November 2020: A Choice Between the Future and the Past

One can either evolve with the world or try to cling to the past.  The former allows one to face the future and innovation and strive for new successes and opportunities.  The later means closing one's eyes to changes that cannot be stopped and trying to freeze time.  The later never works in the long run.  Ask Southern slave owners who resisted the end of slavery.  Ask the Russian aristocracy that on the eve of revolution tried to ignore change and the future.  Ask the British aristocracy that tried to pretend that WWI had not changed everything in society. The same fate will overcome Donald Trump's white supremacist and Christofascist base sooner or later. Time and the future will not stop for them no matter who hard they try to stop or even turn back the clock.  The 2020 elections encapsulate this choice: Trump and the GOP want a return to the 1950's while Biden and the Democrats seek to embrace the future and a changed America that will ultimately come to pass despite the efforts of reactionaries and bigots who now are the face of the GOP.  A column in the New York Times looks at this choice that faces America.  Here are excerpts:

Already, I am dreaming of the debate.

There’s Mike Pence, white of hair as well as cheek, his demeanor more starched than his dress shirt, his smile so tight it’s the twin of a grimace. He represents more than the Trump administration, God help him. He represents an America that’s half memory, half myth.

And there’s Kamala Harris — younger, blacker and more buoyant. She’s only the fourth woman on the presidential ticket of one of the country’s two major political parties and she’s the first woman of color. She represents an America that’s evolving, fitfully, toward equal opportunity and equal justice.

Under her gaze, Pence has to defend a racist, sexist president. As he watches helplessly, Harris gets to talk about how that racism and sexism feel to a Black woman like her. This isn’t any ordinary clash of perspectives and philosophies. It’s an extraordinary collision of life experiences.

And that’s exactly what Joe Biden wants.  . . . . Biden has defined himself as the opposite of President Trump in experience and earnestness and as the antidote to Trump in how he sees America and what he values about it. He has used his choice of a running mate to hammer home that last bit.

Harris is a distinguished public servant with a résumé — U.S. senator from California, state attorney general — unquestionably suited to this exhilarating and daunting opportunity, which she has earned. She is also an agent of contrast, emphasizing the difference between the Republican ticket and the Democratic one, between Trump’s politics of division and Biden’s politics of inclusion.

But even as she affirms Biden’s orientation toward the future, she reflects his appreciation of his own past. She enables him, for a second time, to be part of a presidential ticket that sets a precedent and blazes a trail. It’s almost as if he’s trying to recreate the established magic, to repurpose the victorious script.

In selecting Harris, Biden had to forgive her attacks during a Democratic primary debate for his past alliances with segregationists and his opposition to busing to integrate public schools. He and his aides considered that a cheap shot. They clearly got over it.

Choosing any of the Black women on Biden’s list of prospective running mates would have sent the kind of signal that Harris’s selection does. Choosing any of them would have recognized how crucial Black voters were to the success of Biden’s primary campaign and how crucial they’ll be in the general election.

So why Harris and not Susan Rice, Karen Bass, Val Demings, Keisha Lance Bottoms or Stacey Abrams? Because Biden obviously believes the polls that give him a significant lead over Trump and wants above all to protect it. Harris is the safest of the bunch.

A primary and a general election are utterly different beasts. Harris ran for the Democratic presidential nomination against a huge field of other Democrats. She’s running for the vice presidency against Trump and Pence, and there’s a real chance that the same Black voters who were cool to her in the primary will thrill to her now that she’s on a history-making ticket, prosecuting the case against a president who has consistently and deeply offended them.

She brings to that ticket some of the balance that presidential candidates typically want their running mates to bring. Biden is 77. She’s 55. Biden is East Coast. She’s West Coast. Biden is a white guy, like all but four of the major-party presidential or vice-presidential nominees before Harris. She’s not.

And oh, can she be nimble and fierce. That’s what Biden learned in that tense primary debate, cheap shot or no cheap shot. That’s what Jeff Sessions, Brett Kavanaugh and William Barr learned when they appeared before Senate committees and endured her grilling.

That’s what I hope and trust Pence will learn on Oct. 7, at the University of Utah, where the sole vice-presidential debate is scheduled to take place. A man who reputedly doesn’t like to eat alone with any woman other than his wife — it looks weird and is a recipe for trouble — will face off against a woman who’s big trouble indeed. I suspect she’ll have him for breakfast.