45 1.0 What Happened? 2.0: In Real Life Sometimes the Bad Guys Win
Wednesday 11/6/2024
And in recent politics it seems they ALWAYS WIN. Certainly that’s the self evident lesson of Donald Trump’s political career. When you’re a star they let you do it.
This is the title of Hillary Clinton’s book back in 2017 that attempted-CF Chapter What Happened-to explain what happened in 2016-pretty apt title. In this chapter I’m going to try to explain-to myself as well as the readers-what just happened here in 2024 where evidently America just remarried it’s abusive husband. Yes like 2016 but much worse.
In some ways things seemed more hopeful as terrible as it was. This time the feeling is different-it’s hard to know at this moment where things will go from here. There will no doubt be many, many theories as to what just happened tonight-last night really. Many of them no doubt will focus the blame on Kamala Harris-she will be scorned as “bad candidate” by many pundits. Just like Hillary has been widely scorned as a “bad candidate.”
Of course, Kamala Harris’ defeat will be held not just against her but against her entire gender.
(3) Elie Mystal on X: “Dems are never nominating a woman again.” / X
The bad candidate narrative will be irresistible for many no doubt-it often seems like in this narrative a “bad candidate” essentially is the same thing as a female candidate-there’s the presumption that no woman could be a GOOD candidate for President. I’ll vote for a woman just not that woman.
What is unquestionable is that the numbers in this election were terrible-now wether or not this is Kamala’s fault is another question. But, again, it’s inevitable that many will so presume-it’s Occam’s Razor: the easiest explanation is she was a bad candidate-the quite subtext being that maybe all women are bad candidates.
As to why this is worse than 2016 there are many reasons. One is that this time the country seemed to move to the Right almost uniformly. Trump did better in almost every state-nearly every single county-wether they were Red, Blue, or Purple.
Across the board Trump outperformed his 2020 numbers-or if you like Kamala underperformed Biden’s numbers. In 2020 Trump had also won Florida but by 3 points-this time it’s by 14. Trump had, of course, won Texas in 2020 but by 6 points. This time it’s also by 14. Similarly he won Iowa by 8 in 2020-this time was by: 14. OTOH Kamala won the Blue state of NY which marks the 10th straight time Dems have won NY but this time it was by only 12 points-in 2020 it was 23, she won the Blue state of NJ by under 5 points; similarly she won the Blue state of Illinois by just 5 points-while the Biden-Harris 2020 ticket won the state by 17-which was historically typical for that state-the Dem candidate had won the last three elections in IL by about 17 points-Obama in 2008 had won by 24. In 2022 there was bifurcation where the Dems mostly overperformed except for Florida and Long Island NY. What’s arresting this time is how uniform Trump overperformed.
UPDATE: This was early in the morning of Nov 6-Illinois has risen a bit closer to 10 points since-though that’s still close to a 10 point loss.
He may well-though it’s not certain have won the popular vote. Though it was NOT a “historical landslide” as many have been saying.
How Trump Won, Again – The New York Times
So many will look to blame Kamala AND her gender. Of course, when you lose there are 100 different decisions you can point to as decisive-as vulgar Hegelianism would put it, success is proof of truth, success has many fathers, defeat is an orphan.
Everyone will insist her defeat their particular narrative that was preconceived many years before the fateful day of November 5, 2024.
You might say there are two kinds of explanations of WTF happened?! Many hinge on a version of Kamala Harris was either a BAD CANDIDATE or she ran a BAD CAMPAIGN. It’s hard not to suspect that for many of the BAD CANDIDATE people there’s no such thing as a female candidate who is good.
The other kinds of explanations-which I certainly find more persuasive-is that what happened on Tuesday night was structural.
Nate Silver is not necessarily anyone’s favorite person these days-certainly not among liberals like me-but he did warn about the fundamental picture many times during the latter part of 2024-as he had rightly warned of Trump’s first victory.
I will admit that after the Seltzer poll on Saturday night I became a little high on my own supply-after all, IF Kamala were really up by 3 points in IOWA where else may she have been underestimated? After all, Trump won Iowa by 9 points in 2020 while losing Texas and Ohio by only 6 so… This led me to put out a forgettable tweet I’d like to have back.
VERY EARLY Wednesday morning before the race was officially called for Trump Josh Marshall wrote this:
If Harris loses, that is obviously a crushing result. There’s no way around that. It’s different from 2016 in that it’s not a shock. We all knew or should have known this was a very possible result. The polls and models were about as close to 50-50 as you can get. A number were literally 50-50. But there’s another dimension of the story, assuming Trump does win. And that’s this: everyone knows who Donald Trump is. He was already President once. We know what that was like. Paradoxically Kamala Harris and he both did a pretty good job reminding us who he was over the last month. So it’s not like 2016 when you could say people didn’t know what they were getting. We know who he is. If he wins, which now looks probable though not certain, that’s a very sobering reality.
I wrote yesterday that I thought Harris ran a near flawless campaign. I still think that. And that removes one excuse. If she had run a mess of a campaign that would be one thing. She didn’t. I think she ran about as good a campaign as possible. I’m sure some people will blame her. I don’t think that will be fair. But big picture it doesn’t matter. Trump is the exception. Nobody gets a second chance to run for President. So blame her or not, it doesn’t matter. She won’t be running again.
Status Check Just After Midnight – TPM – Talking Points Memo
A few thoughts. A throwaway thought is that it’s simply amazing how none of the rules of political gravity that govern others effects him. Indeed the fact that he was able to run after not only losing in 2020 but being the ultimate sore loser who still to this day hasn’t admitted he lost like it’s the most natural thing in the world speaks volumes. Yet Harris’s political career is clearly finished-as the rule of political physics Trump alone is exempt from is if you lose a Presidential eelction you’re a loser-not of one election but for all time-think of Jimmy Carter, Wlater Mondale, Mike Dukakis. These folks went onto be political punchlines
FN: True Jimmy carter went onto a second career for all the good works he’s done post Presidency-and to an extent his accomplishmets at Camp David. Speaking of Carter while it’s wonderful he lived to sese his 100th birthday and vote for Kamala Harris, it’s pretty sad he lived to see Nov 5, 2024 in a sense.
EndFN
More importantly I completely agree with Marshall-focusing on campaign quality or mistakes is too easy-you can blame it on any particular decision. But it does seem to me what happened on November 5 was more systemic, more structural.
