Since Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee for President, it's been fun for your vacationing campaigners (that's EP and I) to read about an outpouring of enthusiasm, anchored by women. We feared this was going to be a death march against impending MAGA fascism -- ethically necessary, but entirely defensive rather than uplifting.
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| They met in January as veteran campaigners do. They knew they would have to take up this fight for decency and sanity. I hope most can now share the new hope |
Sure, there will be bumps in the road; many of us will wish Kamala were more able to break free from the inclinations of the administration which brought her here.
But she gives us a chance. When you've been terrified you were condemned to a MAGA world, the relief is energizing.
Frank Bruni of the NYTimes catches some of this:
... [Women] still don’t enjoy full equality with men in America, but we sure have been leaning on them lately to save American democracy. The appallingly stymied attempts to hold Trump responsible for his crimes have rested largely on the efforts of women, a few of whom did vanquish him in court, as my Times Opinion colleague Jessica Bennett noted in an essay in April. She did a roll call of his pursuers: “Letitia James. Fani Willis. E. Jean Carroll, and her lawyer Roberta Kaplan. And, of course, Stormy Daniels. The five women who are living rent-free in Mr. Trump’s mind these days.”
I’d add “crazy Nancy Pelosi” — Trump is still regularly calling her that, unable to purge her from his thoughts — to the list. (Jessica wrote about Pelosi in an essay this week.) Also former Representative Liz Cheney: Nobody on the House panel investigating the events of Jan. 6, 2021, was more forceful or impassioned than she was in exposing Trump’s actions and inaction on that day. She, too, squats somewhere in Trump’s gray matter, so much so that he recently amplified social media posts that accused her of treason and urged that she be subjected to a televised military tribunal.
... Women’s reproductive rights are in the foreground of this presidential election, Harris is practiced and eloquent in her defense of them, and that could widen a gender gap in a way that works to Democrats’ advantage. Women voters could be the barricade between Trump and that first-day dictatorship.
Also, as my Times colleagues Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan wrote recently, and as I discussed with two prominent Democrats in a conversation published on Wednesday, women opponents bring out the ugliest in Trump. Harris will quickly take up residence with Pelosi, Cheney and the gang.
And Trump will have to build an annex, maybe to his frontal or occipital lobe, to accommodate the sorority.
Unless the law gets further twisted to accommodate Trump's crimes, New York State Judge Merchan has now scheduled sentencing in his hush money felonies for September 18.
It's the crook v. the prosecutor now -- and she's a girl!
*Title borrowed from the 1970s "women's movement" anthem.
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