Comments@THE GUSS REPORT-At just 5’2” tall, the smallest person on the Democrat debate stage over two nights last week was the only one with the courage and verbal wingspan, as it were, to punch former vice president Joe Biden’s 76-year old glass jaw, making the politically engaged portion of America sit up and take notice of California’s junior senator Kamala Harris.
But as smart, appealing and steady as Harris is, her California – especially in her Bay Area and the part overseen by Los Angeles of Mayor Eric Garcetti – demonstrates the predictable failure of liberal policies run amok.
President Donald Trump need only point to the streets of Los Angeles infected with the Garcetti-worsened trash, disease, homelessness and this clip of weaponized street violence as one homeless guy in a wheel chair pummels another, with the LAPD demonstrating that our people in blue have a literally unmanageable job because of failed liberal policies of Garcetti and his comrades on LA City Council and the LA County Board of Supervisors. The clip is from Street People of Los Angeles’s Instagram page.
As the road to 2020 dips and curves we will see how blame for conditions in California will partially be placed at Harris’s feet not just by Trump but by the other Democrat candidates themselves. It may be effective because Harris, who hasn’t authored any significant laws while in the Senate, is on the furthest left side of liberal, as shown by this ideology leadership graphic from GovTrack.us.
Since race was such a factor at the Democrat debates, it is worth pointing out that Harris’s father is an accomplished Stanford professor from Jamaica who divorced her mother, a cancer researcher of Tamil Indian descent, when the Senator was very young. That, plus the fact that her husband is an influential attorney, who is Caucasian, makes her background a fascinating intra-cultural American success story, including a 2018 combined annual household income of more than $2 million. But will all of her undeniable success and her background as a prosecutor who dramatically increased prosecutions and pleas of people of color, sending them to prison for non-violent drug offenses, cause her more political harm than good? (Biden, it should be noted, was once a public defender)
On that note, no candidate’s family background is without controversy, either. Harris’s father recently publicly accused her of stereotyping Jamaicans and playing identity politics:
“My dear departed grandmothers…..as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics. Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.”
---Professor Donald Harris, February 2019
For his part, Biden didn’t learn any lessons from the debate pummeling, stepping into more verbal trouble twice over the weekend.
“That kid wearing a hoodie may very well be the next poet laureate and not a gangbanger," Biden said at an event hosted by Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition.
Playing off Harris’s widely applauded calling out of Biden, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, who is also running for the Democratic presidential nomination, Tweeted, “this isn’t about a hoodie. It’s about a culture that sees a problem with a kid wearing a hoodie in the first place. Our nominee needs to have the language to talk about race in a far more constructive way.”
Biden also stumbled at a Seattle event, stating his belief that jokes about the LGBTQ community became inappropriate just within the past half-decade, saying “even five years ago someone at a business lunch could make fun of a gay waiter, and others at the table would sit silently by.”
“Not in Seattle,” some in the crowd notably shouted back, according to media reports.
And not elsewhere, either.
And with a young, mostly well-received gay Dem presidential candidate in South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Biden appears more than ever to be the relic that his date of birth suggests. Another Dem POTUS candidate who is slightly older than Biden, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders doesn’t find himself in these jams. It is Biden who is out of sync with modern, young and diverse America.
For Biden’s campaign, the late, great Yogi Berra may have said it best: “It gets late early around here.”
It makes you wonder why Garcetti recently slipped out of his jacket and rolled up his sleeves to traipse with Biden for grub at the legendary King Taco. Were they playing to the media cameras to falsely portray themselves as regular guys hankering to chow down and hang with the hoi polloi?
Garcetti knows full-well where Biden stands on race, sexual orientation, urban youth and shooting off his mouth. He was there for the cameras, not the tacos.
People for the most part don’t buy that phony imaging. Politicians should stop trying to sell it.
Back soon with the latest LA City Hall corruption, chaos and infighting. Have a great one.
(Daniel Guss, MBA, is a member of the Los Angeles Press Club, and has contributed to CityWatch, KFI AM-640, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @TheGussReport. His opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