The Youtuber Vaush argues-based on Marxist theory-that the material circumstances for what happened was a long time coming. While personally I’m not a Marxist, I AM a big fan of Vaush-and Marxist theory can be helpful as a pedagogical tool-and I do think there’s likely a lot of truth in this.
So what did happen?
There are also some debates on which voters deserve the blame. Some are very eager to insist that Black voters get zero blame.
Seems to me there’s plenty of blame to go around. Sure 52% of White women voted for Trump thereby further enternching Dobbs. But as Mystal says, depending on which exit poll you look at either a very narrow majority of Latino men voted for Trump or voted for Harris-despite Trump’s fascist rally at MSG a few weeks ago with that comic who called Puerto Rico a “garbage island.”
It’s almost as if nothing matters.
This after Biden won the Hispanic vote by 23 points.
OTOH 20-25% of
Some dueling theories for What (the fuck) Happened
One thing that occurs to me is that there’s something reassuring in that premise that Kamala was a terrible candidate or ran a terrible candidate-as this is in principle easy to fix-just get a GOOD CANDIDATE next time. Then we don”t have to do too much introspection-“we” being the party elite. Maybe the country is still not ready for a woman… the party elite might reason.
It’s reassuing precisely because it’s totally facile and there’s no way to falsify it-wether someone is a good or bad candidate is, after all, totally subjective. Hillary Clinton too was allegedly a Bad Candidate-in a total conicidence she was also a woman. One piece of theater criticism of HRC was that she talked too much about the historical aspect of her candidacy. So Kamala Harris talked about electing a woman almost not at all. Yet she too was a bad candidate.
FN: Of course, Hillary herself hadn’t discussed the history of being the first woman in 2008 and she was criticied FOR THAT-in 2016 she spoke about the history to correct what many said was a mistake in 2008.
Seeing as we are in the same place in 2024 we were in 2016 only worse as Trump may have actually won the popular vote-it seems clear that yet again putting it all on the idiosyncrasies of one particular candidate being a bad candidate isn’t going to get us anywhere fast. At the end of the day any candidate WHO LOST can be called a BAD CANDIDATE-after all if they were GOOD they would have won-right? The conversation is entirely circular.
To make any progress on wtf happened?! a more structural and systemic analysis is necessary. Here is Jonathan Chait’s theory of the case-it’s one I suspect we’re going to see a lot of the next few years.
Americans Didn’t Embrace Trump, They Rejected the Biden-Harris Administration
Americans Didn’t Embrace Trump, They Rejected the Biden-Harris Administration
Immediate off the bat that’s reassuring-after all it’s not that the embraced Trump. Still-if true-the question that begs is what exactly is it about the Biden-Harris Administration was so bad?
That half this country could willingly restore Donald Trump to a position of power is a sickening thought. For most liberals, moderates, or people who closely follow news sources not controlled by the Republican Party, it is almost unfathomable.
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The incomprehension often leads either to despair or denial. Because Trump is so abnormal, so grotesquely narcissistic and cruel, that his success seems to upend conventional political assumptions and render his triumph into a kind of black magic. Reality is more banal. The American public has not embraced Trump. The decisive bloc of voters always evinced deep misgivings about Trump’s character and rhetoric, even if they didn’t fully recall all his crimes and offenses (who could?) Trump didn’t win by making people love or even accept him. He won because the electorate rejected the Biden-Harris administration. It is important to clearly discern the sources of that rejection. The work of correction is hard, but not complicated.”
Part of the reason I suspect Chait’s theory is going to be heard about a lot in the next two years is because it’s not complicated-for many the less “complicated” that is the more facile a theory is the better. Whichever theory requires folks to rethink the fewest preconceptions.
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The seeds of Harris’s failure were planted eight years ago, when the Democratic Party responded to Trump’s 2016 victory not by moving toward the center, as defeated parties often do, but by moving away from it. This decision was fueled by a series of reality-distorting blinders on the Democrats’ decision-making elite. During the first Trump era, public polls showed the president immediately and deeply unpopular, fueling the belief that Americans opposed him so overwhelmingly that Democrats did not need to make any ideological compromises to win. And that delusion was fueled by the pervasive influence of social media, especially Twitter, which fostered a delusional sense that the Democratic base had veered far to the left. Candidate after candidate bowed to demands of progressive groups to endorse unpopular stances favored by the left.
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And so the Democratic primary in the 2020 cycle was a race to the left. Joe Biden won because he abstained from that rush to the left, keeping him closer to where the party’s voters had remained. Yet his win happened so quickly it could not dispel the notion that Democrats actually wanted radical transformative change, and Biden had too little organizational ballast or strong convictions of his own to defend the more mainstream vision he had used to win the nomination.”
TBH I don’t find this narrative terribly persuasive. Implicit is the idea that HRC ran to far to the left-but the trouble with this kind of explanations is until you reveal specifically on what issues was she too far to the Left it’s way to broad and vague a claim to make much of.
Later though Chait puts forward a specific issue Biden was allegedly too progressive on: inflation.
In office, Biden suffered a combination of bad judgment and worse luck. The Covid pandemic led to dislocations and a surge of inflation that has toppled the governing parties of every ideological stripe across multiple continents. Inflation generated so much resentment it caused a retroactive halo for Trump, who Americans began to remember more fondly than they ever had during his first term.
,Inflation was by far the largest single source of Biden’s unpopularity. Its effects drove governing parties in other countries twenty or thirty points below water. It would have been difficult for any sitting president to defy the pattern of anti-incumbent rage.
As inflation was generated by supply chain international issues and effected many other countries what would Chait have him do? Chait thinks his big sin was being too Keynesian-of pushing for full employment too soon.
But Biden’s policies worsened his predicament. He ignored warnings of inflation, believing that the fastest return to full employment and rising wages would be rewarded by a grateful public. Biden was following a strategy designed by the “anti-neoliberal” movement, which believed a populist economic strategy provided the key to building a Democratic majority. A 2020 memo laying out this strategy by the Hewlett Foundation, which poured millions of dollars into an intellectual campaign to spread these beliefs, called for “a new consensus permitting governments more room to spend on efforts that boost aggregate demand without worrying about inflation quite so frantically.”
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Many liberals (including me) were eager to believe they could produce rapid growth without the risk of inflation or that inflation would prove more tolerable than slow growth and high unemployment. This proved mistaken: people prefer to believe their wage gains are a credit to their own skill, and inflation is the government’s fault.”
