This has to be one of the strangest mini-issues in presidential-election history, showing just how petty and low our politics have sunk, to wit: the dispute over the correct pronunciation of Kamala Harris’s first name. Is it KA-ma-la, or Ka-MA-la , or KUH-ma-la? For a person who has a medium-low Boston accent (some of those ‘r’s really are difficult to say) and who has trouble correctly pronouncing words like ‘banal’ (no matter how many times I’m corrected), I’m not going to find fault with someone getting a pronunciation wrong. It happens to everyone. The brain can get locked into a mispronunciation, and that’s that for life. 

But … but Donald Trump is now openly mocking the VP’s name in speeches, when he’s not calling into question her racial identity. He certainly seems to be ridiculing the non-European nature of her first  name, as linguist John McWhorter notes at the NYT. But you know what? Let him. He’s on the defensive. Harris is gaining. And he loses independent support every time he plays the racial card.

Update – True: ‘Trump is suddenly running scared.’