The Conservative Political Action Committee has returned to D.C. this week for its annual conference, and it’s serving up heaping platters of lazy, hateful political commentary to conservative voters.
On Thursday, the conference hosted a panel titled “Cat Fight? Michelle vs. Kamala.” The event featured white conservative commentators teeing off on former First Lady Michelle Obama and current Vice President Kamala Harris for half an hour — offering plenty of commentary on the two women’s race, gender, and their fantasies, or nightmares, that one of them might replace Joe Biden as the 2024 Democratic nominee.
“Kamala could be our first Black woman president — Michelle well…” radio host Larry O’Connor said while pretending to wonder whether she qualified. The comment was a barely veiled reference to long-standing right-wing dribble accusing the former first lady of secretly being a man. The crowd at CPAC laughed.
“We were way too nice, except for the thing I said about Michelle,” O’Conner said toward the end of the panel.
Obama has repeatedly declared that she has no interest in running for the presidency, but that hasn’t stopped Republicans from drafting feverish fan fiction about Obama or Harris swooping in as a last-minute replacement for Biden.
Breitbart Washington Bureau Chief Matt Boyle, who sat on the panel, said the last time he was with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the former president told him “he expects that Biden will step aside, or be pushed aside, and they will try at the convention to go with Kamala, and he thinks they will fail to get Kamala. …Then the question is who’s after Kamala, and that’s what [panelist Monica Crowley] is saying about Michelle Obama.”
Boyle added that Rep. Jim Clyburn’s endorsement of Biden in 2020 was “contingent on Joe picking a Black woman as his vice-president” and that “all these people talking about Gavin Newsom being the candidate in 2024, I’m like, eh, I don’t think so. Good luck to the white man trying to take it away from the Black woman.
Crowley, a podcast host and former Fox News contributor, added that Republicans “need to be prepared for the worst case scenario, and Michelle Obama is the worst case scenario because she poses the most threatening challenge to President Trump.”
“We need to be prepared because she is a woman of color, she is considered iconic,” Crowley added before being interrupted by columnist Kurt Schlichter, who questioned who in the country considered Michelle Obama iconic.
“I don’t know, I think a lot of frustrated wine women from the suburbs do,” Schlichter added, noting his belief that a large swath of the country would oppose Obama’s nomination — which again, she has explicitly said she’s not interested in.
The biggest barrier to these absurd scenarios the panelists imagined is that Biden himself has no intention of stepping aside. Crowley raised the prospect that the Democratic Party may force Biden’s resignation in a similar move to Republicans pressuring Richard Nixon to step down in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal.
“The difference is Richard Nixon had respect for norms and the United States of America. These guys don’t, Joe Biden doesn’t. Joe Biden is the capo of a criminal organization,” Schlichter said.
The panel was ultimately little more than a public display of Republicans’ continued fixation on Harris and Obama as punching bags for their racial, gender, and policy grievances. Biden and Harris will be, “clinging to the White House curtains,” Crowley said,” adding that “the left’s powerbrokers, Barack and Michelle, working in conjunction with the deep state, FBI, CIA, all of the agencies that we know are so deeply corrupt, will make some sort of move on one or both of them — I hope I’m wrong.”
Source link: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/cpac-cat-fight-panel-michelle-obama-kamala-harris-1234973931/