An Op-Ed from a former friend of Kamala Harris who has spent some close time with the California US Senator….
He argue’s being the Attorney General would give Harris a better place to be in a Biden admin and for 2024 should Biden NOT seek a second term…
The advice isn’t half bad….
And could make Joe Biden’s week much easier….
Being picked for the vice presidency is obviously a huge honor, and if Biden wins, Harris would make history by being the first woman to hold the job.
But the glory would be short-lived, and historically, the vice presidency has often ended up being a dead end. For every George H.W. Bush, who ascended from the job to the presidency, there’s an Al Gore, who never got there.
True, the vice president does have an advantage the next time the party needs a new nominee, which in Biden’s case could be four years from now. But in the meantime, the vice president has no real power and little chance to accomplish anything independent of the president.
Basically, no one takes the vice president seriously after election day. Just ask Mike Pence.
Plus, if Biden wins, the Democrats will be moving into the White House in the middle of a pandemic and economic recession. The next few years promise to be a very bumpy ride. Barack Obama and the Democrats saved the nation from economic collapse when he took office, and their reward was a blowout loss in the 2010 midterm elections.
On the other hand, the attorney general has legitimate power. From atop the Justice Department, the boss can make a real mark on everything from police reform to racial justice to prosecuting corporate misdeeds.
And the attorney general gets to name every U.S. attorney in the country. That’s power.
Plus, given the department’s current disarray under William Barr, just showing up and being halfway sane will make the new AG a hero.
Best of all, being attorney general would give Harris enough distance from the White House to still be a viable candidate for the top slot in 2024 or 2028, no matter what the state of the nation….
image…Politico
This one gave us a good laugh yesterday. Willie is so jealous. The Chronicle should think twice when his contract comes up.
The “advice” is ridiculous.
As I pointed out awhile back being AG is no launching pad to even running for the presidency .Only Bobby Kennedy as a former AG and then Senator from New York has done so .
Harris ran this time and certainly wants to in the future.
James, who do you know of has been offered the VP nomination but turned it down because they wanted a Cabinet position?
Who does he know that calls San Francisco “Frisco?”
Otis Redding
Herb Caen in The Chronicle, March 1995
“ . . . First time [Ogden] Nash came to S.F., circa 1940, a Chron reporter challenged him to produce a clever couplet on San Francisco and it didn’t take him more than 30 seconds to recite “May I be boiled in oil and fried in Crisco/ If I ever call San Francisco Frisco”, but I think he had it up his sleeve . . . ”
Yes Dave, since you actually lived in the Bay Area, you understand how that term is only used by tourists and the culturally crippled.
I assume right-wingers prefer to denigrate “The City” by calling it Sin Francisco or San Fransicko.
Real Bay Area residents cringe at “Frisco” the same way real New Orleanians cringe at “Nawlins”
Very few people refer to Chicago as “Chi-Town.”
Chriraq is used more sadly.
Yeah no one here calls it St. Louie either unless they are singing a song from an old Judy Garland movie.
That one replacement NFL ref did.
Having lived in Louisiana, most locals refer to it as New Orlins. My brother hears that as Nawlins. I think that is because people from NY and NJ pronounce each syllable so carefully (relative to southerners) that to them the way locals say New Orlins sounds like Nawlins. Likewise, I should add that people from outside NJ and NY grossly mispronounce the way we say certain words. Outsiders hear New Yorkers say New Yawk, but most locals can easily tell the difference between someone who is pretending to sound like a local and someone who is one.
I have heard Chitown often, but never Chiraq. I don’t dispute what CG says. I think it is fair to say We probably don’t have too many mutual acquaintances.
Spike Lee made a movie called “Chi-raq.”
Incidentally, very rough night for Chicago. Wall to wall local coverage of the looting that went on last night in the most upscale commercial part of the city.
The Mayor and Police Superintendent said these people looted because they fear no consequence and that many of course were released after having previously looted the very same stores in June.
Maybe the horrible States Attorney will actually decide it is time to prosecute people for breaking the law.
Jack Chiraq, wasn’t he President of France or Franque or somewhere that Republicans dislike?
They certainly should have been prosecuted!
Providence, R.I., a deep-blue liberal majority-minority city whose past two mayors have been Latinos, has also been identifying, arresting and prosecuting the vandals and looters of downtown during the one seriously-violent late night of Rhode Island’s extensive Black Lives Matter protests.
