DOING WHAT THE LOS ANGELES TIMES AND WASHINGTON POST REFUSED
Towards the end of October, The Washington Post announced that they would not endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election. This comes off the heels of another largely circulated newspaper, The Los Angeles Times, that it would not be endorsing a candidate.
These are not editorial decisions. The fingers are rightly being pointed at these respective paper’s owners. These papers are hedging their bets that if Trump returns to office, they will be spared his vengeance tour. It is to maintain their access to Republicans who are openly hostile to them. This was done while Republicans constructed their conservative media apparatus over the last thirty years beginning with Rush Limbaugh pioneering talk radio to Roger Ailes creating Fox News as alternatives to CNN and MSNBC to the numerous outlets that Republicans concocted with podcasting, other websites, book publishing, and social media.
As many as 250,000 subscribers canceled their Washington Post subscriptions. Several prominent Washington Post columnists expressed criticism of the paper’s decision to not endorse a candidate in their own joint opinion column. The famous Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein issued a joint statement calling out the newspaper they worked for in not endorsing a candidate.
For the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times editorial boards to submit to their owner’s whims on playing nice with Republicans, it adds to the growing distrust Americans’ have in our media apparatus. According to Gallup, 31% of those surveyed have a great deal/fair amount of trust in mass media. Compared to when the question was first asked in 1972, it was 68% before reaching a high of 72% in 1976. The last time Americans expressed majority support in a great deal of trust in mass media was in 2005 and has trended downward since.
In response to the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times siding with neutrality, several prominent newspapers announced their endorsement of Kamala Harris. She has the endorsements of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, a Philadelphia radio station, and two from The New York Times. The second New York Times endorsement is a call to end the Trump political era.
My vote for Kamala Harris is my endorsement but here are the detailed reasons why I marked my ballot for her the moment I received it in Colorado.
I first heard of Kamala Harris when I saw Gwen Ifill’s interview with David Letterman in January 2009, just days before Barack Obama’s first presidential inauguration. She was elected three times statewide in California, twice as attorney general and as senator. Harris gained more notoriety in her questioning of Brent Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing.
Fast forward to August 2019 and I am in a high school gym in Denver, CO for a campaign event in her bid for the Democratic Party’s nomination. Even though she did not appear on my primary ballot in 2020, I am glad that I went. In a previous writing at the time when Joe Biden selected her as his running mate, I detailed her career up to that point and countered the many falsehoods about her record.
As I watch the rallies that Harris is holding in the campaign’s final days, I am reminded that the crowd at Manuel High School in 2019 was about the size of a pep rally. Today, Harris is filling arenas to the rafters with overflow crowds. Nearly 30,000 saw her speak in Houston, TX. 75,000 were at her speech at the Ellipse in Washington, DC last week. People are drawn to her in likely the same manner that I was.
Civil rights are a major issue to me. I identify as a terminally heterosexual white guy from Texas, but more discrimination does not improve my lot in life. I have done my share of protests, lobby days, and written letters to newspapers in order to advance that cause. Most importantly, I voted for candidates who share those same ideals as I do and those candidates are in the Democratic Party. A lot of Americans admire the work that various civil rights leaders have done to advance the values of equality, liberty, and justice for all Americans. The Constitution opens with “We the People”, but when it was adopted in September 1787 that was not necessarily true. One obvious example was that black people were enslaved and only counted as 60% of a person for census purposes. How can a country that fought for liberty for all limit that idea?
Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan describes it in her house judiciary committee speech when it came to voting on articles of impeachment on President Richard Nixon in July 1974. Here she was a black woman in the House of Representatives, an absurd idea in 1787 and a cause for celebration when she was first elected in 1972 from Houston. Jordan stated that despite originally being left out of the Constitution, history put her in that moment as an inquisitor. She was engaged in a debate on whether what the president did fit the definition of high crimes and misdemeanors in regards to the break-in of the national Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate hotel complex. Jordan and her colleagues voted to send articles of impeachment to the full floor of the House. That eventually led to Nixon’s resignation.
The Dobbs decision in June 2022 struck a blow at civil rights. It sent a signal to about 50% of the population that your medical care is dependent on location and we are seeing the fallout of this decision as more stories are coming out about women dying due to abortion bans. We saw this play out many times in our history with Jim Crow and marriage rights pre-Loving and Obergefell. Basing civil rights on location is not the mark of a free and equal society. Speaking of which, in his concurring opinion on Dobbs, Justice Thomas signaled that the Supreme Court should reverse the decisions in those previously mentioned decisions. I have one thing to ask of Thomas: your marriage to your wife Virginia — a white woman — was deemed illegal prior to the Loving decision. Will you be the one to cast the deciding vote to annul it?
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Vice President Harris, along with a Democratic Congress, will protect Roe as well as other civil rights that was paid in literal blood, sweat, and tears. Donald Trump and Republicans with their Project 2025 playbook will dismantle them. For starters, Republicans will institute a national abortion ban which will doom more women to desperation tactics. It is not just reproductive freedom that is on the line, but more rights will be eradicated under a second Trump term. Which ones will it be? Do you really want to take that chance should Trump and Republicans emerge victorious tomorrow?
