So Joe Biden has picked California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate and the plumbing of why he did so has commenced. Biden picked her because she possesses a prosecutorial mind and temperament — she couldn’t have done the jobs of San Francisco’s district attorney and California’s attorney general without them — which enables her to give and take a punch. This ability to serve and volley should also make her formidable in any vice presidential debate.. (See her questioning of now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Attorney General William Barr.)
My uncle, a conservative, likes to point out that a vice president isn’t a prosecutor. That may be, but this one may have to be. President Donald J. Trump won’t be going gently into that good night and, once he goes, he’ll still be around to stir up trouble. Biden picked Harris, because he knows she’ll have his back. (Plus, as a former prosecutor, she’s not soft on crime. And as an American woman of Asian Indian and Jamaican descent with a Jewish husband, entertainment lawyer Douglas Emhoff, she’s a minority dream. Indeed, it’s hard to think how Trump is going to spin this beyond the usual she’s a nasty leftist.)
Having said that, I thought she’d be a superb A.G. and was looking for former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams or Ambassador Susan Rice for the number two slot. But Rice will be perfect for secretary of state with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren a natural for Treasury. I’d like to see Abrams — who should’ve been governor of Georgia and is the founder of Fair Fight Action to end voter suppression — unravel the Gordian knot of our voting system. There will be plenty of cabinet posts to extend the team of rivals to former Indianapolis Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Labor perhaps?) and Sen. Cory Booker (HUD?).
No, I’m not counting the chickens before they hatch. I think of what abolitionist, author and orator Frederick Douglass told the suffragists at the famed Seneca Falls convention of 1848 that began the long struggle for women’s suffrage in the United States, whose centennial we’ll celebrate on Aug. 18.. Remember: The women at the convention were basically looking for an end to domestic violence and for some equality in the home. That should tell you how bad things were. But Douglass was among the few who laid out the inconvenient truth: Nothing would change without the vote.
Voting is power. That’s why we all have to get out the vote. Register if you aren’t already and hound everyone you know to register and then plan on how you’re going to do it — by mail, in person, by Pony Express, whatever, but do it and make sure your friends and family do, too.
Vote as if our lives depend on it. Because as Douglass understood, they do.