There Is No Conspiracy

Once again, fellow Trump haters, please stop with the 2024 election conspiracies.

Many Democrats and associated progressives an socialists are convinced that Donald Trump and Elon Musk cheated in the 2024 presidential election and insist that Kamala Harris is the rightful winner.  Musk, we are told, used his Starlink company to switch enough votes in all seven swing states to elect Trump.  The evidence, we are informed, is that Trump came right out and said it and that Musk said that he will go to jail for what he did for Trump if the Democrats regain control of Congress in November.  

Okay, Trump's comments can be easily discounted, because he's nothing but braggadocio.  No one takes seriously what he says.  As for Musk, he was likely referring to everything he's done for Trump since January 2025, not anything he might have done for him in October 2024.

But the biggest argument against this conspiracy theories is largely circumstantial.  I know of no voting machines that can be hacked by Starlink or by any other tech service.

So why do these theories persist?  Because these people cannot believe that people who stayed home on November 5, 2024 were not part of the problem (polls show that had those people voted, they would have been a bigger problem, Trump would have won by a larger margin).  Or because they can't believe that Harris was unpopular enough to lose every swing state.  Or maybe because these people simply cannot believe that 77 million of their fellow Americans cannot be so vile as to vote for Donald Trump.

They are.

So, please, folks, next time you want to say that Trump cheated to win . . . don't.  Please, don't. 

They Just Might

Former Vice President Kamala Harris is still considering a political comeback.

Asked if she would run for President in 2028, she said that she just "might" do so.

To those who think she should try for the Presidency again, let me refresh your memories.

How many primaries and caucuses did she win in her 2020 presidential campaign?  Zero.

How many primaries and caucuses did she actually compete in in her 2020 presidential campaign?  Zero.  She had to end her candidacy in 2019.

How many swing states did she win in the 2024 general election?  Zero.

How many Democratic presidential candidates other than Harris have lost the popular vote in the past twenty years?  Zero.

Well, at least she has a perfect record.

You know, it's really galling to hear Harris say she might run again after losing to Trump in 2024 and not see her being ridiculed en masse when Martin O'Malley, who showed a real feistiness in going after Trump when he ran for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, got laughed at when he said that he might run again in 2020 after he lost to Trump in 2016, and . . . oh, wait, that was Hillary Clinton!

Good luck with another run for the Presidency, Madam Former Vice President.  The Democrats, as repeatedly noted here, are notorious for shunning and turning away failed presidential nominees.  They don't get to make comebacks.   They don't get a second chance.  They don't even get a lousy speaking slot at the next Democratic National Convention.  They are complete . . . losers.

And that certainly includes Harris.  In fact, she's even less popular than Donald Trump.  Seriously.  In an NBC News poll released this week, Donald Trump - who has led the country into another unjust war in the Middle East, destroyed the economy, sicced ICE on native-born U.S. citizens - including journalists - suspended civil liberties, dismantled federal government services, and has taken away people's health insurance - had 41 percent of people surveyed respond favorably to him.  Harris had a 36 percent favorable response.

Is it any wonder why advertising genius Donny Deutsch laughed at the Democrats on television two days after Trump forced Harris into early retirement? 

Oh, and lest you think I'm being a nasty ol' white man beating up on a woman of color, I'm also here to tell you that Gavin Newsom, Harris's fellow Californian, is even less popular; he only got a 27 percent favorable response.  It's not really surprising.  Newsom has trolled Trump and ridiculed him every chance he gets and has been instrumental in bringing Donald's poll numbers down.  But that should not be construed into thinking that Newsom himself is popular.  In fact, he has been held in great - and justified - suspicion among progressives, who have noted that Newsom does not want to tax billionaires because of the wealth they benefit for the economy, he started a podcast because he apparently has too much time on his hands as governor of California, his podcast included guests such as Steve Bannon and the late Charlie Kirk, and, while talking with Kirk, he agreed with him that it is "unfair" in allowing transsexual women to compete in women's sports.

Gavin Newsom is not the savior of the Democratic Party, people.  He's a smooth-talking technocrat who takes superficially liberal positions and hopes his suave demeanor and his perfect hair will compensate for his lack of substance.  In other words, he's the Gary Hart of California.

I hope Democrats don't get sold on Harris or Newsom in 2028 simply on name recognition alone - or because they're not Vance or Rubio (or Trump, who's already plotting on how to stand for a third term).  As for whom the Democrats should nominate for President in 2028 - assuming there'll be two candidates for th3e office - they must remember Smokey Robinson's mother's advice.

They'd better shop around.  Just not in California.     

Iran: Armageddon It

I just returned from the bizarro universe in which Kamala Harris was elected President of the United States. Having spent her first year checking off her to-do list by helping first-time homebuyers afford a house and expanding child care, President Harris faced a new crisis when, in her effort to negotiate a new agreement with Iran to prevent further enrichment of uranium, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started bombing Iran, causing the Iranians to suspend talks with the United States.

Secretary of State Susan Rice, addressing reporters at the White House after conferring with President Harris, explained to the press that the Harris administration knew that Israel had been planning this attack and that the President had been concerned how that might affect U.S.-Iranian talks.  Secretary Rice added that the real reason Vice President Walz was sent to Israel was not to go on a goodwill tour but because he was on a mission to go to Jerusalem and convince Netanyahu to back off.  Secretary Rice let the Iranians know what Walz was up to.  She conceded that Walz had been unsuccessful, but she added that she received a communique from the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament assuring her that Iran would not attack U.S. interests in the Middle East and concentrate strictly on defending itself from Israeli attacks.

So you can bet your sweet candy bar that I was dismayed when, back in the real world, I learned that Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that, having been aware that Israel was going to attack Iran, he decided that, rather than try to convince Netanyahu not to go ahead with the attack, it was necessary that the United States attack Iran first before Iran attacked U.S. interests in the Middle East.

Marco Rubio is a diplomat like I'm a jet pilot.

Apparently that was the real reason - a reason that don't even make good nonsense - that Trump started bombing Iran, because I thought it was about causing the Islamic Republic to fall and for the Iranian people to gain their freedom.  But that couldn't have been it, seeing as Trump hates freedom.  More likely, some say, it's because Trump is paranoid about the Ayatollah Khamenei killing him in revenge for the 2020 American assassination of General Qasem Soleimani and so decided that he had to take Khamenei out first, so that's what he did.  But he and Netanyahu are still bombing Iran.

So what is the reason we're bombing Iran?  I think your answer is right here.

But this  war isn't going to stop Americans from demanding transparency on Jeffrey Epstein.