Those protestors, who didn’t always uniformly obey other laws, must look like scaredy-cat milquetostes to the sturdy superspreaders of Sturgis, S.D., since they generally wore masks (handed out to the maskless by the state health dept) and kept some kind of social distance. Very, very little of the social spread of Covid-19 in R.I. has been traced to the weekslong outdoor protests late this spring and early this summer.
Zreebs I’m sure you also noticed how outsiders often confuse New Orleans with Cajun country.
And while you might hear a SW Louisiana cajun accent here and there in New Orleans proper their way of speaking is different.
Well there is definitely a strong presence of Cajuns in New Orleans, although they don’t dominate. The Cajun influence is stronger in the Lafayette and lake Charles areas, especially in the rural areas of Southern Louisiana. It took me about a year before I was able to recognize the Cajun accent.
Interestingly, Northern Louisiana has very little in common with the areas south of I-10. Northern Louisiana is culturally similar to Mississippi.
Yo Z?
‘Who Dat?’
And, speaking of pronunciations, I’ve never quite established (although maybe Keith has) the accepted local English pronunciation of Los Angeles.
Sam Yorty, the long-time (think Dragnet/Perry Mason era) Mayor of Los Angeles (and a far-right Democrat from the Dixiecratic wing of the state party), always used a hard G, as in “angle”. I and almost everyone else that I’ve heard use a soft G, as in “angel”.
Of course, Latinos (or whatever the plural of Latinx might be), often use the original Spanish-language pronunciation of G before E or I, which in this case is identical to Spanish-language J and sometimes transliterated into English-language pronunciation as GH (as in ugh or lough).
The original Spanish does put an accent on the A of Los Ángeles. so stressing the middle syllable is just wrong.
NOLA for New Orleans…..
Thank’s DSD…..
It’s not like everybody here doesn’t know what i’m talking about with city
I’m pushing for Rice for VP anyways….
Brown’s view helps that as i pointed out…
I think we are at the point, until Biden announces his pick, that if someone came forward and said that Kamala Harris was involved in the JonBenet Ramsey murder, james would say that it raises a valid concern and is part of the reason that Biden should pick Rice. Still though, he would put aside the Ramsey suspicion to say she should be Attorney General.
Then, if Biden does pick Harris, he will say that is the one he wanted him to pick from the start.
No Attorney-General of the United States has [so far] ever become President, though several have sought a presidential nomination and others have been considered, including Edmund Bates, A. Mitchell Palmer, RFK and Elliott Richardson.
On the other hand, a former President has become Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (Wm Howard Taft).
Even Bobby Kennedy tried to become LBJ’s Vice Presidential running-mate, and he hated him..
I sort of like the idea of maybe having an Attorney General without a political past and without political ambition.
The concept of having an AG as a “wingman” (as Obama described Eric Holder) is wrong, just as it was for RFK and Bill Barr. Sessions should never have been AG either, but at least he had the semi-integrity to recuse himself from a matter in which he had a conflict.
I’m unaware that Elliott Richardson ever formally sought the presidential nomination .
I remember he was “mentioned” by some columnists back in the seventies, but he never took any formal steps toward a candidacy.
Palmer was back in the 1920s and Bates was in the Civil war era.neither went anywhere.
In modern times, only RFK launched a formal campaign and at the time he was serving in the US Senate and had been mentioned as a candidate almost since the day his brother was sworn in as President..
Eric Holder , Obama’s AG, talked about running but that’s all he did, talked about it.
This is making me consider a Presidential write in vote for Ed Meese.
Meese was honored by Trump recently. Old crook.
Ed Meese was one of the assistant DA’s who prosecuted the Berkeley students who’d sat in at Sproul Hall in 1964 as part of the Free Speech Movement.
Sounds like something that old bastard would do.
That Trump honored both him and Phyllis Schlafly –speaking at her funeral in 2016–shows how entrenched Trumpism is with the conservative movement. Despite what you here from two people on this site who rarely agree on anything else.
Trump had no idea who these people were. He was going to banquets with Jesse Jackson and Chuck Schumer and hanging out with the Clintons not long before that.
He engineered a hostile takeover of the Republican Party and knows how to throw a few bones in order to keep people in lnie.
I was joking (obviously) about writing in Ed Meese, and I was not politically aware to any extent when he was in public life, but lumping him in with Trump makes no sense.
Is he supposed to turn down the Presidential Medal of Freedom just because of whom the President happens to be?
That would set a pretty bad precedent for things like that.
If Harris is AG, she would of course actually have to resign from the Cabinet to ever run for President in 2024.
She also would not be able to campaign at all in 2022 or make any contacts in the midterms in regards to future Presidential ambitions.
Becoming AG is largely a political dead-end, at least in the short term.