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Wild take: Right-wingers don't dislike Kamala. At least, not in the way they disliked Hillary. I don't have anything to back this up, just the general vibe from the usual online right crowd on Twitter.
Hillary (and her general circle of supporters) gave off a vibe of "do whatever it takes to win" that Kamala doesn't. But Kamala doesn't have the opportunity to do anything underhanded, she doesn't seem to have access to the underhanded cards in the deck. But presumably that will change now? Maybe?
I get the 'whatever it takes' vibe from Kamala, and am a bit surprised that she doesn't. From her start as a the politically-appointed girlfriend to get the foot in the door, to her prosecutorial role in sketchy prosecutions that suggest political motive, to the bail fund for rioters during the mostly peaceful protest season, to her already-emerging narrative defense strategies pre-emptively accusing critics of sexism and racism, and to her implicit role in the ballot-coup against she has the whole variety from abuse of state power to anarcho-tyranny to culture warring to personal ethical quandries.
There's also a point that almost every single youtube inter-video add for the last few days feels to have been a Kamala fundraiser add... even when I'm nowhere near political topic matter.
If this is the same one I've been getting, my first observation was that the audio was terrible: echoes, ambient noise, and such. This was memorable because even low-budget YouTube channels have, I guess, been able to get good-enough microphones, acoustic panels, and turn off the air conditioner (things I've seen brought up in passing) to manage better than a multi-million dollar campaign that I'd think would be doing professional-quality media constantly.
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FWIW I don't like Trump, and I have no idea who I will vote for since it will be a contest of which bag of shit smells least.
But I would vote for Kodos before I voted for Kamala.
Lefties hate Trump for Jan 6, which I cannot gin up enough outrage to really care about. It was one riot in a year full of them, notable only for the fact that it was righties instead of lefties, and they vandalized government buildings instead of destroying the lives of randos. Did Trump encourage them? Hard to say if he meant to, or they colluded, or they overinterpreted him, but either way it was a bad look.
But Kamala set up a bail fund for rioters. In the middle of destructive riots. The ones that did more damage than a Cat 2 hurricane and fucked up random business owners to no purpose whatsoever. Riots which ROUTINELY had been going for multi-night stretches in each location before petering out. But the idea of a single arsonist being forced to miss out on the second night of terror just because he'd been caught in the first night was so hateful to her that she organized a bail fund to make sure they didn't have to miss a single moment of terrorizing the people of the nation she was running to be VP of. Lefties think Trump is a traitor, I think Kamala is. Trump maybe encouraged a riot that didn't even do much. Kamala funded a terrorist insurgency.
Lefties hated Trump long before Jan 6. Jan 6 was just an opportunity for them to say "see I told you so".
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It's worse than that. When she was California AG,
her office was responsible for writing the titles and summaries of ballot initiatives. She decided to title one of them - Proposition 47 - the "Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act" with an innocuous summary. What Prop 47 actually did was downgrade a whole host of significant offenses, including forgery, fraud, and theft or receiving of stolen items valued at less than $950, from felonies to misdemeanors.[EDIT: I was corrected by /u/sarker on this below] Her office also refused to seek the death penalty for a man who shot a cop in cold blood, and didn't bother to contact the man's widow at all.She also has a track record, both as AG and as San Francisco DA, of things we would normally associate with hard-ass overzealous prosecutors; failing to disclose significant potentially-exculpatory evidence to opposing counsel in violations of rules requiring her to do so. Her office covered up a lying forensic technician in over 600 drug cases, letting a corrupt fire investigator create an illegal slush-fund and falsify records to pin a major wildfire on private landowners, and fighting to defend several blatantly false convictions.
The combination makes sense to me; I recognize her type from my time working in the guts of the administrative state. She's the worst kind of anarcho-tyrant. Someone who will use every trick in the book (and a few that aren't in it) to keep their budgets full, perquisites in place, authority unquestioned, and metrics good, while studiously avoiding anything that smacks of hard work even at the cost of significant injustice or community harm. Goodhart's law made flesh. "Progressive" when the incentives tell her to be progressive, pro-cop when the incentives line up that way instead. But almost always in the worst, most counterproductive way possible.
You (or whoever told you this) made this up.
