In an age where demonizing the country's most unpopular politician is a national pastime, could it be that Democrats have forgotten that their own pols -– while perhaps more racially tolerant and less divisive than President Trump -– are themselves a far cry from being saints?
Who among us can honestly say that beginning a statement to an otherwise friendly acquaintance, saying "I don't think you're a racist..." isn't an opening that inevitably leads to the assertion, linguistically cradled as it can be made, that you believe he is precisely that?
It is too early to tell what lasting impact Kamala Harris' debate takedown of former Vice President Joe Biden will have on the Democratic Party's presidential nomination race. Has she knocked Biden off his front-runner perch? Has the multi-racial Harris taken a big step in her quest to become America's first woman president? Is Bernie Sanders now the candidate to beat or did the attack on Biden and Bernie him about their age find a toehold for other to chip away? And Biden? Didn't those four decades in Washington, D.C., prepare him with a better way to come back at Kamala Harris and defend himself and his public record?
The national press corps are the worst barometer on what this all means. They're like the kids on the playground egging on two kids threatening to duke it out. What was that great line in Don Henley's song about the news business? "She can tell you 'bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye/ It's interesting when people die/ Give us dirty laundry."
American presidential campaigns have become our national theater in which Donald Trump is now only an antagonist, one of many, and not the catalyst. He may simply not be as clever as Senator Harris in initiating the conflict with the protagonist, nor as sympathetic as the California senator who has been roundly declared the winner of a fight to bring down the person who, as the former vice president, was otherwise the titular head of her party.
But at what price? Harris's die-hard supporters, like Trump's are not likely to waver. But what about other traditional Democrats, especially those perhaps a bit more politically pragmatic who already knew Joe Biden to be an imperfect man but a good and decent one?
Perhaps Joe Biden is simply the Democrats' George W. Bush? A man possibly destined to be president in spite of saying the wrong things that he might not mean but is too proud to admit that he's been wrong. Remember that even after all his lousy behavior toward women in the past, he was still the Democratic Party's front-runner by a safe margin going into the first debates.
Afterwards, while Harris supporters and Biden haters were urging his defeat, I heard among many other non-aligned Democrats who felt that Barack Obama's vice-president had been the unfair victim of nothing less than a disappointing character assassination attempt -– and who took a surprisingly negative view of the way Kamala Harris had gone about her premeditated attack.
In last Thursday night's debate, Harris made an emotionally moving argument of recalling how she had been a child who was bussed to school in the 1970s while a young Biden at that same time had opposed forced busing to desegregate public schools.
Democrats to whom I spoke wondered what this said about Harris, who went on to college and law school at the University of California, who became a career prosecutor and then elected attorney general and U.S. Senator in a state where whites -– while only 42 percent of California’s adult population -– comprise 59 percent of the likely voters. More than 40 years after the events she described in her debate diatribe against Biden, as one white Democrat said to me, "she still seems to carry an awfully big grudge."
What did that say to her?
"That someone who carries a grudge that long," she said, "may not be much different in temperament from what we now have in the White House."
Maybe it also says this:
Kamala Harris, at this critical time in the country, it's time to forgive the sins of four decades ago and campaign for president on promises for the redemption of America in the future.
