Election 2024: The Post-Mortem, Part One

Kamala Harris is innocent.

She ran a flawless presidential campaign, she was always on point, she demonstrated a command of the issues, she proved that she had earned her place at the top of the presidential ticket despite never having competed in a primary, and she offered a program that would move the country forward and guarantee freedom for all.

But in the end, 51 percent of voters did not want as President a black woman of partial South Asian descent who prefers Bootsy Collins to Phil Collins and whose husband is a Jew.

If racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and a preference for Genesis over Parliament-Funkadelic were the only reasons Harris lost, that would be troubling enough, for they would show how shallow Americans are.  But there are other reasons for the election results that made Donald Trump the first President to get elected to two non-consecutive terms since Grover Cleveland and the first Republican President ever to achieve that feat.  The Democratic Party suffered a failure of imagination.  They failed to imagine how inflation, immigration, a strong economy that was not as deep as it was wide, a disinterest in politics as usual, and a disgust with the elites who run Washington irrespective of who runs the White House or Congress affected people's perception of how the government works.  They think it doesn't work.  At least not for them.  In running against Trump, the Democrats suffered a failure of imagination, an imagination that would enable to understand why people would vote for him.  They didn't even have imaginations to convey how Trump could destroy democracy.  In spite of Trump's various threats of retribution against his opponents - some of which involved obvious violations of the Eighth Amendment banning cruel and unusual punishment - the Democrats couldn't make people ponder the possibility of using the authorities to squelch dissent, arrest opponents in their homes, force the press to tow the government line, and recognize anti-Trump statements as treason, treason being a capital offense.

Although Harris did what she had to do to win and did her best to convey that she got what voters were going thorough economically and, wisely, did not lean into her sex - the opposite of Hillary Clinton, on both counts - there's plenty of blame to go around in the rest of the party.  Jamie Harrison, the Democratic National Committee chairman, deserves blame for failing at reaching out to voters in the Midwestern and Southern states or committing to a fifty-state strategy like Howard Dean did.  Janet Yellen didn't help matters any by calling inflation "transitory."  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, despite her best intentions, certainly made the Democrats look foolish with a Green New Deal that wasn't so much aspirational as it was fantasy.  But Democrats at large deserve the lion's share of the blame because the party has largely abandoned the working class in favor of neoliberalism, that idiotic belief that social progress and positive change can come in a free market that offers a variety of goods and services coupled with economic opportunity with a government that provides minimal services beyond a strong military.  The Democrats are a party of elitists who discuss policy over French wine and cheese and spend summer vacations on the Riviera while the closest a working-class bloke ever came to the Riviera was when he rode in the back seat of his dad's old Buick.

President Biden, meanwhile, is more or less the last Democrat who has not forgotten about the working class.  He's the most pro-worker, pro-union, pro-blue-collar President we've had since Harry Truman.  Bernie Sanders has considered Biden to be an ally.  But he's been undermined by a party of neoliberals who continue to offer a retread of the Clinton and Obama policy prescriptions.  And to be blunt, the President enabled Trump's win largely for deciding to quit the 2024 campaign when he did.  The reason for this is twofold.  First, he chose the wrong time to withdraw.  If he felt that standing down from a re-election bid was the right thing to do, he should have done that in early 2023 to give the Democrats a chance to select a new presidential nominee on their own.  Maybe Harris would still have been nominated.  Maybe not.  Second, he withdrew in July 2024, and despite endorsing Harris and giving her his full support, he bequeathed to her a campaign apparatus that was designed to re-elect an incumbent President, not elect a new one.  The biggest miracle is that when the Biden campaign became the Harris campaign, she had a hundred days to eke out a victory and she almost did.  But once again, the Democrats at large need to share the blame here; the party leadership, which never accepted Biden in the first place, publicly trashed him and all but forced him to withdraw when he said he was staying in the campaign and Democrats like Nancy Pelosi refused to take yes for an answer.  Kudos to Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman - no one's idea of an elitist - for standing by Biden. 

And after all that, I have more.  But this blog post is already too long, and so I'll continue with Part Two next.