She has some criticisms for her past as an attorney, but I’m not sure why she’s so disliked now. What has she done to engender such distaste from the public?
Because she’s black and she’s a woman.
Same reason why Hillary Clinton was widely respected every year except when she ran against a man.
Hillary Clinton was widely respected every year
(source needed)
Here’s a list of objectionable stuff Hillary was involved with prior to running for president:
- Hillary Clinton’s hawkish stance on war, being more hawkish than Barack Obama and Joe Biden. She is specifically noted for advocating an escalation in Afghanistan.
- Clinton’s involvement in the 2009 military coup in Honduras. Rather than condemning the coup, Clinton pressured other countries to recognize the new right-wing government, leading to increased violence and instability in the country.
- The firing of seven employees from the travel office during the Clinton administration in 1993, an act that some critics attribute to Hillary Clinton’s influence. The fired employees were later reinstated due to public pressure.
- Controversies surrounding her commodity trades from 1978 and 1979, in which she turned an initial investment of $1,000 into nearly $100,000. No official investigations were carried out, but the incident raised eyebrows and led to criticism.
- Involvement in her husband’s controversial pardons during his presidency, including those for the owners of a carnival company convicted of bank fraud.
- A controversy regarding gifts taken from the White House upon the Clintons’ departure in 2001. Some items, worth $28,000, were meant for the White House estate and not as personal gifts for the Clintons. These items were returned after complaints from the donors.
(source needed)
Gallup used to poll her favorability pretty regularly, and until she ran for president in 2015 (from which she’s never recovered) she seldom had an underwater approval rating. i’d say the characterization of wide respect is reasonably accurate given this data, although i don’t agree with the poster’s proposed causation
While this is certainly part of it (and all of it for a large number of people), I think it is overly simplistic view and disregards her past as a DA in which she enforced a draconian truancy program.
- She’s a democrat. that means 42% of the population automatically hate her.
- She’s grossly inappropriate and cackles at exactly the wrong time, and that creeps people out.
- She was a “tough on weed” prosecutor who became a bleeding heart liberal overnight when she got her new job. That makes her seem disingenuous.
Just what I’ve picked up from other people, I have no feelings about her whatsoever.
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I don’t even get that from Biden. He just seems so fake from the get-go.
(Next part is irrelevant and only opinion.) But I’d rather go into the ground by someone sneaky and quiet than by an arm-flailing maniac screaming and yelling as I get beaten down into the hole lol.
I’m not going to argue that some of the dislike she receives isn’t due to racism or misogyny. There has to be an element of that.
But yes, phony is the perfect word.
The only thing conservatives hate more than black people having power is black women having power. So, of course conservatives hate her.
Progressives are tired of neo-liberals sucking corporate cock as hard as the republicans. She is a neo-liberal (and thus a diet conservative), so progressives don’t like her (or Biden) either.
That really just leaves neo-liberals to actually like her.
She’s a racist, classist noeliberal and a fucking cop (or close enough).
Her political career has been chock-full of attacking public institutions like schools, protecting white-collar crime which destroyed countless lives, protecting child molesters in the church, implementing policy against the poor, and protecting prison slavery. I’m not sure where exactly the confusion lies.
This isn’t Facebook grandpa, you need to show your work.
At some point you need to take a degree of personal responsibility and research things for yourself. This isn’t a debate, you don’t get the luxury of being spoon-fed everything.
Asking people to research things themselves is how you have genius’ like op spreading fox news smears but from the left
But like this is all common knowledge if you want to have something of use to offer to this conversation. She was the California AG, literally the top policing position. Before that she was San Francisco’s DA and ran on a platform of Tough On Crime. She’s literally is cop and many would argue by extension, racist, as in systematic.
As for her neoliberal status, I don’t think that needs to be explained.
I hate when people say “do your own research” as much as the next guy, but there is a certain degree of familiarity with the subject matter that should be expected to participate, even ACAB dude up there knows what he’s talking about.
Well, her being a cop is self-evident, but let’s review the entire comment:
She’s a racist, classist noeliberal and a fucking cop (or close enough).
Her political career has been chock-full of attacking public institutions like schools, protecting white-collar crime which destroyed countless lives, protecting child molesters in the church, implementing policy against the poor, and protecting prison slavery. I’m not sure where exactly the confusion lies.
I would argue that, frankly, her being a neoliberal should be explained, for the sake of discussion, but her being racist and classist should be. The details of her career being “chock-full” of various acts should be coupled with specific citations to reporting of those acts. And so on.
I don’t like Harris, mind, but the comment being discussed could have established its evidence in a more convincing manner.