Incidentally, if you're wondering why top brass in the military have followed Trump's illegal orders, it's because in part that no fewer than sixty high-ranking military officers believe that Donald Trump was sent by God to become President of the United States and instigate Armageddon by attacking Iran and bringing about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, in which Christians will be venerated, Jews will be saved, and Muslims . . . well, I assume they'll get food packages for the journey to the fiery caverns below.

In America, anyone can become President.  It's one of the risks we take.  In America, anyone can become a military commander.  That's another one of the risks we take.  I'm only sorry we don't have an educated, highly trained Prussian-style officer class that reads of books of strategy instead of the Book of Revelations.

Trump Is Our Own Damn Fault

Some people claim that there's a woman - Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris - to blame.  

A lot of people insist that once Trump is gone, a new President, particularly a new Democratic President, can reset the nation's agenda and get us Americans back in the world's good graces - assuming we ever were in the world's good graces to begin with (but that's a topic for later).  But it's not going to be that easy.  More likely, it will be impossible.  

See, when Trump was returned to the office he's currently desecrating, the rest of the world squarely blamed the American electorate and the American so-called justice system for letting it happen.  After the January 6, 2021 insurrection, Trump should have been prevented from being in a position to stand for office ever again.  But Mitch McConnell did not bother to get enough Senate Republicans on board for a conviction in the wake of Trump's second impeachment trial, and Attorney General Merrick Garland avoided prosecuting Trump to avoid looking political - and prosecuted Hunter Biden for the same reason.  Jack Smith hit the ground running in his investigations of Trump's two federal indictments for planning an insurrection and stealing boat loads of classified documents, but he eventually just plain hit the ground, because he got a late start, Garland did not have his back, and a certain judge in Florida, where the documents case was set for trial, blocked and checkmated Smith's every move.  Smith testified before a House committee last week that he had more than enough evidence to convict Trump in both cases and would have if a trial for either had ever gotten off the ground.   

And then there are the voters, who knew that Trump was a crook and, as a result of the fraud case in New York City, a convicted felon.  But they voted for him and gave him a plurality over Kamala Harris in 2024 anyway.  Pundits poured nothing but scorn and derision on the Democrats for running a presidential campaign as compelling as milquetoast, and those criticisms were valid - or they would have been, if not for the alternative to Harris and the Democrats.  The commentariat should not have focused so much on the Harris campaign's lackluster policy proposals and focused more on the lack of intelligence and integrity on the part of the voters.  After all, Trump was telling us precisely what he would do as President in a second term and Harris was warning voters to heed the threat of a second Trump administration, but all the voters cared about was . . . the price of eggs?  But then, blaming the voters is no way to keep those same voters tuning into cable news.

The voters' choice of Trump would have made more sense if they felt that President Biden and Vice President Harris had failed their expectations to create a better and more equitable economy for all.  In fact, they did feel so.  That, however, should not have been their motivation.  Other Western countries, like Great Britain, had thrown out their incumbent leaders in favor of the opposition for economic reasons as well, based on a sluggish post-COVID economy that had affected the world.  But the British had a right to reject the Tories for Keir Starmer and Labour, because Prime Minister Starmer, last I checked, is not a convicted felon who tried to overthrow the king.  We had no right to reject the incumbent party.  Our alternative to Harris was Trump.  Voting third-party was not an option like it had been in 2016, when everyone assumed incorrectly, based on polling, that Hillary Clinton was going to win, as opposed to the dead heat the polls remained in for 2024 to the bitter end.  The criticism of the Democrats for how they approached the general election campaign was not valid.

Then again, maybe it was.  Harris may have had problems beyond her control, but she made a lot of unforced errors that made her defeat more likely with each passing day.  Too many Democrats acted like they knew it all, and many of them seemed more interested in rewriting the rules for American English ("Latinx?" pronoun choices?) than offering positive proposals as solutions for the economy.  And once Trump was sworn in, what happened next?  Democrats did nothing to fight Trump - or made strongly worded statements about Trump's actions, which was worse than nothing.  This, coupled with the capitulation to Trump from the legal, business, and higher-education sectors, only convinced foreigners that Americans were just fine with a wannabe dictator who is now quickly becoming one.  People in other countries know that, without Trump being held accountable for his crimes, another Republican President could try to bully and extort other countries in the future. 

The recent efforts to stop ICE funding in the wake of Alex Pretti's murder and an impending government shutdown may convince Canadians and Europeans that Americans may have backbones (but not necessarily brains) after all.  But there is no turning back; people who voted for Trump threw away the United States' credibility and integrity, and they made America a place no one should visit and Americans a people no one can trust.

And that, my friends, is yet another reason why we need to break up the United States into separate countries.  An intellectual New England, a laid-back California, and a common-sense federation of the states of the American Midwest could join NATO and enter the United Nations, and achieve trust and credibility with little effort, even if a revived Confederacy or a restored Republic of Texas could not.  Different regions of the U.S. would likely function better as separate countries, given the cultural and political differences between them.  But as one nation indivisible . . . no.  Those days are gone forever, over not so long a time ago.

We have met the enemy, and he is us.

2025 and All That

The best way to understand how I and my fellow Trump-haters feel about the current condition of These States is to compare where we are now to where we could have been now.  Not that where we could have been would have necessarily been all that much better.  But it would undoubtedly have been better just the same.

To make that comparison, I can't go back to a year ago this time, because this time last year, Trump was already President-elect.  I have to go back to fourteen months ago this time, which, by pure coincidence, was Halloween.  On October 31, 2024, five days before what will likely be the last American presidential election with more than one candidate, Kamala Harris had at least a 50 percent chance of winning the Presidency.  In the event that Harris won, I expected nothing more from a Harris administration than what President Biden had delivered, which was okay enough.  Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but knowing everything Trump was going to do if he won - because he told us - I was happy to vote for Harris.  I did.  I voted early.  And I knew what her victory would have meant.  It would have meant the election of the first woman - not just the first black woman, the first woman, period - to be elected President of the United States, which have been an even greater and more gigantic leap for America than Barack Obama's election to the Presidency in 2008.  It would have been proof that, despite its shortcomings, America really was for everyone.  While President Biden nudged the United States into a more progressive direction, it was still just a nudge, and I was under no illusion that a Harris administration wouldn't accelerate the move toward a more progressive future, I knew that she was preferable to Trump.  And she would shatter multiple glass ceilings - for women, for women of color, for interracial couples, for interfaith couples.  We were on the cusp of embracing true diversity, equity, and inclusion.

