Former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun advised Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday to “hunker down” for a barrage of political and media attacks rooted in “misogyny” — and avoid the mistakes she made by being “hurt” by it all.
“They’re going to come after her with bricks. Whatever it is they can say that’s nasty and bad about this woman, they’re going to do. And she should expect no quarter from any of them. ... They’re gonna do everything they can to turn the American people against her,” Moseley Braun told the Sun-Times.
“There are a lot of people out there who don’t like the idea of a woman telling them what to do,” added Moseley Braun. “Misogyny is one of the most fundamental things in us in our cultural environment. ... You go from a woman to a mixed-race one. You take all of those things and put them together.”
Moseley Braun knows what it’s like to be thrust into the unforgiving media spotlight.
In 1992, she became the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Senate. Her victory was part of the “Year of the Woman” fallout from the confirmation hearings of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Those hearings featured the testimony of Anita Hill, who accused Thomas of sexual harassment.
But Moseley Braun quickly went from media darling to media pin cushion. During and after her Senate campaign and her failed 1998 reelection campaign, she was embroiled in controversies of her own making about campaign spending, her own finances and those of her mother and about her junkets to Africa and her somewhat secretive visit to a Nigerian dictator.
She took all of it personally, lashing out at critics, likening one of the nation’s most established conservative columnists to a member of the Ku Klux Klan: “George Will can take his hood and go back wherever he came from,” she said, though she later apologized.
Those controversies ultimately limited her Senate career to a single term and sunk her subsequent campaigns for president and mayor of Chicago. How she handled all of it, she said, is a lesson in what not to do for women in politics at all levels.
She advised Harris not to “let yourself be panicked into doing stupid things like I did.”
“I’m not going to argue that they weren’t stupid — that calling George Will a racist wasn’t bad. The way I handled even the accounting thing. … I responded to it out of hurt really, more than anything else. This is going to happen with Kamala also,” Moseley Braun said.
“Don’t let yourself get hurt. You have to gird your loins, as the Bible says. ... Feel secure and respond honestly and respond out of your own integrity, and don’t let people gallop you into doing something or saying something dumb. I admit to having done all of those things. But that’s the benefit of hindsight. It’s 20-20. I did not respond appropriately. I could have. I should have. But I didn’t.”
Before Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned amid accusations of extortion, bribery and income tax evasion, he famously blamed the “nattering nabobs of negativism” in the media for his downfall.
Moseley Braun resurrected Agnew’s quote in discussing media scrutiny of everything from Harris’ smile, her laugh and her handling of the migrant crisis to her 90% staff turnover.
“They will find it or make it up. It doesn’t matter. There’s no way you can fight off the nattering nabobs of negativism. ... If you fight back, what’ll happen is, you’ll wind up getting sucked into their conversation, and that’s bad,” she said. “I was so hurt, I didn’t realize that. ... I just needed to push back and not get embroiled in the discussion. I got embroiled. And I didn’t call on enough people to help me at the time, which I should have done.”
Although she’s one of the many Biden delegates who has enthusiastically endorsed Harris, Moseley Braun condemned the behind-the-scenes campaign that forced President Joe Biden to abandon his reelection campaign.
“Joe was treated horribly. … I was horrified that they came after him like that. … Just pitch him overboard? Somebody that’s been loyal and true for 40 years, at least? That was wrong. … He did a great job for … our country and he deserved better than that,” Moseley Braun said.
“People came after him, quietly, surreptitiously. It was a bullying kind of move. … They should have given him a chance to redeem that one bad debate performance because he has given so much. To have him just kind of cast aside like that after one stumble is wrong. … I would tell whoever was involved with the effort to bully him out of the race: ‘It was not right what you did.’”
Moseley Braun, 76, said she believes the treatment of Biden also sends a dangerous message to older adults like herself:
“The message is, ‘When you can’t perform like you used to be able to perform, we’re done with you.’”
