Why Not Kamala?

A conversation with professor Brittney Cooper about dumping Joe Biden and making peace with the K-Hive.

It has been among the weirdest and most perilous weeks in American political history, with news moving so quickly that it has been hard to get any real grip on the recent past, let alone the imminent future. Last Thursday, Joe Biden had a wretched debate, which apparently was not just the bad night his campaign strenuously claimed it was, but a window into the compromised state of his health and campaign. To have Donald Trump’s opponent exposed as unfit in this way is chilling — especially in the days that the Supreme Court issued rulings stripping regulatory agencies of their power and granting presidents an autocratic level of authority. But a funny thing has happened: Out of post-debate despair has risen the possibility that we could get a new candidate, perhaps even a history-making one.

On Monday, I sat down with my friend and colleague Brittney Cooper, professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers, to hash through some of the implications and complications of this rapidly changing moment.

Rebecca Traister: Let’s start with what I believe has long been a story divorced from reality: that Joe Biden is the only person who could beat Donald Trump and the kind of suffocating dynamics that have accompanied that story.

I saw a photo of Jill Biden the day after the debate wearing a dress that said, “VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE.” Which is the clarion call of a certain set of Democrats whose attitude is “Shut up, stop critiquing, just vote, don’t you understand the stakes?” I would argue that a lot of the people they’re lecturing are the people who best understand the stakes, who are having their rights taken away, who have been out in the streets marching, who have been arrested on campuses, whose moral cause has been demeaned by the leaders of the party. The story they’re being told by the party is that they are the problem, that we are impeding a solution.

Relatedly, I think about the people who have been shut out of, for example, presidential contention. Let me be clear: I am not talking about an open convention, which would be a disaster. The time for that possibility was years ago. It is not now. But think about who could be leading now: off the top of my head, Kamala, Whitmer, Buttigieg, Newsom, Booker, Stacey Abrams … That would be an entirely different world we were living in right now.

Brittney Cooper: Joe Biden has had one job, and it is to make the affirmative case for why he’s a good choice, and he can’t do it. I remind myself that inside that old shell of a man is the same Joe Biden who sneered at Anita Hill in those hearings in 1991, the same Joe Biden who sneered at Elizabeth Warren in that debate about the bankruptcy legislation in 2005. He is still that dude. That’s what people sense and why he’s so angering: I don’t have to cultivate new leadership because you don’t have another choice. He doesn’t have to be excellent, he doesn’t have to be inspiring, because he already knows that our back’s against the wall. That will make people resent you; you’re holding them hostage.

Then there is an old Black church lady in me that is like, We cannot have Donald Trump. That to me comes out of a deep cultural thing that Black women have, which is that we are so used to choosing from piss-poor options that you learn to be very good at deciding what is the worst evil and then not picking that. So I’m trying to balance my own radical proclivities and fundamental irritation with Joe Biden alongside my looming sense of the catastrophe that is Donald Trump. I don’t always emotionally know how to thread that needle.

Rebecca Traister: What you’re describing is the politics of dependency, in which all kinds of vulnerable people are dependent on people at the top of the power structure. I remember this around health-care reform and the willingness to jettison reproductive rights: What are you (i.e., women) going to do? You’re not going to vote Republican. They knew they had us.

For me, one of the most important things to hold on to is the ability to articulate both realities. Don’t piss on me and tell me it’s raining. Don’t treat me like I’m stupid. We are dependent, and I will vote for Joe Biden. I have never voted for anyone with more intensity than I voted for that man in 2020 because I needed him to be the vessel that took out Donald Trump. Biden could be literally dead and I would vote for him, because it would be better.

And I understand that voting is not a romance. Voting in its best iteration can be an emotional, moral, historical act that you feel powerfully about. But most of the votes we cast are purely to get the least bad option to represent and protect us. That is what my vote will be in November, and it will be for Joe Biden if necessary. But in order to do that, I do not need to be told that he’s wonderful. What I cannot stand is this idea that we can have watched what happened on Thursday night and then have people tell us that we perceived it wrong, that we are the failures here, that we are the shortsighted ones.

Brittney Cooper: I have no patience for “Why aren’t y’all listening to the substance of the debate?” Because speech impediment aside, Biden was stumbling over facts, unable to clearly articulate a point of view. There are so many different avenues he could have taken. He could have attacked Trump on his lies, which requires agility, which he doesn’t have, but why isn’t he out there saying, “I forgave student debt.” Why isn’t he saying, “I did the biggest decarbonization of your lifetime”? I, somebody who has been a critic of Joe Biden for my entire adult life, can say that this man forgave $80,000 of my student loans. We have movement on infrastructure, and set against the backdrop of what happened in Baltimore, it does matter to Black and Latino folk for you to say we’re trying to rebuild bridges. The expanded child-tax credit pulled families out of poverty.

