ACTUALLY, SHE COULD HAVE WON

The Dumb and Dumber Campaign of Kamala Harris and the Democrats--Was It Plain Stupid or Just Willful Ignorance? And What We Are Left With

First, a charitable view: “The dynamics of this race were baked in before Kamala Harris became a candidate,” Julián Castro, the former housing secretary who also ran for president in 2020, told the New York Times. “She was dealt a bad hand. She was trying to get elected in the shadow of a president who was unpopular and who the public had overwhelmingly been saying should not run for re-election and took too long to step aside.”

A less charitable view: Why was Harris the candidate at all? An open primary would have brought Democrats easy choices to win the swing states, Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania. Wisconsin comes along. Game over.

Now the Stupid: Even with Harris, why wasn’t Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro chosen to run with her as Vice President? “Oh, he’s too Jewish.  America is so antisemitic.”  If Pennsylvania is antisemitic why did a candidate named Josh Shapiro crush his opponent by 15 % points? (OK, if his name was Lenny Cohen maybe he only would have won by 12%.)  Fracking, teachers union objections? That’s called compromise. Would he have over-shadowed Harris? Maybe. Nevertheless,  Shapiro would have given the Democrats the most important state in the election, which she lost by less than 2.5%.

She lost Michigan, the second most important state by less than 1.5%.  Michigan’s Lebanese-American, Muslim, and Arab voters number far more than 200,000.  Whether you see the war in  the Middle East as a just result of the Hamas slaughter of innocent Israelis on October 7 or a mass slaughter of innocent civilians in Gaza and Lebanon carried our across Tik-Tok, Instagram and American television screens—or both at the same time (call that political cognitive dissonance)—Harris and the Democrats did nothing to speak to hundreds of thousands of upset voters in Michigan.

Instead, Harris toured the Upper Midwest with the daughter of the man, who as, yes, Trump said, killed more Muslims than any man alive.  And why? To go after never-Trumper suburban Republican women.  Alas, January 6, the Constitution and a candidate who tried to over-throw the government did not phase Republican women or Independents.  Neither did putting abortion on the ballet of eight Red states.  These folks voted to enshrine reproductive freedoms and then voted for Trump anyway.

Who did Harris not tour the Upper Midwest with? Senator Bernie Sanders, the most popular politician with young people, union members and working people since FDR, even though he asked. The abandonment of the working class, especially the white working class, by Democrats has its roots with Queen Hillary, Deborah Wasserman Schultz and Jim Clyburn in South Carolina ignoring—bigger word would be defenestration, littler word, cheating—of Sanders and everything he stood for.  Put more visually, can you imagine Kamala Harris putting down her West Los Angeles chardonnay for a Bud Lite (the most popular beer in PA) let alone a Pittsburg Dancing Gnome IPA?

Perhaps a chardonnay sipper could have accentuated the cheddar cheese vote to win Wisconsin? Again, a state she lost by less than 1.5%.  With Bernie and Shapiro missing.

In sum, Harris could have won with a common sense concentration on Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the old Blue Wall.  Interestingly, these three states have far fewer Black voters than North Carolina and Georgia.  Harris is Black and Black women have a strong pull with the Democratic Party and so she may have naturally thought she could bring over Georgia and North Carolina. However, this proved to be a romantic lost cause and all polls before the election showed it.  Another casualty of identity politics.

Which brings us to The Latins.  It was Crazy Town thinking to imagine Arizona would go for Harris when 25% of Latin voters were for stopping immigration (far more for Latin men) and Harris was seen as having already failed at that vast project. Arizona’s new Latin Sen. Ruben Gallego crushed the demonic Trumper Keri Lake but Gallego did some cool stuff like sponsoring watch events at prize fights. There are 15.6 million Hispanics in Harris’ home state of California but did her campaign ever showcase her at so much as a Quakes soccer match let alone a WME fight with Hector Urbino, or if you prefer a more feminist fighter to knock your block off, how about flyweight champion Alexa Grasso?

