Kamala Harris

Surprise Lillies, BK, “The Bear” and Kamala

by
By Sarah Kendzior

I was twenty miles outside of Normal when I heard the news.

We were at a Burger King in central Illinois. In the corner of the Burger King was a large, inflatable bear. He was decked out in a red, white, and blue ensemble with a bow tie and a top hat. He held a faded American flag in one hand and a sign saying GOD BLESS AMERICA in the other.

A crown rested on his head. It was upside down.

That is what I was looking at when I heard that Joe Biden was leaving the presidential race.

 

The bear grinned blankly. A pile of new crowns lay on the windowsill, displacing the gold standard. The new crowns said “FIERY” to advertise the new menu, which consists of Burger King putting hot spices in everything, even Sprite. Why not? There’s no way it will be the worst or weirdest decision of the year.

2024 is a good time to get away with things. And get away from things, too.

I ordered the same meal I’ve been getting since 1984: the Original Chicken Sandwich with no mayo. This is the greatest sandwich of all time. The struggle to match the glory of this sandwich is what The Bear should have been about. Now I’m not saying to go get yourself pregnant, but I will say that eating the Burger King Original Chicken while with child was the most spectacular culinary experience of my life.

This is probably not what you wanted to read about, but bear with me; inflatable inverted crown Burger King bear with me.

It takes time to dissect a week that feels like a decade-long fever dream.

I’m glad the sandwich that I discovered when I was five tastes the same. I’m glad to be rid of a politician who had been serving as Senator for a decade by the time I was five, because his horrid political instincts stayed the same too. I long to be rid of the other candidate, a career criminal who should have been serving time since I was five, because he got worse, and the world got worse with him.

We left Burger King and hit the highway. NORMAL, a sign declared, beckoning us to the offramp to Normal, Illinois. I was tempted to visit so I could tell people what Normal feels like. I unwrapped my sandwich and thought about the election.

One down, one to go, I thought, and took a bite.

*          *          *

You may think this is not very respectful of Joe Biden. But Joe Biden has not been very respectful to the Palestinians whose slaughter he funded; or the covid victims whose plight he minimized (including, now, himself); or the Americans he betrayed when he countenanced sedition; or the Black Americans who suffered under the racist laws he passed for decades before repositioning himself behind Barack Obama and hoping everyone would forget.

I’m tired of being told to rehabilitate evil acts when politically expedient. I’d rather the bad men leave and let us enjoy what is left of our lives in the wreckage they created.

I had long reconciled myself to finding the best in a bad situation, with that situation being America. But something is changing.

There is a new energy, one that took me a minute to recognize: the Future. It had been a while since I’d seen it. The Future was in absentia and now it has returned, grinning like a ghost.

Am I really seeing it? Or is it another fake-out future, like those Halloween pop-up shops that appear in the fall and make you forget the empty room rotting the rest of the year? The classic American haunt: a tease, then abandonment.

Kamala Harris is not the future, but the energy surrounding her is. This is the raw energy of possibility, of certain doom being stripped away and discarded dreams returning.

One week before Biden dropped out, a photo of Trump emerging from an assassination attempt was deemed so “iconic” that his win was proclaimed certain. Now people have either forgotten it happened or are waiting to get their questions about the Secret Service, the shooter, and Trump’s minor injury answered.

Suddenly, Trump seems like the D-grade mobster he always was, only now everyone can see the obvious. Suddenly, Kamala Harris’s offbeat behavior feels like a balm. If you’ve got two weirdos, and one is a raving sociopath, and the other is a kooky lady who laughs a lot, the kooky lady comes off as endearing instead of “not fit for leadership”, which was the old narrative of Harris. Trump is hateful; Harris is human.

Kamala Harris is the presumptive Democratic nominee. I’m reserving judgment on what that means until she has policy plans, a list of administrative hires — and, most importantly, a commitment to make right what the Biden administration did wrong.

There is no shame in humility. There is nothing wrong with distancing yourself from one of the most unpopular presidents in US history, particularly when he earned the title through mass death and mass murder.

There is no shame in apologies, but actions speak louder than words, and action is desperately needed. Harris has an opportunity to end some of Biden’s most destructive policies, including his support of Israel’s genocide of children.

If you think this is unlikely, particularly from a presidential nominee who took as much AIPAC money as Harris, you are probably right, but look at last week:

An assassin targeted Trump. Biden got covid again. The biggest cyber breakdown in history took down the world, and the world came back. The GOP convention happened, and no one cared, even with the fascist chants and the fake ear bandages, because there was too much else going on. Biden dropped out. Harris dropped in.

