By Partha Chakraborty-
The victory party for Kamala Harris on the grounds of Howard University was not meant to be. Sound on those big screens were muted and replaced with piped-in music as states’ projections started to not match expectations, even that was shut off shortly. Worried faces stared intently on their screens scouring for any bits of positive news. By the end of the night, it was announced that Kamala Harris would not come to the podium, instead she would deliver a speech the next day. By then the bottom fell out. Within twelve or so hours, a victory speech needed to be put into the shredder.
Let us pause for a moment to let it sink in that we were this close to having a woman President stride into the South Lawn on this nation’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday.
No other country, not a single nation-state, even those dynasties where lineage goes back centuries, ever had a woman head of the state celebrating the birth of that nation quarter of a millennium into its life. Imagine yourself in the crowd, the Marine Band starts “Hail to the Chief,” and out walks a Black and Brown Indian-American woman. A historian looking back, say five centuries from now, could say that a nation born of an idea in the company of men got its groove on the shoulders of a slender woman, a brat to boot.
But that was not to be. The victory party ended when the host failed to turn up. Tears rolled down, ashen faces looked down with disbelief and fear of known unknowns ahead. The nation had chosen a future and it did not include Ms. Kamala Harris in a pole position for the next four years, most likely a lot more.
Let the records show that she almost did it.
Why Harris lost is subject of another time. Yes, there will be much-deserved autopsies, including ill-conceived attempts by yours truly. For now, I will note that she did everything we expect an Indian-American, and an Indian-American woman, to do.
Ms. Harris remained loyal to her boss through the waning months of his cognitive capacity. She never overplayed her support – which was, in effect, a denial of reality – but always presented a happy face that looked beyond. The campaign to oust Biden never had Ms. Harris in its cloak-and-dagger situation room. Loyalty is a trait we speak very highly of, and Ms. Harris exemplified it, even if accounts now suggest that President Biden privately doubted her chops. As the New York Times put it “(s)he stayed a cheerleader for the administration even though some of its leaders spent the first half of her term undermining her to the point of rendering her invisible and ineffective.”
When the decision was forced upon President Biden, Ms. Harris was right there to stand up and be counted. There were barely hundred and a few more days left before the election. Her candidacy was not all peaches and roses internally, even if there was not going to be a (condensed) primary process. It has been reported that in July, in those very same conspiratorial sessions, party leaders “quietly about bypassing her to put a white man at the top of the ticket.”
Anybody new who stepped into the spotlight would have had little time to define themselves and craft a powerful blow against an opponent who, it can be argued, had been running for nine years already. But she volunteered to face what she surely knew would be volleys of gratuitous and graceless attacks by a boor du jour. She did so because it was a worthy cause for her, whether you agree with her stance or not.
Let the records read that Ms. Harris remained unbowed and undeterred. Believe an Indian-American woman when she says, as she did in her concession speech, “Don’t you ever listen when anyone tells you something is impossible because it has never been done before.” In so doing, she mirrored Nelson Mandela’s sentiment – “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”
Her campaign was initially about the “joy.” If it needed accouterments, halls would be decked with stars and stripes. If she needed a posse, she was joined by a who’s-who coalition that her party rarely saw before. It had icons of music, media, and movies. It had war hawks and champions of environment. It had democratic stalwarts as well as Republicans. It had Gen-Z and their favorite octogenarian torch-bearer. The list goes on.
What it did not have was a consistent message. Her messages of joy quickly coalesced into rabid attacks on the person on the other side, even – and especially – when it was apparent these labels did not stick. She did not have enough time to define herself as a contender, something she must have known, any mud-slinging fanfare was a clear waste of time and resources. Resources she had plenty, USD 1.4 billion or more, the most ever by any candidate in the US, but it all went down a river to nowhere-land.
I am on record saying that she did not earn my vote. Even then, I consider this as a eulogy – not elegy – for her valiant attempt at correcting what I do consider a flaw in this great nation’s history that continues to date – we never had a woman President I am hoping, nee praying on my knees, that I will be alive to see the flaw corrected.
