Kamala Harris Is An Oligarch’s
Wet Dream
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Jun
28 · 5 min read
California Senator Kamala
Harris won the Democratic presidential debate last night. It was not a close
contest. She will win every debate she enters during this election cycle. If
she becomes the nominee, she will win every debate with Trump.
Night two of the debates was
just as vapid and ridiculous as night
one. Candidates interrupted and talked over each other a lot, questions
about foreign policy were avoided like the plague to prevent NBC viewers from
thinking critically about the mechanics of empire, and Eric Swalwell kept
talking despite everyone in the universe desperately wanting him not to.
Buttigieg and Gillibrand did alright, Bernie played the same note he’s been
playing for decades, and everyone was reminded how bad Joe Biden is at talking
and thinking.
Biden has been treated kindly
by polls and regarded as a “frontrunner” in this race exclusively because for
the last decade he hasn’t had to do anything other than be associated with
Barack Obama. Now that he’s had to step out of that insulated role and interact
with reality again, everyone’s seeing the same old garbage right-wing Democrat
who sucks at making himself look appealing just as badly as he did in his last
two presidential campaigns. By the end of the night, even Michael Bennet was slapping him
around.
The moment everyone’s
talking about was when Harris created a space for herself to
attack Biden on his citing his collaboration with segregationists as an example
of his ability to reach across the aisle and “get things done”. Harris had not
been called upon to speak, and once given the go-ahead by moderator Rachel
Maddow after interjecting went way beyond the 30 seconds she’d been allotted in
tearing Biden apart. She skillfully took control of the stage and engineered
the entire space for the confrontation by sheer dominance of personality, and
Biden had no answer for it.
That’s the moment everyone’s
talking about. But Harris had already been owning the debate prior to that.
The goal of a political debate
is to make yourself look appealing and electable to your audience. You can do
that by having a very good platform, or you can do it with charisma and oratory
skills. It turns out that Kamala Harris is really, really good at doing the
latter. She made frequent and effective appeals to emotion, she built to
applause lines far more skillfully than anyone else on the stage, she kept her
voice unwavering and without stammer, she made herself look like a leader
by admonishing
the other candidates to stop talking over each other, and she hit all
the right progressive notes you’re supposed to hit in such a debate.
Unlike night one of the
debates, night two had a clear, dominant winner. If you were a casual follower
of US politics and didn’t have a favorite coming into the debate, you likely
went away feeling that Harris was the best.
This wasn’t a fluke. Harris
has been cultivating her debate skills for decades, first in
the Howard University debate team where she is said to have “thrived”,
then as a prosecutor, then as a politician, and she’ll be able to replicate the
same calibre of performance in all subsequent debates. There’s more to getting
elected than debate skills, but it matters, and in this area no one will be
able to touch her.
Harris won the debate despite
fully exposing herself for the corporate imperialist she is in the midst of
that very debate. While answering a question about climate change she took the
opportunity to attack Trump on foreign policy, not for his insane and dangerous
hawkishness but for not being hawkish enough, on both North Korea and Russia.
“You asked what is the
greatest national-security threat to the United States. It’s Donald
Trump,” Harris said. “You
want to talk about North Korea, a real threat in terms of its nuclear arsenal.
But what does he do? He embraces Kim Jong Un, a dictator, for the sake of a
photo op. Putin. You want to talk about Russia? He takes the word of the
Russian president over the word of the American intelligence community when it
comes to a threat to our democracy and our elections.”
Harris is everything the US
empire’s unelected power establishment wants in a politician: charismatic,
commanding, and completely unprincipled. In that sense she’s like Obama, only
better.
Harris was one of the 2020
presidential hopefuls who came under fire at the beginning of the year when
it was reported that she’d been reaching out to Wall Street executives
to find out if they’d support her campaign. Executives named in the report
include billionaire Blackstone CEO Jonathan Gray, 32 Advisors’ Robert Wolf, and
Centerbridge Partners founder Mark Gallogly. It was reported two
entire years ago that Harris was already courting top Hillary Clinton
donors and organizers in the Hamptons. She hasn’t been in politics very long,
but her campaign contributions as a senator have come
from numerous plutocratic institutions.
Trump supporters like to claim
that the president is fighting the establishment, citing the open revulsion
that so many noxious establishment figures have for him. But the establishment
doesn’t hate Trump because he opposes them; he doesn’t oppose existing power structures
in any meaningful way at all. The reason the heads of those power structures
despise Trump is solely because he sucks at narrative management and puts an
ugly face on the ugly things that America’s permanent government is constantly
doing. He’s bad at managing their assets.
Kamala Harris is the exact
opposite of this. She’d be able to obliterate noncompliant nations and dead-end
the left for eight years, and look good while doing it. She’s got the skills to
become president, and she’ll have the establishment backing as well. Keep an
eye on this one.
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