VP Harris: Please Give Us a Vision

Don’t get me wrong. I’m as enthused about VP Harris having all but clinched the Democratic nomination as everyone else. The meteoric rise of her campaign moved me from saying “Our species is doomed!” to thinking that we’ve got a real shot at saving our democracy and the Western Enlightenment. I’ve even written a post, more hope than analysis, suggesting a landslide in her favor.

But so far, I haven’t seen Harris provide us with anything like a winning vision. That worries me. As noted in an old post, a vision was the main thing —if not the only thing — that let George W. Bush get close enough to John Kerry for the Supreme Court to steal the election for him.

Kerry seemed to have it all: competence, dignity, restraint, modesty and decades of experience in politics (as compared to Bush’s six years as governor of Texas). Kerry had even demonstrated both courage and integrity: he had fought and had gotten wounded in Vietnam and then protested that war’s senselessness after he returned home. But Kerry’s new-England modesty betrayed him: he failed to defend himself when “Swift-Boated,” i.e., when GOP propagandists defined his valiant service and even more valiant protest as cowardice.

Yet in my view what really nailed the presidency for Bush was his “vision.” It had three elements, each expressed in a short slogan: (1) “No Child Left Behind,” (2) the “Ownership Society,” and (3), regarding the war in Iraq that Bush had started, “Fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here.” I will go to my grave believing that this “vision” made the younger Bush president—in my view the worst president of my 79 years after Trump.

“No Child Left Behind” was the most successful of these visions. It involved setting national standards to bring poor school districts in poor states up to snuff. Never mind that the federal intrusion into “state sovereignty” contradicted GOP dogma regarding “States’ Rights,” and later bogged down due to local resistance. The vision made a lot of progress and encouraged consideration of long-overdue national standards for educating our kids.

The label “Ownership Society” evoked a vision of more, if not most, families owning their own homes. Coming on the heels of the Crash of 2008 and the millions of foreclosures of “liar’s loans” that followed, it was a bit of a mirage. But like real desert mirages with visions of water on the sand, it worked to generate hope among the hopeless.

The slogan justifying Bush’s pointless War in Iraq was, of course, the greatest mirage of them all. As it turned out, we didn’t have to fight them over there at all. The next president, Barack Obama, dispatched Osama bin Laden, the architect of 9/11, with two helicopters and an elite team of Navy Seals.

But this near-lie, even more than the others, illustrates the essence of a political vision: it doesn’t have to be real, far less a workable twelve-point program. All it has to do is make rough sense, point in a positive direction, and inspire hope. The hard work comes later, if the candidate wins and the people insist on realizing the vision.

With all this in mind, here’s what I would recommend as parts of a “vision” for Harris, consistent with what little I know of her career and values:

1. “Pre-K for every Kid.” This same vision gave me whiplash with Wes Moore, Maryland’s governor. It led me to recommend him for president before Biden stepped down and anointed Harris. I had known zilch about him, except that he is Black in a state with a big Black population and that he had actual military combat experience—something increasing rare among our civilian leadership. So I watched his victory speech after he won the governorship.

It blew me away. Not only did Moore outline several key points of the Western Enlightenment, in his own words, in the few minutes of substance among all his victory thank yous. He also promised a year of pre-K for every kid in Maryland.

What blew me away was not just that promise, which vaguely mimicked the junior Bush’s “No Child Left Behind.” It was the reason that Moore gave. Somewhat later, he said that the science of early-childhood brain development shows that the first few years of life are crucial.

When have you ever heard a politician cite science, other than the science behind planetary heating, as a reason for doing anything? (BTW, with the aid of the Democrats’ “trifecta” in Maryland, Moore implemented his pre-K vision in his first few months as governor.)

So why not steal the junior Bush’s and Wes Moore’s thunder and reveal a vision of every child in America getting one or two years of pre-K education, guaranteed or incentivized by the federal government? If nothing else, such a vision would lay to rest JD Vance’s “childless cat lady” accusation for good.

2. “Bodily Autonomy for Everyone.” Believe it or not, bodily autonomy and inviolability are key concepts of the Western Enlightenment. They are among the foundational principles of Anglo-American law since Magna Carta. That’s why we have laws against rape, robbery, assault, kidnapping, false imprisonment and murder. That’s why even the state has to jump through hoops like jury trials and endless appeals just to jail a convicted criminal like our Demagogue.