But part of Biden’s challenge isn’t that he hasn’t done real bread-and-butter shit for Black communities and brown communities. It’s that he doesn’t want to look like he’s done anything for Black and brown communities. Biden still has this fantasy that he can chastise the radical elements of the party and run to the middle.

Rebecca Traister: He says Roe v. Wade had “three trimesters.” What was he talking about? This is the issue on which his party has won every interim election, including ones that they were predicted to lose, since the Dobbs decision. And he cannot even say, “I made medication available at drugstores,” which was a massively important thing that I am deeply grateful for.

I really want to talk about Kamala. I have been critical about how Biden went about selecting her and how he’s treated her since, which is not as a partner and not as a successor. I understand that vice-presidents are often sidelined, but he did say that he was going to be a “bridge” president. I assumed he meant that he was an older man who planned to hand the job off to the next generation after he beat Trump. The most important thing you do at that juncture is pick your vice-president. But he gave her the worst jobs. He was like, “You’ve got the border.” I’ve been livid at the fact that Biden didn’t appear to consider what it might mean to choose a Black woman for that role and then not set her up to take over your party. That to me was malpractice.

And no, I didn’t think she was a great candidate in 2020, but in the past four days, I have decided I am Kamala Forever. She should be the candidate. I’m going to get a hat and a T-shirt and apply for forgiveness from the K-Hive. It’s not that the debate changed how I feel about Biden, it’s that it made how I feel about Joe Biden visible to the rest of the world. And the sheer relief of having a super-smart, medium progressive, sentient candidate …

Brittney Cooper: So what I’ll say about Kamala is that I think she is very smart. When she was elected to the Senate and people were already talking about her presidential prospects, I wrote this piece saying, “Get off her back.” Let her actually establish herself. Because Black women are always put in this position where they have to save the world. Part of what I think you’re describing is what we call a glass-cliff assignment. The U.S. is about to go over the cliff, and it’s at that point that people want to hand shit to Black women and then be like, “You can fix it.”

Do I think that if Biden makes it to the second term and steps aside, or if his 80-some years catch up with him in some other way, that she could rise to the occasion? I do. Like you, I also did not think she was a great 2020 candidate, and also got harassed by the group calling themselves the K-Hive for saying so. But I also think that Kamala has good people around her. She has been very good in the reproductive-justice conversation. I do a lot of work in my lab tracking online violence, and her office has been at the fore of some initiatives around harassment of women online. The challenge we have is that we live in a country that hates Black women while relying on them to do this saving work.

So everyone wants us to be the schoolmarms and church ladies of the Democracy. They want that fastidiousness at the same time that folks resent us. That would be a mountain that she would have to climb. And she is going to have the same problem that Abrams ultimately had, which is that Black men side-eye Stacey Abrams and call Kamala Harris a cop.

Rebecca Traister: I take your point about the glass-cliff issue. We have an illegitimate and destructive Supreme Court. We have regulatory bodies that no longer have standing to control whether our drinking water is safe, and presidents can get a SEAL team to assassinate a rival, and our planet continues to burn, and we are funding horrific violence in Gaza, and we have a president who might be sundowning in a debate. Let’s bring in Kamala to solve all this!

But let’s say that Biden stays the nominee. And we are voting for him on November 7. And if he does not win — which seems increasingly likely — we are still in a glass-cliff situation. Because I can tell you right now who’s going to be blamed: the base of the party that didn’t come out, including Black and brown people, young people, women who didn’t care enough about abortion. It will be the fault of young people protesting what’s happening in Gaza, the press and the young leftists and TikTok and people who didn’t pay enough attention to Trump’s lies. If Joe Biden loses, it’s everybody else’s fault, and especially the people who are going to be hurt the most: poor people, Black and brown people, women.

Of course, then I think, Okay, so maybe we should go with Gavin Newsom. Because I remember this: I thought Elizabeth Warren could win, I thought she might be a remarkable president. And I viscerally remember Election Night in 2020, when early on it seemed possible that Trump would win again. I retreated in horror and fear to my bedroom and lay face down in the bed thinking, Thank God it’s not Warren. Because every bit of blame would have been put at her feet and the feet of anyone who believed in her. And when I think that way, I think, Hey, Gavin Newsom, looking good! I don’t want this all to be laid at the feet of Harris. But then I think, That’s how we get Gavin Newsoms for the rest of our lives. 

