Okay, I was a little overly pessimistic yesterday. Uncle Joe is, I don’t know, 60% of the way to the White House? 75%? 85%? So that’s better.
Everything else, not so much. Yes, getting Trump out of the White House will be a staggering improvement, but other than that, it was Democratic failure all the way down the line. Over at New York magazine, Frank Rich explains why the Blue State/Red State rift is 1) worse than ever and 2) damned well likely to stay that way for a long time. At this point, my one wan hope is that Kamala Harris will be able to turn the platform she (probably) has been given to turn herself into a real leader, something she signally failed to do when she ran for president in the Democratic primaries last year.1
I was not optimistic going into the election, thanks largely to polls in Pennsylvania and Florida showing Trump and Biden just about even. If you’re into actual analysis rather than finger-pointing, Politico has two pieces, one by Tim Alberta, “Three Reasons Biden Flipped the Midwest”, while Matt Dixon and Gray Fineout explain why the Democratic Party got itself humiliated in Florida, “‘Old white men are dying,’ so Trump looked elsewhere for votes in Florida”, seriously depressing news indeed.
There was some good news. California showed itself to be stunningly bourgeois, defeating a union attempt to shut down Lyft and Uber (Proposition 22), an attempt to revive affirmative action in college admissions (Proposition 16), and an attempt to establish state-wide rent control (Proposition 21). Land of fruits and nuts? Not so much!
1. Dunno what happened to Harris in the primaries. Supposedly an experienced politician, she seemed to think that all she had to do was show up and say “Hey, I’m a black woman, tough on crime” and everyone would roll over for her. When that didn’t work, her reaction seemed to be “Oh, I’m supposed to talk about the issues? Okay, what are they?” Strange. Politicians seem to be a curious mixture of compulsive cunning and naivete.
Apparently, the whole “white skin = bad” thing was not nearly as effective as we had hoped.
We should try using the Catholic Church’s marketing team. They’ve successfully parlayed the guilt tithe into two centuries of pomp and incense.
But we should be happy that Joe Biden received more votes than any other President in history! I would not have known had he not reminded us at least twice this week. And thank goodness he’ll win. I had become despondent over my life, and I have had had to put up with four more years of cis-white patriarchy, I was going to cover myself in honey and stick my head in a beehive.