Outside of Brooklyn and the New York Times, identity politics are dead—political suicide.  With some justified amusement the Wall Street Journal summed it up: Class over Race, as those mysterious Latins turned out to have the same concerns as other voters: the economy and immigration.  People of Color or “POC” has proven to be simply a Black meme, originating from the French gens du couleur, representing melanin combinations from miscegenation and free Blacks in New Orleans long ago.  Why would tens of millions of Latin voters from Mexico and Central America care or even know what the term so beloved by East Coast intellectuals and academics everywhere even means?  It has no relevance, either, for millions of Asian voters more concerned about educational opportunities and the economy.

American demographics have markedly changed in the last 25 years.  There are now 20 million more Latins in the US than Black folks (39M vs ~60M.) Ours is now a White-Brown country, a shift the Democratic Party has not caught up with, though Blacks and Latins are still about equal in their voting punch, both at ~10%.

As for young people—reading the above screed, a discerning political observer can choose between Dumb or Dumber, but when it comes to the Youth Vote, we really gotta use the phrase willfully stupid.

Hot Globe was among the first to point to the Dems’ weakness among young men (“The Democrats Don’t Need Taylor Swift, They Need Travis Kelce.” ) When Harris would do some little CNN interview and garner an audience of 6 million to the seal claps of the East Coast media, The Donald would go on Theo Von and get 15 million.  This sad disparity deepened when Harris refused to do the Joe Rogan Experience with the arrogant demand that the interview be limited to one hour—his format calls for three—and that Rogan and his crew fly to meet Harris somewhere.  Vance and Trump made no such demands. Trump’s show got some 38 million views in the first three days, millions more before the election as it was constantly repeated on You Tube, and Rogan announced for Trump just before the election.  The biggest voice in the world, who asked for Harris to come on, and in 2016 he supported Bernie Sanders!

If you are going to throw ice water in the face of Joe Rogan; you rudely refuse Bernie Sanders and you have to check the Rand McNally Atlas to learn where the Latins are; also you have no answer to the slaughter of innocents in the Middle East when those who do pay attention can swing the swing states in the Upper Midwest, and you think “joy” and a single issue like the loss of abortion rights, important as it is, will put you in the White House, well, are we talking stupid or willfully ignorant?

And no mention of climate change in the middle of one of the most destructive hurricanes in recent years, with fires from Nevada to New England. No mention of the 1.3 million Covid deaths during the pandemic and the disastrous anti-medical, anti-science rollout of the Trump administration. Obama in his great Detroit speech pointed out that Canada suffered losses 1/10 proportionately to the US. Harris? Crickets. Was her campaign afraid to rile up anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers? They certainly would not have voted for her anyway.

You may have noted a certain anger here in the normally placid Hot Globe discourse, but what the fuck! What has been wrought?  What do our Republican victors intend to do? Exactly what they’ve told us. 

Now, I don’t particularly care what some party boy like potential AG Matt Goetz has done or intends to do.  I agree with Bobby Kennedy, Jr., 50% of the time, that is, on his views for improving the American diet. The other half? I consider RFK, Jr. to be a stone-cold, needle-phobic, ex-junkie murderer of children in Samoa (no vaccinations for measles) and thousands of dead Black people he targeted with videos, lying that mRNA Covid vaccinations would kill them not save them. Will this dude shut down future pandemic preparations as Trump did in Round 1?  Evilly stupid.  And I have a feeling that Musk is in all this really just to get to Mars.  He’s a focused boy, and like Bill Gates said, he should never be counted out. I recommend watching The Man Who Fell to Earth with David Bowie to truly understand Elon.

But in our minds the most dangerous appointment so far is that of Chris Rhodes, Trump’s pick for Secretary of Energy, and founder of Liberty Energy, which processes 20% of all onshore wells in the US.  

Because his goal is not to get to Mars like Elon Musk, but to fry Planet Earth.

If 49% of America just voted to sell out our democracy for the price of hamburger, this son-of-a-gun, climate-change-denying MIT grad Chris Wright would, like Esau in the Bible, sell us out for a mess of potage (Genesis 25:29-34, translation, “meal of lentils”) to put it in Texas evangelical terms. To rephrase in more secular language, he would burn our children’s and grandchildren’s birthrights to a crisp for a mistaken belief:

“There is no climate crisis,” says Wright. “and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either.” 

Is that willful ignorance or just plain greed?

The next four years will tell.

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