AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
You might as well play the daisy petal game as a way of predicting a certain outcome of the November US presidential election. Instead of plucking off flower petals in the girlhood game counting “he loves me he loves me not” down to the last petal, you could go “it’ll be Mr President, it’ll Madam President.”
While it is no longer certain that it will be Trump and Vice-President Harris has caught up since Joe Biden stepped aside and is even leading Trump in some swing states, the current state of play in the race for the White House has been labelled by political commentators “a toss- up”.
While we have a surfeit of information about Trump, Harris, who has emerged from relative obscurity as the Vice-President to take up the Presidential race with just three months to overtake Trump’s former lead, is harder to read.
The Truths We Hold, the title of Kamala Harris’s 2019 autobiography – a good counterpoint to Trump’s fondness for alternative reality and conspiracy theories – provides some answers. It also gives the lie to some of Trump’s taunts about her. Growing up in Berkeley, California her Indian mother Shyamala Gopalan, a breast cancer researcher and community activist, involved Kamala and her younger sister Maya in the Coloured community. By that stage Kamala’s mother was divorced from her father, Jamaican Donald Harris, a lecturer in economics. ”She was determined to make sure we would grow into confident proud Black women,” wrote Kamala. So much for Trump’s questioning of her racial identity.
The day in 2013 that Kamal Harris as Attorney General launched her campaign to tackle the truancy crisis in elementary schools was the day that she met her future husband Dough Emhoff, the managing partner in his law firm. They were married a year later, Kamala was 49 at the time, a little late to start a family and Doug already had two school-going children from a former marriage. So much for the “cat lady” slur.
The selection of the two vice-presidential nominees has added interest to the whole contest. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, with a down- home appeal, like Harris has spent his career in public service as a former national guard, social studies teacher and football coach. JD Vance’s views make Trump look moderate, a so- called hillbilly from Ohio, a former marine who read law at Yale before becoming a venture capitalist in California.
The contrast between the track records of former President Trump, a property developer whose businesses had six bankruptcies and who has faced numerous charges including the Stormy Daniels hush money scandal and his rival could hardly be starker. Harris started as a trail blazing prosecutor, a District Attorney focusing on sex crimes and a criminal unit before becoming Attorney General.
Ultimately the results of the November election will be decided in the swing states and the appeal of policies to undecided voters. The tangerine-tanned Donald Trump offers back-to-the-future MAGA (Make America Great Again) to his base in the flyover states, where giant agricultural companies have pushed out small farms and stores like Walmart have pushed out Mom and Pop stores.
Vance summed it up: “We are going to build factories again, put people to work making real products for American families made with hands of American workers.” He is calling for tariff barriers of 10% against imports from countries like Ireland, ending arms support for Ukraine, building a wall between Mexico and the US to halt immigration and reversing climate change measures and encouraging the oil industry. “Drill baby. drill,” says Trump.
Harris’ opposing views include tightening up on US gun law, women’s right to make decisions about their own bodies and the view that more needs to be done about climate change, when she supported the biggest investment in clean energy in US history.
Under Trump’s watch unemployment rose by 6.4% and under Biden’s more than 14 million jobs were gained. But inflation is probably the main focus on US voters’ minds, with 39% now anxious about making ends meet.
From our perspective the big question is which candidate will make the world a safer place? My vote is that it will be safer in the hands of a caring woman with the hope that enough in the US will believe the same.