So what should Biden have done-imposed austerity? What specific policies did Biden implement that sacrificed higher inflation for lower unemployment? If it was unemployment that was high and inflation low Trump and the GOP would have focused on unemployment. And what does Chait have to say about the Inflation Reduction Act-which helped bring down inflation.
The trouble with this particular narrative is the inconvenience that inflation is now down below 3%. As for gas prices they approached $5 dollars per gallon in the Summer of 2023. Thanks in no small part to Biden’s policies gas prices would moderate greatly-they have now been around $3 dollars per gallon for well over a year.
FN: Indeed, one particularly impressive and innovative policy of President Joe was his successfully gaming the commodity market in Saudi oil
find link
End FN
As for the idea that Biden sacrificed high inflation for lower unemployment there’s no evidence of that. Indeed there’s a decent argument that it’s the opposite-he was all too willing to do the austerity Chait thinks his failure to do led to the high inflation that caused his-and his successor’s-defeat.
(3) “The economy is fine” – by Stephen Semler – Polygraph
FN: I’ll have more to say about this premise of Semler’s below. I do think he hits on a crucial point on what may have been the big problem with Biden’s reelection campaign-before he was forced out-with idea that while the macroeconomy has done very well during the Biden years, the economic well being of many Americans has not.
Place this below.
But I do suspect this idea of Chait’s will be one widely recurring theme the next two years as the party struggles to figure out what went so wrong. Many are going to claim the Democrats went too far to the Left-a flawed premise and I don’t say this as a member of the Far Left-the frustrated Marxist Leninists a la Tankies who practice such fealty to Putin who also had a great night on Tuesday-but a Center Left liberal.
Indeed, Lanny Davis too sounds the idea that the Democrats have gone too far to the Left but his focus isn’t that they were too leftist on economic issues but on cultural/social issues.
Many centrist/establishment Democrats as well as centrist pundits are facilely hyper focusing. on inflation as the central cause of the Democrats’ defeat.
But another narrative claims the Dems lost because of their overly zealous embracing of The Woke. This narrative is favored by Lanny Davis who seems to think that the Dems lost because of the terribly salient issue of trans women in women’s sports.
Second is the word intolerance. Our side applies this word to Trump and his supporters even as our left base refuses to tolerate any deviation from their stance on an increasingly long list of sacred cows. I speak from painful experience. I am sympathetic, empathetic, to those who suffer from the feeling they have two genders – one hidden inside, the other marked by physical characteristics on the outside. As President Clinton would say, sincerely, I feel their pain.
“But I am also uncomfortable with the idea that males in transition to being females should be allowed to use restrooms for “girls” or “women” without any concern for the discomfort it might cause young girls or grown women. If we must be sensitive to the challenge of being transgender, why should trans people be insensitive to the discomfort of those who are not? And how did it become a litmus test in our political party to support biological males competing in female sports?”
“The idea that “boys in girls sports”-ie trans women in women’s sports is a big problem for the Democrats I expect to be another major recurring theme the next few years. This is kind of tough as I am a big fan of Lanny Davis’ book on the 2016 election-I quote from him copiouisly in Chapter No Probable Cause.”
But TBH here he drifts dangerously close to outright transphobia here-it’s one thing to debate trans women in women’s sports under the premise they have an unfair advantage-there is scant evidence they do in fact-but to refer to trans women as “biological males” is fairly problematic-and I’m really not a “woke scold” as such. For instance I to this day wonder if the dropping of the name “Redskins” was necessary-Commanders has no history or resonance behind it and I say it as a Giants fan. I mean does the fact that most Native Americans didn’t favor the change mean nothing?
But this narrative where Democrats are picking up the GOP talking points about boys playing on the high school girl’s soccer team seems to have been gaining traction-even before the terrible night of November 5-Ted Cruz’s opponent Collin Allred had made a point of publicly decrying trans women in women’s sports-he framed it as is usual that high school girls are under threat.
Suffice it to say I don’t find the idea that this is why Kamala lost compelling at all. The GOP had gone all in on this contrived moral panic to little avail-at the end of the day it was not an issue that interested many voters. But recently for some reason many Democrats have become interested in this very uninteresting phony issue just like in the last few years Democrats have embraced the GOP’s harsher immigration rhetoric-even if they remained committed to real immigration reform. But as Vaush noted in a recent episode-much more on Vaush below-if you’re a genuine committed xenophobe you’re voting for the GOP-exit polls showed something like 3% of voters who considered immigration a top issue voted for Kamala.
I don’t find either of these narratives compelling but I do suspect we’re going to be hearing a lot about these dubious narratives-Democrats lost because Biden didn’t go full austerity or they lost because they didn’t’ talk enough about “biological males playing girls’ sports.”
And like the idea that they lost because Harris ran a bad campaign is reassuring for some-as it’s a facile explanation that requires little introspection-they idea that they lost because the party failed to adequately repudiate wokeness or “boys in girls’ sports-or Biden didn’t impose enough austerity is also kind of reassuring as they are yet more facile explanations which doesn’t require too much introspection.
The Morning After: Lessons To Learn – and Not To Learn | RealClearPolitics
Seems to me it’s worse than this. Aaron Rupar argues voters didn’t simply vote against Biden-Harris but affirmatively FOR Donald Trump.
It’s hard to wrap your mind around how we got to this place. Donald Trump lost in 2020, incited a coup attempt, was convicted of 34 felonies, is an adjudicated rapist — and yet it appears he’s on the cusp of beating Kamala Harris, the VP of an administration that did a good job under extremely difficult circumstances. And Trump isn’t just poised to win the electoral college — for the first time in three tries he’s likely to win the popular vote too. From the standpoint of January 7, 2021, what’s happening right now is unfathomable.
Sitting in it – by Aaron Rupar – Public Notice
Yes the worst part of this is unlike 2016, a majority or near majority voted for Trump. He seemed to improve on his 2020 performance-and Kamala underperofmred Biden’s 2020 performance-not just in almost every state but almost every single district-in NYC-the hub of Blue State America, it’s because of NYC that Trump didn’t win in NY, Trump improved his performance in every single borough.
Clearly they liked SOMETHING. What DID they like is the crucial question. Would argue-trying to be a little optimistic-that not all of them LIKED this. The Trump Far Right base did. But when you talk about the many-quite honestly, low information voters who gave Trump his first majority-or at least near majority; the votes haven’t all been tallied yet-did al of them like THIS? I suspect not. Many of them either dismissed it-‘but he didn’t succeed so it turned out ok’ ingoring how close he came to succeeding-or maybe even didn’t know about it at all-yes, I’ve become convinced by now that those of us who are hyper engaged in politics greatly underestimate how many people know very little about what goes on in national politics-where if it doesn’t effect their own immediate, lives it doesn’t really exist.
