Waves and Walls Higher for Harris’ Catwalk

By JAMIE STIEHM

Since crossing the Golden Gate Bridge running away from a wrecked home, I’ve taken to life on my own. I come and go as I please. I pursue plans and projects to my heart’s content and can hear myself think.

Then when Girlfriend — my cat — came into my life, it seemed complete. The gray tabby seemed the perfect amount of company. She’s gone now, but she did see me through sickness and health.

Now in the storm of election 2024, suddenly we’re subject to a political statement. Ohio Sen. JD Vance does not approve of us, good heavens! What to do? Take his cuts as a compliment.

But since he started this catfight, here are some political statements of my own.

Opinionated women are defending the republic, JD. Get used to it. Like Athena, we are standing in the way of a Trump takeover of our political system as the world’s oldest democracy.

We are all about Vice President Kamala Harris and can only pray she summons America’s “better angels.” Tell ‘em, as the chill winds of fall blow, that women and girls are the only citizens ever to have our human rights stolen by the Supreme Court.

History called to say that White men are willing to share power first with Black men before women. The vote for Black men came 50 years before women’s suffrage, and then-Sen. Barack Obama coasted to victory in 2008. So the waves and walls are higher for Harris.

Obama had better get out there to galvanize the vote, more than once or twice. A cool customer, Obama did not campaign hard enough for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in retrospect. Nothing matters more than all hands on deck to come to the aid of the party.

Our cherished democracy could crumble in the face of former President Donald Trump’s authoritarian rule and ugly words about mass deportations by the military. He does not pretend otherwise, and Vance is right there with him, flogging false rumors about legal immigrants.

Trump’s raging campaign rallies (Nuremberg, anyone?) should send alarm bells to the press for his crude violations of common decency. His open racism — asking crowds if they’d rather have the Black president or the White president — is met with an eyeroll and a shrug, akin to: “Let Trump be Trump.”

Another way to look at it is that Trump’s violence has a chilling effect on journalists who cover him. They feel his darkness firsthand: “Nice First Amendment you have here.” He intimidates everyone in his orbit.

The FBI better brace for Trump unleashed like a mad dog if he loses again. At the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the mob’s organized blueprint overpowered the Capitol Police, who lost control of the building.

Raw power is Trump’s bloodlust. The Army and Marine generals who were his hired hands, like Mark Milley, condemn him now. Milley called him a “fascist” who might court-martial him for disloyalty.

However, they have not endorsed Harris, which is dereliction of duty. One retired general who’s openly saluted Harris, Stanley McChrystal (fired by Obama), shows it can be done with class and gravitas.

As one who delved deeply into Holocaust studies, I see disturbing parallels in how Adolf Hitler and Trump rose to power. Cunning opportunists who shoved weak opponents aside, still they climbed the ladder of power legally.

Hitler did not run on “Kristallnacht,” the night of horror and broken glass for Jewish homes and shops. He never publicly uttered plans for mass murder of millions of European Jews. That came in time, step by step, during the shattering war.

To put it plainly, the Final Solution was not a campaign promise but a carefully conceived and secretly executed plan for the Third Reich’s death camps.

But Trump’s talk about mass deportations, ancestry and genes has a 1940s Germanic ring. He’s descended from a German grandfather who crossed over to escape the military draft. (What a surprise.)

I can see him taking revenge against “the enemy from within,” as promised, with military efficiency. He is the founders’ worst nightmare, a raving demagogue.

The House, likely to turn Democratic, will be a restraining force.

Free advice: Harris walks a fine line — a catwalk — but she can’t be too careful. Go for it.

Jamie Stiehm is a former assignment editor at CBS News in London, reporter at The Hill, metro reporter at the Baltimore Sun and public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She is author of a new play, “Across the River,” on Aaron Burr. See JamieStiehm.com.

From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2024

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