I don’t know what is going to happen next, and for once it feels good.

As I write this, Harris has been the presumptive nominee for 48 hours. The energy from voters in those 48 hours is more than the rest of the year combined. People are excited. They are making plans. Not wistful daydreams — plans!

One of their plans should be how to combat Project 2025, because the GOP is not going to abandon their autocratic agenda if Harris wins. Another should be how to fend off The Coup: Part Two, because the Biden administration did not punish the key perpetrators of the January 6 plot, thus making a second coup attempt both possible and likely. And because Merrick Garland let Trump run out the clock, Trump was given official immunity from prosecution by the Supreme Court.

We are in for hard times. But there is a sense of a burden being lifted, of options emerging. I don’t know how long this feeling will last.

Many Americans have spent the past eight years joining political cults: a common phenomenon in flawed democracies turning into autocracies. Americans must reject cult logic if we want our nation to survive.

This includes not building a political cult around Kamala Harris. A campaign is different than a cult. It is one thing to back a candidate and cheer them on. It is another to submit to a mindset of fear, deference, and servitude; to browbeat fellow voters offering constructive criticism; and to proclaim a politician’s every puzzling move either an Act of God or evidence of a Secret Noble Plan.

Americans created cults around Trump, Mueller, Garland, Pelosi, Garland, Fauci, “Q”, and Biden, among others, to the detriment of our nation’s health and to the benefit of grifters’ wallets.

Savior syndrome is a sign of national decline. The saviors are frequently betrayers of the public — thus the need for a cult of sycophants to cover their crimes — but sometimes they are simply outlets for desperation.

Kamala Harris is not going to save America. No lone individual can with this level of corruption.

But Harris can be pressured to gut out institutional rot and pass humane policies — and yes, I realize these sound like fantasies, but don’t you know what year it is?! Don’t you know what country you’re living in? Everything about America 2024 is fantasy, usually of the nightmare variety. Why not add some good to the mix?

These ideas are not true fantasies, by the way. Americans label them fantasies because it hurts too much to hope. These “fantasies” are, in reality, demands that Americans have made for decades. They are calls for accountability, long unheeded. Americans deserve a president who will listen and care and act. We do not need another bot-brained cult to defend them if they fail.

The only American royalty that counts is the Burger King Original Chicken Sandwich. Everything else is just a whopper.

*          *          *

When I got home from Illinois, there were flowers in my backyard. They sprouted while I was gone. Pale-purple and pink petals tilted toward the sun, their elegant stems incongruous in the plain green grass.

The flowers are called “surprise lilies” because they seem to come out of nowhere. They tend to bloom in July or August, but you never know if they will arrive, or when. You only know it will happen fast.

One day, you’ve got nothing, and the next day, your yard is full of flowers.

They won’t last forever, so breathe deep, and enjoy the moment while you can.

Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

HCR: Biden’s first 100 days – revising the American dream

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American | April 29

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

April 29, 2021

Today marks the hundredth day of the Biden-Harris administration. In many ways, the hundred-day mark is arbitrary, a holdover from the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who worked with Congress to pass 76 new laws by the end of his first 100 days, setting a high bar for a consequential presidency. A hundred days is not an entirely useless metric, though, because by that time, a modern president has generally set the tone of the administration. Crucial to the success of that tone is having scored a major win. That, in turn, sets the tone for public reaction to a presidency, which then feeds the administration’s momentum.

When President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took office on January 20, 2021, they were facing crises that rivaled the ones faced by FDR and even by President Abraham Lincoln, who took office after a number of southern states had declared they were leaving the United States to form their own confederacy.

Biden and Harris took office after the former president had supported an insurrection to overturn the results of the election and seize power. Trump denied the legitimacy of their election (and continues to deny it) despite more than 60 lawsuit outcomes that upheld it, while 147 members of Congress sided with the former president, challenging at least one of the official state-certified ballots that made Biden president. The actions of the former president were unprecedented, breaking our previous history of peaceful transitions of power, and on January 20, Washington, D.C., was patrolled by troops stationed there to protect the incoming government.

When Biden took office, the novel coronavirus was ravaging the country. More than 24 million of us had been infected with the virus, and more than 400,000 Americans had died of Covid-19, including 2727 deaths the day before Biden was sworn in. New variants were spreading, and while the previous administration had begun vaccinations, reaching about 4% of the population, it had not arranged for distribution of them, planning simply to get them to states and let the states handle the process from there.

