Kamala Harris for president — the Cap Times' endorsement | Editorial | captimes.com
Aug 21, 2024The Democratic National Convention concludes a remarkable process of transition by one of this county’s two major parties. This year’s presidential campaign began with the expectation that President Joe Biden would be the Democratic nominee for a second term and that Vice President Kamala Harris would run with him on a ticket that merited reelection but that was burdened by broad popular concerns about Biden’s age.
Biden’s ill-fated appearance in the first presidential debate with his Republican rival, former President Donald Trump, upended the Democrat’s reelection bid. Biden and his partisan supporters had to deal with the difficult question of whether they were offering voters a sufficiently compelling candidate, along with a sufficiently compelling vision, to prevail at a critical juncture in the American experiment.
To their credit, Democrats faced reality and acted. Biden stood down. Harris stood up. And she chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate on a reorganized Democratic ticket. The process was not easy, but it was necessary — and the willingness of Democrats to do the right thing has been rewarded by a surge in national polls, and in polls from battleground states such as Wisconsin.
Millions of Americans who expressed uncertainty about whether they would back a Biden-Harris ticket are now supporting the Harris-Walz ticket. We think they are making the right choice.
In fact, we think they’re making the only reasonable choice.
Today we embrace that choice by making our own enthusiastic endorsement of Harris for the presidency and Walz for the vice presidency.
The Capital Times had made endorsements — for president, governor, congressional seats and down-ballot posts — for more than a century. We have endorsed Republicans, Democrats and independents — including former Wisconsin Gov. Robert M. La Follette, a lifelong Republican who a century ago ran as an independent progressive.
Most of our endorsements in recent years have gone to Democrats because the party of Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama has offered a more realistic economic and social vision, supporting higher wages, expanded access to health care, increased funding for public education and public services, an embrace of women’s rights, civil rights, LGBTQ+ rights and disability rights, and taking the side of conservation, environmental protection and climate justice.
We would be thrilled if Republicans tried to be competitive with the Democrats on these issues, as they once did in the Wisconsin of Warren Knowles, Lee Sherman Dreyfus and Tommy Thompson. Even when we disagreed with those former Republican governors, we respected the determination to do right by Wisconsinites. We have no such respect for Donald Trump, or for his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance.
Trump is a twice-impeached, multiply convicted, wholly dishonorable candidate who literally tried to overturn the results from Wisconsin in the 2020 election. The American electorate rejected him by 7 million votes. He should not be allowed near the White House, and neither should Vance, whose wild-eyed extremism suggests that he has no more respect for democracy than Trump.
If the Republican Party was serious about politics, and serious about governing at this definitional moment in American history, it would have rejected Trump and Trumpism at its convention in Milwaukee. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the Republicans doubled down on their dysfunction, and, in so doing, they disqualified their ticket.
In stark contrast, Harris and Walz are uniquely qualified. In addition to her four years of experience as vice president, Harris served ably in the U.S. Senate, as California’s attorney general and as San Francisco’s district attorney. Walz, a former teacher who for decades served in the National Guard, has 12 years of experience as a member of the U.S. House and six years as one of the most effective and progressive governors in the history of Minnesota.
Harris and Walz are ready to govern. They will do so with a domestic policy vision that builds upon the successes of the Biden-Harris administration, working to counter inflation by cracking down on corporate price gouging, investing in housing construction and initiatives to make home buying easier for working Americans, cutting child poverty and addressing the medical debt crisis.
Trump says Harris’ proposals are radical. That’s absurd. These are relatively modest interventions that, in many instances, are less ambitious than the anti-inflation initiatives of former Republican Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. And the effort to tackle medical debt, while surely welcome, falls far short of the single-payer “Medicare for All” reform that represents the best strategy for cutting costs and improving care.
There are, of course, areas in which we differ with Harris and Walz. For instance, we would like to see them make a clearer break with Biden’s foreign policy team on the question of Gaza. To our view, the United States needs to become an honest player in the Middle East, actively advocating for an immediate cease-fire, for the release of hostages, and for justice and security for Palestinians and Israelis.
We believe that Harris and Walz have the capacity to evolve toward the positions embraced by former President Jimmy Carter and U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, D-town of Vermont, when it comes to Middle East policy, and we hope they will do so.
In a more general sense, we have had enough contact with Harris and Walz over the years to develop confidence in their shared desire to keep moving in the right direction for America and the world.
With Trump, on the other hand, our only confidence is that he will continue to break everything he touches.
The 2024 election is not a close call. The contrast between the Harris-Walz ticket and the Trump-Vance ticket is stark. We know that some may think it is early for a newspaper to make an endorsement in the fall campaign.
We disagree. We believe that this is precisely the time for Wisconsinites to throw their support to Kamala Harris for president and Tim Walz for vice president.
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I'm still one of the ones who is hard to convince FL will flip but I'd love to be wrong. I hope Nikki Fried and them know what the fuck they are doing. lol
