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India needs an all-party national government to tackle Covid, the greatest threat since Independence. Lessons learnt from the virus. Alisson Becker, and the long line of non-own goalscoring goalies.
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Accept Reject. Update Consent. Facebook Twitter Linkedin. Raghu Krishnan A journalist who has lived all over India and is now based in Bangalore. Joe Biden would have been better served if he had not stated in advance that he would choose a woman as his vice-presidential candidate. That statement itself smacks of a certain degree of patronizing male chauvinism. What Hillary could not do, I will facilitate.
Without serving advance notice, nothing prevented Biden from choosing a woman as his vice-presidential candidate and then declaring that he believed she was the best person for the job, irrespective of gender, race or creed. By giving public notice in advance that the post is reserved for women, Biden can no longer say that she is the best person for the job. All Biden can say is that she is the best woman for the job since men need not apply.
Biden’s commitment to choosing a woman as his vice-president could boomerang on women
Is Biden implying that no woman or no woman of colour has the capacity to emulate Obama? He will be 78 this November and 82 if he wins and serves his full term. What happens when you try and fight chauvinism with chauvinism is that the whole thing gets reduced to a circus.
Which is what is happening. She is a woman of colour, father Jamaican and mother Indian from Tamil Nadu. She is empathetic to the poorer sections of American society and understands their aspirations and problems. For instance, according to the American news website Politico, Senator Harris announced on July 7 that she proposed to introduce legislation for a revolutionary plan to provide relief to homeowners and renters.
With an estimated 30 percent of Americans the majority of them Black or Latino missing their housing payments at the beginning of June according to the online retail platform Apartment List due to the economic devastation caused by the coronavirus, and with a federal-backed motgage ending on July 24, Harris has proposed that there be a one-year ban on evictions and foreclosures to preempt an unprecedented homelessness crisis and that public utilities be prohibited from stopping essential services like power and water during this interim period. However, the progressives in the Democratic Party say Harris is not progressive enough and that, during her earlier avatar as the California attorney-general, she did not come out against capital punishment the death-sentence and did not call out loudly enough for body-cameras to be worn by cops on duty to record miscarriages of justice like black youths being shot or choked to death.
At that debate on June 27,when Joe Biden had talked about how he was acceptable to not just Democrats but Republicans and mentioned the names of a few who had served with him in the US Senate and the House of Representatives, Kamala Harris had promptly criticized him for taking the names of segregationists who had publicly opposed the process of integration through the busing of children of colour to good schools where the students had till then been predominantly white. She, Harris added, knew what it was all about since she was one of those subjected to the process of busing as an eight-year-old.
Another woman of colour being vetted for the Democratic vice-presidential candidacy is the year-old Val Demings, who represents Orlando from Florida in the US House of Representatives. Val Demings attracted national recognition as one of the House managers during the televised impeachment of President Trump.
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She, like Harris, has a background in criminal justice since she had served as a cop for 27 years, finally holding the position of police chief in Orlando. However, the progressives argue that anyone with a police background would be empathetic to the cops and would not do largo to reform the criminal justice system to the extent necessary following the choking to death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Key Her critics also claim that, after she stepped down as the police chief, there was a decline in the of incidents involving arbitrary police action against black suspects in Orlando.
She is not black but brown since her mother was from Thailand. Her parents met in Thailand where her white father was serving in the US Army. Her supporters say that even Trump would find it difficult to criticize a war veteran like Duckworth who served in Iraq and lost both her legs when the helicopter she was flying was brought down by enemy fire on November 12, Despite the traumatic injuries, Duckworth continued her military service before entering politics.
However, during a recent interview where she was asked about the demand made by sections in the Black Lives Matter movement for the tearing down of the statues of George Washington the first US president and Jefferson both of whom owned slaves at the end of the 18th centuryDuckworth replied that there needed to be a dialogue on the woman. Her reply pleased the progressives in the party but was attacked by conservatives in the seeking, one of whom, the Fox News TV anchor Tucker Carlson, even questioned her patriotism in a tweet.
Duckworth tweeted back that those who questioned her patriotism should try running a mile in her prosthetic legs. However, her critics within the Democratic Party wondered why Duckworth had opened herself to criticism when all she Florida to do was to reiterate what Biden had earlier said when asked the same question of whether he was for the tearing down of the statues of the first and third American presidents, Washington and Jefferson.
