WASHINGTON: The story — possibly apocryphal — goes that when some Democrats in Arkansas realized that Hillary Clinton was much smarter than the man they chose as governor, someone exclaimed, “We’ve elected the wrong Clinton!”
No such sentiment is in the offing in the current Republican ecosystem, whose leadership appears to prefer women take a backseat while all too readily denigrating them — particularly if they happen to be women of color.
Echoes of such sexist, racist outlook surfaced again over the weekend when former President Trump called his rival Kamala Harris a “bum.”
“She was a bum three weeks ago. She was a bum,” Trump told a conservative group of his opponent who has been the US vice-president for three and half years, and whose sudden elevation to the top of the Democratic ticket has rattled Republicans.
The slur outraged Democrats who found it strange that a “twice impeached 34X convicted felon & adjudicated rapist who bragged about sexually assaulting women, was fined a half a billion for fraud, stole hundreds of classified docs & attempted a coup – is calling Kamala Harris a bum.”
The war of words is threatening to take the election campaign into the gutter. On Sunday, Republicans surfaced a Harris event in which she ostensibly used the f-word and claimed she was drunk during the interview.
Such claims are becoming increasingly hard to verify given the AI tools now available. Also over the weekend, Elon Musk, the boss of X (formerly Twitter), who has become an ardent Trump supporter, himself posted a deepfake video of Harris’ without disclosing it was manipulated.
Meanwhile, Trump’s running mate JD Vance, responding to disquiet among some MAGA Republicans over his wife Usha Chilukuri’s Indian origin, dropped another clanger, saying, “Obviously, she’s not a white person… but I love Usha, she’s such a good mom.”
“Honestly this is such a weird way to respond to white supremacist attacks on your Indian-American wife. Pathetic.” one commentator remarked, even as analysts on both sides of the political spectrum dissected their relationship and marriage going back to their early days in college.
The scrutiny has intensified following Vance’s “childless cat lady” remarks that he has doubled down on and defended, even as some of his other comments talking up families, children, and parenting — at the expense of single people — are surfacing.
In a searching assessment of Usha Vance’s life and career, the US media is focusing on how an accomplished woman from a liberal, Democratic leaning family, who had herself voted Democratic, signed up for her husband’s Trumpism and the conservative values it espouses.
Citing unnamed friends, one report said Usha was “outraged by Trump’s incitement of the deadly riot at the US Capitol and lamented the social breakdown that fueled his political support,” while noting that she explicitly did not mention the former President’s name in her Republican convention speech in which she praised her husband and supported his nomination.
“Usha found the incursion on the Capitol and Trump’s role in it to be deeply disturbing. She was generally appalled by Trump, from the moment of his first election. It was surreal to see her sitting next to him,” the Washington Post quoted the unnamed friend as saying.
The report noted how “an overwhelmingly White crowd on the convention floor…tittered uneasily as she joked about her husband learning to cook Indian food and audibly gasped when she mentioned her vegetarian diet.”
Republican strategists though say her views of Trump have changed along with that of her husband, who was once so critical of the former President that he called him “America’s Hitler” and a “cultural heroin.”
No such sentiment is in the offing in the current Republican ecosystem, whose leadership appears to prefer women take a backseat while all too readily denigrating them — particularly if they happen to be women of color.
Echoes of such sexist, racist outlook surfaced again over the weekend when former President Trump called his rival Kamala Harris a “bum.”
“She was a bum three weeks ago. She was a bum,” Trump told a conservative group of his opponent who has been the US vice-president for three and half years, and whose sudden elevation to the top of the Democratic ticket has rattled Republicans.
The slur outraged Democrats who found it strange that a “twice impeached 34X convicted felon & adjudicated rapist who bragged about sexually assaulting women, was fined a half a billion for fraud, stole hundreds of classified docs & attempted a coup – is calling Kamala Harris a bum.”
The war of words is threatening to take the election campaign into the gutter. On Sunday, Republicans surfaced a Harris event in which she ostensibly used the f-word and claimed she was drunk during the interview.
Such claims are becoming increasingly hard to verify given the AI tools now available. Also over the weekend, Elon Musk, the boss of X (formerly Twitter), who has become an ardent Trump supporter, himself posted a deepfake video of Harris’ without disclosing it was manipulated.
Meanwhile, Trump’s running mate JD Vance, responding to disquiet among some MAGA Republicans over his wife Usha Chilukuri’s Indian origin, dropped another clanger, saying, “Obviously, she’s not a white person… but I love Usha, she’s such a good mom.”
“Honestly this is such a weird way to respond to white supremacist attacks on your Indian-American wife. Pathetic.” one commentator remarked, even as analysts on both sides of the political spectrum dissected their relationship and marriage going back to their early days in college.
The scrutiny has intensified following Vance’s “childless cat lady” remarks that he has doubled down on and defended, even as some of his other comments talking up families, children, and parenting — at the expense of single people — are surfacing.
In a searching assessment of Usha Vance’s life and career, the US media is focusing on how an accomplished woman from a liberal, Democratic leaning family, who had herself voted Democratic, signed up for her husband’s Trumpism and the conservative values it espouses.
Citing unnamed friends, one report said Usha was “outraged by Trump’s incitement of the deadly riot at the US Capitol and lamented the social breakdown that fueled his political support,” while noting that she explicitly did not mention the former President’s name in her Republican convention speech in which she praised her husband and supported his nomination.
“Usha found the incursion on the Capitol and Trump’s role in it to be deeply disturbing. She was generally appalled by Trump, from the moment of his first election. It was surreal to see her sitting next to him,” the Washington Post quoted the unnamed friend as saying.
The report noted how “an overwhelmingly White crowd on the convention floor…tittered uneasily as she joked about her husband learning to cook Indian food and audibly gasped when she mentioned her vegetarian diet.”
Republican strategists though say her views of Trump have changed along with that of her husband, who was once so critical of the former President that he called him “America’s Hitler” and a “cultural heroin.”