Today, of course, the greatest threat to bodily autonomy is for women. Leave aside the fact that this assault on their autonomy is based primarily on religious faith, in violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of our First Amendment. Leave aside the fact that Roe v. Wade drew the line between the mother’s autonomy and that of the unborn fetus at the proper place, when the fetus is first viable outside the mother. The laws of many states now intrude outrageously into women’s many personal decisions about their health, life, personal and economic survival, and future prospects that no state legislature ought to be making (let alone in the abstract) for any sentient woman.

But the concept of bodily autonomy has far broader application, for example, in cases of mental illness, juvenile crime, homelessness, and undocumented immigration. If you want a vision of a just and humane society, bodily autonomy of ordinary people should loom large in all of these fields, including cases of separating undocumented immigrants from their children.

3. “Workers who are Union Strong.” The conflict between workers and their bosses is older than the so-called “slaves” who built the Pyramids. (Actually, modern history reveals that they were not all slaves: many were skilled workers who were treated rather well, if only because they had unique skills.) When I studied Spanish in a course for geezers, we coincidentally covered the rise of serfs to workers and skilled laborers in the medieval history of what is now Spain.

The basic problem has always been the same. There have always been more workers than bosses, but bosses always had the whip hand (literally, during slavery) by virtue of the structure of society and the distribution of wealth and power in it.

Twentieth-century laws restricting child labor and maximum working hours helped a lot. But the real progress during the last century was due to the rise of labor unions.

That’s why the bosses, through the action of their Republican Party, tried hard to kill labor unions. They did so with so-called “right to work” laws, laws making it hard to collect union dues, and the importation of cheap migrant labor made docile by being mostly undocumented and so susceptible to instant deportation for just trying to organize. (At the same time, Republicans made a virtue out of union busting by demagoguing the competition from immigrant labor.)

The simple fact is that US workers never had it so good as when labor unions reigned supreme, in the two or three decades after WWII. And the simple fact is that workers and their unions are not stupid: if foreign or internal competition or supply-chain difficulties require them to make compromises, or even sacrifices, they can and will, to save their jobs. But who should better make those decisions, the workers themselves in democratic votes in their unions, the bosses in their endless quest for profit above all, or pols in Washington heavily influenced by boss-paid lobbyists?

The rise of union organizing among Amazon workers and ride-share workers suggests that American labor is once again beginning to “get” these fundamental historical truths. Think there might be a few more labor votes for a candidate who can explain all this?

5. “A Just Society.” Who doesn’t want that? But what does it mean? I think it means a society in which people don’t get stopped more for minor traffic violations because of the color of their skin, their gender or gender identity, or their accent or religion. It definitely means a society in which people don’t get killed more by police for any of those reasons. It also means a society in which any kid capable of a good education can get one, as far as he or she an go.

A pol can hint, with great justification, that it might mean some kind of compensation for people and families who’ve been subjected to systematic discrimination in the past, such as the Black farmers who lost or nearly lost their land because of discrimination in loans, farm subsidies, etc. (Perhaps it’s best to avoid the word “reparations’ in this context, if only because it’s been demagogued to death. Let’s all heed the lesson of Bernie Sanders, an insightful, courageous and admirable pol who “led with his chin” by labeling himself a “socialist.”)

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. A “vision” is not a ten-point plan, far less a complete solution to difficult social or international problems. It’s a direction and a goal, expressed in the simplest, most comprehensible terms possible.

It doesn’t have to be instantly realizable, and it doesn’t have to be backed by a workable plan. That comes later, in Congress, or in all the drama and agony of national politics. Remember how long it took for “Obamacare” to become accepted, even though it gave tens of millions of Americans reliable and affordable health insurance for the first time?

Republican operatives do a great job of creating visions for their candidates, as the Bush-Kerry race showed. Even Trump has a vision, albeit a somewhat vague one: “Make America Great Again.” He also has a darker vision of vengeance and retribution for people who feel disrespected and ignored (mostly because he eggs on those feelings).

If VP Harris can give us visions of her own, just a bit more detailed, specific, hopeful and oriented toward the average voter, her grip on the White House is almost assured. I hope the Democrats and her staff are capable of that hardly insuperable task.

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