As the YouTuber Vaush persuasively argues I suspect that many people who voted for Trump have never even heard a speech of his beyond the clips they may see on social media-or maybe Joe Rogan? What is hard to estimate is how much those intimate Trump’s spots on Rogan and Friends did to humanize him-‘They say he’s this Nazi who wants to end democracy but he’s just a regular dude he likes wrestling and will sit down and shoot the shit with you like he’s another guy.’
Back to Rupar:
That voters are choosing to put him back in power … whew — words fail. And unlike 2016, nobody can say they don’t know what they just signed up for. As we wrote many months ago, Trump didn’t try to hide his plans to abuse power and brutalize outgroups.
In the wake of a disaster of this sort, it’s natural to play the blame game. I’ve already seen people nitpicking the campaign Kamala Harris ran, opining on what President Biden should’ve done differently, sounding the alarm about the role Russian interference played, and so forth. These are all legitimate things to talk about. But I also think we need to process the reality that even if it still doesn’t have majority support, fascism is far from a political loser in this country. Deportation raids will almost certainly be unpopular in practice, but the idea of them isn’t. Misogyny and a skewed media environment were factors working against Harris, but ultimately a huge chunk of American voters simply are buying what Trump is selling.”
Exactly-that’s what’s so hard to understand-how is J6 by itself much less Dobbs, his theft of sensitive and classified documents as he finally walked out the door after he fomented the insurrection, his 91 criminal indictments, his 34 counts of criminal conviction in Manhattan, or that he’s an indicted rapist to boot-how does none of this disqualify him? J6 in particular is such a foundational breach of our rule of law and our system of democracy. Of course, Trump’s own SJC set aside the 14th Amendment of the Constitution and then the voters in their own way would follow suit.
What do these voters think they’re buying though? And does his assault on democracy not matter at all? Arguably no-there’s an argument that many voters DON’T care-not only do they not care that Trump seeks to subvert our democracy they welcome it.
Donald Trump reveals the ugly truth of today’s politics
My guess is different voters want different things. There is certainly a base of Trump support that welcomes the idea of Trump being their dictator. OTOH another subset of voters don’t believe he really intends to do it-the take him seriously not literally canard. What Tuesday night definitely convinced me of is that you can’t overestimate how low information many voters are-it’s not for nothing Trump declared “I love the poorly educated.”
But I think Vaush gets to the fundamental dynamic of the travesty of 2024-a year that’s been a disaster both personally for me-if I may speak personally for a moment-and socially and nationally-after all we elected a fascist. a fascist may have won the popular vote-this is one of the numerous reasons 2024 is much worse than 2016.
Vaush argues Kamala did NOT run a “bad campaign”-he argues she ran as good a campaign as could have been expected within parameters she was constrained by-she ran a good campaign and was a good candidate he argues.
FN: He also dismisses the idea that the decisive factor was Gaza which I certainly tend to agree with.-a big part of the problem is the Left thinks this is like the Iraq war or Vietnam but it’s not as those were US soldiers with boots on the ground dying thousands of miles away. Here we’ve simply been giving arms to our ally. If simply sending arms to an ally who arguably engages in genocide makes you a war criminal-most war leaders are war criminals-North Korea has been sending Russia a good amount of weapons; indeed who on the Left would agree that the Soviet Union were the war criminals during Vietnam-rather than the US government
Indeed it’s rather appalling for alleged pro Palestinian activists to be celebrating the election of a literal fascist.
I’m sure Trump who moved the embassy to Jerusalem-all conversations between him and Abbas ended after taking an action the Palestinians saw as a betrayal-and who recently revealed he’s been talking to Netanyahu almost every day is going to be great for Gaza. When he gets back into the Oval with David Friedman and Jared Kushner in tow-Kushner wants to turn it into beachfront property so there’s that, meanwhile per Barak Ravid it was Friedman who pushed hard to move the embassy at a time Trump was somewhat torn.
UPDATE:
FN: Link
Having said that, I do reluctantly have to agree with the leftist YouTube streamer Hasan-Kamala should have had a Palestinian address the DNC. I understand why she and her campaign were pretty cagey on this issue-on Israel-Palestine she was pretty boxed in, it seems as if they sort of viewed the whole issue as a kind of scab, picking it would only make it worse. Nevertheless I do think she could and should have given the Palestinian activists SOMETHING. She had given a few early signals that suggested she might have been better than Biden on the issue-she didn’t attend Bibi’s talk and apparently was pretty strong with him when they talked privately. But over the campaign she seemed less willing to give anything on the issue. Trump shrewdly exploited the issue by meeting with Palestinians in Dearborn the last week.
Despite his terrible record on Israel-Palestine from the standpoint of the Palestinians, despite moving the embassy when he was last President, despite his Muslim ban, despite revealing the almost daily conversations with Bibi during the campaign-Trump did at least meet with them
FN: I’m not assuming there WAS a quid pro quo between Trump and Netanyahu I’m also not assuming there was NOT.
IF Bibi announces the end of the offensive in Gaza on the first day that will be very good news but it will also beg the question wether this was another version of the agreement between the Reagan campaign and the Ayatolloah-Likud was also in on that see Chapter Iran Collusion-to delay the release of the hostages until literally the morning Reagan was inaugurated.
I just can’t help but think of Michael Deaver’s book.
In Chapter Democratic Part is a Girl I talked about the gendered nature of the parties. The idea that the Democratic party is the codependent Mommy party while the GOP is the abusive Daddy party is buttressed by how the division of labor between the parties is divided-Dems do all the work and the GOP gets all the credit.
I mean it couldn’t be more stark in Deaver’s Book:
When the coffee ended, the president and president-elect, as is the custom, drove up to Capitol Hill together. They were alone in the car, but Reagan later told me, Carter remained on the phone with his National Security staff nearly the entire time. When we got to the Capitol, Reagan pulled me aside. Instead of feeling slighted, he was deeply moved by Carter’s determination to see our people free. Reagan himself was becoming increasingly agitated that a handful of Iranian zealots could bring a sitting American president to his knees. He genuinely felt for Carter and understood entirely what was going through his mind.”