Ballotpedia
Ballot title The ballot title for Proposition 47 was as follows:
"Criminal Sentences. Misdemeanor Penalties. Initiative Statute."
Ballot summary The ballot summary for this measure was:
“ • Requires misdemeanor sentence instead of felony for certain drug possession offenses.
• Requires misdemeanor sentence instead of felony for the following crimes when amount involved is $950 or less: petty theft, receiving stolen property, and forging/writing bad checks.
• Allows felony sentence for these offenses if person has previous conviction for crimes such as rape, murder, or child molestation or is registered sex offender.
• Requires resentencing for persons serving felony sentences for these offenses unless court finds unreasonable public safety risk.
• Applies savings to mental health and drug treatment programs, K–12 schools, and crime victims. "
Quoted text above is taken from the information booklet sent to every voter.
That was never the official name of the proposition, it is simply marketing from the supporters and is not within the AG's remit.
You are correct, she did not title the Proposition; that title is in the Proposition's text. However, the information booklet's text is not necessarily the same as the text on the actual ballot.
I'm not aware of any cases where the name of a proposition is different in the information booklet versus the ballot. Please provide an example.
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As a former Democrat, perhaps I was never able to summon a burning dislike for Ms Clinton, although I was never her fan. I didn't vote in the matchup between her and Trump. My opinions of her only turned more negative further down the line.
By comparison, I find Kamala to be odious on nearly every dimension. I might have given Hillary a lot of shit, but I never doubted her intelligence or general political savvy. Kamala is a bobble-head, and while I could have tolerated her existence as a fashion accessory for the Biden campaign, watching her get escalated to her current position without having to jump through a quarter of the hundreds of fire rings Trump had to circus through is now insulting.
I think she will ultimately do herself in. But I admit that every couple of hours I have a mini-freakout about her being this close to POTUS. I relax when I remind myself that she never had any momentum and has been entirely reliant on elder statesmen's protection and hiding her from view. Now she has nobody else's wing to hide under and there's no more safe spots to bail to.
Victoria Nuland and her type are also 'intelligent' on the same level and look where their brilliant group think has gotten America. Into the enviable position of supporting a meatgrinder that has, so far, killed something like half a million people.
Ask yourself how you'd feel about the intelligence of Chinese politicians if they staged a coup in Canada, replaced the Canadian government with a pro-Chinese ones and then were surprised by US invading the place.
But not surprised by the "US" annexing the oilfields and key military locations, right?
I don't think they'd bother tbh.
Canada has always been a 'fake' country of sorts, and after 1945 it has existed purely on US sufferance, as a place where Americans can do shady shit like illegal experiments on people and US courts have no jurisdiction.
They'd simply fix the Chinese influence problem and return things to how they were before.
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Wow, that's an awkward interjection of a tired conspiracy theory for a pet topic. Really couldn't hold it in, could you?
For your parallel to hold, you'd have to change some things- like that instead of a Chinese politicians staging a coup in Canada to get a pro-Chinese government, it was the American president bribing, sanctioning, and then successfully pressuring the Canadian Prime Minister to start shooting supporters of his own government in the street, only to find that the Toronto Mayor wasn't willing to go along with a lethal party purge and then the Canadian PM fleeing the country for the United States before he could be impeached.
And then the United States conducting an invasion of one province, and then astroturfing an insurgency in another in an effort to start a civil war, and then having to intervene to sustain the insurgents when they start to fail, and then maintaining a frozen conflict for half a decade while attempting to coerce the Canadians into changing their constitution in a way to give the American proxies veto-authority over Canadian foreign policy but empowered them to have their own foreign policy with the US.
And then giving up, calling them all Nazis and not a real country anyway but actually American and outright invading with pre-made plans for all the pro-Canadian and anti-US advocates to go to the torture sites and mass graves.
'Tired conspiracy theory'
Are you seriously suggesting you'd not be blaming Russia for January 6th had one of their foreign policy officials gone there and was photographed being nice and chummy with the insurgents ?
Sure. Not least because January 6th didn't have insurgents.
If you have to invent alternate history comparisons- twice- to validate your conspiracy theory parallel, that in and of itself is indicative of the quality of the original metaphor.
High ranking foreign policy officials greeting and handing out cookies to actual insurgents - people in armed militias engaged in violence against the state, not just 'pretend' insurgents who are there to create a spectacle..
