As much as it's a certainty that Kamala Harris' grotesque strategy of leaning in on making swing state campaign appearances with an unpopular GOP loser with deep-state war criminal ties softened enthusiasm among her base, squandering much of the good will that came with her replacement of the visibly malfunctioning Joe Biden at the top of the democratic ticket in July, it's also possible that it got her the strongest showing an unknown California woman of mixed non-European stock with a less than stellar (or particularly visible) term as doddering Joe Biden's veep could ever have wished for with the exceedingly short amount of time she had to do it. We'll obviously never know the outcome if she had gambled on a bold break from the guy who was going to tank anyway-- if she had promised conditioning military and other aid to Israel on immediate ceasing of the genocide in Gaza and other aggressions against their neighbors, making reparations for damage they caused and facilitating humanitarian aid to the survivors of Israel's devastation; if she had urged a quick diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine; if she had sold a case for distinguishing her position on immigration from both Joe Biden and Donald Trump from a humanitarian and economic perspective; if she had urged expansion of Medicare to cover those that Obama care lets fall through the cracks; if she had promised an aggressive approach to mitigating the climate disasters of increasing magnitude that threaten the future of the planet and frankly portend greater chaos from unprecedented weather-related events for the foreseeable future; if she had articulated a fix to the abortion crisis and thrown her support behind court stacking and term limits for Supreme Court justices as a fix to the Judicial problem that brought it about. But it's entirely possible her doubling down on demonstrations that she was not intending to make the radical break from the status quo that the color of her skin and the femininity of her gender seemed to signal to even the very organized factions of non-white and non-male traditional voters she courted deprived her opponent of an even bigger blowout. It was an uphill climb this eleventh hour appointment to assume the head of a badly faltering -- increasingly doomed-- ticket, and she may have done the best she could possibly have done with a larger segment of voters than she would have by focussing more lovingly on the progressive segment she took for granted.
If you want to look for blame, start with Joe Biden and his enablers. While he still had a modicum of sense, he strongly signaled early on in his presidency that he would be a "bridge president" with a single-term administration whose mission would be to undo some the worst dysfunctions of Trump's first term, clearing the way for younger blood to speed the country away from the dark proto-fascism of the Trump era. Then he didn't restore treaties with Iran and Cuba, he doubled down on Trump's dystopian immigration policies, he wimped out on student loan debt cancellations and used excuses of parliamentary procedure to let COVID era moratoriums on evictions and child tax credits that reduced child poverty by 40% lapse. He expanded drilling and pipelining. He publicly sided with management in the 2021 railroad worker's strike bringing a rapid end to the workers calls for sick pay and saner, safer working hours and conditions with larger crews on smaller less hazardous trains. Then he conveniently under-responded to the subsequent colossal derailment in East Palestine Ohio that demonstrated the urgency of what those workers were asking for. At least he finally got us for the most part out of Afghanistan-- bellicose bellyaching about it from the expected quarters notwithstanding -- with the predictable result that we had nothing to show for our commitment of years, blood, limbs and guilt in too many scores of thousands of civilian Afghani (and American) deaths. While I applaud the withdrawals of troops and cessation of hostilities in one of too many pointless forever wars of the neoliberal era, the fault for the dubious and ultimately futile mission of democrats to retain the presidency and the senate and to win back the house lays squarely at the feet of Nixon-era perennial Joe Biden and the wimps who let him break the promise of his one-term presidency. He won the primary by force of the etiquette that sitting presidents are not challenged, and in some cases by legalistic force itself. By then it was too late to float alternative visions for the future. When his legendary hubris led to a national pratfall of a performance in his first debate with Donald Trump in June, well before the Democratic National Convention, the ticking of the clock made the temptation to switch him out for younger blood too tempting for the string pullers and back channel operators to resist. It may have been too late to organize a democratic process to pick a successor-- who, face it, would have been the one the operatives wanted anyway by hook or by crook-- but it was not too late to put forth Biden's hand selected Number 2, the untested but youthful and well-packaged Kamala Harris, who could plausibly be said by virtue of being named on ballots to have been selected in the primary. By this point, she had no choice but to use the services of the team that graced us with Uncle Joe to run her last minute campaign.
As always, we on the left need to set aside grievances and work toward a world that isn't dependant on suboptimal periodic choices between overfunded under-imaginative careeerist politicians. In the meantime, if you are complaining about the choices that people made on November 5, you are too late. The opportunity to vote for change is not November 5. November 5 is the obligation to mitigate the outcome of a choice made long before. Being among the 2% that cast a fatuous and futile vote for change on November 5 by voting third party may boost your personal cred. Good for you. But if you're complaining about the rest of us, what did you do to make our actual choices better?
Where were you all in the primaries?
