If Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) enters the 2020 presidential race, the establishment media will be looking to Breitbart News to see how conservatives will attack her candidacy, according to Politico’s California Playbook.
California Playbook writers Carla Marinucci, David Siders, and Diamond Naga Siu pointed out on Friday that Harris has been garnering “a flurry of will-she-or-won’t-she, 2020-focused stories detailing her every move on Capitol Hill (and back in California).”
They then said Breitbart News is previewing where conservative media will go should Harris enter the 2020 race:
RIGHT WING REVS UP: A preview of where the GOP, and the rightwing media, will go on Harris, should she ever begin serious efforts at a 2020 White House run. That first trip to Iowa hasn’t been scheduled – but if or when it is, well, brace yourselves, Kamala fans:
California Playbook then linked to a Breitbart News article about two veteran California journalists who ripped Harris for being a “shallow” and “narcissistic” lightweight.
In that article, Breitbart News also pointed out that, “Democrats, especially operatives who may see her as a vehicle they can use to line their pockets or enhance their profiles en route to television contracts, have been hyping Harris as the party’s next big star. “
Though Joel Pollak and Sam Chi at Breitbart California have kept tabs on Harris, those on the left and in the establishment media have been just as critical. This week, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) seemed to tell Harris, in the words of ESPN’s Lee Corso, “not so fast,” when Feinstein told the New York Times, “she just got here.”
“What she should do is concentrate on being a good, and possibly great, United States senator,” Feinstein continued.
Two veteran journalists in Harris’ home state recently wrote that Harris is a show horse who is taking “bad advice from the craven whisperers around her.” They said there is “not much there there,” and Harris is just “the flavor of the week among the big grains in the Beltway.”
Harris Ain’t The Next Barack Obama
Should Harris somehow enter the 2020 race, she would need considerable support from black Democrats, especially in the South, who make up the heart and soul of the party’s primary electorate.
But here’s the inconvenient truth—Harris has shown no indication that she can galvanize these important voters like Barack Obama did or Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) possibly can. In fact, she has not even shown to date that she could be as effective as John Edwards was.
Before Obama won his party’s nomination, columnists like Stanley Crouch were questioning whether Obama, having grown up in fairly insulated Hawaii and abroad, understood the experiences of black Americans. In his 2006 column titled, “What Obama Isn’t: Black Like Me on Race,” Crouch wrote that if the country ends up with the “the son of a white woman and an African immigrant” as “our first black President, he will have come into the White House through a side door – which might, at this point, be the only one that’s open.”
Obama, days before the anniversary of Bloody Sunday in March of 2007, went to Selma, Alabama and delivered a rousing speech. Obama, assuaging many establishment black Democrats who were skeptical of his fast rise, said then:
So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don’t tell me I’m not coming home when I come to Selma, Alabama. I’m here because somebody marched for our freedom. I’m here because y’all sacrificed for me. I stand on the shoulders of giants. I thank the Moses generation.
But we have got to remember now that Joshua still had a job to do. As great as Moses was, despite all that he did, leading a people out of bondage, he didn’t cross over the river to see the promised land. God told him, your job is done, you’ll see it. You’ll be at the mountaintop, and you can see what I’ve promised, what I promised to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and I promised to you, you can see that I will fulfill that promise.
Booker meanwhile, in addition to effectively using Twitter like Obama’s squad used Facebook, has been giving passionate speeches in which he weaves in James Baldwin, William Lloyd Garrison, and Robert Smalls. He talks about the “impossible dream,” recounts growing up in black churches, and describes how dogs were unleashed on his father and a volunteer real estate agent who was helping his family integrate a New Jersey neighborhood during his childhood.
Even Edwards, in a seminal “silence is betrayal” address at New York’s famed Riverside Church in which he apologized for supporting the Iraq War during the 2008 election cycle, appealed to the hearts of black voters better than Harris has done to date:
As he put it then, there comes a time–not just for Dr. King, but for all of us–when silence is betrayal–not just betrayal of your own personal convictions, not just betrayal of your country, but a betrayal of our–all of our joint responsibility to each other, to our brothers and sisters, not just in America, but all across the globe.
…
There does come a time when we have to each one of us refuse to wait for others to act–a moment when we realize, as one of Dr. King’s great teachers, Gandhi, said, we have to be the change that we want to see in the world.
That time is here again. It’s with us today. Dr. King taught us well. I believe, as I know many of you do, that it is a betrayal, a betrayal to stand silent and watch 37 million of our own brothers and sisters who literally worry about surviving, every single day. It is a betrayal to stand silent while the disparity between he rich and the poor gets worse and worse and worse, every single day in America, in the richest nation on the face of the planet.
And I also believe that it is a betrayal not to speak out against an escalation of the War in Iraq.
Harris, in the meantime, talks about “fighting” various policies, grandstands at Senate hearings, opposes Republicans taking away “our stuff,” and hurls F-bombs.
As Calbuzz’s journalists noted, so far, there really isn’t much there there.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.