The economy was under water. More than ten million people were out of work and another 3.9 million had stopped even looking. Economic growth before the pandemic was modest—2.2%—but the economy contracted during the crisis. Biden also inherited the biggest federal debt since World War II, standing at over $21.6 trillion. That debt was not simply a product of the coronavirus recession: Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, passed without a single Democratic vote, cost almost $230 billion, helping to create a federal deficit of $984 billion even before the pandemic hit. 

The first tweet Biden sent as president made a marked contrast from what Americans had seen for the previous four years. “There is no time to waste when it comes to tackling the crises we face,” Biden wrote. “That’s why today, I am heading to the Oval Office to get right to work delivering bold action and immediate relief for American families.”

And he did.

After he was sworn in and the ceremonies were over, Biden went to the Oval Office and began the process of signing more than a dozen executive actions that either addressed the pandemic or rolled back some of the policies of the previous administration.

During the campaign, Biden had promised to hit 100 million vaccine doses delivered in his first 100 days; on January 25, he increased that number to 200 million. By February, the administration had bought enough vaccines to inoculate all Americans and had begun to open mass vaccination sites. By April 22, the United States had met Biden’s goal of 200 million vaccinations, a week ahead of time.

On January 20, Biden announced the American Rescue Plan to rebuild the nation after the ravages of the pandemic. It appropriated $1.9 trillion to expand unemployment benefits, make direct payments to individuals, increase food security, fund housing, move children out of poverty, support small businesses, and fund support for healthcare and Covid vaccines. The plan passed Congress, and Biden signed it into law on March 11, less than two months after he took office, a major win.

The job market is rebounding. For the third straight week, initial jobless claims—which are a way to look at layoffs– have dropped below 600,000, the lowest they’ve been in a year. At the same time, U.S. employers added more than 900,000 jobs in March, and economists expect to see more than a half a million new jobs a month for the next year. That will not end the economic crisis of the past year—we are still down 8.4 million jobs from the beginning of the pandemic—but numbers are moving in the right direction. In the first quarter of 2021, the economy grew at an annual rate of 6.4%

A problem for the administration that did not show up in the media last January was the budding crisis at our southern border, where numbers of refugees were about to surge both with seasonal migration and with those held at the border by the former administration. The administration adhered to Covid protocols, turning away from admission all but unaccompanied children. This initially created a surge of children in Border Patrol and Health and Human Services facilities, but the administration has worked to get the situation under control. The number of children in the custody of Border Patrol has dropped 82% in the past month, leaving fewer than 1000 still in custody. The problem is not solved—the children still need to be moved out of Health and Human Services facilities—but it seems to be getting into order.

But Biden has done more than address the coronavirus crisis, the economy, or the refugee crisis. He is reclaiming the nation from the policies of the Reagan Revolution, rejecting the idea central to that revolution, that government is bad by nature and that the country works best when we turn it over to individual actors. He is doing so by working around the Republican lawmakers who are determined to obstruct him at every turn, appealing instead to ordinary Republican voters, who actually want many of the same things ordinary Democratic voters do. The American Rescue Plan, for example, was popular with 77% of Americans, although it received not a single Republican vote.

Biden is reasserting the idea that government can address problems that can only be fixed at a national scale—problems like a pandemic and the economy—but he is not resurrecting the idea of using the government to protect the ability of men to support their families, as FDR did. He is adapting the idea of an active government to the civil rights movements after World War II, defending the rights of Americans as individuals, rather than as members of nuclear families. His administration is centering children and those who take care of them, rather than shoring up any particular family structure.

His revision of the American dream shows in his appointment of the most diverse cabinet in American history: 58% of his political appointees are women while half identify as non-white, 15% were the first in their families to go to college, and 32% are naturalized citizens or first-generation Americans. He chose the first female vice president, the first female Treasury Secretary, the first Indigenous American to lead the Interior Department, and the first Black head of the Pentagon.

One thing, though, about what sure seems to be a very strong start from the Biden administration…. Never forget that what made the American Rescue Plan possible was the election of Democratic Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in Georgia. Had the Democrats not held 50 seats in the Senate, enabling them to enact the American Rescue Plan through reconciliation, Biden would be able to maneuver only through executive orders, since Republicans in the Senate would have stopped all legislation.

Biden and his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, traveled today to Plains, Georgia, to visit former President Jimmy Carter and former First Lady Rosalynn Carter. “We owe a special thanks to the people of Georgia. Because of you, the rest of America was able to get help,” Biden said to reporters while he was there. “If you ever wonder if elections make a difference, just remember what you did here in Georgia…. You changed America.”