Rush Limbaugh Revives Crude Sexist Smear Against Sen. Harris

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) is widely seen as a leading choice to be Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden's running mate. As Biden moves closer to announcing his running mate, Rush Limbaugh revived a smear against Harris that implies that she advanced her career by dating a prominent politician.

Limbaugh has launched sexist attacks on Democratic politicians, family members, and aides for decades, frequently tying the attacks to personal relationships and marriages. This was particularly true of Hillary Clinton, for example.

The sexist narrative against Harris, pushed in graphic terms by a variety of fringe right-wing figures before spreading to Fox News, involved her past relationship back in the 1990s with Willie Brown, a former speaker of the California Assembly and mayor of San Francisco. During Harris' own presidential campaign in 2019, Fox News personality Tomi Lahren tweeted a message at her going well beyond previous innuendos on the network and instead used language that could be traced right back to the fever swamps: "Kamala did you fight for ideals or did you sleep your way to the top with Willie Brown?"

On the August 10 edition of The Rush Limbaugh Show, the eponymous Medal of Freedom recipient took an opportunity to bring the topic up all over again.

In response to a comment by Brown in his latest newspaper column this past weekend that "Harris is a tested and proven campaigner who will work her backside off to get Biden elected," Limbaugh went off on a particularly vile sexist tangent, declaring: "If anybody knows her backside, it's Willie Brown."

"And I mean in the biblical, intimate sense," Limbaugh continued. "He knows her backside. They've both acknowledged it. She knows his. Even though his backside is not as big as hers — but — but, look, I got distracted."