The Democratic Party establishment is moving rapidly to guarantee the nomination of Vice President Kamala Harris well before the Democratic National Convention opens in Chicago August 19.
The rules committee of the DNC voted Wednesday to hold a virtual nomination vote of all convention delegates during the first week of August, in order to meet ballot requirements in Ohio. State governors and other party bosses have already announced that a majority of convention delegates will cast their votes for Harris, based on online polling of state delegations.
Harris must select a vice-presidential running mate before the virtual vote is held. A half dozen Democratic governors, senators and Biden administration officials are currently being vetted by the Harris campaign, a process that usually takes months but has been telescoped into a 10-day period.
Since President Joe Biden announced Sunday he was withdrawing from the election campaign, there has been a surge of campaign cash into the Democratic Party’s coffers, as well as a deluge of flattering media publicity, hailing the supposed youthfulness and excitement that the 59-year-old former senator and California state attorney general brings to the campaign. Polls reportedly show that the race between Harris and Trump is effectively tied, particularly in the six or seven closely contested “battleground” states.
On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who had briefly held back from endorsing Harris, appeared together on Capitol Hill to declare their support. Only a handful of prominent Democrats, including former president Barack Obama, have yet to officially endorse the presumptive nominee.
Harris made her first public appearance as the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Tuesday in Milwaukee, where the fascist Republican National Convention was held last week. She made a series of demagogic pledges for actions that the Biden-Harris administration has been incapable of accomplishing, including guaranteeing that “every person has affordable health care, affordable child care, and paid family leave,” and “every senior can retire with dignity.”
In reality, the Biden-Harris administration has subordinated all social spending to the demands of its aggressive and militaristic foreign policy, including all-out backing for the war against Russia in Ukraine, tens of billions for Israel to carry out genocide in Gaza and prepare for war against Iran, and a military build-up in the Indo-Pacific region directed against China.
Harris is fully committed to continuing all these policies and has the support of the bulk of the military-intelligence apparatus in doing so. They distrust the Trump-Vance ticket, regarding Trump as too erratic and impulsive and Vance as willing to do and say anything to keep in Trump’s good graces.
This was demonstrated in an open letter signed by 350 former ambassadors, military officers, CIA executives and other national security officials, most of them Democrats from the Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations, but including many prominent Republicans and career government officials not affiliated with either capitalist party.
The letter declared:
When it comes to handling America’s national security, Vice President Harris requires no on-the-job training. In fact, if elected President, she would enter that office with more significant national security experience than the four Presidents prior to President Biden [i.e., Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump]. And in today’s global security environment, we need a strong and tested leader.
Vice President Harris’s record of diplomacy is outstanding. She has met with President Xi of China and dozens of leaders throughout the Indo-Pacific as part of our efforts to strengthen alliances and partnerships, grow our economy, and out-compete China. Across four trips to the Indo-Pacific and representing the United States at numerous global summits, the Vice President has strengthened alliances and partnerships in the Indo-Pacific, and in particular, Southeast Asia, in recognition of the importance of this region to American security and prosperity. She has met six times with President Zelenskyy of Ukraine, including in a meeting five days before Russia invaded Ukraine in order to warn him of the imminent invasion and help Ukraine prepare. She has traveled to NATO’s Eastern Flank and helped ensure NATO unity in the face of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Those signing the letter endorsing Harris include the national security officials most closely involved in the preparation and instigation of the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, such as Victoria Nuland, former under-secretary of state for political affairs and chief organizer of the 2014 Maidan coup that overthrew the elected pro-Russian government in Kiev, as well as Obama’s two secretaries of state, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director Michael Hayden, former CIA Director and Pentagon chief Leon Panetta, former national security advisers Thomas Donilon and Susan Rice, and former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, as well as former CIA general counsel Jeremy Bash, the former husband of CNN anchor Dana Bash.
The Republicans or Republican appointees to top State Department and Pentagon positions include Robert Blackwill, Robert Work, Richard Haass and Chuck Hagel.
Demonstrating the priorities of the Democratic campaign, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, one of the top prospects being vetted as a possible running mate for Harris, lashed out publicly Wednesday against Republican vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance, charging that he would “abandon” Ukraine in favor of Russia.
“It’s pretty clear to me you’ve got JD Vance who wants to totally abandon Ukraine, and you’ve got Donald Trump who has been in the past rather pro-Russia and leaned in with Vladimir Putin in ways I would never expect the president to do,” he told Politico. “So again, we have a serious choice to make, and I’d be really concerned about what those guys would do to abandon an ally in favor of an adversary. And that would be a much more dangerous world.”
A former astronaut and Navy pilot, Kelly has advocated training Ukrainian pilots on US-built F-16 fighter jets at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. Kelly reportedly visited the Farnborough International Airshow in England this week, where he conducted discussions about US military assistance to Ukraine.
The vast flood of campaign cash for Harris and the Democrats comes from two sources. Some $126 million has been raised in small-dollar donations from workers and middle-class people fooled by the claims that Harris would represent a more progressive and vigorous alternative to the fascistic campaign of Trump and Vance.
Even more money, however, comes from billionaire supporters of the Democratic Party, who played a major role in forcing out Biden by withholding promised donations. One of those financial oligarchs, Abigail Disney, an heiress to the Disney fortune, revealed publicly that she had reversed her previous decision to hold back support for Biden, and would pump millions into super PACs backing Harris.