When She Fought, She Lost

For the last several months, I’ve been saying that Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential election because too many voters didn’t want as their President a black woman with a Jewish husband.  But a couple of books I’ve been reading make it clear that, while there is truth to that, it’s hardly the whole story.  The Democratic Party blew the 2024 presidential (and congressional) elections largely due to incompetence, ineptitude, and infighting, and also for the same reason Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump in 2016 - they had no ability to communicate with the voters they needed most.

Perhaps the biggest reason the Democrats were doomed to fail in 2024 was because of President Biden.  It pains me to admit this, after believing otherwise, but he had no chance of winning a second term and he didn’t know what he was doing when he decided to try for one.  It wasn’t only because he was older and had a growing cognitive disorder.  It was also because his economic policies were unpopular.  Maybe the economy was doing well during his single term, but many people did not feel the effects of it. They were dealing too much with inflation, especially at the supermarket at the gas station, and Biden kept talking about with a wonderful economy it was.

Both his unpopularity and his growing cognitive disorder, eventually, left him to give up his bid for a second term - a year and a half too late.  How I wish that President Biden had announced his decision not to stand for a second term at his 2023 State of the Union address.  Bowing out much earlier would have allowed other Democrats start presidential campaigns and compete for the party’s presidential nomination in a fair and open contest.  Biden’s decision to withdraw from the presidential campaign in July 2024 made Harris the nominee largely by default.  She was next in line and there wasn’t enough time to have a rump primary quickly set up and held for Harris and other presidential possibilities to run in.

Moreover, Harris did not have unanimous support among leading Democrats. One might think that Barack Obama, the nation’s first black President, and Nancy Pelosi, the first female Speaker of the House, would get behind Harris in a heartbeat to see her become the first black female President.  In fact, Obama didn’t think Harris could win, and Pelosi disliked her. The leading proponent for a Harris candidacy, James Clyburn, the black congressman from South Carolina, said that it would be an insult to the black women in the Democratic base not to make her the nominee.  With that statement, Clyburn more or less invited MAGA Republicans to dismiss Harris as a "DEI candidate."

All of this could have been mitigated by the Harris campaign, which unfortunately had problems of its own.  Harris inherited the Biden campaign's apparatus and the Biden campaign's staff, including campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon, a control freak known for making grown men cry and making grown women scream.  Harris felt more or less stuck with her, and she trusted her instincts, which was a problem in and of itself; she should have looked not to O'Malley Dillon's instincts, one of which was to freeze out Harris insiders, but her data, which showed that Harris had a great deal of skepticism toward her presidential bid to overcome. 

The skepticism was rooted in Harris's message, or lack thereof.  Her to-do list read like just that - a list, not a comprehensive and coherent vision for where she wanted to take the country.  Trump, as he had done in 2016, was able to articulate his vision in bold, declarative words, whereas Harris only offered policy positions.  People demanded change, and change was what Trump offered as he did in 2016, but when given the chance to offer on ABC's "The View"  an example of what she would do different as President from Joe Biden, who had told her not to separate herself from the administration and whose staffers dominated the campaign, said she could not think of such an example.

Also, unlike the Trump campaign, the Harris campaign fumbled the ball in pursuing the crucial youth vote, particularly young men.  She did make an earnest effort to appear on Joe Rogan's podcasts but Rogan, based in Austin, Texas, insisted that she appear in his studio in person, not remotely, and her efforts to get on his show failed, particularly when she tried to have a rally in nearby Houston and time it with a possible Rogan appearance on his show.  The result?  Rogan had that particular day off, which he forfeited when Trump, whom Rogan had criticized, offered to come on and mend fences with him - and Rogan couldn't say no to that.  The Harris rally in Houston - a lame cover for her botched effort to talk to Rogan on his show, given that she had no chance of winning Texas - occurred on the same day that Trump appeared on Rogan's show and she didn't, a Friday in October . . . a day when Texans were otherwise occupied with Friday night high-school football.  Too bad - maybe, on Rogan's show, Harris could have explained why she left a Trump ad accusing her of supporting gender-affirming care for transsexual inmates that aired during NFL games go unanswered.

Even if Harris did know whom to reach for their votes, her campaign didn't know how to reach them.  Again - what sort of a presidential campaign tries to win votes in working-class South Philadelphia by sending the worldly and glamorous model Paulina Porizkova to canvass there?  A presidential campaign resembling the clueless DJ who plays Jethro Tull at a hip-hop house party, of course.

In the end, Biden's ego, Jen O'Malley Dillon's self-importance, and Harris's own inability to define herself doomed the Democrats in 2024.  Sure, I and others voted for Harris because Trump represented a threat to democracy.  But by making that a centerpiece (a centerpiece, not the centerpiece) of her campaign, she was preaching to people who were going to vote for her anyway.   She needed to reach out to people who were more concerned with economic security than with the right to vote for President.  Many of those people, perversely, did not vote in 2024 at all. 