All of that hope for at least such a step forward - and, as far as I'm concerned, the soul of America - died the day Trump won and Harris was forced into early retirement from public life.  Instead of an era of diversity, equity and inclusion, we've entered a period where all three have been eliminated from the body politic.  Instead of nice things like sustainable energy, bullet trains for Amtrak, paid maternity leave, or support for unions - all things the Biden administration was at least taking baby steps toward - we've gotten more tax breaks for the wealthy and programs and amenities slashed to the point where anyone affected is out of luck.   Instead of prosperous, healthy citizens, we've become serfs living on borrowed time and borrowed money who should consider ourselves fortunate if we can afford medical bills or get a vaccine without paying out of pocket - and even vaccines not covered by insurance may be unavailable soon.  

Granted, the four years under President Biden weren't exactly a new Era of Good Feelings (and even the original Era of Good Feelings under President James Monroe two hundred years and change ago had a recession caused by a bank panic).  But even a Harris administration providing minimal improvements would have been preferable to a time in which good things go bad and bad things get worse.

And then there is that new birth of freedom we let slip between our fingers.

This is the cover of the New Yorker that was planned for the November 18, 2024 edition of the magazine in the event of a Harris victory in the presidential election.  Created by Kadir Nelson, it shows Harris dressed in a coat showing images of all of the people throughout history involved in the advancement of civil rights in the U.S. that led step by step to the ultimate culmination of the fruits of their labors - a black woman as the leader of the nation.  Needless to say, a different cover ran - one showing Trump as an ominous storm cloud.  Although the November 18, 2024 edition of the New Yorker came out ahead of the actual date, it was the perfect coincidence that that was the date that Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski revealed on the air their supplicant visit to Mar-a-Lago.  So much for freedom of the press.  

The United States, because of voters who discounted the danger Trump posed to the nation and the world because they either didn't want a black woman running the show or thought that Trump could really bring back prosperity (not that he would have if he could have), has slipped into darkness and despair faster than at any time in its history.  Even Germany took more time in 1933 to move from a democratic republic to a National Socialist state.  One week before the election of 2024, Harris represented a renewal of possibility for the United States.  Seven weeks into this administration, I decided that America was finished as a country.  

And that is when I became a secessionist.  That is when I began my efforts to promote the breakup of the United States into separate countries.  

The surprise was that it took that long.  

The United States has been on the wrong track for forty-five years.  There were times when I saw a modicum of hope for a better and happier future - the first Clinton budget and the push for health care reform after the fall of the Soviet Union, the way Americans came together after 9/11, the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency, the start of the Biden Presidency . . ..  No more.  I no longer have any hope in any positive trend that only turns out to be fleeting.  I've had it with with getting my hopes up only to see America go back to being America.  I no longer live for an era of national renewal.  And on November 5, 2024, the United States didn't go back to its previous incantation as a nation of belligerent ignoramuses.  It flat-out died.  For my home state or any other state where decency and intelligence are still showing pulses to remain in the Union is anathema to me.  I believe one of these states should withdraw from the Union and hopefully start the process of arranging a peaceful separation.

I want out.  I want a divorce.

I'm not going to wish anyone a happy new year.  No one in the fifty states that make up the Union is going to be happy until the United States of America ceases to exist once and for all.  And not only will we former Americans be happy, so will the rest of the world. 

Swum and Sunk

One of the most galling things about the outcome of the 2024 presidential election - a topic I will return to with much more vigor and vitriol tomorrow - is that, given that the United States about to co-host the World Cup with Canada and Mexico, celebrate a quarter millennium of nationhood, and host the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, we could have had Kamala Harris, a woman of Jamaican and South Asian descent with a husband of Eastern European Jewish origin, presiding over all of this from the White House - a White House with an intact East Wing - and demonstrating that the United States had truly become an international nation.  Instead we put a xenophobic, provincial, undereducated real estate developer from Queens back in charge.  And Trump not only knows he has the World Cup, the semiquincentennial celebration, and the Olympics happening under his reign of error, he brags about it.

Instead of a Jamaican-American President, we got once again a President from Jamaica Estates.

Because he's in like Flynn - Michael Flynn - with FIFA, the World Cup games in These States will go on as planned, at least with the teams that don't lose any members to Immigration and Custom Enforcement custody.  The semiquincentennial, however, is likely to be a disaster, because I already see less promotion, interest, or hype around it than that which surrounded the bicentennial fifty years ago.  CBS - now being denigrated by the Ellison family and Bari Weiss - can't even be bothered to air "semiquincentennial minutes."  And then there is the unpleasant subject of the Olympics.

Back in early September, I wrote about how I sent a letter to newly installed International Olympic Committee president Kirsty Coventry (above) urging her to have the 2028 Olympics moved out of Los Angeles and out of the U.S. entirely.  At first I wasn't going to write Chief LA28 Athletic Officer Janet Evans make my case for the same because I had no postal address . . . until I found one.  And thus I went ahead and wrote both swimming legends, addressing them in their current capacities,  and subsequently waited for replies.

It's been nearly four months, and I haven't heard from either of them.

I'm not going to write them again.  I've had enough trying to convince the powers that be - and my Olympic heartthrob - of the need to stop the Los Angeles Olympics from happening under MAGA.  Even if Kirsty Coventry wanted to move the Games to another country - say, her own, Zimbabwe - she's need the support of the full committee membership and is unlikely to get it.  And Janet Evans?  She's just the athletic officer, she's not involved in location-related logistics.  These two women must get so much correspondence as it is, my letters probably never reached them . . . and even if they did, they probably had no time to read them themselves.  Besides, Janet Evans has a son who's a high school senior now, and she's probably helping him choose a college to attend (University of Southern California, no doubt), with no time to read a letter from little ol' me. 

It is what it is, and it ain't what it ain't.  All we can do right now is hope Trump and his entire administration are removed from power (consult Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution for more on that) before July 2028 (and hopefully before July 2026!).  I'm not going to get my knickers in a knot over Kirsty Coventry's failure to acknowledge my letter.  As for Janet Evans, I could never, ever be upset with the dear woman. 😊 

I am, however, upset with her 1996 Olympics swimming teammate Amy Van Dyken, who recently said she went back to church because she was inspired by what a wonderful guy Charlie Kirk was in the wake of his assassination.   

I don't want to talk about it . . ..

Anyway, the 2028 Olympics might not go on as planned.  Given Chinese saber-rattling against Taiwan, Iranian saber-rattling against everyone (but especially Israel), and the war between Russia and Ukraine grinding on, and given Trump's cavalier attitude toward all of this, we're likely to have a third world war anyway.

Book Review: "107 Days" by Kamala Harris

The title of former Vice President and former future President Kamala Harris's new campaign memoir about her bid for the Presidency in 2024 refers to the length of her campaign, but it could just as easily be a reference to how long it takes - or seemingly takes - to read it.

