The Harris-Walz Bandwagon

Going into the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the Harris-Walz ticket seems to have caught like wildfire. Kamala Harris has injected enthusiasm and energy heretofore lacking among Democrats into the 2024 political season, and she has introduced a set of policy proposals that would directly help Americans deal with inflation and acquire the ability to purchase a house. Like Harris, Tim Walz, her vice presidential running mate, relates easily to Americans in ways that most Democratic presidential and vice presidential nominees of the past forty years never could - not just failed nominees like Michael Dukakis or the 2004 John Kerry/John Edwards ticket  (not to mention Hillary Clinton, so I won't), but even successful presidential nominees like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and successful vice presidential nominees like Al Gore, who in retrospect were too polished and too centrist to strike a chord in people and inspire them to make and sustain a clean break from the bedrock Republican principles of low taxes, small government, and supply-side economics - Reaganism.  

Since 2016, though, Reaganism has mutated into Trumpism, a mean-spirited movement that not only benefits the rich and the powerful but seeks to enslave the masses in a punitive, fascistic despotism in which the rights of ordinary citizens based on race, gender or class are severely curtailed and failure to tow the line or voicing opposition to the authoritarian order is punished with equal severity.  How can such a system be so cruel?  The cruelty is the point . . .which I believe is a maxim originally enunciated by Heinrich Himmler.

Since 1980, when the election of Ronald Reagan to the Presidency emasculated a once-proud Democratic Party that had won eight out of the previous twelve presidential elections and had controlled 22 of the previous 24 Congresses, the only way the party has been able to loosen the GOP hold on power in Washington was to nominate fortysomething centrists for President whose charisma reminded voters of Reagan or to cultivate congressional leaders who struck a centrist pose to counter rightist orthodoxy espoused by people like Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan. President Biden began the process of ending the era of Republican domination but has been hindered by his Washington-insider perspective and, let's face it, his age in his efforts to stop Trumpism from gaining permanent power with an iron fist. Harris and Walz, with their real-world perspective and relatability, their vigor, and their symbolism of a new, multiracial, democratic America, are ready to finish what Biden started - and save America from fascism in the process.

Biden's Philadelphia Speech

President Biden gave a good speech in Philadelphia at Independence Hall on Thursday night in talking about "the soul of our nation."  It was a good speech, but it was not a great one.  

The speech lacked the focus of earlier speeches on liberty and freedom, mainly because it was nearly half an hour long and speeches meant to call attention to democracy under threat are shorter and more to the point.  But then again, you shouldn't expect the Second Coming of the Gettysburg Address from Biden or anyone else.  

A lot of Biden's critics on his left will take issue with his assertion that violence and suppression are not who we are when there's plenty of evidence that such values are who we are and have been for a long time.  Slavery, the Civil War the Ku Klux Klan, lynching, Bull Connor . . . and back in the late 1960s, black activist Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, who was then known as H. Rap Brown, called for blacks to revolt against the government and declared violence to be "as American as cherry pie."  January 6, 2021 proved al-Amin right.  That al-Amin should have so much in common with the racist Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers is one of the great ironies of contemporary American history.

Biden was at his most effective in this psech, though, when he laid out a dark vision of America in 2022 and rested the blame at the feet of Donald J. Trump, whom he called out by name and declared an existential threat to the American Experiment.  He centered in on Trump supporters and their disregard for the will of the people and the rule of law.  Then President Biden strategically pivoted to the accomplishments of his own administration and the Democratic Congress and their relevance to making America freer and safer in order to set the argument as a choice between democracy and Trumpism, not as a referendum on the Democratic Party.  If there was one misstep Biden made in this speech and in remarks from earlier in the week, it was his somewhat clumsy effort to separate "mainstream" Republicans from Make America Great Again (MAGA) Republicans, because, quite finally, MAGA Republicans are mainstream.  Also, anti-Trump Republicans aren't really Republicans anymore.  They're either independents or members of the nascent Forward Party.

But with so many pro-Trump election deniers on the ballot in November in so many states for offices like governor or secretary of state, the choice in the 2022 midterms is clear - it's either the Democrats or the Trumpists.  The Forward Party (do you call its members Forwardists?) is still in the process of forming.