Biden had then replied that there was no question of tearing down the statues of the founding fathers of American democracy like Washington and Jefferson who had lived in a different century when the values were different. Biden had also added that the only statues which should be removed and perhaps kept in a museum were those of Confederate leaders like Jefferson Davis and generals like Robert E Lee who had supported slavery to the extent of taking up arms against the Union during the American Civil War in the middle of the 19th century.
Biennial elections to all the seats in the US House of Representatives will take place along with the presidential polls on November 3,as also the elections for one-third of the seats in the US Senate. The Democrats not only have to retain their majority in the House of Representatives but also regain control of the US Senate so that a Biden administration can nsa its policies approved.
Trump has been taking full advantage of Republican control of the US Senate to push through his appointments of conservative judges. The importance of the judges for whom there is no retirement-age cannot be underestimated.
That kind of experience is there in the case of the year-old Karen Bass, who is also being vetted and who is a five-term member of the US House of Representatives, being elected from a district in California. She is currently the chairperson of the Congressional Black Caucus. However, her critics say that she is soft on Fidel Catro, the late president of Cuba, who is detested in the battleground state of Florida by thousands and thousands of Cuban expats who had fled from their motherland, and their votes would make a difference in any presidential election in Florida.
That kind of experience is also there in the case of the year-old Susan Rice, a woman of colour who had served as the National Security Adviser during the Obama Administration. Rice has, say her supporters, both a distinguished academic background a Rhodes scholar with a PhD in international relations from New College, Oxford and the NSA expertise.
Six months after Hillary launched her campaign for the presidential race, she was grilled for hours on the death of the US envoy to Libya by a select committee in the US House of Representatives where the Republicans had a majority till November If Biden chooses Rice, footage of her comments on Stevens being killed in a spontaneous uprising could be endlessly replayed on Trump campaign commercials. Warren, the Senator from Massachusetts, is regarded as very progressive but she is 71 and will be 75 if Biden wins and completes his first presidential term.
Senator Baldwin, who is openly gay, is from the key state of Wisconsin but she is not a woman of colour. There is considerable pressure on Biden to choose a woman of colour. Raimondo has achieved national recognition because of her success in fighting the coronavirus by following the South Korean and New Zealand playbook of relentless testing, tracking, isolation, and social distancing. At 49, Gina Raimondo has not just the successful track-record against the coronavirus but the youthful energy Biden is looking for. However, she is not a woman of colour. Michelle Lujan Grisham has focussed on the key issue of health largo her political career.
She once even mounted a sting operation when she was the head of the New Mexico seeking agency on aging Key pretending to be affected by a stroke so as to expose the shoddy treatment being offered in state-run clinics. Hispanics constitute the second biggest ethnic minority in the USA after the Black population.
Grisham is not as well known as the others and could nsa a surprise choice. There is, however, the problem that if Biden chooses a Latina and not a Black woman, he could be asked some awkward questions. Then there is Keisha Lance Bottoms. She acquired national recognition because of the firm action she took to defuse a critical situation after the shooting down on the night of June 12 of a year-old Afro-American Rayshard Brooks by Atlanta women.
Brooks was sleeping in his car in a drive-in restaurant at night when three cops questioned him. However, when the police tried to handcuff him after a test indicated a higher level of alcohol consumption, there was a tussle, and Brooks grabbed a Taser an electroshock weapon to temporarily incapacitate the target from one of the cops and ran. The cops chased him and when he pointed the Taser at them, he Florida shot dead.
Bottoms acted firmly and ordered the arrest of the cop who shot Brooks.
There is, however, another issue. When Reed stepped down. In the ultimate analysis, there is one woman of colour who enjoys instant national recognition, who has an impeccable academic background Harvard Law School, Princeton, et alwhose speeches on past presidential campaign trails have been widely appreciated, and who did better against Trump than even Biden in some initial opinion polls.
That woman is Michelle Obama. In any case, Michelle Obama has made it abundantly clear that she is not interested. It all reminds one of the story of a young man who was looking for the perfect woman to marry. When he finally found someone and proposed, she promptly rejected him, saying that she was looking for the perfect man.
A final announcement on who Joe Biden will choose as his vice-presidential candidate is expected in the first week of August. Start a Conversation. More Blogs.