There are three revelatory facts in "107 Days" that most people didn't know before this book was published.  The first is that she came to the realization that President Biden shouldn't have sought a second term.  "In retrospect, I think it was recklessness," Harris wrote. "The stakes were simply too high. This wasn't a choice that should have been left to an individual's ego, an individual's ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision."  The second is that her first choice for a running mate was Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg but she thought it would be too much to ask voters averse to identity politics to elect a ticket headed by a half-black, half-South Asian woman (with a Jewish husband) whose running mate was gay.  She deemed Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, her second choice,  "unrealistic expectation" for the role of the Vice President and thought his Jewishness and his support for Israel may have been a turnoff for voters.   And the third revelation is that Biden White House staffers seemed to have little interest in defending her record against attacks from Republican ideologues.  But you don't need to read this book to learn all of that.  The media already reported on it.

I was going to say that the reader wouldn't learn anything beyond what I've already noted, but apparently that is not true.  I, for one, learned that Vice President Hubert Humphrey wouldn't count the votes in and certify the 1968 presidential election, in which Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon, when the electoral votes were tallied in Congress, so he let the Senate president pro tempore do it.  But did I have to hack my way through a book as revealing as a burqa just to learn that?

I'll come right out and say it: This is the most boring campaign memoir I've ever read.  It induces the worst sort of tedium - enough to make your eyes glaze over, but not enough to cure insomnia.  Harris's writing style is the sort of style you'd expect from a lawyer - emotionless - and her picayune descriptions of life on the campaign trail - her accounts of the hotels she stayed in, taking hot baths, relaxing with a chamomile tea - actually brought to mind that hilarious episode of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" in which Ted Baxter tries to write his autobiography and documents every minute thing that happens to him or is said to him.     And then there are irrelevant personal stories the story of her mother, a medical researcher, complaining about a male co-worker walking around the lab with an obscene cell sample in a Petri dish that's one of those stories I could have done without hearing.

Kamala Harris tries to make the case for her one-hit wonder of a presidential campaign as a pretext for a possible third try (counting her failed 2019 presidential campaign which sputtered out before the 2020 Democratic primaries and caucuses began in earnest) in 2028.  Like Hillary Clinton before her, Harris deflects most if not all of the blame for her loss to Donald Trump on others.  Unlike Hillary Clinton, not everything that went wrong was her fault - after all, she inherited a Biden campaign staff more loyal to the President than to anyone else, and yes, racism and misogyny are to blame (in part) for her loss - but she still bears some responsibility, such as not directly addressing issues concerning the voters (like inflation), and her perky, cutesy-pie turns of phrases that she thought would endear herself to voters ("Trump has an enemies list, I have a to-do list.").  Plus, she kept playing that horrible Beyoncé song at her rallies (which is not worth expanding on in yet another parenthetical clause). If this book is meant for Harris to make her presidential ambitions for 2028 take off, it crashes without ever getting off the ground.

As always, the best reporting on the most recent presidential campaign, which is thus the most riveting reading, is Jonathan Martin's and Amie Parnes' "Fight" about the Harris-Trump election.  If Kamala Harris wanted a solo account of her campaign without a male perspective, she should have let Doris Kearns Goodwin produce a book about the 2024 presidential campaign.  Harris is only good at making history - not writing it. 

Democratic Disarray - October 2025 Edition

Kamala Harris announced that she might run for President again in 2028.

The party is thrilled.

The Republican Party, that is.

Kamala Harris ran the best campaign she could have run in 107 days, but her best wasn't good enough.  That's because she wasn't good enough as a candidate.  Voters and donors had made that clear during her first presidential campaign in 2019.  (She didn't make it to 2020.)  She likely wouldn't have been the nominee had Joe Biden announced his withdrawal as a candidate for re-election sixteen months earlier than she did, and, as Steve Schmidt recently pointed out, she saw Joe Biden up close and personal and should have intervened to get him to acknowledge his fragility and his decline before he set out to run again.  

Again: Harris should not have been Vice President.  She should have been Attorney General, not Merrick Garland.  She would have been more aggressive in going after Trump than Garland was.

And just to show you how screwed up the Democrats are overall, consider their genius in fighting gerrymandered redistricting in Texas.

You might recall that, this past summer, Texas Democrats in the state legislature took buses to Chicago (the Chicago bus station is shown above) and holed out there during the effort to pass a redistricting plan in order to deny the Republicans a quorum.  After only a couple of weeks in Chicago, the legislators returned to Austin because they had made their case and let the plan pass, vowing to challenged the new district maps in court.

Wait, what?

Texas Democratic legislators would hve had to stay in Chicago until early December to force the Republicans to withdraw the plan and attempt to reintroduce it in 2026.  One Texas Democrat explained that the legislators would have had to make numerous sacrifices to stay in Chicago that long, and it would have been impossible for them to be away from their families for so long.

Right.

You know, if these people had been involved in the Western Front campaign in the Second World War, we'd all be speaking German.  "We can't stay in the Bastogne to fight the Nazis in December; we have to be home for Christmas!  And Junior is in big basketball game the Monday before!"

These are the Democrats?

Nuts.

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. 

Kamala Out of the System

Much like Hillary Clinton released a memoir of her failed presidential campaign against Donald Trump titled "What Happened," former Vice President Kamala Harris has a new memoir of her failed presidential campaign against Donald Trump, titled "107 Days" (after the length of her campaign), though it should be titled, "What Happened?"  Because the added question mark would be highly appropriate.

Harris appeared with Stephen Colbert on his late-night talk show a few days after he - like Harris eight months earlier - had become irrelevant.  She lamented that the system of government in America is broken, and that she plans talk to people about their lives while she tours the United States to promote her book, saying that, by not asking for anyone's vote, she can talk to them in a way that is not transactional.  All of this comes as Harris has announced that she will not run for governor of California in 2026.

"I believe, and I always believed, that as fragile as our democracy is, our systems would be strong enough to defend our most fundamental principles," she told Colbert.  "And I think right now that they’re not as strong as they need to be."

By talking to people on her book tour, Harris is planning to do exactly what she could have done as Vice President if President Biden had made it clear from the start that he would be a one-term President, which, I now believe, is what he should have done all along.  He should have decided privately that he would not run again in 2024 and wait until after the 2022 midterms to make his decision public.  That would have given Harris plenty of time to talk to Americans in a non-transactional way to help her decide whether to run in 2024, as Biden's earlier withdrawal, had it happened, would have allowed other Democrats to run and make the primary/caucus campaign more competitive.

