The Quiet, Righteous Rage of Kamala Harris

The Quiet, Righteous Rage of Kamala Harris
America spent years turning the vice president into a joke. In the end, she might get the last laugh.

BY SCAACHI KOUL
JULY 20, 20245:40 AM


(Slate) When the political satire Veep premiered on HBO in 2012, it was viewed by those of us outside of government as a show too absurd to be a true commentary on the vagaries of American political power. By the time the show ended in 2019, two and a half years after Donald Trump had been sworn in as the president, the audience had come around to some hard truths: Veep’s absurdism was starting to feel like a black mirror to reality. There are the vanity-obsessed lawmakers, the slobbering cronies, unethical lobbyists, and the now-predictable incompetence and selfishness that we recognize as holding us all hostage in a political system that feels far from representative. Central to all of that in Veep’s universe is Vice President Selina Meyer, an ineffectual, sharp-elbowed politician who’s routinely shunted to the side in President Hughes’ administration. In early seasons of the show, her sole political power is in being trotted out for photo ops with “the people” while rarely getting invitations to official briefings. Most of the show’s jokes stem from her barely repressed fury at being ignored by her own party; she struggles so much to get any face time with the president that the audience never sees his face either.

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What … the hell is she talking about? Who knows, but it’s all I’ve been able to think about for the past few months. Momala. I repeat it to myself almost daily. Has any vice president been talked to so condescendingly, and with no real recourse available to her? Of course not: No one would ever ask Dick Cheney to take over the reins as Papa America and bring us comfort during the Iraq War. Even Joe Biden, back when he was the VP himself—in his aviators, eating an ice cream cone, politely edging away from a frenzied Leslie Knope on Parks & Recreation—was in on the joke, and still treated with some admiration. Harris, meanwhile, has the distinct expression of someone who’s just been spit on in public but is forced to grin and bear it.

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But it’s not a coincidence that Harris, of all people, has had her vice-presidential term defined largely by being the butt of the joke. Since she joined Biden’s ticket in 2020, Harris has been sidelined by her party, defanged in quips made by pundits and in TikTok memes, and largely forgotten by voters in a fate befitting that of the first woman of color in her position. How funny, then, that, amid increasingly panicked concerns over Biden’s age and mental acuity, with those worries multiplied at least threefold following the assassination attempt on Trump, Harris is now being bandied about as one of democracy’s last hopes as the presidential election draws nearer like the promise of death itself. As the pressure on Biden to drop out of the race intensifies with each passing day, Democrats have worked themselves into a tizzy over who can possibly replace him. America (or half of it, at least) feels a little doomed, and the only person who might be able to save us is the very person we’ve been dutifully ignoring this whole time. Veep couldn’t have scripted it any better.

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Miraculously, Harris seems to be responding in turn. Finally, she’s stepping off the sidelines to directly address what kind of threat the Republican Party could pose in the near future. At a campaign stop in North Carolina earlier this week, she sounded more sure, more confident, and more presidential than ever. “If you claim to stand for unity, you need to do more than just use the word,” she said to raucous applause. “You cannot claim you stand for unity if you’re pushing an agenda that deprives whole groups of Americans of basic freedoms, opportunity, and dignity.” She spoke fiercely about Project 2025, about the plan to restrict abortion rights across the country, about the Trumpian attempts to overturn the last election. “We’re too busy watching what you’re doing to hear what you’re saying,” she says with a smile, but she’s not fucking around. She’s not falling out of a coconut tree. She’s mad as hell; it’s a good reminder of why so many people thought she had such a good chance in 2019. .................(more)

https://slate.com/life/2024/07/kamala-harris-biden-trump-vice-president-vp-memes.html