Let’s get one thing straight, the Kamala Harris debacle – if one can call it that – is not because of her being a woman. Granted, it may have played a part in the US elections 2024 specifically for the voters, but surely a very miniscule part. This assertion diverts attention from a long list of grievances, challenges and burning issues that needed and still require deliverance. That said, numerous instances can be found where powerful women have been thrown as last-minute scapegoats to miraculously snap their fingers and make it all better.
In 2012, Marissa Mayer left Google to become the CEO of an ailing Yahoo! to turn it around. While the stint was unsuccessful; the technologist tripled the company’s stock price as well as helped create more than $30 billion shareholder wealth prior to its online operations being sold to Verizon in 2017. At the time of her resignation in the same year, scores of case-studies, articles and opinions emerged in news and media about the ‘wunderkind’s’ capacity and capabilities as a leader. The criticism ranged from her celebrity status, glamorous demeanor to leadership qualities. Reading between the lines, the criticism did feel a tad bit about a female technologist earning too much money and ‘inflicting’ an unheard of remote work ban for a beleaguered and already dying company.
No fan of Kamala Harris (and certainly not one of Trump’s either), the US Vice President’s rise and fall can be attributed to many reasons. The first and foremost is the Democrat party’s failure to recognize or rather their lack of inclination to yield to the needs and demands of the common US citizen: healthcare, housing, employment! If Trump is in fact deemed a persona non-grata in the larger geo-political (both internal and external), economic and diplomatic schemes of things, the Democrats had ample time to regroup since the 2016 elections. Instead, their last gasp of survival at the very last minute, thanks also to an aging president not wanting to let go, was to nominate a powerful woman, coming from a diverse background, already standing on shaky grounds. Yes she did have all the credentials; but in both cases and to a great extent, culpability lies in the hands of the powerful, conceit-filled decision makers – be it the Yahoo! board or the top echelons of the Dem party.
But the story doesn’t end there. Indeed, reams of the proverbial paper have been blackened about the diplomatic, moral and political depravity that has actually been the hallmark of the current US presidency collectively. Harris’s unbending alignment to Biden’s ‘liberal interventionist’ approach especially when it comes to the genocided people of Palestine, her stark indifference and allegiance to an apartheid regime was already an end of her beginning. From renowned author Ta-Nehisi Coates to Zeteo’s Mehdi Hassan and many more, all urged about the urgency and importance of rising against the tepid tides of status quo and creating a legacy. The legacy was of a woman, hailing from a long list of colonized African Asian peoples, breaking the glass ceilings by challenging and rising against God-complexed saviors of the world.
From her time in the office leading up to the election campaign trail, there was much that could have been done. Her people, her nation were waiting for her to deliver or even speak about what they really wanted to hear. Trump did that. As much as his speeches were laced with vitriol; he spoke about the working class, he ‘mentioned’ the Middle East, and more. All magical words for a nation that yearned for change.
The golden ticket to the White House was cherry-picking for the Republicans.
In the end, Kamala Harris – a powerful woman of color sitting at one of the highest offices in the world, of Asian, African descent, failed… miserably!
Image: Pixabay
){kind=link}