And the democracy argument would have had more resonance coming from a party that did not force a sitting President to stop aside and then replace him with a candidate who never competed in any presidential primary, simply because she was next in line.

An earlier Biden exit would have allowed a candidate with an inspiring agenda and a better-than-even chance of defeating Trump.  Maybe Harris, after a grueling primary and caucus season, still could have been such a candidate.  But her aborted 2019 presidential campaign - why was she running then, anyway? - didn't offer any promise of her rising to such a level either.  And when Biden continued to insist he could have won once the election was over, despite all evidence to the contrary, he only cast shade on Harris, a woman he and others once championed.

It is just this sort of backstabbing that ended with Donny Deutsch ridiculing the Democrats on national television and with Chris Matthews scolding them through the same medium two days after the election.  

It's just this sort of party - left in the wilderness once Trump started to bask in his triumph - to end up being lost as to what to do next.

But, as an secessionist who favors breaking up the U.S. into smaller countries, that's none of my business.

Please be sure to read two books on the 2024 presidential election, 'Fight" by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes and "Uncharted" by Chris Whipple. 

Election 2024: The Post-Mortem, Part Three

The Democrats are already talking about a forensic study of last week's election returns to figure out how they blew it.  They thought they had everyone behind them based on the formation of pro-Harris social-media groups - Black Women For Harris, Latinos For Harris, White Women For Harris - White Dudes For Harris!   White Dudes For Harris, a social media group spearheaded by Jeff Bridges, one of the most esteemed and revered actors in Hollywood - more so than George Clooney.  What could possibly go wrong when you had white men for Kamala Harris?

How about the fact that that the white men for Harris could have held their in-person meetings in a broom closet?

Donald Trump did better with white males than with any other demographic, which should not have surprised anyone.  But he was able to improve marginally with black male voters and even more with male Hispanic voters.  Despite having a running mate who loves to go hunting, despite featuring Bruce Springsteen at her rallies, and despite appealing to so-called "girl dads" who wanted to protect their daughters from extremist MAGA policies, Harris was never going to win over a large number of male voters.  It wasn't just because too many men could not imagine a female President.  It's because her campaign had a soft-focus approach to people who voted more out of emotion than reason.  In other words, she ignored the large masculine side of the electorate - the "bro culture."  The Harris campaign's rallies had an effeminate air to them, featuring celebrity surrogates like Beyoncé Knowles and Oprah Winfrey in a love-fest atmosphere that sometimes bordered on rainbows and unicorns.  But none of this addressed the concerns of men - especially young men.  

The economist Scott Galloway has commented on this repeatedly on cable television, noting how young men are less likely to go to college and have disconnected with society at large, while their female peers have been succeeding in academics and the workplace at a much higher rate.  Young men have returned inward, spending more time online - not blogging, a constructive labor I engage in, but playing video games and communicating on right-wing chat boards.  The Harris campaign addressed the concerns of many Americans, but the young men who felt left out of society felt left out of the Harris narrative.  

In fact, Harris's entire approach to appealing to masculinity was all wrong.  Instead of hunting, like Tim Walz, many men today go for kickboxing.  Instead of Bruce Springsteen, they listen to Jason Aldean.  And not every man has a daughter.  Some not only don't have daughters, they also don't have sons.  Not only aren't many men married, a lot of men don't even have girlfriends.   

Of course, not all men are toxically masculine, but in America, a lot of men are.  A lot of American men like NFL football, listen to macho country music, and drive Ford pickup trucks. I like soccer, listen to jazz, and drive a Volkswagen Golf, but while all that would be fine in France, here that makes me a pussy.  In America, of course, being a pussy is tantamount to treason.  And if you don't listen to Joe Rogan (below), that goes double.

Kamala Harris did try to make some concessions to reach bros while not selling out.  She attempted to get booked on Rogan's podcast, where could have made her case, and she could have, and probably would have, talked to his listeners in a conversational tone rather than a lecturing or admonitory one.  (Not surprisingly, Rogan didn't book her, possibly out of fear that his listeners would think she was making sense.) But most of her efforts to reach such voters fell flat.  Trump was far more successful in reaching them, thanks to an ad his campaign ran on NFL games accusing the Biden-Harris administration of paying for transgender (another example of liberal PC language, as the proper word is "transsexual" - the word "gender" is a literary, not an anthropological, word) surgeries for prisoners - actually a Trump administration policy - and the Harris campaign did nothing to counteract that ad.