Brittney Cooper: I am thinking about Joe Biden saying he wanted to be a bridge president. It recalls the classic feminist phrase: “This bridge called my back.” Most American democracy works on the idea that Black women lie down and the bridges are built by walking over our backs. That is the way he has positioned Kamala, that she is the bridge to the idea that the party could fully acknowledge the importance of Black women to its future. But part of the way that you know that Joe Biden has not actually reconciled that is that when he was asked in that debate what his accomplishments were, he did not proudly say, “I got to pick the first woman vice-president, the first Black woman vice-president. I got to pick the first Black woman to be on the Supreme Court.” When Trump was spouting all this shit about what he did for HBCUs, all Biden needed to say was, “I picked an HBCU graduate to be my vice-president.” That’s a person that hasn’t even thought at a fundamental level about the choices he’s made and what they mean. That would’ve been enough of an answer to crush Trump on the question.

One day last week, I was just driving along, and I remembered what I thought when Barack Obama was elected; the thing Black people said to each other about it was, “They’re going to get us back for this.” But we never could have imagined. We knew there would be retaliation, but this level of retaliation in this short amount of time? In the 15 years since Barack Obama became the president, we don’t have abortion rights anymore. We don’t have affirmative action anymore. Voting rights have been gutted. In retaliation for a system that actually worked in 2008, these folks have systematically dismantled it.

What I know for sure is that to the extent that we live in a country that is fundamentally anti-Black, it is even more anti–Black woman. And I can’t imagine what the levels of retaliation would be if folks were asked to follow the leadership of a Black woman; the only place for Black women in the psychic life of the nation is as its unwilling wet nurses. That is it. That is the psychic place that people have for us to be in. You and I have talked about what if Hillary Clinton had won, the backlash we were going to receive, but just the fact that she won the popular vote, was a major-party nominee …

Rebecca Traister: In some ways, it does not matter that Hillary Clinton lost; we are still paying for the imagined idea that she could be president. One thing about how this is playing out now, though: If Biden had turned it over to Kamala six months ago, you would’ve had a lot of runway for critics to come at her. And all kinds of racism, misogyny. But I actually think this is a window in which his performance was so abysmal that we saw a kind of rock bottom. Look at how many leftists who are like, “Bring on Kamala.” That is how profound the relief would feel.

I feel confusion myself because for years, I’ve seen the K-Hive do this prosecutor-chic thing, fantasizing about Kamala throwing Trump in jail. That fantasy doesn’t do it for me. But seeing the impotence of Biden on the stage against Trump — just a wet noodle against this man who has been convicted on 34 felony counts — I had a moment of thinking that it would be great to see a prosecutor talk to this man with authority. I wondered, Oh no, did I just engage in a K-Hive fantasy? What’s happening to me?

Brittney Cooper: Black women beating him is his worst nightmare right now. Because of Tish James. I would be arrogant enough to be like, “You have a Howard University problem.” I mean, that is her tagline. She wanted to prosecute the case against Donald Trump. That was her reason for running for president. This would be her opportunity to do that in a particular way.

Rebecca Traister: Yes! Today I’m yearning to have a president who could come out and talk about what the Supreme Court has done with energy and comprehension and passion. That’s something I’ve yearned for with Biden in many instances in the past couple of years, that he could say something moving and cogent about the devolution of our democracy. Kamala could do that. She understands what happened today. What does it mean that you can’t prosecute a president? I very rarely say this, but let’s talk to a prosecutor about this.

Brittney Cooper: The thing that I think about Kamala in relation to all that is, isn’t it terrible that the only time that we can even actually fully see the potential for a Black woman is when we are reminded of the depths of the mediocrity of two white men? We have to watch white men be terrible; white men have to tank it, they have to put us on the brink of not having a whole democracy in order for us to be like, “Hey, maybe a Black woman can help us.”

Rebecca Traister: That is exactly right. It’s a version of the widow’s mandate, which is how do you get a woman in power? Her husband dies.

Brittney Cooper: Right, it’s not proving yourself through your great ideas and turning a state blue like Stacey Abrams or being the most qualified like Hillary Clinton. That didn’t work for either of them. The truth that we have to remind ourselves on the left is that the presidency is not a meritocracy. The world that white men have built is not a meritocracy. It is a tactical maneuver for political ends. And once the left keeps being reminded of that, we will stop having this conversation as though we are debating the merits of which of these terrible white men is actually better. Neither one of them on their merits deserves the presidency, given that there’s so many other people who are meritorious. So I think that that’s a thing.

The other thing to say is, of course, it’s unfair to ask Black women to be Jesus, but the reality is we live in a country where the closest thing to Jesus that we have is Black women. And so just go on and let us do it. I mean, it’s not that we can’t do it, it’s that people get in our way. Before, I said, “Get off Kamala’s back.” Now what I’m going to say is make Joe Biden’s back the bridge to a new democracy and let Kamala walk over it.