Is Amy Goodman enough for you?
Excuse me, but at some point someone will have to do research themselves, otherwise there won’t be any knowledge.
Also, how do you know anything if you don’t do any research yourself? Do you have someone else whisper in your ear to tell you things all the time?
I know things because people teach me. Just like other people know things because i teach them. I dont tell my math students to just read the damn book and figure it out themselves lol. Vast majority of people do not have the critical thinking or media literacy skills to properly research a topic let alone a plethora of them. If you dont wanna expend the energy to properly explain things thats fine, but telling people “just look it up yourself” helps no one
The guy who wrote the book is teaching you in written form. They teach critical thinking in English class, that’s what it’s for. I had to write my first lengthy research paper in 10th grade. It’s not difficult.
This is so lazy. The burden of proof is upon the claimant. Feel free to toss out wild claims without providing anything to support what you are saying, but then don’t be surprised when no one believes you.
Hitchens’ Razor - “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
Cool and 5 seconds on Google will give you that evidence.
This is i,t shes a fucking cop. I dont trust cops.
I get why rich people are Republicans. It pisses me off when poor people gladly vote against their own interests in order to “own the democrats.” OK but you’re still in west va coal country with mountains being pulled down and the only hope for your kids is to leave and maybe visit. And now Republicans are making child labor legal so they might not even get that opportunity.
The Cons should love her, I don’t get it.
Woman. Of color. Democrat.
That’s a large part of why no republican (or conservative) is going to give her any respect.
Partly because of discrimination, partly because she lacks charisma. There are a substantial number of people that dislike her because she’s a black woman and they have biases against both, sometimes without even knowing it. There are also some people on the left that dislike her because she’s a moderate liberal that used to be a prosecutor. Honestly she’s about standard as vice presidents come, so though I’m farther to the left than her I don’t have any strong feelings on her.
What has she done to engender such distaste from the public?
What has she done (that actually has improved the country) since she’s been VP that would make her tasteful to the public?
What roles does a VP have that front and center for policy though? Fundamentally a lot of the roles with in the executive branch are kind of invisible to the general public. Unless your neck deep into politics (and I don’t mean the cable news network… but more along the lines of reading stuff from federal register and CRS reports, and straight up political science research papers.)
unless your that deep into things what the VP does might as well be invisible
This is the real question. I’m sick of people dismissing criticisms against her because she’s black and/or a woman. Give me an actual reason to like her!
She’s definitely a horrible public speaker. I totally disagree with how she tackled truancy during her time as a DA/AG. Is this just my internalized racism speaking or can I ACTUALLY feel this way?
I don’t hate her by any means, but it just feels like she really hasn’t done much of anything during her tenure in office tbh
I’m mean the VP’s #1 job is to have a pulse, so she has full marks on that front.
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she’s a black woman? Seems like that’s enough for a lot of people.
Yup. Everyone here giving their own reasons for disliking her seems to be missing that the amount of vitriolic hatred spewed at her is wildly disproportionate to anything she’s actually done or failed to do.
(speaking as someone who doesn’t like her either, in that I don’t “like” 99% of politicians)
This is it 100%. I think she’s great.
Used to really like her as senator. She was a bulldog questioning people in front of committee, and going after other senators for nonsensical arguments. When she became candidate, she became completely stage-managed to the point that she seems so phoney. I’m not suggesting that most politicians are not phoney, but she just comes off fake and smug to me.
I agree. I was a big fan of hers during Congressional testimony. But she is definitely awkward in unscripted environments and would be a poor presidential candidate in a nation where a significant portion of the electorate wants a president they can have a beer with. Additionally, her history as a prosecutor makes Democrats suspicious of her.
Republicans hate her because she’s a Black woman. They’ll make up other excuses, but none of them hold water.
She’s not really a good public speaker for one. Not a lot of charm or charisma. She’s not good at schmoozing like Bill Clinton or Obama. A good presidential candidate needs that, and I think it’s a big part of why Al Gore and Hillary Clinton lost. She can speak well in public sometimes, but at others she sounds flat, boring, and artificial.
Charisma is a big deal. Think about Reagan Democrats and how people to this day love Reagan even though facts and hindsight analysis show that he was a terrible president who was arguably the start of America’s modern decline into horrendous oligarchy.
She was disliked before she was VP
I assume nearly half of the country hates her for being black and/or a woman, while some other large chunk of the country hates her for being “a cop.” I think she’s fine. She’s done the job a hell of a lot better than a whole list of other VPs I could name. And since I’ll be voting against Republicans no matter what, if a Biden-Harris ticket is the opposition I’ll be checking that box. No problem.
