Joe Hill.

When the Kamala Harris announcement was made last week, one of the first tweets I saw (Twitter being my de facto news feed) was from Bernie Sanders, in support.

My view is that after we elect Biden, what we’re going to do is everything that we possibly can to move his adfarm-near-me/">ministration in a progressive direction. Biden has told me, and I would not say it if he hadn’t made the same statement publicly, that he intends to be the most progressive president since FDR. That’s a noble ambition, and our job is to hold him to that goal. I think millions of people are prepared to do that.

This week or next, maybe I'll be able to finish a particularly vexing, ongoing ON THE AVENUES column draft, in which I've been trying to sort through the arguments and counter-arguments running through my brain with respect to my choices in this year's presidential election.

I'm not there yet. But you can see where I'm headed.

Bernie Sanders on How He’ll Rally Progressives Tonight, by John Nichols (The Nation)

In an exclusive interview with The Nation, the Vermont senator says backing Biden/Harris is the start of their work, not the finish.

JOHN NICHOLS: When you were campaigning for president, you spoke quite frequently about the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt’s “Economic Bill of Rights.” It was part of your effort to frame the 2020 election around fundamental issues and the need for structural change. Obviously, you didn’t know at the time that Covid and mass unemployment, and a rising demand for racial justice, would heighten the sense of urgency. But even before the crisis unfolded, you saw a need for a politics that was focused on transformative change.

BERNIE SANDERS: Absolutely. Absolutely. It is imperative that we not only deal with all of the injustices and inequalities that exist in our society today, which of course have been made worse by the pandemic and the economic meltdown, but it is also imperative that we start, in the 21st century, to rethink our value systems.

What Roosevelt did in his State of the Union speech in 1944 was really quite extraordinary. For whatever reason—we were in the middle of a war then and, of course, he died a year later; the media was not particularly sympathetic—what he said back in 1944 has been largely forgotten. But what he said was extraordinarily profound and revolutionary.

What he said is that, yes, our country has political freedom. We have a Constitution. We have a Bill of Rights. We have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, etc., and that’s all great. But what we have to do is go beyond just political rights and into economic rights.

In other words, it’s not good enough that you just have the constitutional right to vote (that’s good!), to protest (that’s great!), to assemble (that’s wonderful!), and freedom of religion (great!).

What we have got to be talking about, Roosevelt said in 1944, is that economic rights are human rights, and that means you are entitled, as an American, to decent housing, to decent health care, to a decent job, to a decent retirement. Economic rights are human rights, and you’re not going to be a really free person unless we guarantee those rights. That was an extraordinarily profound statement!

What I tried to do in the 2020 campaign is talk about Roosevelt’s 1944 speech and how we make it relevant to the year 2020 ...

Another failed Democrat: "(Kamala) Harris’s record as a prosecutor was representative of a politics of the past."

I haven't thought very much about the presidential race because most of my time has been devoted to local issues, a paradigm now undergoing renovation.

Nothing has changed with me. I support Bernie Sanders, and will continue to support him. If Sanders loses in the primary, then it will be time for a rethink. In next year's election I'll vote for whichever presidential candidate best reflects my own worldview, and national special-interest-driven Democrats wailing about the necessity of centrism are of no greater attraction to me than Gahan's sycophants. 

In my view, Kamala Harris one of many non-factors, as the article linked here attests. In fact a case can be made for many of the Democratic Party aspirants as potential cabinet members, but that's about it, and it isn't clear if even this level of attainment would be proper.

KAMALA HARRIS’S CRIMINAL JUSTICE RECORD KILLED HER PRESIDENTIAL RUN, by Lara Bazelon (The Appeal)

Harris’s record as a prosecutor was representative of a politics of the past. The nation has moved on.

News broke on Tuesday that Kamala Harris was ending her run for president. While there are a number of reasons her candidacy was not successful, chief among them was her decision to brand herself a “progressive prosecutor.” She was not, at least not by today’s standards.

The Achilles heel for the Harris campaign has been a perceived lack of authenticity. There is no better example of the gap between public presentation and historical record than her mischaracterization of who she was and what she did from 2004-2015, when she was San Francisco’s district attorney and then California’s attorney general. In truth, Harris’s record reveals that she is a centrist on criminal justice. Had she run on that record or reckoned with it—including acknowledging the harm her status-quo policies inflicted—the outcome might have been different.

It is understandable that Harris would want to claim the progressive prosecutor label—it is trending nationally now. It signals to voters that a candidate will break from the failed tough-on-crime policies of the past. In the last five years, reform-minded candidates across the country have run and won top prosecutor posts on a message of ending money bail, refusing to prosecute low level drug crimes, and vows to prosecute police officers who shoot unarmed civilians—who are almost always black and brown men.

Harris positioned herself as the original “progressive prosecutor.” She was first elected as San Francisco’s top prosecutor in 2004. As district attorney, she pledged to never impose the death penalty, defying the city’s police department and Democratic leaders who were clamoring for the execution of a 21-year-old who killed an undercover police officer. She later wrote a book called “Smart on Crime” that urged officials to abandon the “tough on crime” policies of the past and instead favor rehabilitation over punishment. By the standards of the time, claiming a “smart on crime” mantle was lonely territory for an elected prosecutor.

But Harris fell behind the curve over the past fifteen years, as the nation’s sense of the scope and moral urgency of needed reforms to the criminal legal system—and especially to the role of elected prosecutor—shifted dramatically. The shift revealed that Harris’s brand of “progressive prosecution” was really just “slightly less-awful prosecution” — a politics, and set of policies, that still meant being complicit in securing America’s position as the world’s leading jailer ...