LOL-I’m sure old Ronnie’s heart was breaking for Carter-as his campaign negotiated with these same Iranian zealots behind Carter’s back to win flip the election in Reagan’s favor.
Later, in the holding room, Reagan waved me over. “What is it, Governor?” I said, calling him by that title for the last time in my life. Based on the intelligence information he was provided, Reagan thought the release of the hostages was imminent. “If it happens, even during my Inaugural Address, I want you to tell me. Slip me a note. Interrupt me. Because if it happens, I want to bring Carter up to the platform. No country should embarrass and humiliate any president of the United States.” The opportunity never came. Twenty minutes after Reagan took the oath of office, word came to us that the hostages were in fact free. At the time, the new president was having a traditional lunch with the Senate leadership. I wrote out a quick note and made my way toward President Reagan.
“Without looking at the note, he instinctively knew what happened. He read it and let out a long, silent breath and smiled. America had a clean slate—and a new president. He knew that the Iranians did this to embarrass Carter. You would never hear Reagan boast that he had anything to do with the release of the hostages.”
He didn’t have to all his Republican hagiographers did it for him. But the question begs-how did Reagan know the release was imminent? So Carter did all the work, making himself sick for over a year, then within 20 minutes of Reagan’s inaguration they were released.
IF Bibi announces the end of the offensive in Gaza on the first day that will be very good news but it will also beg the question wether this was another version of the agreement between the Reagan campaign and the Ayatolloah-Likud was also in on that see Chapter Iran Collusion-to delay the release of the hostages until literally the morning Reagan was inaugurated.
No doubt this is what will happen with the economy-inflation has recently fallen below 3%-under the Biden WH US handled inflation better than anywhere lese in the developed world all the indicators of macro economy are pointing upwards now Trump gets in just in time to get full credit as we all know he’ll grab. Meanwhile all the positive benefits of Biden’s Chips Act and his Inflation Reduction Act will finally begin to make themselves felt in the next two years once again confirming the false narrative of many that Trump’s is awesome on the economy.
In retrospect I had a terrible sense of foreboding during 2024-which has turned out to be a terrible year on many levels-I think of 2024 as actually starting on October 7. While I’m not arguing October 7 was a false flag it clearly has greatly benefitted Netanyahu whose political standing was pretty precarious prior to it. As unpopular as he was, though, his numbers have improved-Israeli’s liberals missed their moment a la Benny Gantz in the immediate aftermath of Oct 7 just as US liberals missed it in 2021-2022 a la Biden, Merrick Garland et al. In many ways Netanyahu and Trump are the same guy-both were hanging from a cliff very recently-politically and legally-both need to be chief executive of their respective nations just to stay out of jail and both have been allowed to be entirely rehabilitated by their feckless political opponents and with a major assist from the media.
And while I’m not arguing Oct 7 was a false flag-I’m not aware of any evidence; then again Netanyahu has prevented any serious investigation-but it clearly saved Netanyahu’s career as well as keeping him out of prison-unlike we Americans-Israelis have no compunction about putting a former PM in prison.
But it’s kind of hard to dismiss Seth Abramson’s premise-linked to above-that there is a quid pro quo between Trump and Netanyahu-as there was in 2016-seeing as Trump has himself recently revealed he and Bibi speak almost every day. Gee I wonder what they have to talk about almost every day. Kind of hard to believe the little word Gaza hasn’t come up. So could there be a quid pro quo between Bibi and Trump like there was between the Reagan-Bush campaign and Iran in 1980? Again if they are released immediately after Trump’s inaugurated…
In his recent book War, Bob Woodward reveals that Trump and Putin spoke at least 7 times since he left Office. Pretty interesting Trump and his team have suggested repeatedly that Trump will end the Russia-Ukraine war BEFORE he gets into Office-he certainly is never shy to break the Hatch Act one more time.
UPDATE: It’s getting harder for me to reject the idea of Trump-Bibi Collusion out of hand
I mean cuo bono-who benefits.
End FN
At the end of the day so many people seem to have very short memories, Tuesday night proved that if nothing else. It also didn’t hurt that the Inman Trump met with was clearly conservative. In an interview he had on Zeteo with Mehdi Hasan the Inman said a few things that suggested he was motivated by more than just Gaza-he made an aside that sounds like he’s also worried about trans issues in schools.
But Kamala could have done the same thing-find a Palestinian who’s sympathetic politically to her-indeed, the perfect choice would have been Ahmed linked to above who lost 31 members of his family in Gaza but has been just as critical of Hamas as he has of the IDF and had warned repeatedly of the fallacy of punishing the Democrats by electing Trump.
The left must stop apologizing for Hamas – The Forward
End FN
But she was greatly constrained by these parameters. He argues the recurring problem of the liberals who run the Democratic party is they don’t understand that institutionalism is done as a political force in US politics-we live, Vaush argues, in the age of populism. Liberalism itself he argues, is spent Still he goes on to argue it’s not that a liberal policy agenda can’t win just that the Democrats haven’t been running in the right way-they remain beholding to the institutionalist canard.
The problem is not liberalism per se but liberal institutionalism. Indeed, what’s striking is how popular the liberal Democrat policies are vs the Democratic politicians.
An Overlooked — and Increasingly Important — Clue to How People Vote – POLITICO
Vaush’s argument is very thought provoking as it reveals the big stumbling block we Democrats have struggled with since the Obama years. The public clearly likes are policy agenda whereas the GOP agenda is extremely unpopular. Yet we struggle to translate that into victories at the polls. The reason for this is the failure of Dems to speak in narrative form about their agenda. This is the missing piece. In a way it’s understandable-as Democratic policies are good and popular it’s not obvious why there is a need to frame them in a particular way-if policies are popular don’t they speak for themselves? In this era of populism and lack of trust in institutions-the answer is no. There are two big problems-one if the anti institutionalist mood of the public-Vaush persuasively argues this has been the mood post 2008-and then there’s the disinformation tsunami the GOP has launched in Right wing media and social media the last few years.
I’m not fully willing to embrace his premise that Bernie Would Have Won but I do agree with him that it all comes down to populism-that’s why Trump won. Here is Bernie’s own statement on Twitter X after the debacle.