She’s just incompetent. Look at some interviews with her, she can’t answer basic questions and has done absolutely nothing as a VP. It has nothing to do with her being a woman or black.
For me, it’s this:
[Harris] fought for this law, which raised the financial penalty and made it a criminal misdemeanor for parents, up to a year in jail, when their children missed at least 10 percent of school time.
The single biggest problem standing between the left and sustained and meaningful control of the federal government is the complete lack of ability of voters to circle around a consensus candidate. There are several valid reasons to be critical of Harris just as there are pretty much every single Democratic Presidential decade basically of my lifetime. But Republicans vote consistently for candidates they dislike or even hate just to beat Democrats. Every single candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2016, 2020, and undoubtedly in 2028 will have some vocal subset of registered Democrat voters telling you exactly why they will never in a million years vote for them. I saw it constantly on Reddit and I don’t see any reason why it won’t continue.
Until somebody drops the magic “consensus candidate” name that somehow pleases everyone, Democratic voters are always going to be a major hurdle to their own success. And frankly I don’t think that “consensus candidate” name exists. Such is the curse of being the big tent party opposite the GOP. Republicans know they can continue winning elections for at least a little longer thanks to Democratic infighting alone.
Democrats fall in love. Republicans fall in line.
It’s reductive, but look at the Christian Right and Trump. Trump is nowhere close to the picture of a Christian. It’s astounding he can safely cross the threshold of a church. But he promises to make sure abortion is illegal and men can’t pretend to be women to steal kids, so they vote for him. Replace the abortion issue with guns and you get another set of voters who will vote Republican regardless of what they might personally feel.
Meanwhile and to your point on the left, each candidate’s worst flaws are held as some kind of uncrossable line by people who are terminally online (which isn’t helpful) and the Democratic Party does what they can to feed this and make sure they don’t have to enact meaningful change. They just want to maintain the status quo but they get to do it with a pride flag waving behind them. If the Party establishment would just stop putting a thumb on the scale (not just against Bernie but ANYONE remotely progressive/left of the neoliberal center) and let the primary process shake out the most popular candidate, they might actually find themselves winning elections.
The DNC doesn’t put their thumb on the scale as much as people like to pretend. The real problem is the under 40 crowd simply not showing up to vote in primaries. There is nothing stopping the same turnout in general elections happening in primaries except people refusing to get off their couches.
More accurate is: Republicans vote, Democrats don’t.
If this country had compulsory voting with sane voting days, and better protections against taking away voting rights to blacks and poors, Democrats would have a supermajority in Congress, and a Democratic president for decades.
I don’t really think compulsory voting would be that beneficial for democrats. Yes, it may boost them a few points across the board, but my general intuition about the general public is they lean towards democrats but are more socially conservative than you see in online spaces. 2020 is probably the best example: super high turnout yet Dems still clipping by with only a +4 advantage instead of the +10 predicted by looking at far more politically engaged voters.
It’s not social stuff. A lot of Americans are socially conservative, but social progressives and social libertarians (live and let live types) together make a clear supermajority. The problem isn’t that Americans are socially conservative, it’s that a large number of people have the notion that Republicans are good for the economy and Democrats are bad for the economy, and that therefore when things are economically rough they should vote in the Republicans. This group of people play a large role in why Congress flips so often.
Replace the abortion issue with guns and you get another set of voters who will vote Republican regardless of what they might personally feel.
The funny part is, Trump suggested to take away guns first, and do due process second - and these 2nd Amendment goobers still voted for him.
The party needs to figure out what they actually stand for and focus on that. The Republicans have distinct factions but the conflicts between those factions are somewhat in the details. The factions in the Democratic party are wildly different and in direct opposition sometimes. The Democratic party has Socialists, Pacifists, and Environmentalist in the same tent as Corporatists and war hawks. Some of these factions just have zero common ground.
But Republicans vote consistently for candidates they dislike or even hate just to beat Democrats.
Now, that’s just not true. The Republicans lose elections because of in-fighting too. For example, they lost the most recent election for House in Alaska to a Democrat because Begich voters didn’t want to consolidate behind Palin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Alaska's_at-large_congressional_district_special_election
The exception that proves the rule, maybe? That election was the first to use Ranked Choice for congressional offices in Alaska. FPPT voting is a powerful thing, which is why Republicans try to stop alternatives such as Ranked Choice.
Edit to fix unclear final sentence.
I agree. Dems just need to be OK with the person the DNC picks for them and vote like good little peons.
