Thread by @SethAbramson

A nonwhite woman can become California AG, a US Senator, then Vice President of the US and there’ll always be someone on hand to say she has no idea what she’s doing. Harris isn’t above critique, but let’s have a substantive, incisive, policy-oriented one. wsj.com/articles/kamal…

Trump was POTUS and didn’t read *anything* and his subordinates regularly committed crimes. Harris is VPOTUS—though she only has been for ~10 months—and now we hear she isn’t reading *enough* briefing materials and her subordinates are disgruntled. On some level, give me a break.

It’s columns like these that explain, in not-so-minor part, why Harris has a lower approval rating than a career criminal and serial sexual assailant with a quarter of her intelligence and competence. Columns like these and the attitudes of those who read them and nod their head.

I shouldn’t be reading anything that questions Harris’ competence. I shouldn’t be reading anything that questions whether Harris is knowledgeable. I shouldn’t be reading anything that asks if some dysfunction in her office means she’s not cut out for her job. Why? I’ll tell you.

Because if you were to rank every politician in Washington by competence, knowledge, and the level of dysfunction within their office, about 450 *men* would have to be written about *before* Kamala Harris—because they would rank *much* lower.

But those stories don’t get written.

There’s nothing wrong with noting that Harris has struggled to develop a broad base of admirers within the electorate. There’s nothing wrong with noting that she’ll need achievements as Vice President if she hopes to one day be a POTUS. But “Does she have it?” stories are absurd.

Kamala Harris is one of the most successful women in US history. And she got there by being incredibly smart and talented and—yes—a good administrator. Any story that fails to start from that premise is so historically implausible and comically tilted it can’t be taken seriously.

It takes an odd combination of skills to be POTUS. And as we saw with Trump, sometimes the skills are risible and nothing to aspire to. The question of whether Harris has the right combination of admirable skills and abnormalities to be POTUS can be asked without denigrating her.

When Trump chose him to be his bootlicker, Pence was a failed pol of little distinction who as VP was wooden and distant and obtuse and dogmatic and a zealot. I don't recall seeing many stories questioning whether he was ready to be in the Oval Office.

Why? He “looked the part.”

Noonan is erudite, eloquent, and has a sense of history. She was perfectly capable of writing a critique of Harris’ approach to being VPOTUS—and what might be required of her to become POTUS—without indulging the ecosystem of misogynistic media bullshit that’s surrounded Harris.

(PS) On a personal note, I want to acknowledge that I wasn’t always sensate to the toxic inequalities in how American media portrays powerful men and powerful women. It took being married to a woman who is much smarter and wiser than me to learn how deficient I was on this score.