At the mature, old age of 72, the Oxford-schooled Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana is far too wise, much too educated, and way too refined to run his fat mouth like some cocky young punk.
But the sharp-tongued Republican chose to do just this last week with personal insults about Kamala Harris, the vice president of the United States and the Democratic candidate for president against former President Donald Trump, Kennedy’s fellow Republican.
If elected, she would become the first female president and the second of color.
“Many Americans think the vice president is a little bit of a ding-dong, that she’s not serious,” Kennedy told Neil Cavuto of Fox News Channel. “ . . . She is a member of the loon wing of the Democratic party . . . She’s just like Congresswoman [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez except without the bartending experience.”
Kennedy mocked the way Harris laughs.
“Margaret Thatcher didn’t giggle,” Kennedy said. “Golda Meir didn’t giggle.”
While discussing how Harris replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket last month, Kennedy portrayed both Biden and Harris as damaged goods mentally and not quite human. Harris is a woman, Kennedy said, the American voters will reject.
“They’ve had one vegetable-in-chief,” he said of Biden. “They don’t want another.”
In that Cavuto is one of Fox’s more objective anchors, he asked Kennedy — from a Republican point of view, of course — whether all this caustic ridicule of Harris by Kennedy, Trump, and other Republicans might “come back to bite your heinies.”
By this, Cavuto implied that attacks on Harris’s intelligence — along with those about her race (mixed American) and gender (female American) — might backfire on Trump because they offend voters (even Republicans and conservatives) who aren’t as sexist and racist as Trump.
“Well, I’m sorry if that offended you, Neil,” Kennedy said, with sarcasm, as he sneered and Cavuto frowned into two cameras on a split screen.
Perhaps we can rationalize the arrogant Kennedy, who looks and speaks like “Mr. Haney,” the bumpkin con man from the old TV comedy Green Acres. Kennedy is a loyal member of the chorus of red-state politicians from the old Confederacy who are singing Trump’s treasonous tunes.
They harmonize with the Boss. In appearances before the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago and at the campaign rally in Atlanta last week, Trump continued to mock Harris’s very name, and her race, as he painted her as an angel of doom.
He lied that she just recently “turned Black.” Even when Trump pronounced her name correctly, he used it, at times, without her last name, the way the master of the house addresses the hired help, like Hilda, the cook, or Sam, the gardener.
Notice how jarring it sounded when she smiled and called him, simply, “Donald?” Two can play that game.
Here are more random discharges from the large, loud, orange-faced, yellow-haired demagogue, who foamed at the mouth for 90 minutes at his Atlanta rally but left stage after about 35 minutes with Black journalists in Chicago.
“Crazy Kamala,” Trump said. “ . . . Some people think I mispronounce it on purpose . . . I said ‘Don’t worry about it’ . . . I couldn’t care less if I mispronounce it or not. I couldn’t care less.”
He compared her to other progressive politicians and psychoanalyzed her.
“She’s a dumb version of Bernie Sanders,” Trump said. “. . . She is a lunatic . . . She’s a horror show . . . She’ll destroy our country . . . If Kamala wins, it’ll be . . . crime, chaos, and death . . . She has destroyed our country . . . She is grossly incompetent.”
Of course, Harris is to blame for any crime committed by an undocumented immigrant.
“Kamala Harris let in the savage monster who murdered Laken Riley,” Trump said. “Laken’s blood is on Kamala Harris’s hands . . . Harris wants to be the president for criminals and illegal aliens.”
Might there be a sex component?
“Harris is a radical ‘trans’ activist,” Trump said.
Republicans with more decency than Kennedy have gently suggested in the Cavuto manner that it might be wise for MAGA Republicans and Trump to focus more on “the issues” and “policy differences” with Harris than on ad hominem attacks.
They don’t get that race and gender are Trump’s “policy issues” with Harris. By doubling down on personal attacks before the Black journalists, Trump spoke not to them but to all the bigots in the TV audience.
In effect, he showed his hard-core base: “Look at me! I stand up to our uppity enemies who dare to threaten our white, Christian nationalism.” His tone of voice and body language conveyed casual disdain for his foes.
And low blows are part of presidential history. In 1988, the first George Bush paved his victory with the “Willie Horton” ads that implied that his Democratic opponent, Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, would parole (through a revolving prison door) Black convicts who would commit more crimes.
Twenty years before that, George Wallace drew MAGA-style crowds at rallies and a national following by ranting against all the changes of the 1960s that he thought were spurred by the Civil Rights movement — which he brazenly defied as governor of Alabama.
What will Trump target next: Harris’s romantic history or her religion? What is beneath him?
Certainly, religion plays a role in presidential history. More recently, enemies of President Barack Obama accused him of being a Muslim and not a Christian. Forty years before Wallace, the Democrat Al Smith lost in 1928 to Herbert Hoover in part because Protestants feared Smith’s Roman Catholicism.
But when the Democrat John F. Kennedy ran in 1960 against Richard Nixon, former President Harry Truman was asked if he feared JFK’s Catholicism. In that Kennedy’s father, Joe, was a political wheeler-dealer, Truman replied: “I don’t fear the Pope. I fear the Pop.”
Winning that election, JFK brought to Washington grace, charm, and true wit, things no longer found in the capital even from elected officials named John Kennedy.
