The sisterhood is facing 97 more days of brutal misogyny. Fasten your seatbelts, my friends, there’s dangerous turbulence ahead.
We’ve endured it for centuries, of course, but it always gets worse when the creepy, creaky old guard gets nervous. And my oh my, the wave of popular support for Kamala Harris in the past month has them palpitating, red-faced and flummoxed.
They were already feeling uneasy. It was obvious. I mean, they even invited a 70-year-old former WrestleMania knucklehead to speak at their convention to help them look less flaccid — and that was before the charismatic Harris emerged as their challenger.
It’s not her political ideology, her experience or her politics, but rather who she is that makes them so determined to exploit America’s lurid history of sexism and racism for naked political gain.
It’s pathetic, of course, but it’s just the latest chapter in a long tradition of tactical bigotry going back at least to the days when Nixon’s “Southern strategy” and George H.W. Bush’s racist Willie Horton ads were employed with such unapologetic glee.
And face it, the mere existence of women candidates makes these arrogant critics of so-called identity politics go absolutely nuts with identity politics of their own.
Over the years we’ve seen them launch relentless attacks on women, including hostility and violence aimed at Nancy Pelosi, arguably the country’s most gifted and successful House speaker; disgusting sexualized insults targeting Hillary Clinton when she was in the Senate and running for president; the nastiness aimed at Liz Cheney because she refused to sacrifice her integrity to the MAGA hordes; the blatant disrespect shown toward Pat Schroeder, who was criticized way back when for, among so many other things, serving in Congress while being a mother.
Somehow it made all these women so much stronger — and their supporters so much angrier.
So, this election season, we’re looking at a tough, canny, battle-tested and motivated segment of our population facing off against a bunch of spoiled, entitled frat boys with bad haircuts and puerile attitudes.
And it’s guaranteed to be an uphill fight. The old guard has rallied a cavalcade of tax-evading billionaires to finance its campaign to keep their grip on power and money forever.
But they’re facing a surge of new energy and, so far, the strategy to rally racists and misogynists has come off as just another sign of weakness in the hoary old boys’ network.
And the backlash to it has been awesome to behold.
Consider the explosive viral response to the Trump campaign’s effort to ridicule Harris for her mention of her mom’s “coconut tree” comment about how each person lives in the full context of their lives and those who came before them.
Trump pushed out the clip of her comments and called her “Laffin’ Kamala Harris.”
Instead of an insult, it became a rallying cry.
Then, in addition to the coconut tree memes taunting Trump, a whole line of coconut tree campaign merch quickly appeared along with the widespread public awareness that apparently no one has ever heard him laugh. Think about it.
Then there was JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies” remark that mobilized tens of millions of American women who, for a whole range of perfectly admirable reasons, don’t have children.
Once again, thanks to Vance, “The Handmaid’s Tale” was featured in characterizations of the Republican Party’s approach to women as breeding stock and the resulting commentaries and memes were spectacular. Through it all the VP candidate hasn’t even had the sense to back away from his preening misogyny. He embraces it.
Thanks to him, Taylor Swift doesn’t need to endorse Harris. She’s the face on the most prominent childless cat lady meme of all — and given the speed with which they are lighting up social media, that’s saying something.
Then there’s Trump at a meeting of the Association of Black Journalists last week questioning Harris’ racial identity. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black,” he said to a roomful of astonished Black reporters.
His ignorance of the facts is, as usual, breathtaking.
Harris’ father is Black, from Jamaica, an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford. Her mother, born in India, encouraged her to embrace her Black identity as a child. Harris, who was born in California, attended Howard University, pledged the Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, and was a member of the Congressional Black Caucus when she was in the U.S. Senate.
Jeez, don’t you love it when an old rich white guy tries to tell us who’s Black and who isn’t?
Obviously, none of these tactics should come as a surprise to anybody who has observed the political scene. It’s business as usual and Harris has seen plenty of it.
On a recent campaign call with prominent Colorado Democratic leaders, State Rep. Leslie Herod spoke of a conversation she’d had with Harris last spring.
“She told me, ‘As women, when you break glass ceilings, you get cut. Do it anyways. It’s worth it.’ ”
Clearly, this isn’t the polite women’s movement of the Geraldine Ferraro era anymore. The insults, the abuse, the disrespect, the attacks on our freedom in recent years have galvanized women. In the wake of the Dobbs decision and the realization that we have so much more to lose, we’ve never been more motivated or better prepared to respond to it all.
“This is not gonna be an easy election,” Herod said. “There will be glass flying, because we are gonna shatter that glass ceiling, but we need each and every one of us to be involved. … She is not gonna win this thing alone. She is gonna win it with every single one of us behind her.”
Diane Carman is a Denver communications consultant.
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