And what does Harris plan to do when her book tour is over?  She plans not to return to government "for now," but that tease may indicate another presidential run in 2028, and many Harris supporters believe she is entitled to try again, since a 107-day campaign was clearly insufficient at defeating Donald Trump.  But let's look at the big picture.  In a live recent podcast he hosted, journalist Ryan Lizza asked listeners to weigh in on whom they thought should be the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee, and they responded with the names of numerous Democrats, but the name of one particular Democrat was never mentioned.  Guess which Democrat. 

Wanted: 2028 Democratic Presidential Nominee. No Women Need Apply.

I'm going to blunt and come right out and say it: The United States will not have a female President in our lifetimes.  That includes babies born today who live to be a hundred.

We need a white male Democratic presidential nominee.  Preferably a Protestant.

As a Catholic who voted for Kamala Harris, I am embarrassed by this statement, but I stand by it.  The presidential election of 2024 definitively proved that a woman can't get elected President of the United States.  Donald Trump is the second worst major-party presidential nominee of all time, surpassed only by himself when he was nominated by the Republicans in 2024 after the GOP nominated him in 2016 and 2020.  He made it clear that would govern as a fascist dictator during the 2024 campaign.  Yet when it came to a choice between a female presidential nominee - and a black female presidential nominee at that - and Donald Trump, the nation chose Donald Trump.  He won every demographic except for two - black women and white men married to black women - while many Democrats stayed home.

And when the Democrats ran a white woman - who was also a Methodist - in 2016, Trump defeated her too. 

Two highly qualified women lost to a megalomaniac con artist.  I'm sorry, but in this case, two strikes is out.

Democrats who once celebrated the fact that a black woman and an Italian-American woman sat behind President Joe Biden at presidential speeches to Congress in 2021 and 2022 have to realize that we now have two white men with Anglo-Saxon names sitting behind a lapsed-Protestant President of German and Scottish origin because the Democrats have a problem reading the room when they nominate presidential candidates.  Kamala Harris lost not just because she couldn't communicate with voters - or at least she couldn't communicate with voters once the consultants took over.  She lost because too many voters - including many black and Puerto Rican men - tried to picture Harris in the White House and just couldn't bring themselves to see it.  Democrats love nominating female candidates for President because they want to make a statement.  Statement made.  Now we have the National Guard occupying Los Angeles like the Wehrmacht goose-stepping through Paris. 

So, assuming we get to have a presidential election in 2028 in which there is more than one candidate and neither of those candidates are named Donald Trump (because if one of them is, it means that the Constitution has been terminated and the election is rigged), Democrats have to ask themselves this: Do they want to make a statement, or do they want to win?

So forget about Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, and especially New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand (who currently runs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee - oh, yeah, that'll help the party win back the Senate in 2026!) as the Democratic presidential nominee for 2028.  And most definitely forget about Kamala Harris - Democrats don't rerun failed nominees of the past.  

Also, forget running another black man - many white voters think Barack Obama is one black President enough for awhile.  So that rules out Governor Wes Moore of Maryland, and besides, the failed presidential ambitions of his two predecessors have proven once and for all that governors of Maryland do not get elected President.  Vice President, yes (regrettably; I'm just old enough to remember Spiro Agnew).  President, no.  

And not even every white man in the Democratic Party is right for the 2028 presidential nomination.  Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania? Jewish.  Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts?  Jewish.  Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois?  Jewish, and also so squat, large and heavy-set, you could show a widescreen movie on his back.  He doesn't look like a President.  No Jews.  No Orthodox Christians either, least of all Greek Orthodox, because Greek-Americans, as Michael Dukakis proved, can't get elected President.  Vice President, yes (I'll cite the late and unlamented Spiro Agnew again).  President, no.

Also, no Catholics.  John F. Kennedy faced accusations in 1960 that he would bow to the Vatican.  John Kerry lost in 2004 because it was feared that he wouldn't bow to the Vatican (then under a Curia more conservative than the Republican Party).  Now that we have an American pope who's so woke he's almost a Unitarian, there are fears once again that a Catholic President would bow to the Vatican.  We need a white male Protestant, one with executive experience (sorry, Chris Murphy) as a governor.

Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky?

Andy Beshear.

But then, as I am a secessionist who believes that New Jersey should leave the Union and form a new country with five or more of the other Eastern states north of the 36°30′ parallel line or become a Canadian province, that's none of my business.  

Rockin' Trump

Bruce Springsteen made a powerful statement against Donald Trump and his dictatorial actions - you've already heard it, I won't repeat it - at a concert he performed in Manchester, England. 

To be honest, I would have preferred that he make that statement in Manchester, New Hampshire, not in a foreign locale, but as Trump got upset over it, it was worth it.

Trump is now threatening to investigate Springsteen, as well as pop stars like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé Knowles, and Paul Hewson, the artist familiarly known as  Bono . . . although, as an Irish national, Bono probably shouldn't be subjected to what is apparently the very, very long arm of the law.

Especially when he didn't participate in the 2024 presidential campaign, he being an Irish citizen and all.

Apparently, Trump believes that Springsteen's and Knowles' appearances at Harris campaign events and the appearances of other high-profile appearances of celebrities like Oprah Winfrey amounted to a "MAJOR AND ILLEGAL CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION" (capital letters his), and that they were paid to appear.  In fact, they were not, and even if Harris had paid them, giving money to campaign supporters is perfectly legal, as is any campaign contribution Bruce or Beyoncé might have given the former future President.

Bruce . . . Beyoncé . . . Taylor Swift . . . They may all be singing the same song -  "Trump Is a Dictator" - but in the future, they may have to take the advice of Rubber Soul #14.

The Untied States of America

Donald Trump's proposed federal budget - which cuts domestic spending to the bone and in some cases the marrow while increasing spending on deportations - is probably the best reason so far for the Democratic and Democratic-leaning states to secede from the Union.  The proposed federal budget severely cuts spending on cancer research and weather forecasting while zeroing out altogether programs like Head Start and agencies like FEMA.  Presidential budget plans are meant to be a statement of values.  This budget blueprint was completely unnecessary; we already know what Trump's values are.  He has none.

Meanwhile, Trump concedes that the tariffs he imposed on China will make Christmas gifts such as toys much more expensive this December, but the Donald thinks that maybe a little austerity would be good for us after having promised his voters to be able to live the good life like he does.  Maybe only two dolls for little girls instead of dozens - funny how he never said that little boys should have only a couple of toy cars.  

And while all of this is going on, Trump is extending his tariffs to foreign films - which won't do much for Hollywood but will certainly shut down the very few remaining art houses in Manhattan.  Trump is actually less concerned with keeping a 2026 seventieth-anniversary American re-release of And God Created Woman, starring Brigitte Bardot (though his evangelical base might be), than he is at getting Hollywood studios to shoot fewer films on location abroad.  Well, that should finish off the James Bond franchise!  