Now let me say this-Bernie’s theater criticism of the Democratic party has the convenience of at least being much more plausible and substantive than that of the two centrist takes I quoted from above-of Chait who claims Biden was too liberal economically and did nothing about inflation-what would Chait specifically have him do?-or of Lanny Davis that the Biden Harris Democratic party is too WOKE on “cultural issues.” Again the problem with these kinds of narratives is they entirely vague and superficial-they can never name one specific example of Biden being too far to the Left either economically or “culturally” whatever the hell these pundits even mean by culturally.
Bernie’s criticism is much more substantive-it is, has been, and remains true that the underlying problem is a 60% supermajority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Yet Harris’s policy agenda was much better for this working class than Trump”s-indeed, Trump’s policy agenda-to the extent he even had one-would be-will be?-very harmful to the struggling working class cum frustrated middle class.
Sargent makes the crucial point that Kamala’s platform was overall very good for the working class though again per Vaush’s insight above, the really frustrating point may be that policy doesn’t matter. If that’s true then we shouldn’t be TOO quick to conclude this was why voters voted as they did-because PACE Chait low inflation is more important than full employment-as if the workers are to paraphrase Nixon “all Monetarists now.”
Vaush’ very important insight is that it’s not about policy it’s above vibes and Trump’s grievance politics are in line with voters not his, ahem, policy agenda-to the extent he has one. His “platform” as enunciated by himself was deport 20 million illegal immigrants-even though there’s nowhere near 20 million illegal immigrants-a huge tariff that will in reality function as a huge sales tax on these very same working class voters, and a very dubious proposal that claims to cease taxing tips but may in reality be a stealth plan to defund Social Security.
Indeed, regarding policy, Hillary Clinton’s platform she agreed to negotiating with Bernie at the 2016 convention was very favorable to the working class-as we saw in Chapter What Happened-if only she hadn’t backed away from her own idea of a Universal Basic Income, her economic agenda would be to the Left of Bernie’s-or so I believe in any case. As important as healthcare is, the immediate problem of the struggling working class cum frustrated middle class-frustrated as many folks come from a middle class background but have been unable to sustain a middle class life for the last 23 years or so-is low wages, our low wage epidemic.
As for healthcare, Kamala actually made a truly radical progressive proposal for Medicare to start covering home healthcare costs. If I might speak personally for a moment, 2024 has been a terrible year both for us as a society-because of November 5, 2024-andn personally, this year Doordash deactivated me, meanwhile my father had a stroke. He was hospitalized for a few months and now he’s home and I’ve now learned what many elderly Americans and their children learn-even if you were fortunate to amass a good financial savings throughout your life, home healthcare costs may well bankrupt you-remember when Republicans used to talk about the Death Tax? The real death tax are these home healthcare costs that can easily cost $85,000 a year.
Yet the struggling working class failed to vote for this. What explains it? It seems to me there are two possible explanations: one is Vaush’s point that policy doesn’t matter it’s just about vibes. Ie even if this is a very beneficial progressive policy, Harris failed to talk about it in the right way.
But this brings me to another possibility: she didn’t talk about it enough, indeed barely at all. Perhaps she should have mentioned it prominently in every speech. And I do think there’s something to that. Indeed, the fact that Biden’s macroeconomic record is so impressive yet voters according to a widely held narrative-according to polls-were terribly disastisfied with his economic performance once again keads you to kind of throw up your hands-apparently nothing matters. Certainly facts, much less an incumbent’s record, matter.
Indeed it’s not clear what does matter at this point
And note that Sherrod Brown was more in line with the leftist Bernie “anti Nafta” line and this didn’t spare him. So how do you explain this? How the voters threw out a President with a record of unsurpassed job growth, record economic performance for his opponent who himself was voted out as President four years earlier for record job losses? Who leads a party with an abysmal record of economic performance and job growth since the end of WW11?
FN:
The real paradox-beyond the fact that the economy performs so much beter under Democrats-is that so many voters believe the opposite:
We have heard much about the puzzle that US economic performance under President Joe Biden has been much stronger than voters perceive it to be. But the current episode is just one instance of a bigger historical puzzle: the US economy has since World War II consistently done better under Democratic presidents than under Republican presidents. This fact is even less widely known, including among Democratic voters, than the truth about Biden’s term. Indeed, some poll results suggest that more Americans believe the reverse, that Republican presidents are better stewards of the economy than Democrats.
In a sense, it is not exactly surprising that so few people know that economic performance has been consistently better under one party than the other. The proposition sounds implausible on the face of it, like the sort of blatantly partisan claim that is not even worth checking out. The puzzle is the fact itself: that it is completely true.”
See also:
End FN
Because facts, character, a candidate’s actual record in Office, don’t matter not even a little bit? It’s all vibes a la Vaush’s observation?
OTOH a less nihilistic argument is that while Biden’s macro record is excellent-record job growth, etc it’s arguable that he made a wrong turn early in his first year back in early 2021. While it’s true in any ways his economic record was excellent other parts were less impressive. One economic metric which has not been good during his term is disposable income.
What About Wages? – People’s Policy Project
In early 2021 Biden very quickly chose to end expanded unemployment benefits. When he was pressed he said that Dem Governors were welcome to expand it if they chose-they of course also let it lapse-even the allegedly progressive Gavin Newsom. Indeed, regarding Kamala Harris, while no one remembers it, back in June, 2020 she’d called for $2,000 dollar monthly checks until the end of the Covid pandemic
UPDATE:
Ron Klain:
FN:
IReturning to Semler’s piece I linked to above I find his argument that the real problem wasn’t simply inflation but at the same time Biden cut back fiscally compelling. However I find Semler’s attempt to link fiscal austerity to supporting Ukraine against Russia’s aggression pretty dubious-as if Biden had only let Putin conqure Ukraine in 2 days everything would have worked out for the good. For one thing the fiscal tightening begun already in May 2021-in my view the first big mistake economically at least-his first mistake overall was not firing Wray-was letting expanded unemployment lapse-if not only doing the $2000 $1400 check one month, indeed maybe the mistake was going for only $1,400-usual Biden fastidiousness in counting Trump’s $600 towards the $2,000. Also Semler’s premise that Biden completely bailed on a progressive economic agenda is belied by the work he did to get the Chips Act and the Inflation Reduction Act-which while these certainly weren’t perfect and could hae been much better was probbay the most you would get in the face of the willingness of Manchin-Sinemal to torpedo their own party’s agenda.
