General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I posted some things two years ago about Kamala Harris that were I shouldn't have. [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)I don't even disagree with you on K-12.
I simply reject the ideas that
1) I was obligated to support HRC in the primaries to prove I cared about the poor or about POC;
2) College affordability only benefits the upper middle class;
3) It's either the K-12 things OR college affordability.
I care about the poor and about POC as much as you do.
And I campaigned hard for HRC in the fall, which meant I was campaigning for the exact things you preferred in the end anyway, so why are you still even angry with me about 2016? It's not as though it was a betrayal of the poor simply to not prefer HRC from the moment she declared her candidacy.
Also, I don't understand what you mean about expecting things from women or people of color that I don't expect from white men. I have the same expectations of all candidates. All I was saying in the cases HRC or Senator Harris was that the identity of the person is not in and of itself transformational. It can be of importance for establishing historical precedent, it can be important in the realm of creating role models and that has its value, but if those are accompanied by more of the politics of excessive caution that this party has specialized in since 1976, doesn't that at least somewhat limit the importance.
What I want is for us to be a party of boldness, for our nominees, whoever they are, to actually spend as much time trying to shape the fall narrative and win the argument on the issues as the Right does. The main reason we've been in trouble since '76 is that we haven't done that-instead our nominees have bought into the idea that most of the country is to our right, that we have to let the GOP set the terms of debate, that we can't even openly defend the idea that the Left half of the spectrum has as much of a place in the discussion as the Right. And I dream of the day we finally nominate somebody who will campaign in the fall on that basis.
And the reactions to the candidacies or potential candidacies were always about the sense that nominating those two would be about preventing change.