Kamala Harris may be riding high on her break-out debate performance last week, but there is still no Democrat who can beat Donald Trump, Harris’s ex-boyfriend Willie Brown wrote in a column Saturday. The former California Assembly Speaker downplayed what many considered a key moment for Harris in the Democratic debate Thursday, saying that Trump could make easy work of her position on school busing.
“California Sen. Kamala Harris got all the attention for playing prosecutor in chief, but her case against former Vice President Joe Biden boiled down in some ways to a ringing call for forced school busing. It won’t be too hard for Trump to knock that one out of the park in 2020,” Brown wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Harris ex-boyfriend: no Democrat can beat Trump
In a column titled, “Bad news for Democrats — none of these candidates can beat Trump,” Brown offered up a bleak assessment of the primary field. The debates offered the first real test, after weeks of speculation over polling, of the candidates’ strengths. But according to Brown, none of them stood out — not even Harris, who was widely seen as the winner. “Trump must have enjoyed every moment and every answer, because he now knows he’s looking at a bunch of potential rivals who are still not ready for prime time,” Brown wrote.
Harris was widely considered the break-out star of Thursday night’s debate after she all but decapitated Biden, the current frontrunner, over recent comments on working with segregationist Democrats. Harris also went after Biden on his past opposition to federal busing to end segregation with a seemingly rehearsed line. “That little girl was me,” Harris said of her childhood experience being bussed as schools were just being integrated in her county.
At the same time, Biden did himself “zero favors” with his endorsement of states’ rights as defence, Brown said. “It was a weird endorsement of states’ rights and local jurisdictions’ right to segregate schools. That’s the best argument he could marshal against busing little kids miles across town?” Brown wrote.
In January, Brown admitted in a column titled “Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So what?” that he and Harris dated during the 1990s, and that he influenced her budding political career. The former speaker of the California state assembly appointed Harris to state positions.
Weak candidates
Harris’s take-down of Biden was thought to mix up the primary field, which has for weeks been led by Biden in polling, with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) trailing in second. But both Democrats slumped in recent weeks, with Biden suffering a particularly steep drop after Thursday’s feeble performance.
Biden’s age and stamina has long been in question, and his poor showing last week validated what many had long suspected: Biden is too old and out of touch to unite a new, more radical Democratic party against Trump. The drubbing that Harris gave Biden marked the first moment that the 76-year-old Democrat has been actually called out over his record on race in front of millions of voters, and it doesn’t bode well for him.
Sanders was long considered number two, but the progressive patriarch hasn’t quite been able to shake off the sense that 2016 was his moment. Recent polling showed Sanders sliding behind Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who is competing for the Democrat voters in the populist, anti-corporate lane.
While Warren has enjoyed a recent surge, she still has to deal with the baggage of her botched DNA test, and despite her detailed policy agenda, she will struggle with a charisma gap against Trump. The president could easily make her claims of Native American heritage an issue. Much like Trump made voters associate Jeb Bush (please clap) with weakness, he could leave voters with a strong impression that “Pocahontas” is untrustworthy.
Meanwhile, the multi-lingual, picture perfect mayor Pete Buttigieg is in free fall after a recent police shooting controversy in his home town of South Bend, Indiana. The shooting has left many with doubts as to whether the well-spoken Ivy Leaguer can actually run the country, let alone a city in the Midwest.
While Harris was an early frontrunner in the race, she receded from view after Buttigieg and Biden jumped in the race. Now after last week’s fiery debate performance, she’s on the upswing. But the primary race is just getting started. And just because Harris can temporarily best her fellow Dems doesn’t mean that she has a chance at beating Trump.
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