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.”
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.