Commentary

Kamala Harris and Alexandra Ocasia-Cortez are two Democrat women getting a bit of attention but it’s too early to tell where either one will wind up as campaign season rolls around.

 It’s hard to imagine Harris becoming the party’s presidential choice after her overwhelming 2024 loss to Donald Trump.  While AOC gets an occasional mention as a presidential candidate, a run in the Senate challenging Chuck Schumer in New York is more plausible.

Kamala Harris

Harris’ appearances continue to feature her “word salad” approach to campaign messaging.  While most of her appearances have been in connection with her extended book tour, “107 Days,” this past week she was invited by the Nevada Democrat Party to do what was billed as a fireside chat in Las Vegas as the party looks to its June primary.

While talking about conversations she had while traveling around the country, referring to high prices, housing and childcare, she said, “For far too many people in our country, the American dream is not real.”

Believing it is an American myth, she urged voters to “revive the American dream.”  Too bad she didn’t leave it there.

But instead, there was kind of an excitement in her voice, with a Southern drawl, as she changed her seating position to face the audience saying, “We need a revival of the American dream and began referring to the singing, clapping and dancing common in Southern church revival meetings, where people are in a joyful mood as they repent and renew their religious faith and spiritual commitment.

She should have stuck with her hope that voters will “revive” the American dream rather than using the word “revival,” comparing old-fashioned Southern church revival meetings.

It was reminiscent of Hillary Clinton who often slipped into a Southern inflection to say “I come too far. I don’t feel no ways tired,” 

It didn’t work for Hillary, and it won’t work for Kamala.

Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez

Then there’s AOC’s cockamamie statement, “You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that,” she repeated during her appearance on the podcast, It’s Open with Ilana Glazer.

Believing that billionaires “create a myth of earning it,” she insinuates that they “break rules,” and “do all sorts of things” to get market power.  She charges the “abuse of labor laws and paying people less than they’re worth.” 

Unbelievably, she speaks of those people at the top who assume they “are smarter, better, and more sophisticated, and therefore the people on the bottom are uneducated, lazy, et cetera,” so they “need somebody under them … to point to who broke the rules, someone else has to get locked up so that you’re not.”

With that she seems to be questioning the legitimacy of billionaires.  Sure, one may wonder about Bernie Sanders having become a billionaire, but I don’t think the earning power of Tim Cook and other industry moguls can be questioned, nor that of Oprah Windfrey (worth $3.5 billion) and many in the entertainment field.

I recall my years in the aerospace industry when I was alerted to questions from stockholders at annual meetings regarding executive salaries, including why they earn what they do.

Despite AOC graduating cum lade from Boston University with a bachelor’s degree in international relations and economics, her remark about billionaires did not come as a surprise to me as capitalism is not taught by the leftist faculty in our universities.

She has a long record of making foolish statements like the extinction of the middle class, fossil fuel production should be stopped and stopping climate change will end racism.

A Female President

I’ve previously written that I wouldn’t be opposed to a woman as president of the United States as long as she had the savvy of Margaret Thatcher.  Here are views on the presidency by Harris, AOC and Nancy Pelosi.

Harris

“Listen, I might. I’m thinking about it,” Harris said in response to a question from Rev. Al Sharpton at the National Action Network’s conference in Manhattan. “Let me also say this. I served for four years being a heartbeat away from the presidency of the United States. I spent countless hours in my West Wing office, footsteps away from the Oval Office. I spent countless hours in the Oval Office, in the Situation Room. I know what the job is. And I know what it requires.”

Ocasio-Cortez

Ocasio-Cortez has said she is not quite ready to announce a run in the 2028 Democratic primary, because she said her ambition is far greater than that.

“They assume that my ambition is positional; they assume that my ambition is a title or a seat,” she told Democratic strategist David Axelrod at an event Friday in Chicago. “And my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country.”

“Presidents come and go; Senate, House seats, elected officials come and go, but single-payer healthcare is forever,” she continued. “A living wage is forever. Workers’ rights are forever. Women’s rights, all of that.”

“And conditions change radically all the time. So, I make my response less to an attachment to some positional, like, you know, title or position and working backwards from there.

“I make decisions by waking up in the morning, looking out the window, and observing the conditions of this country. And saying, ‘What move or decision can I make today that’s going to get us closer to that future, stronger, faster, and better than yesterday?”

Pelosi

“I think the country is more than ready,” Pelosi told Michele Cottle of the New York Times.  Speaking on the topic generating angst among fellow Democrats, Pelosi spoke of the “frustrated chatter” since Harris became the second woman to lose to Trump

Pelosi is confident — adamant, even — that her party just needs to stay laser focused on elevating “the best person” to lead the nation and that this person absolutely “could be a woman,” she told Cottle.

May God continue to bless the United States of America.