Harris’ managers are wise to keep her out of the hot seat. She remains incapable of stringing coherent sentences together, and so, in that painfully literal regard, she is not a good spokesperson for women, or men either for that matter. I am no typical feminist, but I find myself exasperated: there must be a higher-calibre candidate to represent women than Clinton or Harris?
She is not a suitable role-model to girls and young women. In her early political career during the mid-90s, Harris’ relationship with married and influential Democrat Willie Brown, who served as mayor of San Francisco from 1996, was well-known. Brown recently wrote himself:
Yes, I may have influenced her career by appointing her to two state commissions when I was Assembly speaker. I certainly helped with her first race for district attorney in San Francisco. I have also helped the careers of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Gov. Gavin Newsom, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and a host of other politicians.
If Brown’s own testimony – which reflects widely accepted facts about Harris’ early career – is true, should we hold Harris up as an example for little girls? Democrats should spare us the idolatry.
Women of all political persuasions have abundant reasons to not put their hopes in Harris. It is undeniable that gender ideology materially endangers women, no matter how compassionate you feel about the plight of people with gender-related distress (as Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote about here). Women’s prisons are harboring male sex offenders because people invested in transgender activism can’t admit that there are limits to their “liberation” movement, when a logical reductio ad absurdum reveals the problems of doing away with the sex binary. Remember: Trans-identifying inmates (i.e. transgender “women” in prisons) are in federal custody for sex offenses at ten times the usual rate. Rather than acknowledging that perhaps her side has gone too far, Harris has expressed the aim to expand Biden’s agenda for child transition, threatening the ability of parents to protect their children from potentially disastrous “healthcare” interventions and distressing ideology in the classroom.
Harris’ principles are unclear to the general population. She has echoed standard Democrat platitudes, to be sure: Amid historically high rates of anti-Semitic hate crime following the onset of war in the Middle East, Harris declared that Islamophobia was the issue of the day, issuing a vague promise to “protect Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim from hate, bigotry and violence. And to address the concern that some government policies may discriminate against Muslims”. While being an inoffensive enough stand-alone remark, this statement made it clear that Harris is willing to echo the identitarian claims of the far Left without backing them up with evidence in order to save face. It is a common failure of feminism to refuse to address Islamic misogyny, instead considering “race” (in this case, ethnicity) to be a more sacred status than sex in the ranking of oppression. Harris is one such “luxury feminist”.
There has been some optimism about Harris’ proposed plans to help young families afford childcare. Crucially, both Vance and Harris have floated proposals to expand the current Child Tax Credit from $2,000 per child for single parents earning under $200,000 or for couples earning up to $400,000. Vance proposed a $5,000 CTC per child without any income restrictions in an effort to reward Americans for having more children and to drive up the birth rate; similarly, Harris proposed a $6,000 CTC for a child’s first year of life, when childcare costs can be particularly high. On this issue, both parties seem willing to respond to the falling fertility rate and to the plight of women who are essentially financially punished for having children.
Finally Harris’ frankly reckless promise to implement price controls – which effectively means forcing supermarkets to close stores in food deserts – will likely disproportionately affect mothers, who do most of the work when it comes to shopping for families’ basic needs. She claims she will combat “price gouging”, when in reality most supermarkets have thin margins. Price controls will inevitably worsen, not improve, inflation, and moms trying to get their children adequate nutrition will take the hit.
Recent interviews in Minnesota revealed that young women do not know what Harris has achieved in her career, while championing her regardless. Given young women’s continued alienation from Trump, this is somewhat understandable; but I urge my female readers to remind their female friends that now, as in any presidential race, it’s policy over person. Harris’ bizarre laughing fits and meme-able interview clips might provide us with comic relief, but she is just another figurehead for the increasingly absurd establishment Left who have offered women nothing, instead overseeing their growing depression and impoverishment over the last generation.