Democrats aren’t falling in love, but they’re definitely falling in line. Republicans are just falling.

Anyone who has followed the Democratic Party for the last half-century can only look on in awe. Just as in Poland last year, just as in France and Britain this month, there’s now a real coalition, with all rivalries set aside. For maybe the first time in my life, Democrats are totally in array.

The prevailing feeling is relief. We’d been anticipating four months of high anxiety at the thought of any repeat of that one devastating debate. There will be enough October surprises as it is.

Most of the credit goes to Joe Biden. In our collective agita of the last month, we knew we could trust him to do the right thing, but we didn’t know what the right thing was. He figured it out before we did. When you think about it, Biden has been a step ahead of the rest of us for at least the last four years.

He weighed the situation, he figured out the solution, and he acted fast. In one stroke, he took Trump’s legs out from under him, and sent the Republican Party into panic mode. He flipped the “age” issue on its head, which is a big deal. But that’s just part of it.

He ended the vendetta against his son, which removes an entire industry of right-wing talking points. All talk of impeachment will soon fade away, and we can put to rest forever the “Biden Crime Family” and its nefarious but totally fictional ties to China and Ukraine.

House Republicans already had nothing to show for their two years of control, and now they have less than nothing. Maybe they can cook up a Harris Crime Family on short notice.

But more than any of this, Biden made yet one more payment on the party’s longstanding debt to Black America. It was Sen. James Clyburn who engineered his victory in the South Carolina primary of 2020, paving the way for his presidency, and it wasn't forgotten.

It’s not news that Black women are the backbone of the Democratic Party. They do the heavy lifting of both local politics and electoral administration. They volunteer. They work the precincts. They get out the vote. They protect the integrity of the process.

Biden understood that debt — perhaps more deeply than any of us did — and he acted on it. There are now Black women thriving at every level of his administration, including one on the Supreme Court.

And then there’s Kamala Harris. 

Black and Woman, the two things Republicans fear most. To them, she is hell on heels, and she has no problem rubbing it in their faces. When she speaks of her long experience with predators and swindlers, you know she’s hitting all of them, not just Trump, where they live.

Biden spent his entire career being collegial. He was civil and respectful to everyone, no matter how odious. I never felt he’d fully come to grips with the sheer vileness of Trump and the MAGA crowd. I think it offended him deeply, yet he always seemed reluctant to confront it.

Not so, Kamala. Her whole time in the Senate was spent with knives out. She is under no illusions about these jerks, and she seems to understand the value of ridicule. Her clear intention is to hit Trump hard. Since the courts can’t get to him in time, she’s happy to take the case to the public. She’s already putting out the messaging she wants to use — “I know Donald Trump’s type”  — and she is quite comfortable using all the words the press won’t: liar, rapist, fraud, felon. I haven’t heard her call him a traitor yet, but we can hope.

Biden will leave an astonishing legacy, but he’s not done yet. He’s still president, and he still has some tricks up his sleeve. Like yesterday’s editorial in the Washington Post, in which he fires a serious shot across the Supreme Court’s bow. Nobody expects anything to come of it any time soon, but it does shine a harsh spotlight on the Alito-Thomas junta. Plus, it was timed nicely to ride the Kamala wave.

But while Biden was the ideal guy to run the government these last four years, he has never been a great campaigner. He can bring the fire when he needs to, but public speaking has never been his strength. Even when he’s good, he’s not that good.

Kamala, on the other hand, is a natural. She creates energy. She thinks on her feet. She knows how to reach an audience, just as she once reached a jury. The skills are not unrelated.

So yes, it’s okay to fall in love with Kamala, just as we did with Obama in 2008. But what’s important is not the falling in love, it’s the falling in line.

When you’re trying to hold on to a democracy, what’s love got to do with it?

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