Yes, perfectly normal, in no way was it a message to the militias that they had official support of the White House because no diplomat or foreign policy official would ever meet publicly, on camera, with armed resistance without an official blessing. Unless he wanted to get shitcanned spectacularly and probably charged with something the next day.
You know, you're not a weird person. You seem more like an NPC.
And here we are appealing to more alternate history caricatures, for a third time. That bored with this timeline, huh?
Feel free to keep on. I promise to go 'Uh-huh' for any more efforts.
Uh-huh.
Alternate history caricatures? Was Nuland not a highly ranked state department official ?
Were the people she was seen with handing out cookies not armed militias ?
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Data point: one of my more MAGA baptist friends told me the other day that he found the whole anger about the switcheroo confusing and lame, because the conservatives were all screaming they had to switch from Biden and then the Democrats did and the Republicans were like NO FAIR.
But the Brat stuff will wear out. The excitement is overrated. I was guilty of saying it was over after the assassination, but I just don't think the fundamentals of the race have changed that much. Trump is in the lead, with about a 2/3 chance of winning the election in November. Tons of stuff will happen in between now and then, but that's what a 2/3 chance looks like.
I think Kamala was a good move for the Dems, but more to get the good vibes going for the undercard. Kamala is here to keep the loss to respectable limit. She's much more likely to pull off the Popular Vote and hold at least one house of congress. That will materially limit what Trump can accomplish, and help keep the #Resistance moving. But I don't think she's going to change the base odds of the race.
As for me personally, I don't hate Kamala, and technically my vote is back in play. I was pretty much certain to vote third party, in that I was more or less morally precluded from voting for either of Trump or Biden. She could persuade me to vote for her, but I doubt she will.
Republicans are hating on the switch because they see it as a potential weakness, and the reason it doesn't seem to be getting traction is that Democrats are so totally shameless about having spent the better part of a year trying to gaslight everyone about Biden's age.
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I'm sure they'd prefer to keep beating on Biden, but I'm not quite convinced that Republicans are 'freaking out' about Kamala switching with Joe. As is usual in partisan politics, the game is to criticize them for everything they do and to not allow any win conditions. First you yell at them for entrusting the country with a man who obviously needs to go, then you criticize them again for backstabbing/ousting their dear leader when they actually do away with him. Superficially, this looks inconsistent or hypocritical, but eh. I think this is totally normal.
It's also easier to justify if the argument is "I am criticizing literally every thing you do because they are all consequences of your enormous unforced errors", like an inverted Xanatos Gambit.
I agree. If any Republicans are actually worried about people suddenly recognizing Trump's profound weirdness and caring, I don't see why it would suddenly matter.
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Different kind of hate. Hillary was deeply unpopular and hated because of her personality, her disengagement and distance from the base, and her disastrous record on foreign policy (to be fair, America has a pretty poor record on foreign policy generally and it's uncertain how much of her record was her fault vs Obama's). Her failings come from her thinking that she was better than everyone else and that she knew better than everyone else ("basket of deplorables" etc.) which are also the shared failings of the Dem party elite (The Squad etc.).
Kamala is hated because she's a female politician with no clear principles who is also a naked opportunist willing to do anything to further her personal stake. The same applies to Trump to some degree, but what codes as Trump being a savvy businessman or alpha in a male context, when female-coded, comes across as Kamala looking for the next back to knife or connected boyfriend to trade up on. What ironically helps Kamala is that the Dems didn't prep for her at all so she looks a bit more of a longshot outsider, which is an advantage in an exhausted voting base sick of Business as Usual. She's also more connected to younger, idealistic voters who have yet to encounter a situation they think can't be solved by the destruction or humiliation of their political opponents.
Speaking as someone who is entirely selfish and outside America, Trump, to my great sadness, has the best record on foreign policy out of every American president since Clinton. Kamala is an unknown risk, nothing she's done personally or professionally makes me think she knows how the world of international realpolitik works beyond the reach of her own grasp. At best she's considered a harmless, ineffectual joke by other heads of state, at worst she... accidentally blunders into WW3, either egged on by the MIC, bipartisan hawks, or a complete misunderstanding of how Putin and Xi view the world.