Semley also ignores the inconvenient fact that Biden’s numbers actually tanked after the Aghanistan pullout never to recover. The irony is that this was something the Left had been beating the drum for years on yet Biden reaped no political benefit for it-quite the opposite. Trump and his GOP co-conspirators of course had no compunction in attacking Biden for doing Trump’s own withdrawal plan-he’d negotiated with the Taliban
UPDATE:
Kamala Harris Supports $2,000 Monthly Stimulus Checks, Giving People Money – Business Insider
If she had endorsed this as VP would it be a different world today? Had Biden not phased out expanded UI so quickly would it be? Had she endorsed it in the Presidential campaign would she have won? While she did have a pretty good economic agenda she was concerned with denying the narrative that she was a “San Francisco liberal”-would things have been different if she’d embraced it? The irony of leftist criticism is her record is very progressive-in her four years in the Senate she was the fourth most progressive Senator.
This FWIW has been my own premise post 2016-when I personally ran in the 2018 Democratic primary in NY 2nd district I ran on a platform of a Job Guarantee, Universal Basic Income, and expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit. Today I would have added expanded unemployment benefits.
My guess though is Kamala would have been a very progressive President-provided they won back the Senate and also won the House, in this parallel universe where she won the Presidency, the Senate Dems would have ended the filibuster-led by new Senator Adam Schiff-we would have gotten very progressive, “populist” if you prefer economic policies. But her campaign strategy, ironically, was to understate her own progressive preferences and record.
Again, she DID, call for Medicare covering home healthcare costs, but arguably she didn’t talk about it nearly as much, much less in the right way as she could and should have.
Assuming that ANYTHING matters much less policy. And I think there’s a good argument that in a parallel universe where a parallel Kamala Harris ran a parallel campaign, she would have won a parallel election.
If this is true her big mistake was rather than-falsely-denying she is a San Fransico liberal, she should have embraced it. And this perhaps comes to what I have thought all along might be her big weakness-a tendency to dissemble during campaigns. I’ve suspected during the campaign that her weakness is an unwillingness to ever contradict the conventional narrative. Here’s an example that struck me on one of her series of October interviews-was it 60 minutes? Basically she was asked a question the media loved to ask during the campaign-what about the polls that showed voters trusted Trump more on the campaign?
Her response was basically to list all the things she’s trying to do in terms of good policy to reassure voters. Yet it seemed to me what she could have said was point out that recent polls actually showed her now breaking even with Trump on the economy. In the big scheme of things this doesn’t seem terribly important in retrospect. I agree with Sargent’s argument that anyone who argues she lost for this one reason-this one thing she said or didn’t say, this one campaign tactic she did or didn’t employ-is grossly oversimplifying
But the importance of it in my mind wasn’t substantive but tactical. Rather than questioning a particular media narrative, she implicitly accepted it and tailored her response to operating within it. And this has arguably always been her big weakness-in a candidate I personally really liked; she’d been my first choice in 2020, I’d first discovered her during the Senate Judiciary hearing in 2017 when she very effectively cross examined Jeff Session on his attempt to dissemble on his meetings with the Russians during the 2016 campaign.
Regarding the entire San Franscico liberal narrative, her conundrum of how to respond goes back to the 2020 campaign. During that campaign there was an anti police narrative during the Dem primary or at least so it was perceived. For that reason she tended to mute her own experience as a prosecutor and California DA, etc. Despite the fact that she’d written a pretty interesting screed back in 2009 for the progressive prosecutor-rather than “tough on crime” or “soft on crime” she called for being SMART on crime.
FN: link
I actually bought it during the 2024 campaign and it’s pretty interesting. But back in 2020 she or her campaign didn’t feel she could embrace her experience as a progressive prosecutor.
Because of the perceived ascendency of the Left she kind of got pushed into a bidding war on who could be the furthest Left on every possible policy issue. The issue that really seemed to sink her campaign was the single payer debates.
It seems to me-and she was so seemingly deliberately ambiguous it was tough to say for sure-that she did NOT support single payer but rather was in favor of the public option. Indeed, initially she had not called for SP but after the leftist backlash on Twitter she came out explicitly for Single Payer. This pleased no one-the Left still claimed she didn’t REALLY support it-while others criticized her for supporting it. Her proposals were ripped apart in the media, her numbers tanked and never recovered.
In retrospect that charge that she wasn’t playing it straight had a ring of truth in it-she didn’t support Single Payer-neither do I, like her I support the Public Option-but pandered in claiming she did. There are a few problems with this starting with her opponents can rightly say you can’t trust her on anything she says about policy as she just wants to say whatever she thinks everyone wants her to say. Where are her own core beliefs?
And in 2024, I think it’s fair to say-as a big fan and supporter of hers-she never adequately answered this question. In 2020 she’d tacked further to the Left than she really felt comfortable, in 2024 she went the other way and tacked further to the Center.
She didn’t talk in detail about her own beliefs on healthcare too much. She didn’t mention the public option. Again, she DID call for putting home healthcare costs on Medicare, which is an excellent idea, but she hardly centered or amplified it in her campaign.
Ironically then she may have lost because she was unwilling to show voters who she really was or what she believed even though she would have liked that person.
Regarding Vaush’s very important critique that the problem of the Dems is not about policy but vibes, I will argue that the big takeaway is for Democrats is twofold: OTOH progressive economic policy is good. The Dem rjoinder is: WTF do you think we’ve been doing. This is true-DNC Chairman to Bernie-but the corrolary is in the way you say it, the way you from and package it.
Vaush’s poinot is that this is a populist age-rather than an age of great trust in institutions-if you go back far enough you could argue that trust in usititions has been dimishing going all the way back to Warren-but certainly the post Iraq post 2008 economic collapse error has been different-basically we’ve been in this populst anti institutionalist era since 2008.
This is why while Biden presided over a very progressive administration it didn’t matter-because of the importance of the way you frame and narrative it
UPDATE: However, one hopeful point for those who earnestly wish for the return of a more trusting error is a recent study which showed that voters who are better informed about the true performance of the economy voted for Harris at higher rates.
