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A peek into the US polls race

Friday, August 02, 2024

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US Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump.

Photo credit: Reuters

By Mutuma Mathiu

Columnist

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What you need to know:

A sixty-year-old, woman of mixed race is running against a 78-year-old eccentric and populist real estate billionaire for US president in November.

A sixty-year-old, woman of mixed race is running against a 78-year-old eccentric and populist real estate billionaire for US president in November.

She is the daughter of Shyamala Gopalan, an Indian cancer researcher, and Donald Harris, a Jamaican Marxist who taught economics at Stanford.

Ms Kamala Harris’ parents were immigrants, the type of people that her opponent, Donald Trump, refers to as “animals”, to quote The New Yorker.

I don’t know too much about this US election and I haven’t spoken to many Americans about it.

Besides, there is little reason why they would confide in a stranger their true feelings about the election and their choices.

But I have been watching a bit of coverage on TV and reading up, including the piece in The New Yorker I cite here and I intend to buy, though not necessarily get round to reading, her autobiography, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey”, a title that does not make me want to read the book, ever.

But before I get to Ms Harris and what I think is in it for Africa in this contest, let me dispense with her better-known opponent.

Having Mr Trump as your President is like being married to a dramatic spouse: every day you are forced to run the gauntlet of embarrassment and gaffes.

A clever politician with an unerring aim for the popular, Mr Trump probably has behavioural or other psychological problems, he lies like another politician we know and is shockingly self-absorbed.

But he is a germophobe billionaire who is quite likely revolted by poor people, is possibly a racist and a closet white supremacist to boot, who has convinced poor people, including many people of colour, that he is one of them and he loves them!

Mr Trump is a native son of sorts, a man whose ancestry entitles him to lay claim to the land and its wealth, or at least a bigger claim than more recent migrants.

I suppose the land belongs as much to those who were there first as to those who mastered it.

The Aboriginals, Native Americans and other ancient races lived on and preserved the land, their home, but it is the migrants who unleashed its goodies.

It is bad that the migrants sought to wipe out the original settlers and have hated and discriminated against them for centuries.

Way of Europeans

It would have been a lot better if they had carried them along on the journey to prosperity. But that is not the way of Europeans.

Mr Trump came along when these European native sons were feeling that their place as the primary and indisputable owners of the land, its riches and prosperity, was slipping out of their grasp.

The system they had created to suppress the minority and claim all the privileges, was turning against them. Newer migrants from other races are pouring in, as they see it, and are reproducing faster.

In some foreseeable future, they saw themselves becoming a minority and others using their political system to dominate the power and great wealth they had enjoyed for centuries.

Those who feel like this, for sure, are not the majority, they are mainly at the bottom and fringes of society where guns are more popular than degrees, but they are in sufficient numbers to make Mr Trump politically formidable.

The elite, naturally, gravitate towards the winner.

Mr Trump’s politics consists of coming down his billionaire escalator and pretending to love and be one with hoi polloi, doesn’t obsess or venerate the constitution unlike mainstream politicians, and probably has never read it, and shows every inclination to stick an ICBM in the heart of American democracy – which will not work for people like him much longer – and blast it to the Oort cloud.

Ms Harris has a much more complicated profile.

She grew up in a middle-class part of San Francisco, in a community of intellectuals and activists. Her mother brought her up among blacks and she identifies with them.

However, I see frequent refrains of “she ain’t black” on Twitter because she is quite blended.

And other than her well-established ability to get ahead professionally and politically, most people haven’t quite fully understood who she is and what she wants to do with power.

Jay Caspian Kang writes in The New Yorker: “Harris has been part of my political life for almost twenty years, basically since I moved to California. I’ve read her autobiography and watched her debate. And yet I feel as though I couldn’t tell you much about her, outside of the fact that she keeps being elected to higher and higher offices. She has no clear political identity; she always seems stuck between places.”

I was surprised when an African woman living in America confessed that she supported Mr Trump.

For us at the bottom of the food chain, we want a sure and firm hand that will guide the world away from world war, resolve the conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine fairly and stay the hell away from Africa.

Does that sound like Ms Harris or Mr Trump?

Mr Mathiu, a media consultant at Steward-Africa, is a former Editor-in-Chief of Nation Media Group. [email protected].

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