Source: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / Getty
By the close of September, Kamala Harris’ campaign had raised more than $1 billion in support of her candidacy, NBC News and multiple outlets reported earlier today. The amount includes monies raised by both the campaign and joint efforts with the Democratic National Committee and its state affiliates. Harris is now able to do what was perhaps completely unexpected when President Biden stepped out of the race on July 21 so that she could take the reins.
It took the Vice President only two months to pull those funds together, making NBC News and other mainstream outlets concede that the excitement around Harris–unlike the center poet WB Yeats wrote of during the First World War–would appear to have held. Surely her debate performance helped, as likely the slippages Trump has demonstrated–along with his messages of doom, gloom and hate–did.
The Times had this to say:
“Past presidential candidates, including Joseph R. Biden and Mr. Trump four years ago, have [each] raised more than $1 billion together with their parties.
Mr. Trump announced that he had surpassed that mark in July 2020, after he had been raising funds for his re-election for multiple years.
It is the sheer speed with which Ms. Harris has reached the $1 billion threshold that is notable. No presidential candidate is believed to have ever raised so much so fast after entering a race…”
Trump has rich friend too! (Maybe just not as hopeful friends.)
Elon Musk, who has ensured he is seen and known as the super villain he perhaps always has been, has made his super PAC–and a whole bunch of in-kind advertising–work for Trump. There are others in the vulgarly wealthy class–Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, for example–who are doing the most they can for the ex-president. But it may not be enough. Voters may need the one thing Trump is almost universally incapable of offering: hope.
Of course there are many who don’t read anything credible–evidence-based–about the economy or the state of the world Trump left in his wake. Perhaps they feel something like hope in Trump, who may not feed them and may let them die of one disease of despair or another, but will never let them die not thinking that their whiteness was the only saving grace they ever needed.
More legitimately, hope for a Trump presidency lives among members of the vulgarly wealthy class who most certainly would have even grander tax shelter under his rule. And as for rights, they could be bought, sort of like they are now, only probably more openly, probably without shame. But these truths generate something like hope. Not the thing itself.
Source: Bettmann / Getty
A legacy unbroken
That kind of hope has been seeded in Kamala Harris’ run, and her run only–whether or not one believes that hope has been planted in the soil needed to grow. The person who can’t admit that, is a person who has likely dealt in lies for nearly as long as they’ve been able to speak, because observably and tactilely–people across the nation are feeling the hope. They’re breathing the air that hope creates. And we’ve needed that air, that moment to exhale. And no group more so than the very group that always seems to call us to breathe and hope: Black women. They’re who made this moment possible, announcing it publicly within an hour of the Vice President declaring her intention.
And who else but Black women? It’s the kind of hope we have always somehow known it and known soul-deep. Known before we were even aware of our knowing. Before we gave a single thought the foremothers who first bequeathed us some 20 generations ago. They passed on the kind of hope that still seems unimaginable. It’s hope that is borne of the sort of walk-on-water faith only women who saw a free universe for their progeny, even as the chains bound them without reprieve inside a nation founded as their death camp. A nation that ways it pretends it doesn’t, remains a death camp to this day.
MAGAs don’t know that kind of hope. Nor do they know the kind of hope the Harris candidacy inspired in the families of women who died as a result of Trump’s legacy of successful, misogynist campaign to take away healthcare from 50 percent of America’s population because they were born with ovaries and a vagina. That’s a full, thick hope as in: Please God please don’t let another’s mother’s daughter lose their life. It’s hope that is, at the same time, impossible to release and impossible to keep holding without experiencing a pain that cannot be named or explained. They hold anyway.
As do the parents of children who grew up to become soldiers who never had the chance to step off one of America’s war theater stages. They were taken off that stage and wrapped in a flag that provided no protection against a leader who dismissed their deaths with the breath-stealing callousness he dismissed the deaths of what was 400,000 people in the U.S. during the pandemic by the time he hung his head and headed out of D.C. No country in the world experienced the loss America did–despite its money, its medicine and technology. The loved ones left to bury their dead, lost on battlefields and win nursing homes, know the marrow-level hope now having been forced to say: Please do not let the next leader of this country publicly and cruelly dishonor my baby. Please God please.
And they don’t know the kind of hope that lives in every rumbling tummy of at least 1 in 3 Black children.
That’s the kind of hope that pleads, Can the next billion dollars raised please help us all eat?
SEE ALSO:
‘Say Her Name’: At DNC, Kerry Washington, VP Harris’ Grandnieces, Teach America How To Properly Pronounce ‘Kamala’
Black Voter Registration Rates Surge Amid Kamala Harris’ Historic Candidacy, Data Shows
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