Like our Middle Eastern friends Jasmine & Aladdin say, it’s a whole new world: 85000 newly signed-up volunteers. $80 million in small donations, 62% of them from first-time donors. Nepo-Baby Huey Elon Musk scared away from Donny Littlehands by the power of Harris.
The last time I posted, it was Yom Kippur for the Republic: The world hung in delicate balance as the Biden camp was judged for its sins, and would our President do the right thing and make teshuvah — not mere repentence but genuine action to repair?
And should he, would the Party Ambitious take his retirement as blood in the water, chicken-fighting to advance their careers, or would they do the sensible thing and unite around the one other Federal elected, who also happened to be the biological, cultural, moral, and political antithesis of Littlehands?
It’s hard to believe, but folks have pretty uniformly done good. Even Cranky Joe Manchin backed off. I can’t remember three days of such consistently uplifting domestic political news as this week. The cavalry’s here, and to paraphrase Bernie Sanders: It isn’t her. It’s us.
So, what about her?
You can’t turn on MSNBidenC or open Facebook without hearing late-phase handwringers kvetch that our new presumptive flagbearer is “untested.” “Not vetted.” “We should’ve had a fight.” “Are the Democrats delusional?” Blah blah blah.
I won’t invoke the nightmare of 1968 nor a Kennedy’s irresponsible candidacy in 1980: the debacles that brought us Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Best to be a good winner and not rub salt in the wounds of the ex-Clinton and -Obama strategists whom Kamala Harris out-strategized. (Here’s yer vetting, pal!)
On the other hand, I won’t repeat the litany of accomplishments with which others have already squashed “untested,” nor make excuses for that godawful 2020 not-quite-primary run. Because, you know what? None of that matters. Not now.
We’re living in July, almost August, 2024. Our opponents are Littlehands and Bedbug. Sure, somewhere in America (probably Burlington, Vermont) there may be a perfect next POTUS, but our nation can’t afford that dream right now. Right now we need the best nominee for right now.
Maybe that nominee had a mixed record as a prosecutor. Perhaps she changed her mind once or twice (or three or four times) campaigning in 2019. She may lack Joe Biden’s foreign policy chops, Bernie Sanders’s truth-to-power anger, and (thank goodness) Pete Buttigieg’s McKinsey technocratic good-government instincts. But she also never married Kimberly Guilfoyle, unlike the lubricious Gavin Newsom. (In fact, she’s Kimberly Guilfoyle’s worst nightmare, but that’s another story.) More to the point, Harris is the Democrat most likely to wake the sleepy (i.e., brain-dead) undecided, to zap the dullwitted to attention, to bring sisterhood, inclusion, and intersectionality to bear. She already has.
Doing short time in the Senate, Harris proved herself a force of nature grilling bad guys like Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions and alleged teen sex-offender, beer-loving Brett Kavanaugh. She’s not afraid to say “fuck.” And she displays one oft-overlooked feature that turns voters in America on — a move conspicuously unplayed by her opponent. Kamala Harris has an absofuckinglutely killer smile.
She smiles to express confidence, to take credit for a quip, to forge bonds with her listeners. She claps; she winks; she waves; my god, she laughs. Her face lights up when she scores a deep cut or alludes to some outrage she knows her audience already, painfully, knows, and that she’d put a stop to. She’s sassy. She takes a podium with verve. She takes being Kamala lightly; it’s us, she conveys, she takes seriously.
So let’s get back to Ronald Reagan. Tall, handsome, honeytongued, optimistic, happy Ronald Reagan, the man in the white cowboy hat on the horse, the man who saw the shining city on the hill, Mr. Morning in America. No genius when it came to policy (David Stockman invented “Reaganomics” and the USSR was crumbling under its own weight), but the picture of American glory from, as Littlehands loves to put it, central casting. Unlike Littlehands, he helped voters feel good about themselves and their future, not bitter and thwarted. Unlike Littlehands, he won both the popular and electoral votes, and bigly, and twice.
Now watch Kamala Harris. Watch her reintroduce herself to the ex-Biden now-Harris campaign team. That clip revs up almost as much civic gemütlichkeit as Bernie’s America ad from 2016. She’s sunny, where Littlehands is nightshade. She’s perky, where Littlehands is punitive. She radiates gratitude; Littlehands radiates grievance. Kamala makes us feel it can be Morning Again in Progressive America.
She’s a bit undefined and unknown policy-wise -— but just a bit, just enough to surprise with a gesture that might reframe the national discourse. Take Israel/Palestine. This morning, she refused (or at least declined) to preside over Netanyahu’s shameless show on Capitol Hill. At the same time she frustrated the inevitable blowback by proposing (but not scheduling!) a low-fi private meeting. That’s deft politics.
Harris is our captain now. With her and phone calls and postcards and doorknocks and texts and four face-to-face canvassing contacts per persuadable, we can scrape out the few thousand votes here and there, in Wisconsin, in Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, in Arizona, that it’ll take to turn a popular-vote majority into victory in the Electoral College. Harris secures our shot at preserving democracy. If she picks, say, a border-state/swing-state/gun-control-advocating hulky male astronaut as VP, she may run the map — from the Midwest straight down through the Sunbelt, and of course from California to the New York island. If she heeds Bernie Sanders and runs as an unabashed, pro-working-people progressive, the first woman, second Black, first South Asian U.S. President may win by a landslide.
Harris may not be the one we expected. She may not be the doyen voters dreamed of when they dreamed beyond Joe Biden. But she’s the one who sparked this whole new world. She’s the woman for this very particular moment, these final fifteen (dear Lord!) Trump-inumbrated weeks. And if we — and she — are diligent, and if we — and she — don’t get cocky (so to speak), and if we are very, very, very, very lucky, Kamala Harris might prove to be our own Ronald Reagan.