Kamala Harris and the Company She Keeps

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Politics makes strange bedfellows. Conventional wisdom says that axiom dates to the 19th century, but the more generic ‘strange bedfellows’ percolated into the culture in 1611 thanks to William Shakespeare who wrote in The Tempest, “Misery acquaints a man with strange bed-fellows.”

Vice President Kamala Harris has accumulated her share of strange bedfellows in recent days. When Russian dictator Vladimir Putin announced his support for Harris recently, the former KGB agent characterized her nervous cackling as an “expressive and infectious laugh.” Given Putin’s expertise in spycraft, his endorsement might be some sort of head fake, but the feckless response of the Biden-Harris administration to his February, 2022 invasion of Ukraine lends candor to his backing of Harris.

Shortly after Putin’s announcement, we learned that former Vice President Dick Cheney is also supporting Harris’s candidacy. This endorsement has a lot of strangeness to it. For as often as Harris has denounced former President Donald Trump as a threat to democracy, she seems oblivious to the many accusations from within her party’s coalitions that Cheney is a war criminal and “an enemy of democracy in America.” Whether Cheney’s endorsement indicates actual support for Harris and her policies, or is simply a symptom of Trump Derangement Syndrome, is open to debate.

Within moments of the September 10 presidential debate ending, entertainer Taylor Swift showed her hand, boldly announcing her intention to vote for Harris in November. The self-proclaimed childless cat lady who promotes her career by telling reporters, “I’ve made a lot of bad choices,” also offered effusive praise for Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate. Swift is apparently enamored of Walz’s efforts to advance child genital mutilation and infanticide.

To be fair, most people did not have Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s endorsement of Trump on their political bingo card. But at least the two men share common ground on issues involving public health so Kennedy isn’t an entirely strange bedfellow. Conversely, recent endorsements of Harris suggest something else.

Harris has not disavowed the support of a former Communist spy and imperialist tyrant. She has not rejected the endorsement of a singer who seemingly approves of the killing of newborns and the surgical disfigurement of children. She has not spurned the backing of a man who has been vilified by her own party for two decades, not to mention the fact that more people have been shot by Dick Cheney than were delegates for Harris in the 2020 campaign.

No politician can control who endorses them and we don’t know whether Harris actively courted the support of Putin, Cheney or Swift. But every politician can control whether they accept such endorsements and Harris has accepted all of these. By contrast, Trump repeatedly rejected the unsolicited support of his 2016 candidacy by former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke. Trump had no say over Duke’s comments but he had everything to say in response to them and he repudiated Duke.

When considering which candidate to vote for and what they might do if elected, Americans are faced with something of a crap shoot. A politician may well keep the promises they made on the campaign trail. But it may also be that a promise cannot be kept because of congressional hurdles. Significant changes in circumstances may also prompt a politician to go back on the promises made during a campaign. But it may be that a candidate is simply lying in order to win our vote. The best we can do is try to assess a candidate’s credibility, and we do this in part by examining their past pronouncements and the company they keep.

When Harris told CNN’s Dana Bash last month that her values have not changed, I believed her. We saw some of those values in her responses to the ACLU’s 2019 candidate questionnaire in which she expressed her support for taxpayer-funded sex change surgeries for illegal aliens and federal prison inmates. She also backed decriminalizing the use of drugs – all drugs – along with ending the detention of illegal aliens and cutting funding for immigration control.

Harris’s values prompted her to support these issues. Today, there’s nothing to credibly indicate otherwise, which likely influenced people to endorse her. Vladimir Putin knows illegal immigration is destroying America so his endorsement makes sense. Taylor Swift knows Harris and Walz favor radical abortion and sex change policies so her endorsement is similarly logical. Dick Cheney has watched two major wars break out on Harris’s watch and given his prior involvement with the Military Industrial Complex, his endorsement is understandable.

This certainly doesn’t represent all of those who have endorsed Kamala Harris but it’s an illustrative snapshot of the company she keeps. Perhaps they’re not such strange bedfellows after all.