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Kamala just seems like she would be more fun to have a beer with than Hillary. She's awkward and weird in a fake politician way, but somehow manages to seem more like a human being than Hillary did. Kamala bullshits in public and is a hypocrite but seems like she might actually be oddly fun to hang out with, which might appeal to right-wingers because that's basically Trump's energy too. Even the allegations that Kamala used sex to jump-start her career, in a way, help feed into this impression because it would be hard to imagine 2016 Hillary having sex at all. And if Kamala did sleep her way into her career, it doesn't even make her look weak because well, at the end of the day she became a Senator and then a Vice President. Her having been a prosecutor also probably appeals to the typical right-wing mind on some level.
Even according to democrat media, she's an horrible boss with a really high staff turnover. So.. good to hang out with ?
Hanging out with a boss as an employee is often very different than hanging out with the boss as just some random person.
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Not wild. I'm as opposed to DEI and representationalism as anyone. Here's (what I'll try to make) an unvarnished report of my feelings.
I feel no animosity towards her. From the catbird seat, she will doubtless say things to make me dislike her in the future. But for now, I see her as a minority actress who was chosen to play the wife of an rich white guy in an insurance ad, except instead of playing wife she was playing vice president, and the rich white guy wasn't her husband but Joe Biden.
My animosity is for the people who put her there, both on the supply and demand end. That animosity is fairly strong, more or less whenever I see a BIPOC/gender-nonconforming minority in a leadership position now.
Yeah, I often view questionable DEI appointments as essentially human-shield tactics. Now all criticism of her can be suspected as an attack on women and minorities. And of course there's people who do just hate women and minorities, just like some Zionists do want to see dead innocent Palestinians. Their tweets and memes can be amplified to garner support, at the expense of all the women and minorities who let it get to their heads. Quite tragic.
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This is a time thing - Hillary was basically Public Enemy #1 (even more than Bill) from their arrival into national politics in 1992 to Obama showing up in 2008. So much was thrown at her (the truthfulness is up for you to decide) that it seeped into even left-leaning people's view of Hillary.
Kamala's only been a national issue for around five years and in that time, honestly, the wider Right has been from the outside, seemingly more obsessed with AOC & Hunter Biden than Kamala.
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Anecdote, but I absolutely despise her. I think she's a genuinely terrible person, combining vacuousness and disinterest in personal conviction with a thirst for power. The only thing she truly believes is that she should be in charge. I would be surprised to find that others with my general inclination think differently.
The one caveat would be that I think I would probably get along with her just fine in person, but that's true of many terrible and destructive people.
I think this is true of many, perhaps even most, politicians. Some of them just do a better job at hiding it.
Relatedly, I think an underrated force in politics is that the job of being a major politician, along with the process required to get there, is genuinely very unpleasant. Not only is the pay low and the workload high relative to other options, but people are constantly criticizing you, mocking you, scrutinizing your every word for a way to use it against you and combing through your personal life for damaging stories. You also have to do a lot of personally awkward things like call all of your friends and ask them to give you as much money as they possibly can just so you can be elected. Without the motivation of either intense ideological commitment or extreme megalomania, it seems to me that it would be very difficult to remain in politics for long, especially on the national level.
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Just want to echo your sentiments.
Especially during the Kavanaugh hearings, and then the VP debate with “I’m speaking….Im speaking.”
She comes across as a bitter “cool wine aunt” who doesn’t understand her place in the world.
I don't know exactly what your thought process is to get to this sentence but to me it just sounds like you're saying she's a woman who should know her place and leave the male politicians to get on with the important business of striving for power.
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Or understand how dumb she is, or understand that people who disagree with her have rights.
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To the extent that this is true - and I’m not sure that it is - it would be because Hillary Clinton was seen as a very serious and dangerous person, with the power and know-how required to do very serious harm to her enemies. Kamala, meanwhile, is widely seen as a joke. Someone with no real skills, or base of support, or chance at achieving any real power.
Now that she has been thrust into a position where she might actually pose a real threat, expect to see the knives come out immediately as people grapple with what four+ years of a President Kamala Harris would mean for this country, both domestically and internationally. For my part, I have made my strong loathing of Harris abundantly clear and have spoken about it numerous times here, so you can’t say I’m not doing my part.
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