The man who gave Sen. Kamala Harris big breaks in California politics sees big trouble brewing for the Biden-Harris presidential ticket. ...
The man who gave Sen. Kamala Harris big breaks in California politics sees big trouble brewing for the Biden-Harris presidential ticket.
Willie Brown, a fixture in California power circles who has long acknowledged dating Harris in the 1990s, used a column in the San Francisco Chronicle this weekend to describe just how badly Democrats are being hurt by riots that pretend to be for the cause of “racial justice.”
While President Donald Trump was an early and outspoken critic of the violence and has been willing to send federal agents and the National Guard to the worst-hit cities, Democrats have been proving to the American people just how spineless they are by being afraid to call out the rioters for the criminals they are.
No sensible American voter will forget that Democrats staged a four-day national convention while violence tore at cities such as Portland, Oregon — during a summer of racial unrest that struck Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and other Democratic-run cities — but barely said a word condemning the violence.
Democrats made it clear then that they did not want to upset the radical left for fear it would hurt support for former Vice President Joe Biden in November.
The fact that members of Biden’s campaign staff had donated to a fund to bail arrested rioters out of jail isn’t lost on voters.
The fact that Harris herself has published a Twitter post seeking to raise money for those arrested for “protesting” in Minnesota, the scene of some of the nation’s worst rioting, isn’t helping her cause.
That kind of activity might have scored points with the party’s radical, leftist base, but the vast majority of American voters are neither radical nor activist, and that puts the Biden-Harris ticket in a bad spot, Brown wrote.
“A recent Harvard CAPS/Harris poll found that three-fourths of people surveyed were concerned about rising crime in the nation’s cities,” he said. “Nearly half were worried about rising crime where they live.
“Numbers like that have Democrats in a heck of a bind.
“If they stand up and condemn the ‘demonstrators,’ the left wing will label them as Trump flunkies and they’ll be in all sorts of trouble.
“If they keep quiet or offer passive responses, voters will assume they’re OK with burning and looting.”
What Brown is saying is that literally no one — not even supporters — will assume that Biden or Harris is speaking out against looting, arson and murder because they’re actually wrong. Even leftists and liberals will see some ulterior motive.
No conservative with any sense, of course, or even an independent who might actually be included to want a change in the White House, will see a Biden-Harris statement against the rioting as anything but a play for votes from the saner sections of the country.
Even more importantly, Brown doesn’t even claim the decision would be anything but political.
In fact, the moral and ethical issues involved in the government’s responsibility to stop mobs from burning, pillaging and killing at will in American cities doesn’t even merit a mention in his piece. It obviously means just as little to the man and woman who are on the Democratic ticket.
So, in short, no one seriously disputes the idea that the Democratic ticket is morally bankrupt, ethically oblivious or politically spineless. The only question is what tactic it could use to be most effective.
On Monday, Biden tried to address that in a speech in Pittsburgh, as CNN reported, but the real answer is that it could well be too late to make a difference. The die was already cast.
Trump, meanwhile, has been a law-and-order candidate since his entry into the political arena in July 2015, when he outraged liberals and the mainstream media by calling out “illegal immigration” as something that should be stopped — on the grounds that it’s illegal. On numerous occasions, the president has also made no bones about his anger at rioters trashing American cities, and the mainstream media that cover up for them.
It apparently only takes political courage and calculations to tell the truth about violence if you’re a Democrat.
In the column where he acknowledged dating Harris, Brown, a former San Francisco mayor and longtime speaker of the state Assembly, also had no problems admitting that he’d aided his …. protege.
“Yes, we dated. It was more than 20 years ago. Yes, I may have influenced her career by appointing her to two state commissions when I was Assembly speaker,” he wrote.
Still, there’s no guarantee that Harris or anyone in the Biden campaign will read Brown’s column.
As Fox News reported earlier in August, Brown used another Chronicle column to urge Harris to turn down an offer to be on the ticket if Biden made one, so clearly he’s not exactly a campaign insider.
But his long experience in Democratic politics and his personal experience with Harris should give Democrats an idea of how badly they’ve botched their response to the riots by relying on cold political calculation.
As author Maya Angelou famously put it, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Even a Democrat like Brown knows the Biden-Harris ticket has shown America who they are.
And that should mean big trouble come November.
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