A defeat foretold

Kamala Harris proved too cowardly even to address her supporters Tuesday night, as her loss to Trump became more and more inevitable. But what could she really say? She couldn’t honestly say she’d run a vigorous campaign that championed the poor, the downtrodden, and the voiceless or that she’d fought for peace, and human dignity, and to fix an unraveling climate. I’d be really interested to hear her say what she thought her campaign was all about, but even Harris probably couldn’t have pinpointed the purpose or the meaning of her doomed run…

From the outside, Harris’s entire campaign seemed to be about saving an economic system (neoliberalism) that she described falsely as “democracy,” which isn’t working for large segments of both the political left and right; at the same time she and Biden were flouting an international system of laws in order to arm and finance a genocide in Gaza. The hypocrisies were too transparent to sustain.

This was a fatal moment in the friendly confines of the Stephen Colbert Show around the time that her post-convention/debate bounce began to deflate and she never got any better… Stephen Colbert: “Under a Harris administration, what would the major changes be and what would stay the same?” Harris: “Sure. Well, I mean, I’m obviously not Joe Biden. So that would be one change. But also I think it’s important to say with 28 days to go, I’m not Donald Trump.”

Like Hubert Humphrey, Harris was saddled with an unpopular war (a war & a genocide in her case) that her own boss was waging. Humphrey tried to break from LBJ on Vietnam but too late. Harris never did. Harris’s stubborn refusal to separate herself from Biden to any degree went so far as to turn her campaign over to his campaign staff, the same brilliant strategic minds that had him trailing Trump by 10 to 15 points in July…

Harris had very different policies when she ran against him in 2016, maybe she should’ve stuck with a few of them, instead of saying stuff like her beliefs haven’t changed but her position on fracking/national health care/the border/ have…. In what was obviously going to be a “change” election, when Harris had the chance to differentiate herself from Biden, she said there wasn’t a “thing she could think of” she’d do differently…

Harris’s flip-flop on fracking is emblematic of her entire campaign, a relatively minor issue that gave devastating insight into her vacuous political character. She could never explain it because the only explanation was pure political calculation (and a bad one). She was willing to invalidate her climate policy to court a few thousand votes in Pennsylvania. It was the equivalent of Hillary telling Goldman Sachs she had one policy in public and another in private. But even more inept. How could you make the campaign about honesty & trust, once you’d shown yourself to be dishonest and untrustworthy on an issue you’d described as being an existential threat to human life on earth?

Harris sold out the climate movement (and the climate) and still lost Pennsylvania… Harris losing Pennsylvania almost ensures that the Democrats will turn to Josh Shapiro as their champion in 2028 and won’t reverse course on their blind support of Israel. Maybe in Harris’s case she’d’ve had a better shot at winning Wisconsin if she skipped it like Hillary. It could be the more they saw of her, the less there was to see…

Exit Poll in Wisconsin: Trump doubled his support among Black voters. He now has about 20% of the Black vote, compared to 78% for Harris. Four years ago, Trump won only about 8% of Black voters in the Badger State. John Kerry lost in part because his “Ready to Serve” campaign emphasized his military career as the war in Iraq unraveled. Harris played up her role as a hard prosecutor at a time of record police shootings – no wonder her support with Black and Hispanic men collapsed.

As I wrote in my column two weeks ago, Harris’ strategy to use Liz Cheney as a surrogate to win the mythical Haley voters when Haley herself was out campaigning for Trump was doomed to fail. And fail it did, spectacularly. Recall that when Cheney left office, he was one of the most universally reviled figures in American history, with an approval rating of 13%.

The Harris campaign’s messaging was so bad that they lost to Trump on the issue she hit the hardest, his MAGA movement being a threat to democratic values…The Cheney gambit didn’t help her with independents. In Pennsylvania, independents went 50-44 for Donald Trump.

If any good comes out of this disaster, it would be driving the final nails in the coffins of the Clintons, Bidens, Bushes, Obamas, and Cheneys… It won’t. They’ll all be back in one manifestation or another. The one thing we can count on is that no lessons will be learned from this debacle. The Democrats lost to Trump the same way they did in 2016, only worse. Ryan Grim: “The Cheneys have now stolen two elections from Democrats, but you can’t really blame them for the second.”

Sending NAFTA Bill Clinton to scold Arab-American voters in Michigan (of all places!) and Obama to harangue black men in Pennsylvania during the last week of the campaign seems to have gone over well…

The Harris campaign refused to allow one anti-genocide speaker at their convention, even one willing to give a tame, non-confrontational, pre-approved speech. Harris lost south Dearborn, Michigan, a 90% Muslim area that Biden won with 88% of the vote four years ago…

Trump: 46.8% Harris: 27.68% Stein: 22.11%. Dr. Gassan Abu Sitta: “Gone is a genocidal president too hypocritical to admit it. And in comes a genocidal president who wears it as a badge of honor.”

Harris made little effort to court the youth vote and, at times, seemed to actively disdain it. They repaid her in kind. CBS News Exit Poll in Michigan: “Younger voters (age 18-29) are narrowly going for Trump right now…This deficit for Harris is largely due to younger men in Michigan who are more for Trump.”

Excerpted: ‘Chronicle of a Defeat

Foretold’. Courtesy: Counterpunch.org