Aside from forcing us to pay double to see the Palme d'Or winner at Cannes, Trump and Elon Musk have devastated the Federal Aviation Administration so much that Newark Airport can barely function amid its numerous delays and cancellations.  Now I get it.  Trump won't try to prevent us from leaving the country by banning us.  He's doing it by making fights to London and Paris impossible.  At least out of Newark.  JFK is next.

It is in this milieu that the Met Gala, a fashion party for rich celebrities with terrible taste in clothes that shuts down the Metropolitan Museum of Art to tourists with only one evening in New York City who are denied the opportunity to see the painting of Washington crossing the Delaware 😡, was held.  As usual, female pop stars unfamiliar to fans of classic rock dominated this event, which manages to be both elitist and vulgar, with their space-cadet threads, but the star of the show was a female pop singer classic rock fans, through their affinity for Motown, are familiar with - Diana Ross, who arrived in a gown that could have clothed all three Supremes, with a train longer than a BNSF freight coming into Chicago.

Oh yeah, another female pop-culture figure was at the gala - Kamala Harris!

The former Vice President and former future President, aware that her political career is over, chose to spend her down time to attend this ode to vulgarity by showing up in a dress that was clearly inspired by the black and white cookie!

Seriously, her dress is making me hungry.

The fact that Harris would rather attend this ode to vulgarity in a dress that is clearly too big for her than join Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (to whom I now offer anew a proposal of marriage) on their anti-oligarchy road show offers prima facie evidence that top Democrats have no connection to the middle and working classes they purport to represent.

Least of all, Senate Democratic "leader" Charles Schumer, who, in response to Trump's trashing of the Constitution, has vowed to issue a strongly worded letter to Trump in protest.

Not gonna work, Chuck.  Trump can't read.

Right, I have to return to my secessionist activities . . ..

Kamala Down, Tim Up

After losing to Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024, Democrats realized they they had developed a curse when it came to nominating women to run for President involving their male vice presidential running mates - if your you're going to nominate a woman for President, never let her running mate be a guy named Tim. 😉

After Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election to Trump, she remained in the public eye to troll Trump and continue living rent-free in Trump's head.  She did so based on a delusional hope that the Democrats would give her, despite having been a failure as a Democratic presidential nominee, a second chance - something no failed Democratic presidential nominee has been given since 1956.  Her 2016 vice presidential running mate, U.S. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, dropped from the radar screen entirely, returning to the Senate and doing, well, Senate stuff.  In that sense, Kaine adhered to the strict American tradition of failed vice presidential nominees of any party whose names aren't Franklin Roosevelt or Earl Warren being forgotten more than actual Vice Presidents.  In the aftermath of the disaster that was the 2024 election, however, the roles have been reversed.

Once January 20, 2025 came and went, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris promptly disappeared.  It was easy to see why former President Biden dropped out of sight.  At 82, he earned a nice long rest, and nowadays he's probably kicking back in his basement den, contemplating plans for a presidential library and possibly making notes for his memoirs.  Harder to understand was why former Vice President Harris would keep a low profile to the point of having no profile.  She hasn't trolled Trump online or sent out any derogatory press releases since January 20 - good grief, even Hillary Clinton has been more visible in the past two months.  The most plausible reason is that Harris too needs a rest, and she also needs to decide whether to run for President again or run for governor of California in 2026.  (Of course, the very real possibility of Trump declaring martial law for a trivial reason would make that a moot question.)

And then, there's her former running mate, Tim Walz.   

Walz started his vice presidential campaign ridiculing Trump and James David Vance as "weird" for their public utterances and their world views.  And it registered.  It gave the Democratic ticket a big boost.  Then, inexplicably - unless they were Trump moles - Democratic consultants told Walz to tone down his "weird" rhetoric, and the Minnesota governor retreated a bit in the background, which allowed Harris a bigger spotlight.  When the election returns showed that giving Harris a bigger spotlight proved to have done more harm than good,  Walz was expected to join Kaine, Lloyd Bentsen, William E. Miller (Goldwater's running mate, who was the first Catholic Republican nominated for Vice President, and who appeared in one of the first "Do you know me?" commercials for American Express), Estes Kefauver, Charles McNary, Arthur Sewall, and Theodore Frelinghuysen (gotta mention someone from New Jersey), among others, in the Archipelago of Forgotten Failed Vice Presidential Nominees.  Instead, Walz has begun touring the American heartland, showing up in Republican U.S. House districts and giving speeches ridiculing Trump and his policies - and also ridiculing Elon Musk and his mere existence.  He has been scoring a lot of points for his efforts - especially when he joked about having an app on his phone that allows him to watch Tesla stock as it sinks to new lows.   For from being forgotten - as Jonathan Last of The Bulwark predicted would happen - Walz is a star once again.

One thing Walz hasn't done is explain what Democrats should stand for in 2026 and 2028 as opposed to merely being against Trump and his agenda.  Perhaps one should look at Walz's record as governor of Minnesota - a record that includes universal school breakfast and lunches for the Gopher State's schoolchildren - as a clue to what the Democrats should stand for.

And what office would Walz run for if he plans to seek another office, assuming he doesn't run for a third term as governor of Minnesota at the end at the end of next year?  Walz has already ruled out running for Senator Tina Smith's seat, which is up in Minnesota in 2026, and there's no Senate seat up for election in Minnesota in 2028, so what office higher than a state governorship might Walz be looking at, assuming we're not under martial law before the end of the decade?  The Presidency, maybe?

Franklin Roosevelt.  Earl Warren.  They too were failed vice presidential nominees with brilliant futures behind them. 

Yet Another Open Letter to Janet Evans About LA '28

Just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in.

*

Dear Janet:

Hi, it's me again.  I think you know why I'm writing you today, given everything that's gone down since your fellow California girl Kamala Harris had her joyful rear end handed to her in the last (at least I hope it's not the last) presidential election.  So I'll just come right out and say it - the 2028 Olympics, for which you are the organizing committee's chief athlete officer, cannot go on in Los Angeles.

Look, Janet, here's the deal.  The Olympic movement is an international one, meant to foster good relations between the countries of the world through sport.  And Donald Trump has managed to foster horrible relations between the United States and every other country on the planet in one short month.  Right after we were in the Paris Olympics, he pulled us out of the Paris climate accord.  He pulled us out of the World Health Organization.  If the United Nations headquarters building weren't in New York, he would have pulled us out of the UN in a heartbeat - and given the endless real-estate repurposing possibilities for the UN's East Midtown property, he might just still do that and send the UN packing and off to Geneva.  His hirsute Vice President was just in Munich admonishing European countries for refusing to acquiesce to the growing and increasingly dangerous rhetoric of right-wing populists and suggested that politicians who ignore the political concerns of the European far right are more of an enemy to American and European values than Russia or China.  The only people in the audience for James David Vance's speech who applauded him were his own staffers. 

