Why Harris 2024? Personal Musings…

I usually keep my political thoughts to myself (or to friends and family), but with so many potential national and personal policies and issues at stake, I have decided to share some of my musings. First of all, like most Americans, I felt both former president Trump and current President Biden were too old and lacked the stamina needed to effectively run a country of our size and complexity, let alone the endless global realities that require continuous hands on engagement. Without pointing out obvious character shortcomings of Trump, he is simply out of touch with the current policy needs of all Americans, unaware of demographic changes, and his arguments are simply not coherent and appear to be angry rants of a bitter person, which are not good qualities a president should present to the world. Biden, a good and honorable man who served graciously and reflected presidential qualities is also not capable of representing us given that the impact of his age and the riggers of the office took a toll on his fitness to continue to run for another term. Thus, before Biden dropped out, I felt sad for America — the duties of a second term for Biden would surely crush him; yet, we could not elect someone who has no ability to empathize with the needs of all Americans and would not represent us in the policies he or his team invoked on and against many of the population.

I often wondered why our political parties were not presenting us with more acceptable candidate choices. We need younger, energetic, honorable choices than what we currently had. I was not a big supporter of Vice President Harris just taking over during his second term if President Biden could not manage his role any longer as we deserve to choose our president through an election. Thus, when President Biden did the right and honorable thing by stepping aside to allow the electorate to choose Vice President Harris, I felt relief and pride for our democratic process.

To truly have a democratic society, we need a strong Republican party as well, not a cult of a person; yet, the Republican party has chosen to fragment and destroy its own strong values to support an undeserving person rather than choose a candidate that represents important conservative values as previous Republican presidents had in decades before. The Republican party is no longer recognizable in its current form and that saddens me as I had once voted for President Reagan with the confidence that his values were representative of where the country was at that time. Since then, I voted for President Clinton, President Obama, and President Biden as the policies they represented reflected the country’s demographic changes, economic and global realities of their times. Surely, the Republican party at its core still exists in some small way and has access to a set of younger, stronger, and more relevant candidates than Trump…I hope. But how do they reinvent themselves as the coherent, honorable party that reflects our current values and needs. The Republican party of the past demonstrated that they do not need polarizing dictator personalities to win elections. They won by being a voice of logical reasoning with a unifying message All Americans can see themselves being part of and helping to shape. Presidents are to be our collective voice and collective set of values. They represent us, all of us, and not just a few. They are not to dictate their values upon us and punish us for our beautiful diverse perspectives and beliefs. We are the republic.

Well, this gets me to Vice President Harris and her running mate Tim Waltz. I am so thankful that a new choice has arisen and I can feel the relief and energy this has brought to the American people. Vice President Harris is showing herself to be a tough and gracious candidate, who cares about the people in this country — all the people. We all still need to hear each other as we share our beliefs, values, and grievances. I suspect we are probably more aligned across parties than we know. We need to help VP Harris and Tim Waltz reflect these values and beliefs in their policies through all means available to us. We, the people, have the opportunity to shape our government to reflect the current republic, which will allow us to unify and heal. I am thrilled for this change in the democratic party because it has been a long time since we have had the opportunity to reinvent ourselves in a way that reflects us all. So how do we do this?

How do we bring our voices to be heard? Well, we write, we participate in surveys, rallies, conventions, and we post our thoughts in social media, especially on the candidates pages. We talk to people openly and honestly about policies that help or hurt us. We form alliances and leverage our democratic rights at community and counsel meetings, share our grievances at peaceful protests, and call our representatives.

In the mean time, I will keep digging into these candidates and policies so we can deconstruct them together. More to come…