Vice President Kamala Harris gave the public its first real look into her nascent presidential campaign with a stop at her organization’s headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware on Monday night.
Harris’ first applause line came when she discussed her background as California attorney general and as a courtroom prosecutor.
“In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” she said, earning cackles while she beamed, clearly enjoying the joke. “Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”
Change from what?
What did people want to change?
What was wrong that we all wanted to change… Away… From?
Yeah it was deliberately vague bullshit, but I was there. We wanted to change away from Bush and war and bigotry and callous disregard for our fellow citizens.
Obama’s genius was retorical, not substantial. This country doesn’t know what it wants because we have vastly different ideas about what would be best even inside the Democratic party, let alone independents and Republicans. Laying out specific policy goals is mostly a trap. Because whoever you piss off cares a lot more about that than whoever you please.
Trump does the same thing by vomiting so much bullshit that voters can imagine he will give them whatever their hearts desire is because he said he would at some point. He won’t, but his voters are mostly already praying to a sky angel so they have a lot of experience projecting love and benevolence for them onto a distant figure that doesn’t care about them at all.
Obama had a huge advantage on McCain because McCain seemed comparatively old, feeble, and not nearly as well-spoken. Then McCain picked Sarah Palin as a running mate and America heard her try to form sentences in real time.
GW was on his way out. The choice was McCain’s version of conservatism plus whatever the crazy cat lady was going to say along the way, or Obama’s promise of hope and change, with a very well-understood Biden at his side.
Mcain’s primary win was a rebuke of Bush. McCain lost to Bush in the 2000 primary. He ran again in 08 and that time he got it because he represented a different “maverick” path from Bush’s Neoconservatism.
McCain was also a neoconservative, but his brand was a straight shooting veteran with principles.
But the voting base wanted more change than that. McCain was still a Republican. The people wanted the Opposite of Bush, as seen in the down ballot races giving Dems a supermajority. People were predicting the end of the Republican party in 2009.
We all know how that turned out. But at the time it seemed transformational.
Though Palin kind of twisted it right back to W-ism, but even more so.
It was a terrible decision, but only in hindsight. She was a popular governor and a political outsider, even by Alaska standards.
But she let the proto tea party get to her and just ran with her worst instincts.