Janet, how much more do you want to hear?  When Trump isn't eroding human rights in America with his anti-abortion measures and his persecution of non-heterosexuals, he's starting trade wars with his tariffs.  His erosion of public health standards - Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who's a health expert like I'm a jet pilot, just got confirmed as Health and Human Services Secretary - will make athletes who plan to compete in the Los Angeles Olympics much more hesitant to come here out of fear of catching something.   And all of the bureaucratic elements that make a country function smoothly have just been gutted by Elon Musk.  Need I say more?

Well, Janet, I will.  Los Angeles and a few of its immediate suburbs just suffered some of the most catastrophic fires in the state of California's history.  Even if former President Biden had been able to stay in the campaign and win re-election or if Kamala Harris had eked out a victory over Trump this past November, the fires still would have happened, and the loss of the entire Pacific Palisades section of LA merely underscores how sensitive southern California is to natural disasters - and in an era of climate change, that goes double.  Given the scope and breadth of the disaster, Los Angeles, I would argue, is in no condition to host a major sporting event of any sort.  And, given how the greater Los Angeles area can only sustain naturally a population of a couple hundred thousand, without all of those aqueducts, I don't see how Los Angeles County has the ability to host an Olympiad when it struggles for the necessary resources to sustain the 9.7 million people who call it home.

Look, Janet, I know it would have been cool to have a President Kamala Harris officiate at the opening of the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, especially since it's her and her New Jersey-bred husband's adopted hometown, and no one certainly expected Donald Trump to be President in 2028.  That's why LA got the 2028 Olympics and not the 2024 Olympics - I have no doubt that the members of the International Olympic Committee figured, when awarding the the Games of the XXXIV Olympiad to Los Angeles, that Trump would either serve two consecutive terms as President and be gone by 2028 or he would be lose his 2020 re-election bid and would be too politically wounded to win a second nonconsecutive term, especially since no former U.S. President had pulled that off since 1892.  And, since Trump won a plurality in 2024, and since he made significant gains among black men, white women, and Hispanics of both sexes, and since Harris won solidly Democratic states by smaller margins than Hillary Clinton in 2016 or Joe Biden in 2020, the inference is that the country is moving in the direction of Trump's extreme agenda and is quite happy with where Trump is taking the country, if recent polls are to be believed.  Here's something else we can infer, Janet - more Americans would rather have a racist, misogynistic, fascistic con man in the White House than a black woman with a Jewish husband.

Yes, yes, Janet, I know California is much more liberal than the rest of the country, and Kamala Harris may still officiate at the 2028 Olympics as governor of the state (though I think she's as politically dead as Albert Gore was in 2001), but holding an international sporting event in California and pretending that it's not part of the now-hated United States is like what holding international figure-skating or track and field championships in Minsk and pretending that Belorussia was not part of the hated Soviet Union would have been back in the Cold War era.  In fact, to the rest of world, California means Hollywood, and to rest of the world, Hollywood is America.  Clearly, under present circumstances and circumstances for the foreseeable future, holding an Olympiad in Los Angeles or in any other American city is a no-go.

Therefor, Janet, I am writing a letter to International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach - a real postal letter, not an open online letter like this one - and asking him to move the 2028 Games elsewhere while the IOC still can do so.  And, Janet, given that Trump could start a world war, the LA Olympics might have to be cancelled anyway.

Sincerely.

Steven Maginnis

P.S.  You know I still love you, right?  Just don't tell your husband.

A Female President? PAH!

Tomorrow is the day that Kamala Harris, as the president of the United States Senate, presides over the counting of the Electoral College ballots and the certification of her own presidential-election defeat, the fifth Vice President since 1836 to do so.

She had hoped to make history be becoming the first black woman and the first woman overall to take the presidential oath of office - on Martin Luther King Day, in a nice bit of coincidental symmetry.  (This is only the second time Martin Luther King Day coincides with a presidential inauguration since it became a holiday in 1986.)  The fact that a racist and misogynistic bastard will be returning to the Oval Office instead makes the holiday seem sadly ironic.

Courtney Subramanian of BBC News has said that the reason Harris lost to Trump was because that the former and future President "has proven that his message and style appeals to a huge cross-section of Americans," citing his gains among black men, white women and Hispanics.  I don't buy it.  People may have voted for Trump in part because of inflation and illegal immigration, but I doubt they voted for tariffs,  tax cuts for the rich, trashing of the environmental laws, weaponization of the Justice Department, pardons for insurrectionists, jailing Liz Cheney and the two Adams, Kinzinger and Schiff, for investigating the Donald, or executing Mark Milley for treason.  

But they likely did vote against Harris because she's a woman.

I think it's time that we accept the idea that this is a patriarchal country where a Margaret Chase Smith cannot get elected President, as opposed to Great Britain, where a Margaret Thatcher can become prime minister.   Americans still can't get used to a woman in charge of the country's defense and national security, and they can't imagine a woman making the call on whether or not to use force and when to pivot to the complexities of diplomacy.  Chris Matthews recently suggested that maybe a center-left female leader isn't right for this country and that a woman like Thatcher, who leans more to the right, would have a better chance of winning the White House.  When I heard him say that, I thought he was possibly trying out a new career as a stand-up comic.  As the right-leaning party in the American-leaning two-party system, the Republican Party has less than zero interest in putting a woman at the top of its presidential ticket, as the failed candidacies of Elizabeth Dole, Carly Fiorina, and the aforementioned Margaret Chase Smith (who ran for President in 1964) proved.  And even if a woman did win the Republican presidential nomination, feminist voters would not support her, mainly because they would see her conservative policy proposals as anti-woman, but also anti-poor, anti-middle class, and pro-business.  

The clearest evidence that Americans aren't ready for a female President and never will be is the fact that there have only been two female presidential nominees of major political parties - Harris and Hillary Clinton.  And Donald Trump defeated both of them.   

In other words, nominating Gretchen Whitmer for President in 2028 is the surest way the Democrats can hand the Presidency over to one James David Vance.  That, of course, is assuming there even is a presidential election in 2028 that has more than one candidate. And if there is only one candidate, it won't be Vance.   

As for tomorrow's electoral-vote certification, it promises to go much more smoothly with a lot less drama than last time.

Kamala's To-Do List For 2025

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris said that while Trump had an enemies list he was working on, she was working on a "to-do" list for 2025.

