Karine Jean-Pierre, former White House Press Secretary under President Joe Biden, has shocked her peers and the political world by announcing recently that she’s abandoning the Democratic Party and declaring herself an independent. And I’m happy to say, “Welcome!”
Born in Martinique, Jean-Pierre attended – among other colleges – the New York Institute of Technology (from where I earned my B.A. in English) and had been a registered Democrat her entire adult life – well, until now. Like most people in the maelstrom of the American political arena, she had to conform to certain party ideology and maintain a specific persona. After her brief stint as Biden’s Press Secretary, however, she apparently couldn’t tolerate the deception any longer.
I have to admire her candor. She’s one of the few people in recent years to step forward and be so blatantly honest with her sentiments. The truth always hurts, and Jean-Pierre has taken a sledgehammer to a migraine.
I didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016 because I didn’t feel she was the right leader for the nation. I only voted for Biden in 2020 to keep Trump from winning another term, but I reverted back to the Green Party last year and voted for Jill Stein. Trump still won, since the U.S. is not quite ready for a president with vaginal attributes – unlike many other nations in the Western Hemisphere, including our two bordering neighbors.
Jean-Pierre has notably critical of Biden’s mental and physical health – something his opponents had frequently cited from the moment he declared his candidacy. American politics is such an ugly venture. It’s always been nasty, but I feel it became especially toxic after the Watergate scandal. I’ve said for years that the worst thing the Democratic Party could have done in the run-up to the 2020 elections was to stand by as Biden and Bernie Sanders announced they were seeking the U.S. presidency.
As the 2020 presidential race commenced, the Democratic Party presented the most diverse gallery of candidates of any such contest. Then, like their Republican counterparts, they ended up with two old White men at the top. Biden’s only saving moment was selecting Kamala Harris as his running mate. It was an odd pairing. Harris became the first female Vice-President in U.S. history, while Biden eventually became the nation’s first octogenarian Commander-in- Chief.
During Donald Trump’s first term, I often told people – both supporters and detractors – that I felt the U.S. was essentially leaderless. Trump pales in comparison to many of his predecessors. On the other hand, though, his Democratic counterparts have their own share of failures. When the Democrat Party elected Ken Martin its new chair this past February, the news arrived with the same bravura as paint drying. The longtime leader of the Minnesota Democratic Party, Martin hopes to lead his constituents into a future filled with greater accomplishments (wins) across the nation.
“Donald Trump, the Republican Party, this is a new DNC,” Martin told reporters after his election. “We are not going to sit back and not take you on when you fail the American people.”
And I wish for the blind to see and the lame to walk.
*YAWN*
Wake me when something really important happens.
Like Jean-Pierre, I certainly won’t hold my breath. The Democratic Party needs a hell of a lot more than a new chairperson. If they’re prudent, they’ll heed Jean-Pierre’s not-so-subtle warning.
Chief Writing Wolf 
I watch from across the ocean with interest!!
It’s truly maddening. In recent months the U.S. has experienced a rash of violence against elected officials and high-profile financial and corporate figures that harks back to the Anarchist Movement of the 1890s and early 1900s. Ordinary people – regardless of their personal background or political ideology – sadly feel violence is the only way to bring attention to the social injustices that plague our society.
The late Martin Luther King, Jr., deplored violence and sought to change America’s racial attitude with non-violence resistance. But, by the time of his murder in 1968, he’d come to acknowledge the persistence of violence by declaring that riots and other acts of insurrection “are a distorted form of social protest.”
In 1950, Spanish director Luis Buñuel released a film in México titled “Los Olvidados” (The Forgotten Ones), released in the U.S. as “The Young and the Damned.” It follows the lives of teenagers in México City’s slums who struggle just to get by in life and end up committing various criminal acts. The film was received harshly in México because it didn’t follow the cinematic trend of portraying poverty in melodramatic fashion, but rather in the cruel light in which it actually existed. Buñuel declared that the oppressed just didn’t need to work harder; they needed revolution to force change upon what he deemed the bourgeois that kept the working and lower classes downtrodden.
(FYI, Buñuel is also co-creator with Salvador Dalí of the shocking 1929 film “Un Chien Andalou.”)
Those films sound interesting and more powerful and thought-provoking than the romantic musical theatre versions of historical poverty.
Humans seem inherently violent when push comes to repeated shoves, although some like King and Gandhi successfully and inspirationally repress this animalistic urge.
People have a right to rebel and the right to protest, an eminent Australian judge once ruled. The rise of violence in the US is a response to a scared, powerless public, and in that group I see similarities to the oppressed poor you mention in the Mexican film.
It doesn’t bode well so strap yourself in and let’s hope the political ride the US has embarked on will not be too wild.