Six big lies that won the election: How Donald Trump gaslit America
Two Elections: “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check” – emptywheel
It’s not for nothing that Trump says he loves the poorly educated-and if the electorate were solely made up of those with a college degree she would have won… Indeed this whole dynamic recalls the whole problematic of Plato’s Republic. The whole premise of it was that the people can’t be trusted to vote in favor of their own interests and, indeed, on Tuesday millions of Americans voted against their own material interests like a proverbial Hispanic guy wearing a maga hat getting deported.
view.newsletters.cnn.com/messages/17309047019367633539cf02b/raw
(3) The global anti-incumbent backlash doomed Kamala Harris
So it’s not about ideology per se-it’s about structural issues vs narratives. This is the conundurm for Democrats as voters clearly prefer Democratic policies-yet for the most part elections aren’t decided on policy-or not entirely, it’s also about the narrative framing of policies. The Democrats didn’t talk as if they understood how tough things remained for a large swath of voters-certainly nothing Biden said suggested he understood-they described the economy in glowing terms and argued that while voters might tell pollsters the economy was bad they thought their own situation was good. This was literally the opposite of the case-all the Macro numbers were good but on an individual level many voters continued to struggle caught in the vice between high prices and low wages-and Biden had at least somewhat tightened fiscally.
Trump Dodged the Law. Blame Merrick Garland, Mitch McConnell and the Supreme Court. – POLITICO
Ok, so having exhausted how we got here, where do we go from here? Let’s go back to Vaush again-who elese? He had a very incivisve critique of Kamala’s concession speech yesterday that I think was also on the nose.
Kamala’s TERRIBLE Concession Speech Shows Why She Lost
He points out that while she called him a dangerous fascist during the campaign, her concession totally muted any criticism of him. Indeed, if anything it recalled for me nothing so much as Al Gore’s 2000 concession that was so heralded by the media-unlike 2024, though, the 2000 election was stolen from Gore. Still Gore rejected any calls for questioning the results at certification in January 2001-he’s dismissively rejected Shiela Jackson Lee’s raised objections at the certification.
As is typical for liberals they never seem really for a fight even when it’s their own survival. Kamala did the liberal thing of brandishing their own decency-it is ironic that she conceded the next day in 2024 while Trump still hasn’t conceded the 2020 election.
Shaiel Ben-Ephraim on X: “Kamala conceded 2024 before Trump conceded 2020.” / X
Yet as a liberal I don’t think this is anything to take a victory lap over-once again we were good losers. For Kamala the point of her speech was supposed to be reassuring her heartbroken-and scared-followers. After all during the campaign Trump had made all kinds of threats of reprisals against his real and imagined political enemies. But if anyone at that rally wanted hints from her on how to proceed they were disappointed.
Obviously as liberals we’re not going to do a Donald Trump and wrongly allege the election was stolen-as opposed to 2016 and 2000 when it WAS STOLEN! But that doesn’t magically mean all the things we’ve said about him the last nine years are no longer true-including that he DID steal the 2016 election and refused to recognize the transfer of power in 2020 for the first time in US history. And of course he WAS going to steal 2024 but didn’t as it turns out there was no need.
UPDATE: Joe Biden himself just declared victory-after all Trump’s victory PROVES there was no Deep State conspiracy to deny him the election. True but is this really where we want to plant our flag-with the terrible threat coming from Trump 2.0 the Absolute Immunity edition?
Biden: Trump win lays to rest question of election ‘integrity’
Just seems Dems always want to celebrate being these staid institutionalists-not seeming to get that in thi political environment no one’s going to give you EITHER a medal OR a monument for engaging in normal poltics. That’s the trouble Democrats have mastered all the trappings of normal politics-endorsements, fundraising, tv interviews, playing by the rules, being reasonable and fair-minded but per Vaush’s point that’s not what anyone is celebrating today.
To be clear-as liberals it’s natural and congenital for us to recognize the rule of law and the legitimacy of a legitimate election as we should, and to Trump’s great discredit he didn’t. But let’s be clear-Trump remains the fascist threat he always was. Yes he’s getting old but luckily-for the fascist GOP-his running mate is only 39 and very ready to come in if Trump shows any further massive cognitive decline in the next few years.
Indeed, way back on May 24, the Atlantic asked a very good question: if democracy is dying why are democrats so complacent?
If Democracy Is Dying, Why Are Democrats So Complacent? – The Atlantic
Liberals patting ourselves on the back for being good losers sure isn’t going to defeat the threat. This was brought home in Biden’s recent speech lauding the econoic accomplishments of his Administration which while perfectly true seemed hollow when you remember that the voters think his economic record was terrible and elected the same man he beat in 2020 and who immediately upon being sworn in will take credit for all Biden’s accomplishments-and all the GOP voters telling pollsters the country is on the wrong track will change their view overnight.
.
I am, however, willing to say what Michael Kinsley said in 1988-2024 may be only the second time since Bush’s landslide over Dukakis that the Democrats have lost the popular vote-democracy can goof
Essay: Democracy Can Goof | TIME
Trump Promises To Make Things Much, Much, Worse
BrooklynDad_Defiant!☮️ on X: “I’m so disappointed in America right now.” / X
Amen. I mean how can you not be disappointed in the voters? As Sargent observes:
It’s simply astonishing 1/6 didn’t end Trump’s political career but clearly it didn’t.
Great piece in the NYT-after Bezos not sure which mainstream media organization I trust more:
Trump Asked for Power. Voters Said Yes. – The New York Times
Donald Trump Will Become America’s Dictator on Day One – emptywheel
Donald Trump reveals the ugly truth of today’s politics
Possible Trump AG Mike Davis Threatens to Jail Letitia James in Profane Rant
We are so screwed:
Polling USA on X: “Who’s ready for an economic depression? 😎 https://t.co/u5t2N6jqgI” / X
Certainly Olurinatti’s feelings today match my own mood at 9:45 am on November 6
(917) Donald Trump Won & America Will Regret It – YouTube
Indeed again and again you ask yourself-do voters simply not believe the things Trump says? Even though he’s already done much of it? Another interpreation is maybe that’s not the problem-maybe the trouble is they do believe him and they’re cool with it
Opinion: Here’s What I Learned From Trump’s Victory: I’m the Problem. It’s Me
Dems need to up their media game-or maybe simply get one.
Biden still hasn’t learned anything
Very interesting piece on “Dem timorousness”
Opinion | What Do Trump Voters Know About the Future He Has Planned for Them? – The New York Times
All Bets Are Off | Joseph O’Neill | The New York Review of Books
Dereliction of duty: How Merrick Garland failed America | Opinion
Trump wins the 2024 election. Can democracy survive this? | Vox
(3) Proof of Consequences, Vol. 1: Where America Goes Now
Mehdi Hasan quotes Churchill: best argument against democracy is a 5 minute conversation with a voter
Rick Wilson: Republicans just want to win-Dems rather lose pretty. See Bulwark