There might be a way for Democrats to appeal to men going forward, assuming the Democratic Party is allowed to exist under a second Trump term.  But getting Jeff Bridges and George Clooney to speak on their behalf isn't going to cut it.  Those actors represent a suave, sophisticated masculinity that is completely alien to today's male culture.  The fact that the Harris campaign even needed surrogates like Bridges, Clooney or Bruce Springsteen to appeal to men was actually an Achilles heel.  Because Donald Trump only needed one surrogate.

His name was Donald Trump.

Stay tuned for Part Four.

There Goes Old Mad Joe Again

Neil Young and Joni Mitchell may have lost money by taking their music off Spotify in protest of Joe Rogan's penchant for spreading COVID misinformation, but Spotify lost even more money; its stock tanked earlier this week.  It also lost more musical artists; Graham Nash (who turns eighty today) and India.Arie pulled their music off Spotify as well.  India.Arie pulled her music off for comments made on Rogan's show about race.)  

So it should comes as no surprise that Rogan (above) apologized for having COVID deniers and vaccine skeptics on his podcast, and he has vowed to try to harder to present all points of view on COVID.  While Rogan himself has an iffy stand on the vaccine (though he has usually dismissed it), he says that his main objective is to air as many different views on any given topic, and he says he hopes to give more time to COVID believers and vaccine supporters to balance out the debate.  

"I'm not trying to promote misinformation. I’m not trying to be controversial," he said. "I've never tried to do anything with this podcast other than just talk to people and have interesting conversations."

That should be the end of the the issue, buy it won't be.  Rogan now has to prove that he means it when he says he wants to broaden the conversation on this and any other topic.  You know the old Russian proverb: Trust, but verify.

We'll be listening.  Well, not literally, at least not for me.   

Idiot's Delight

I'm beginning to think that the COVID pandemic will never end in America.  Because we let too many people who know nothing about public health speak out on public health issues.

Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson are the latest major impediments to progress toward getting out of COVID.  Rogan, a comedian best known to network-television viewers as the savant electrician in "NewsRadio," now has a podcast, while Carlson . . . er, you know about him.  Anyway, Rogan recently said on his podcast that anyone young person who's healthy, eats right, and works out shouldn't have to get a COVID vaccine.  Rogan - who was not the most entertaining cast member of "NewsRadio" - doesn't get it.  It doesn't matter how healthy you are; an airborne coronavirus can infect anyone.  Take it from someone who twice got the flu because he didn't get vaccinated.  The only different between that coronavirus that causes the flu and the SARS CoV-2 virus is that the flu virus is a lot less likely to kill you.  

Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson said the most outrageous thing in his career since Friday.   He sais hat anyone who sees a child wearing a face covering (FC) ought to call the child abuse hotline and, I assume, have the parent arrested, because of the psychological damage the wearing an FC will cause for children that will last for the rest of their lives.  Look, I get it.  I don't like wearing an FC. I don't like looking at people wearing FCs.  I even listened to President Biden's address to Congress on the radio last night because everyone expect President Biden had to wear them and the thought of seeing that on TV made me queasy.  But we have to wear them until the pandemic ends - nay, we have to wear them to make it end - and there are three very good reasons why children should:

• Children can get COVID and spread it.  
• The British variant is now dominant and can kill any child that gets it.
• A first-grader in Minnesota died of COVID.

Not having to wear a face covering may spare psychological damage to a child for the rest of his or her life, but the kid isn't going to live very long.

As to the suggestion that warning an FC does cause psychological damage . . . well, my paternal grandfather was ten years old when the Spanish flu pandemic hit.  He grew up in Philadelphia, one of the worst-hit cities during the Spanish flu scare.  He must have had to wear a face covering.  He went on to study physics at the University of Pennsylvania, graduate in the upper half of his class, work for RCA designing television sets, and own and operate affordable-housing rental units.  Oh yeah, and in between, he sired seven children.  That's not the life of a psychologically damaged pandemic survivor.

What's really scary is that Joe Rogan is one of the most popular podcasters in America and Tucker Carlson is one of the most popular cable-news commentators in America.  They have influence.  Their "advice" can lead not only to an interminable pandemic but to more needless deaths.

I may be wrong about Carlson's remark being influential, as it's so ludicrous, even conservatives wouldn't take it seriously, but Rogan's take on vaccinations is much more serious because there's already vaccine hesitancy to deal with. So far, such hesitancy isn't having a negative impact on vaccinations.  Vaccines were being administered at about three million a day about a week ago; now it's 2.7 million people a day.  But that's still 2.7 million people more who've been vaccinated today than there were last week.  As long as the overall number of  vaccinated Americans keeps going up, there isn't a problem.

But when the daily vaccination rate plummets to 100,000 people a day, then we have a problem. And we'll know whom to thank for that.