Score Settling and Driving Using the Rear View Mirror

The opinion I’ve held of the Harris campaign since her loss was, well, she had a hard job, and I’m not going to quibble. The Liz Cheney / court the reasonable Republicans stuff was bad, and Tim Walz’ debate coaching was an offense to smart campaigning, but, overall, she played her hand fairly well. Now she’s out with a 300 page (!) score-settling memoir, and boy is that a bad look for her. I don’t plan to buy the book, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s a career-ender for her.

Apparently she wanted Pete Buttigieg as her VP pick, but instead she convinced herself he was too gay or whatever (paraphrasing heavily here). First, he would have been a terrible pick — there’s nothing like having someone who talks like a McKinsey consultant as the second banana on a ticket where the person at the top of the ticket has some issues relating with the “common people”. Walz was a good pick, as far as I’m concerned. Second, what is the reason to write a memoir where you say “I wanted X but picked Y” other than to sound like a fucking whiner? You picked Y. That was your decision. You’re running for a job where hard decisions are the currency of the realm. Why on earth would you think that anyone cares about what you wanted in your head? Your actions speak for themselves.

There’s also the whole, convoluted issue of Biden. In 20/20 hindsight, the best thing that could have happened in, say, August 2023 would be for VP Harris to spearhead a group of Democrats who would tell Biden that he needs to step aside. A robust primary would have ensued, and we’d have a pick that the whole party could have gotten behind. She apparently wants us to believe that she did the best she can with the Biden situation, but it’s clear she was on the fringes of Bidenworld. After she became the party’s candidate, she listened far too much to Biden’s not-so-great consultants.

Enough on that unpleasant topic, except I’ll put Kamala Harris into the very long list of Democrats who didn’t take MAGA seriously enough to break out of her cautious lawyer habits and swing for the fences.

Next topic: Ezra Klein, but Klein as an exemplar of the weak, pants-pissing so-called “liberal” elite who are willing to cast aside any form of principle as part of their punditry. In addition to his Charlie Kirk stupidity, he also had some kind of a discussion where he said that he thought Democrats should tolerate anti-abortion candidates in order to win.

This is a two-fer with both Klein and Neera Tanden — who heads the supposedly progressive Center for American Progress — ready, willing and able to throw women under the bus to do something that won’t win a fucking election. Do these political numbskulls now know that Kansas, Ohio and Missouri voters have all voted, recently, for pro-abortion initiatives in large numbers?

I’ll also note that Klein’s wife, Annie Lowrey, wrote extensively about how awful her pregnancies were and how they exacerbated her chronic itch. Klein apparently lacks the tragic imagination, empathy and common sense to think about what would happen if his wife needed a D&C to save her life and happened to be in some terrible red state. Or, maybe, he just chose not to think about it. I should have him fly to the Dakotas and spend an hour or two with my dad, after which he would have a full, complete, and terrible understanding of the importance of the D&C as a life-saving procedure. But it wouldn’t matter, because he cherishes his position as part of the elite over all else, and he can’t imagine that his pregnant wife would ever be on a operating table in the middle-of-nowhere Dakotas, bleeding out, and the physician attending her might want to wait a couple of hours to make “sure” that the pregnancy was really non-viable.

The Democratic Party has a huge problem with pundits and consultants who are driving using the rear-view mirror and/or think they’re part of the elite. They have no skin in the game.

This post is getting long but I want to give two examples of a different path for Democrats. The first is Bernie Sanders in West Virginia. Both reader John and my brother encouraged me to watch this video, and it’s worth a watch:

It’s a video that shows Bernie going to meet some West Virginia Trump voters. His basic message, which we all know, is that billionaires are fucking them over. And, when he explains that to them, they agree. Some of them note that Bernie in person is not the antichrist that they all expected him to be. The anti-oligarchy message resonates, but the rear-view-mirror pundits and consultants won’t recommend it because their funders don’t want to hear it. If we want to “expand the tent,” this is the message that needs to go out.

Finally, AOC posted this on her Instagram and I’m going to reproduce it in full:

Translation:

Here’s the text from AOC’s post:

At this point, I choose a Democratic Party that doesn’t have a leader who’s more interested in score settling than in the party’s future. I choose a party that won’t chase some imaginary voters who don’t share our key values, who would never vote for us anyway. If it takes a while to get there, and if it takes some division and fighting, so be it.