Kamala Harris confronts Joe Biden during a Democratic debate in Miami, June 27, 2019.
Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesI’ll admit that Joe Biden rose in my estimation when I thought he was stringing Kamala Harris along to punish her for her temerity in playing the race card against him in the Democratic TV debate in June 2019.
Ruthlessness can be a Christian virtue. Sometimes a politician needs to hold a grudge to enforce norms and protect his or her dignity and the power to get things done. If you wondered if Mr. Biden was up to the job, you might be even more skeptical now.
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The disingenuousness of her attack was bad enough. Mr. Biden was hardly opposed in the 1970s to busing kids to better schools if they wanted to go. Ms. Harris has since admitted she would be against forced busing. All the more so because the Democratic machine from top to bottom today is institutionally committed to denying kids in poor neighborhoods a choice in schooling.
But could the real lesson be that the race card has lost its sting? Rep. Jim Clyburn, in a May interview with Politico, seemed to suggest as much. Ms. Harris’s attack was just a debate thing, a display of political moxie for insiders to chuckle over and everyone else to forget. “We’re at a point now where whoever was part of the scrimmage needs to be on the same team.”
Mr. Biden’s claim in 2012 that Mitt Romney wanted to put black voters “back in chains” is now treated as a lovable Joe gaffe. And this week weren’t Chicagoans united in guffaws over Cook County prosector Kim Foxx’s response to a damning public report on her handling of the Jussie Smollett case? She sent out her attorney to decry “a blatant attempt to take down a black, progressive, female prosecutor who does not fit within the white power structure.”
Uh huh.
Forgiveness is not a universally healthy practice if it encourages the offending behavior. Voters and colleagues might have wondered when and against whom wouldn’t Ms. Harris play the race card if she would against Barack Obama’s loyal wingman on national TV. But if it was just a cute trick to gain attention, nothing more, no harm done, we may be at an inflection point in racial politics, and not in the way people are thinking, the institutionalization of white guilt.
Don’t like the way the police conduct business in your town? Don’t like the priorities of the mayor and city council? Think certain neighborhoods get the short end of the stick in public services such as schools? Black voters have the power in much of America and have lately used it not to satisfy an appetite for tokenism.
They saved Mr. Biden from the dustbin and may have made him president. Black moms gave Ron DeSantis, a white Republican, a narrow edge over an up-and-coming black Democrat, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, in the 2018 Florida governor’s race. Mr. DeSantis was a defender of charter schools. Mr. Gillum could not free himself from his compact with the state teachers union.
In the 2010 Washington mayor’s race, the shoe was on the other foot. Black voters upended the nationally watched school reform efforts of a black mayor, putting the interests of teachers over the apparent interests of students. The black electorate obviously is not monolithic in the things it wants, as is true of any respectable voting demographic. The biggest success so far of the Black Lives Matter-related agenda? The 2018 criminal justice reform law, passed with the help of Republicans and the Trump administration. A widely cited 2018 study found that, contrary to what you might have seen at this week’s Democratic convention, political correctness and racial gotcha have become a giant turnoff for blacks and whites alike, outside a small strata of disproportionately white ultraliberals.
Ms. Harris should reject Mr. Biden’s offer of the vice presidential nod, wrote former California power broker Willie Brown in the San Francisco Chronicle shortly before she was picked, perhaps to remind the world that Mr. Brown exists and was once Ms. Harris’s mentor and boyfriend.
His advice might have been better directed at Mr. Biden. On charisma, energy and now-ness, Ms. Harris has Mr. Biden beat. The campaign’s problem will be finding enough bushels to hide her light under. Mr. Biden’s cheek-turning will be studied by the political tribe for years to come. It goes against the Willie Brown style, not to mention the LBJ or FDR style. Truth be told, it’s Trumpian. As long as you say something nice about him today, it doesn’t matter what you said yesterday. The important thing is the next reality-show installment, not the last one.
What does it mean for the country? Not much right away. The important race in November may be the one for the Senate. But coalition politics in a future America without an ethnic majority can likely only reduce the appeal of making racial enemies by playing the race card.
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