And here is the outgoing Vice President's to-do list for the new year.  It's, uhh, rather short. 

Trump's to-do list for 2025 is even shorter.  It has only one task - make those who oppose him wish they'd never done so.

My New Year's wish for my readers is the simplest wish I could wish for anyone . . . that Kash Patel's goon squads never knock upon your doors.

Kamala 2028. NOT!

The margin between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump has narrowed to the point where the difference between them is about 1.5 percentage points and three million votes, 239,000 of which in key swing states would have elected Harris President had they gone the other way.  Trump is now going to be a minority President, with less than 50 percent of the vote, despite getting the most votes.  In this environment, some folks are already talking about the possibility of Harris trying again for the Presidency in 2028.  A poll already shows her as the favorite for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination.

Sorry.  Ain't gonna happen.

The most obvious reason is the reason I've been bringing up on this blog over and over and over - Democrats don't give losing nominees, whether at the presidential level or down the ballot, second chances.  Harris will be no exception.  Excuses will inevitably be made as to why she shouldn't run again.  Democrats will say that she had trouble connecting to crucial working-class voters in Pennsylvania and Michigan.  They'll say that she carried reliably Democratic states like New Jersey by margins that were too narrow.  They'll point out her ties to President Biden and that the country will demand a clean break from the past in 2028.  

Also, Democrats know that there are too many people in These States who can't accept a woman of color - or any woman - as President.  That remains the clearest reason for Harris's loss.  The Democrats don't want to have to go through that again.  This is why you won't see a woman as a leading candidate for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, assuming that the Democrats are still around in 2028 and opposition presidential candidates are allowed.  Sorry, Gretchen Whitmer.

A white male Democratic presidential nominee with Harris's qualifications would have been sent to ride off into the sunset as well.  How long have Democrats shunned unsuccessful presidential candidates and denied them a second bite at the apple?  How far back do you want to go?  If you look at the electoral history of Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party and its successor, the modern Democratic Party, from 1800 to 1856, you'll see that they won thirteen out of fifteen presidential elections, and the only nominee who never served as President, 1848 nominee Lewis Cass, was never considered again after his loss to Whig nominee Zachary Taylor.  After President Martin Van Buren lost his bid for re-election in 1840, he made two tries to win the party's presidential nomination thereafter; he failed both times.   

Aside from Grover Cleveland (who was elected to his second nonconsecutive presidential term in 1892 in a rematch with Republican President Benjamin Harrison after having won the popular vote against Harrison four years earlier while losing in the Electoral College), Democrats have given additional chances to only two failed presidential nominees - 1896 nominee William Jennings Bryan (nominated two more times, in 1900 and 1908) and 1952 nominee Adlai E. Stevenson II (nominated again in 1956).  Needless to say, neither of them became President.  Democrats simply don't like losers and will move heaven and earth to ensure that losing nominees - presidential or otherwise - don't get another chance.  They'll sow doubts on TV talk shows, discourage donations to losing nominees looking for another shot, and say that want to "look forward."   

Oh yeah, there are rumors that Harris will run for governor of California in 2026 when the term-limited Gavin Newsom steps down.  Good luck with that.  But then again, even a former Vice President from California who loses a gubernatorial election there can make a national comeback.

There's a precedent, and it's been set by a lesser public figure.

Whither Biden 2024?

You know what's depressing about the popular-vote result of the election?  Although Donald Trump got as many votes as he did in 2020, millions of Democrats decide to stay home rather than vote for Kamala Harris.

But what if Joe Biden had remained at the top of the Democratic ticket?

President Biden originally intimated that he would serve only one term, but he never declared his intentions for 2024 one way or the other in the first two years of his term to avoid being seen as a lame duck.  When the 2022 midterm elections turned out to be unexpectedly not awful for the Democrats, Biden took that to mean that he would be in a strong position for 2024.  Also, there was the paucity of serious contenders for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination; too many Democratic rising stars had ended up with brilliant futures behind them when they lost important statewide elections for governor or Senate, and the few Democrats who had the chops to replace Biden at the top of the ticket were handicapped by prejudice or stereotyping.  As I said at the time, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer had just gotten re-elected but still had to deal with her sex as a political liability, given the American people's resistance to the idea of a female President.  There was Pete Buttigieg, but he was too young.  Bernie Sanders, by contrast, was too old.  California governor Gavin Newsom was connected to socially liberal San Francisco, where he'd been mayor.  And the Kamala Harris of 2022 was the same Kamala Harris of 2024 - a black woman whose husband is a Jew.  But any white man with her chops would have been handicapped by simply coming from the San Francisco Bay Area like she did.  And Gavin Newsom clearly was. 

In short, the consensus was that it was either Biden or a houseplant.

So what if Biden had resisted calls to step down and tried to persevere?  We'll never know.  It's all good and fine to suggest that he would have been able to eke out a victory if his own party - and George Clooney - hadn't publicly trashed him this past summer.  Certainly Biden would have done his best to recover from that debate with Trump in a second debate.  Obviously he would have gotten out more in front with the voters, an opportunity the pandemic denied him in 2020.  Clearly he would have talked a lot about economic issues, which would have rung more true from him given his background.  No doubt he would have done his darnedest to make the election about Trump - because if it was about Trump, the Democrats might have gotten an edge.  But the evidence for a Biden victory had he gotten the full support of his party and not had to deal with jokers like Dean Phillips is nonexistent.

So what if Biden had decided not to stand for re-election much sooner?  What if he had decided not to do so in January 2023 and had announced that he would not seek re-election in his February 2023 State of the Union address?  Despite the apparent lack of able contenders to succeed him, there is, to be sure, that someone will make the argument that an unlikely presidential possibility - former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley, Kentucky governor Andy Bashear, North Carolina governor Roy Cooper, or someone no one, not even I, has heard of - would have won the nomination in a fair and open primary/caucus contest and gone on to win the general election.  But the case for a dark horse flies in the face of the likeliest scenario - the party would have immediately coalesced behind Vice President Harris, as Representative James Clyburn (D-SC) insisted should happen back in 2022.

But at least, if Harris had become the presumptive Democratic nominee much earlier, she might have been able to get more people to know her better and had much more time to do so that the 105 days or so she did have.

Then again, maybe the American people never really did want as President a black woman whose husband is a Jew, and no difference of circumstances would have changed that.

It is just this sort of second-guessing and pondering what might have been that is going to plague and bedevil the Democrats as they prepare for next year's gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia and the 2026 midterms . . . assuming they're still on under Trump 47.

Trump is already teasing the idea of a third term for himself, which is possible only if he terminates the Constitution.