Asked once by reporters to explain the notoriously deliberate pace with which she made key decisions, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for president of the United States, replied: “I believe you’ve got to always exercise due diligence”.
Trust a former lawyer and attorney general to use a legal term implying that careful analysis of the facts at hand should be conducted before a final decision is made, all to ensure that a client is not held liable for loss or damage.
But more than her penchant for calculation, we know of the vice president’s richly textured interfaith and multicultural background. We know she is the daughter of immigrants — a mother from India and a father from Jamaica — who is married to a Jewish doctor from Brooklyn, which should arguably make Harris a poster child for America’s much-trumpeted notion of the melting pot, formally known E Pluribus unum, or out of many one, a motto that Congress, in acknowledging the status of the US as a “nation of immigrants”, adopted in 1782.
So, ethnic diversity-within-unity aside, what can we expect from Kamala Harris if she were to win the election in November (a pivotal, make-or-break election like no other in modern American history difficult to believe is less than a hundred days away) and go on to occupy the White House on Jan. 20, 2025?
Work cut out for Kamala
That is if, and only if, she wins, a big if indeed, since polls show that she and former president Donald Trump, the GOP’s nominee, are in dead heat at 49 per cent.
Americans who are alarmed at the potential insinuation of a neo fascist agenda like Project 2025 into their political culture and are spooked by Trump’s recent comment that they “will not have to vote again”, will of course hope and, while on their knees, pray that Harris will prevail. But even if she does, we really still don’t quite know what direction she will steer the country in.
She is still yet to tell voters in the few remaining weeks she has left on the campaign trail how she will address key domestic issues such as the economy, abortion, immigration and other matters of concern to ordinary, everyday Americans.
And as for foreign issues, well, Harris remains a neophyte — despite the 17 foreign trips she has reportedly taken during her tenure as vice president — when compared to President Joe Biden, who spent years in Congress serving as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and two terms as vice president.
In short, as chief executive, Kamala Harris will have her work cut out for her, having to deal as she will with issues as complex as a China that is seeking, in the weary eyes of the Washington foreign policy establishment, to become a superpower, and as intractable as the bloody war in Gaza, a war which to date has resulted in the death of tens of thousands of civilians, the displacement of 80 per cent of the population and the destruction of an equal percentage of the Strip’s infrastructure — its homes, businesses, farms, schools, hospitals and water, electrical and sanitation facilities.
“The day after”
True, Harris has voiced seemingly genuine empathy for Palestinian suffering, describing Gaza once as a “human catastrophe”, and even at times used visceral language that evoked images of children eating animal feed — as she all the while backed continued shipment of US weapons to Israel — but will she have the wherewithal, the resolve and the diplomatic pluck to navigate the perilous path to “the day after” in Gaza when that day finally comes?
One expectation that we should not, at the end of the day, be naive enough to harbour of her as president is that she will depart in any appreciable way from the rigid and implacable pro-Israel policies that Joe Biden had embraced.
That is, we say, if and only if American voters choose to elect Kamala Harris as the 47th president of the United States. And we use the conditional here because among those voters are the 700,000 in swing states who cast “uncommitted” ballots in the Democratic primaries this spring to register their opposition to Biden’s position on the Gaza war, as well as countless Blacks, Latinos, younger Americans, progressive Jews, Muslims and Arabs — in particular Palestinian Arabs — who might not vote at all in November because they want to express their disquiet at the fact there appears to be, at a seminal level of relating to them, no daylight between the Biden and Harris positions on the unpardonable carnage in Gaza, and because they would rather jump off the Brooklyn bridge than vote for Trump.
I for one will vote, and vote for Harris — while holding my nose — simply because, to paraphrase the iconic TV ad from the 1970s, “A mind is a terrible things to waste” — a vote is a terrible thing to waste.
— Fawaz Turki is a noted academic, journalist and author based in Washington DC. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile
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