"With an election on the horizon the current administration can't afford to alienate America's bigots" — says the most-liked comment on the Washington Post editorial,
"Mnuchin’s excuse for delaying the Harriet Tubman $20 bill is insulting."
The "insulting" excuse is that more time is needed to deal with "counterfeiting issues."
Obama's Secretary of the Treasury, Jack Lew, announced the decision to put Tubman on the 20 in April 2016, when it was too late for him to make it happen, but he had reason to think he'd boxed the next administration in. He said: "I don’t think somebody’s going to probably want to do that — to take the image of Harriet Tubman off of our money?"
The WaPo editors rub in the politics: "No one can blame [Lew] for a failure to imagine that any future administration would be so petty and narrow-minded as to go out of its way to thumb its nose at women, minorities and history."
This is such cheap race-and-gender politics — the choice to put Tubman on the 20, Lew's single-handed showiness, the faux outrage that Mnuchin isn't hopping to completing an assignment that was crafted to make it a political requirement, the gleeful appropriation of the genuine reverence for Tubman.
I had to look back to see how I reacted to Lew's original announcement. Here, in April 2016, I contemplated
"The argument that Harriet Tubman wouldn't want to be on the $20 and that it disrespects her and appropriates her to use her that way"— an argument that began on the
left:
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