That’s not the only option. People can start participating in primaries to get the candidates they actually want. But when the general election rolls around and the other option is christofascism, yes, you need need to vote against that. Or you won’t be voting for anything ever again pretty soon.
We really need a different election system (ranked choice for one option) for the primaries to have any impact. As they stand it’s just an illusion of choice while the DNC decides who they want for their candidate and the shitty voters go along with it.
I don’t think I agree with that. I haven’t seen a single Democratic nominee who wasn’t also the lead vote getter in my lifetime. Pretty sure there hasn’t been one since the modern primary process was introduced in the 70s. Sure you can argue that the DNC throws it’s weight behind certain candidates in terms of money and exposure, sure the order of the primaries influences how the later ones tend to lead. And superdelegates will always be controversial. But you can’t argue in good faith that the DNC is choosing the candidates for us until you show me one who didn’t win the primary popular vote somehow getting the nomination.
Ironically the closest we’ve gotten to that in recent years was 2016 when Bernie won very few primary elections but won many of the caucuses. The caucuses are inarguably less small-d democratic than primaries but the same people arguing that the DNC rigged those primaries against Bernie conveniently ignore that actual voters didn’t want him.
At the end of the day it’s still the voters who pick the nominee. And voters can easily pick more progressive candidates if they want to, but the numbers don’t lie. Turnout in the primary in 2016 for Dems was 14.4 percent of eligible voters. In the general it was over 40%. In 2020 primary and general participation among Democrats both went up which is good, but the relative gap between primary and general participation more or less stayed the same. Biden won the Presidency with over 80 million votes. He won the primary cleanly, more than doubling second place Sanders’ total… with 19 million votes. That’s a massive, massive discrepancy.
Saying the DNC hand picks their candidates when younger and more progressive voters can’t be bothered to participate is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or moderates simply still outnumber progressives. Those are really the only two possible conclusions you can draw. I don’t really think the latter is true personally so what it comes down to is primary turnout. All the money and exposure and power brokering within the DNC doesn’t change the fact that nobody is going into these voters’ houses in primary season and physically restraining them to keep them from voting. They are simply choosing not to. And you can’t really expect to be taken seriously if you’re going to complain about the outcome of a process that you willingly abstain from. That’s like going into a restaurant, telling the waiter to surprise you, then being angry that you get served a burger when you wanted chicken. Next time order the goddamn chicken.
Sure you can argue that the DNC throws it’s weight behind certain candidates in terms of money and exposure, sure the order of the primaries influences how the later ones tend to lead. And superdelegates will always be controversial. But you can’t argue in good faith…
This is exactly what I’m arguing. In good faith. To dismiss the impact of those concerns is just putting your head in the sand to hide from reality. Sure there are exceptions to the rule. AOC taking out Crowley for example. But as we’ve seen, that made waves, and the boys at the top, they did not like waves.
sustained and meaningful control of the federal government
You want a one party system? I’m not a big fan of the Republican party but there are some issues they are championing at the moment like free speech. Back in the day that was the Democrats, and I have no doubts it will flip flop again at some point but that just goes to show how we need at least two parties to act as a check on each other.
Silencing your ideological opponents is great and all until it’s you being silenced.
I’m not a big fan of the Republican party but there are some issues they are championing at the moment like free speech
Free speech like this?
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Legislation in Tennessee could potentially criminalize speech that causes ‘emotional distress’ to or ‘frightens’ another person, which could be seen as a suppression of free speech (www.alternet.org/gop-revolts-against-free-speech-republicans-push-anti-protest-bills-across-the-country/).
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In Washington state, Republican Senator Doug Ericksen introduced a bill that would allow state authorities to charge protesters with “economic terrorism” if they participated in illegal demonstrations or coerced private citizens into doing so (www.alternet.org/gop-revolts-against-free-speech-republicans-push-anti-protest-bills-across-the-country/).
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In Kentucky, a bill was passed criminalizing the act of insulting a police officer (www.alternet.org/gop-revolts-against-free-speech-republicans-push-anti-protest-bills-across-the-country/).
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Republicans are not championing free speech. Entirely the opposite with how they’re treating LGBT folks currently.
And on that note, the Republicans are so beyond bad that yes, a one party state is actually better. To be clear, a one party state is utterly awful. That’s how terrible the Republican party is. They cannot be even remotely viable when their entire platform is hating other people.
If the options are one liberal party and one fascist party, or just one liberal party, I would pick the one-party state every time. Anyhow, the Democrats are such an umbrella party that if they were the only party they would almost certainly break into two or more smaller parties, all of which would be far more tolerable than the Republican party.
