Quote:
Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski
I saw her say she wants the government to pay for sex change operations for inmates. I bet I saw her say it 1000 times. It was a big part of why she lost Michigan.*
*And Arabs reaction to what was happening in Gaza, which is pretty crazy if you think about it.
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I was talking to one of my college roommates about this, and he's a former Senate staffer who has stayed involved in Democratic politics in a way that earns him money, and I think his take on this was right. I don't think you saw Harris say that, exactly. In 2019, her campaign answered a questionnaire (and based on what I know about how campaigns work, I assume that a staffer did this in a way that was approved by the campaign, if not her personally).
See the facts recounted here. My roommate suggests that what happened here is not that Harris particularly cared one way or the other, but that -- and this is a recurring problem for Democrats -- the party is a coalition, and the campaign basically acceded to the demands on this position made by the people within the the Democratic coalition who really care about this stuff. At the time, Harris did not want to have a fight with them, so she took what seemed like the expedient way out. When the issue blew up during the campaign, she tried -- unsuccessfully -- to defuse it by saying she was just following the law, as Trump had during his first term.
Do you really think Harris wanted to expend political capital on this issue? No. And if she were a better politician, she wouldn't have put herself in this box. Am I defending her here? Not at all, but I am trying to put my finger the actual problem, which is not that Harris really wanted the government to pay for sex change operations for inmates, but more about the problems Democrats can have in trying to manage a coalition. My understanding, from my roommate, is that she got that questionnaire from an organization that was more committed to pushing the Overton Window on trans issues than on winning elections for Democrats, and the lesson he and others take from it is that the Democrats need to more resistant to that kind of hijacking.
(Note to Sebby: When the hard left actually holds sway, it doesn't to try to influence to discourse by sending people questionnaires -- it just sends dissenters to the gulags and re-education camps we don't have in this country.)
