I confess I did not see it coming. After essentially calling Joe Biden a racist by saying “I don’t think Joe Biden is a racist” during a primary debate, I did not expect to see Kamala Harris getting the nod to be his running mate.

I am wondering if Biden was even asked to sign off on it or whether the adults simply made the call and sent him a memo. It’s an interesting racial spin, though. For eight years, the black man was the boss and the white guy fetch-and-carried for him; now it’s the white guy who gets to snap his fingers, assuming the white guy still remembers where his fingers are.

The two of them were responsible for the most memorable moments from the debates. It came when Sen. Harris accused Biden of having been opposed to school busing in the 1970s and he denied it.

What made it so odd was that in the 70s, aside from the New York Times and a few liberal judges, everyone — blacks and whites, alike — opposed forced busing. But decades later, Harris could accuse Biden of being on the wrong side (which is to say the right side) and he would instinctively deny it.

Once Biden, in the throes of the BLM hysteria, painted himself into a corner by vowing to select a woman of color, he didn’t have much to choose from. I leaned towards Susan Rice because Tucker Carlson had just said he’d heard she was almost a sure bet and I assumed he knew things I didn’t know. But considering that the others on the short list were Val Demings, Keisha Lance Bottoms, Tammy Duckworth, Stacey Abrams and even Michelle Obama, we’re talking very slim pickings.

Frankly, I don’t know what Biden’s people see in Kamala Harris. Although the New York Times has already obligingly dubbed her a moderate pragmatist, she is as radical as any of the other dimwits in her party.

For instance, she is in favor of biological males competing with girls in athletic competitions even though it not only cheats females out of victories they’re entitled to but deprives them of athletic scholarships.

Nobody really knows why she has adopted this policy since even in San Francisco, aka Kooky Town USA, transgenders don’t constitute a sizable voting bloc.

She also supports federally-funded abortions for biological males. If anyone has asked her if she personally knows any pregnant males, I missed hearing her answer.

One thing that counts in her favor is that she’s loyal. When Jussie Smollett first announced he was attacked by two Trump supporters in Chicago, Sen Harris immediately came to his support tweeting that Smollett is the kindest, most gentle, human being she has ever known. And even after it was discovered that he had staged the attack by paying a couple of brothers to rough him up in an attempt to use the publicity in order to get his salary bumped on a TV show (and perhaps cause a race riot), Harris didn’t change her opinion.

And I’m sure Smollett remains grateful and if there’s anything he can do to help her and Biden get elected, I’m sure he’ll be happy to do it. He might even give her the phone number of the two brothers just in case she feels she needs to get roughed up in the final weeks of the campaign.

The biggest question in my mind is what the Biden team thought she would bring to the campaign. I mean, the reason her own attempt to grab the nomination failed was because she had so little support, something like 2%, among blacks. That may have been because she had been a prosecuting attorney and then Attorney General of California before running for the Senate. Black politicians who make a name for themselves by sending young black men to jail aren’t beloved figures in the urban jungle.

She is a bi-racial mix, the daughter of a black father and an East Indian mother. So she’s breaking all kinds of glass ceilings just by garnering the nomination. But there is apparently a ceiling above the glass one that’s a bit harder to bust through. Others who tried and failed include Geraldine Ferraro, Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton.

It will be ironic if it requires Joe (“If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black”) Biden to deliver the black vote.

Sen Harris doesn’t even help the ticket geographically in a way that Amy Klobuchar might have. Harris is from California. For Heaven’s sake, Benito Mussolini could carry California so long as he had a (D) after his name.

In the long run, I don’t believe Harris will add any votes to the ticket. Her selection, in fact, is bound to cost Biden a few; namely those of Demings, Bottoms, Duckworth, Abrams and Obama.

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Bob Hunt sent me a copy of a letter dated April 28, 1955, that is of little historical importance except that it shows a human, somewhat humorous side, of one of our Nobel Prize-winning novelists, John Steinbeck. It’s a little difficult to picture the esteemed author of “The Grapes of Wrath” and “East of Eden” sitting down at his typewriter and addressing the following to Marilyn Monroe:

“In my whole experience I have never known anyone to ask for an autograph for himself. It is always for a child or an ancient aunt, which gets very tiresome, as you know better than I. It is therefore, with a certain nausea that I tell you that I have a nephew-in-law who lives in Austin, Texas, whose name is Jon Atkinson. He has his foot in the door of puberty but that is only one of his problems. You are the other.

"I know that you are not made of celestial ether, but he doesn’t. A suggestion that you have normal functions would shock him deeply and I’m not going to be the one to tell him.

"On a recent trip to Texas, my wife made the fatal error of telling Jon that I had met you. He doesn’t really believe it, but his respect for me has gone up even for lying about it.

"Now, I get asked for all kinds of silly favors, so I have no hesitation in asking one of you. Would you send him, in my care, a picture of yourself, perhaps in pensive, girlish mood, inscribed to him by name and indicating you are aware of his existence. He is already your slave. This would make him mine.

"If you will do this, I will send you a guest key to the ladies’ entrance to Fort Knox and, furthermore, I will like you very much.”

There was no indication on the page as to how he signed off, whether it was “Best wishes, John,” “Sincerely, J. Steinbeck” or “As Ever, Cuddles.”

But it’s nice to know that not only was Steinbeck a fine writer, but, more importantly, a first-rate uncle-in-law.

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As I think most of you know by now, I get bombarded with a ton of email on a daily basis. By and large, I welcome it. But there was one fellow who kept sending me lengthy pieces of his own on a daily basis. He’s a nice guy and, so, I kept trying to provide him with hints that I wasn’t actually reading more than a paragraph or so before conking out. I mean, it wasn’t that he was critiquing what I had written. He was simply writing long meandering pieces and seemed to feel that inasmuch as he read my stuff, I should read his.

I finally wrote him the following, which might be of interest to others:

“Dear Dan: When even your wife suggested you should write shorter, she was right. But that doesn’t just pertain to word count. It means, for one thing, avoiding redundancy. Once you made your basic point early in the second paragraph of your latest email, you just kept repeating the same point with only slightly different examples. And you didn’t top it off with a bit of humor or an offbeat observation. If you’re going to write essays, even mini-essays, you have to learn how to edit. As someone once said – or should have said – writing is easy, editing yourself is difficult. You have to write it as if someone else had written it and now you’re being asked to read it. Best wishes, Cuddles Prelutsky”

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Bob Hunt has passed along yet another meme, that apparently being his sole purpose in life, and a fine purpose it is: “Every single day, the stupid get stupider. We have to stop asking ‘How stupid can you get?’ Some people are taking it as a challenge.”