When it comes to the economy, Vice President Harris will improve on the gains made under the Biden Administration. Trump says that he was great for the economy what he means is that he was great for the people he gave tax cuts to. At Trump’s inauguration in 2017, the unemployment rate was at 4.7%. Four years later, he slinked away to his Florida compound with the unemployment rate at 6.4%. That huge spike where unemployment hit nearly 15% was in April 2020, right as the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States and Trump’s horrendous mismanagement killed over four hundred thousand Americans during his presidency. In years since the pandemic and Biden’s election, the United States’ economy is on better footing than other comparative nations.
Trump says he was the jobs president. The fact is that since the end of the Cold War, the jobs presidents were Democrats in Clinton, Obama, and Biden creating over 50 million jobs. Under three Republican presidents and their continued adherence to supply-side economics, a total of one million jobs were created. The only president to see a net decrease of jobs was Trump. Nearly two dozen Nobel Prize-winning economists called Harris’ economic plan vastly superior to Trump’s, stating that her plan “will improve our nation’s health, investment, sustainability, resilience, employment opportunities, and fairness and be vastly superior to the counterproductive economic agenda of Donald Trump.”
In 1984, Reagan declared that it was morning in America with unemployment at 7% and inflation at 4%. Today, Biden’s economy puts that to shame with unemployment at 4.1% and inflation at 2%. This was due to the Inflation Reduction Act that every Democrat in Congress voted for and every Republican voted against. It passed the Senate by one vote. Casting the tie-breaking vote was Kamala Harris in her role as vice president.
We have expectations that presidents are to portray stability. Harris has been campaigning with breakneck speed through the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Harris has not strayed from her message nor given anyone watching question her fitness for office. In fact, I’m very impressed that someone nearly twenty years older than me is going at this pace. Meanwhile, we have evidence of Trump’s instability as president and more evidence of his physical decline. Harris released her medical records. Trump continues to hide his medical conditions despite the increasing visual evidence that something is wrong.
In his four years in the White House, Trump was chaos defined, even long before the COVID-19 pandemic that he greatly mismanaged. His administration was a revolving door of officials to where only two cabinet officials, Steve Mnuchin at Treasury and Betsy DeVos at Education, were there the whole four years. The only things he managed to get passed as president were tax cuts and three consequential Supreme Court justices that were approved by the Federalist Society. He shutdown the federal government — twice — to fund his pet project of building a massive border wall. For shutting down the federal government, the ultimate deal maker received nothing in return. Trump vowed to get rid of ObamaCare but a dramatic last-minute thumbs down in the senate chambers by John McCain stopped that.
If Trump is back in the White House, there will be no Republican like John McCain (deceased in 2018) to resist Trump’s worst inclinations. All of the people who worked with Trump in his first, and hopefully only term, have spoken out about his worst behaviors, with some even endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris. Even the sycophant Mike Pence refused to be Trump’s running mate this cycle, after Trump incited the 6 Jan mob to “hang Mike Pence.” Has Senator Vance contemplated that? Trump and Project 2025 want to use the federal government to go after those who Trump believes wronged him in his deteriorating mind. Kamala Harris will use the federal government to serve all of its people, even the ones who will not be voting for her.
Finally, Trump was twice impeached. The second impeachment was for his role in sending a mob to attack the Capitol on 6 January 2021. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell could have whipped the votes to convict Trump but he more afraid of what Trump and his supporters would do to his colleagues. Instead of banishing Trump and excising the Republican Party of his toxic brand of politics that gradually cost the party elections, McConnell made the decision to let the courts decide what to do with Trump.
Since leaving office, Trump was found liable of rape of a reporter, his businesses were determined to be fraudulent, and he was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records. Other charges he is facing include the election interference scheme in Georgia, the classified documents case in Florida, and his role in 6 January 2021 that is still in the District of Columbia court system. All of these cases are expected to be decided after the presidential election. In addition to all the other drama surrounding Trump, we do not need a convicted felon in the White House.
The only reason why Trump is running for president this time is because he is trying to escape accountability for his numerous crimes. In her time as a prosecutor, Kamala Harris successfully prosecuted predators like Trump.
I acknowledge that I am leaving out a lot of other things about the Trump political era, but recapping it all is exhausting. Trump entered the political arena in 2011 with him being the pied piper to the baseless claim that Barack Obama was not born in this country. These last 13 years of him is tiresome and our country cannot go through another four years with him as president.
At 18, I enlisted in the United States Navy and I took an oath that I would support and defend the United States Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. It still stings to this day that Trump called our fallen service members “suckers and losers”, and it was revealed most recently that he wanted generals like the ones that Hitler had. Trump likely is unaware that Hitler’s generals tried to kill him in Operation Valkyrie in July 1944. I had several motivations to enlist after high school but one of them was to protect freedom and democracy around the world. The world also includes the United States. I did not sign up for a president to praise Hitler and most certainly not to cozy up with autocrats like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, and Viktor Orbán.
Donald Trump is the very antithesis of that document that I protected.
Kamala Harris embodies what that sacred document strives for, a more perfect union.
