Joan Walsh

Kamala Harris Steps Up

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The future of American democracy now rests on the vice president’s shoulders. That’s why it’s more important than ever to understand who she is

By Joan Walsh

New York City—I sat down with Kamala Harris on a scorching June afternoon, one of a nearly week-long string of 90-degree-plus days. Staffers escorted me to a well-cooled hotel room that had been made over into an interview chamber. I sat at a spare table where a bed would normally be. It was draped in one of those forlorn table skirts and set with two empty glasses, and the window’s thick curtains were closed to the midday sun. It was a little bleak.

I heard the rapid staccato click of high heels. Harris walked in, greeted me warmly, and immediately yanked open the curtains. She was not afraid of the heat. She wanted sunshine in here.

She is about to get much more sunshine—and heat—than she asked for. A few days after our conversation, President Joe Biden had the worst debate performance of his career and sent the Democratic Party into a crisis over his ability to win the 2024 election against Donald Trump. Pundits and more than a few Democratic leaders clamored for Biden to step aside, as polling showed his path to a second term drying up. On July 21, Biden announced that he was suspending his campaign for president and endorsed Harris as nominee soon after. Prominent Democrats quickly lined up behind her as her work wooing Biden’s delegates began.

Harris and I spoke when she was still trying to win a second term for Biden, dispatched to reach voters who were among the most critical to his reelection. In the days before I met with her, I was repeatedly told: Do not suggest that she’s “found her voice” in the two years since the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, when the Supreme Court robbed American women of rights we’ve enjoyed for half a century—although she kicked off her Dobbs anniversary tour the day we spoke. Do not say that she’s “having a moment” on the 2024 campaign trail. Or ask if there’s any “daylight” between her and the president over Israel’s brutal retaliation against Hamas in the wake of the October 7 massacre. (On policy, there isn’t, though Harris has been more critical in public about the mercilessness of Israel’s response and the toll on Palestinian civilians than Biden has.) Do not ask whether anything “surprises” her after a long career as a district attorney, an attorney general, a senator, and now as the nation’s first Black, first Asian, and first woman vice president. This struck me as a defensive tic, a reaction to the feeling that she has repeatedly been underestimated. (That feeling simmers under the surface of our conversation as well.)

I was warned against going down these paths not just by her staff but by some of the friends who’ve known her for decades. They were not protecting her; they were protecting me—from her impatience with what she thinks are stupid questions she’s heard time and again.

So I struggled with how to phrase a question about whether Dobbs has given her a new mission. I think I maybe even used the dreaded word “moment.”

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Why I Can’t Watch the RNC

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The level of Trump toxicity in my system makes it impossible for me to consume the RNC’s festival of fear and cynicism.

By Joan Walsh

I missed night one of the Republican National Convention. Deliberately. We’re all practicing some forms of self-care during the pandemic—that was mine. When I woke up, early, I saw “cocaine,” “Adderall” and “Cecily Strong” trending on Twitter, at least here in New York. In a way, that was all I needed to know.

I have no evidence that either glassy-eyed Donald Trump Jr. or his lovely companion, screaming fascist Kimberly Guilfoyle, were doing either drug. As my colleague Jeet Heer said after night one, it doesn’t matter—he blamed Trump’s strange countenance on “existential dread”; it was scary and disgraceful enough, without drugs being involved. The “Cecily Strong” suggestion—that the Saturday Night Live star play Guilfoyle—was completely on point.

It’s hard to believe the convention got worse after that, but it did. I tried to watch Tuesday night, but its cynical manipulation was even worse than Tuesday’s apocalyptic screeching. We had to watch the president of anti-Obama birtherism, the defender of Confederate statues, pardon a black man convicted of armed robbery who turned his life around. (To be fair, the man pardoned seemed genuinely moved, and grateful, but it was a political stunt nonetheless.) We had to watch a president who has made immigration tougher at every turn, who’s railed against “shithole countries,” naturalize five new citizens. I had to turn off the television and go to bed early, again.

Source: Why I Can’t Watch the RNC


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This F#$%ing Decade

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Trump with the Romneys

For years, media and political elites refused to acknowledge the growing racism and radicalism of the Republican party. Their “both-sidesism” led to Trump’s GOP takeover.

By Joan Walsh for THE NATION

I’ve always resisted the notion that new decades are news events, bestowed on us in pre-measured pallets of history to be analyzed later as self-contained units of meaning. But as we ring in 2020, it’s hard not to feel like we’ve been through an epoch we should pause to acknowledge. Being ornery, I’ll date it to 2009, and the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency. However we count them off, we have to admit: These last 10 (or 11) years saw the rise of a sometimes violent right-wing American extremism, fueled by racism, and an even bigger story — the utter failure of political elites and mainstream media to figure out how to handle it.

I finally became convinced I had to write about this decade—or as I like to call it, “this f&$%ing decade”—when I read the Rolling Stone interview with Meet the Press host Chuck Todd that burned down the Internet just before Christmas. The decent person in me, who is withering to nothing given the lack of nutritive decency around us, wants to give Todd credit, however belated, for realizing the obvious: that the Trump administration, but more important, Republicans generally, have used his show to spread lies and then double down on them when caught, for a long time.

From Trump toady Kellyanne Conway’s mind-fracturing “alternative facts” defense in the first week of the administration, to alleged anti-Russia hawk Senator Ted Cruz inviting himself on Todd’s show to spout pro-Russia

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