This is all so sad, assuming Harris is basically telling it like it was.
One thing to wonder about: has she killed her political career with this? If so, did she think she was done for anyway, so why not say what was on her mind? Or, given the increasing drumbeat against the old guard of the Democratic Party, does this airing of the dirty laundry potentially help her?
I’d also add that while Team Biden may have set Kamala up to fail, she certainly did a lot of that herself by clinging so close to him in the campaign—when you can’t answer the question “what would you do differently from the president who was so unpopular he had to drop out late in the race” you’re pretty much not ready for prime time. Shame of it I think she’d have been a good or at least decent president but at campaigning she was way too conservative and guarded when the situation demanded boldness and flexibility.
Arguably, the only rationale for Harris as the nominee was that Biden's policies were overall popular but he couldn't effectively champion them because of his age, which was a dealbreaker for most voters. I confess that I shared that perhaps overtly optimistic view after the disastrous debate.
If the Biden *administration* was unpopular and his numbers on the economy would've been underwater even if he were 60, then the *sitting vice president* is hardly the best replacement. You'd need someone who could effectively distance themselves from the administration and its choices. Trump/Vance pretty quickly started hitting Harris on "why haven't you already done the things you've said you'd do?" -- sure, she wasn't the president but it just reinforced how little practical influence she had.
This is frankly clear evidence of the rot within the Democratic Party establishment. Let's be honest: If by some miracle, Warren had won the presidency in 2020 but had Biden-level approval in 2022, there would have been a stampede of mainstream liberal Dems challenging her from the center. No way, they stand around and hope for the best.
Part of the problem was many people (myself included) couldn’t figure out why Biden was so unpopular. Sure, the post-COVID hangover and its economic impact (including inflation) were bad, but by 2024 all the trends were positive and the opposition had a clear record of failure (2020 literally had “we ran out of space for all our corpses and Asshole calls it a hoax). But like it or not, Biden was incredibly unpopular by 2024.
So unable to diagnose the problem, a lot of wishful thinking took over (“maybe his numbers will increase when economic gains sink in”; “maybe it’s just Biden’s age and Harris can make the sale”). My best guess is Democrats have lost so much ground in the media/communications war that Republicans could defy reality when they needed to.
It's a sad fact that when a candidate is thrust onto the national stage, they often surround themselves with a phalanx of aides and consultants who try to homogenize the candidate into a nonentity. If we have learned anything about Trump, he is immune to shutting up no matter who tells him to do so, and in his case, his mouth breathing followers see that as an attractive quality, and amazingly, it has served him well.
By now, I would hope that Dems have realized that their supporters want candidates who will stand for something and speak out loudly, and take it to the opposition at every turn. If they can't do that, they can kiss the undecided voters goodbye.
Yep—Democrats are still under this idea that voters want carefully parsed statements, bland inoffensiveness and soaring oratory and Trump proved that “say whatever comes to mind and give no shits who it offends” has more appeal. I still don’t think they learned it.
Whatever Biden’s intentions in 2020, it was clear by 2022 that he was unpopular and needed a plan to win in 2024 (especially as he foolishly went easy on Trump’s crimes in hopes that the country had moved on). And even if he thought he was the stronger candidate, it would be crazy to not do everything possible to improve Kamala’s popularity from day one considering voters obviously would think a VP has a good chance of becoming president suddenly when the president is in his 80s.
Just all around failure at the worst possible time.
The whole sordid saga of Joe and Kamala just makes me despise Democrats all the more, especially as this was happening with the backdrop of a fascist restoration campaign.
Ah well, may all be moot as that might have been our last free election for a while.
Confusing, as I read an interview of Biden and he could not stop singing her praises. He declared she was the best decision he made. And, I believe Biden had a very successful presidency, and brought our country back after Covid. His dealings with Anita Hill were horrid, his stance on Israel gut wrenching. Do not profess to be all knowing, but definitely believe, for all his faults, he is being unnecessarily maligned. Will be interesting to read her side of the story. No matter what, there’s much we will never be privy to.
Joe Biden, nice guy, but also frustratingly tepid and milquetoast. I place the failure to hold Trump and his terrorist base fully accountable solely on him.
Enh, I guess it's reckless to have someone 78-year old run for President if they also don't have a rightwing media human centipede to cover for them. After all we don't seem to talk about age anymore, now do we?
We do know at least that there's always going to be someone to leave the nominee twisting in the wind.
I'm just waiting to see who the Dems put up as Johnny Unbeatable in 2028 (well, should honestly be 2026) given the appetite the American people have for sadopopulism.
And I'll say it again; the time to worry about Biden's age was 2019-20.
Age wasn't the only issue. I said many times in '19 & '20 that we were on borrowed time with Biden, because we didn't need fucking "healing," we needed accountability for Trump and MAGA.
But Americans like "healing" because there is a very, very narrow space of acceptable behavior for Democrats, under Murc's Law. Democrats ALWAYS have to call for unity because there is massive deference in the political and legal systems for the unreconstructed, who get to be called "Real America."
And there is never going to be any meaningful accountability for the pricktator or MAGA because the unreconstructed not only have deference in the political spectrum, they have deference in the legal arena too. That's why the pricktator typically does not get consequences, and gets unlimited appeals like they were Olive Garden breadsticks. And of course the thing that cements it further is Taney Court 2.0.
Look at the difference. Under Biden, Biden's legislation gets some narrow rejections based on *Republican* suits to make life worse for people. Yet this same court is perfectly fine to give the pricktator "official immunity," all kinds of gifts and loss of regulation.
Democrats always have to operate by the letter of the law. Knowing what we know now, I will guarantee you if a Democrat promised to arrest and prosecute the MAGA movement outright, the *minute* that would happen there'd be a Taney Court 2.0 injunction.
The quoted remarks in the Axios piece by Alex Thompson from Biden's henchmen is classic white male misogyny. Kamala Harris had a long, effective, successful career in elected offices before serving as VP. To smear her as some sort of ineffective failure is preposterous. It seems we are expected to ignore what we saw with our own eyes. Harris is a brilliant, accomplished, successful politician who spoke with warmth, intelligence, and connected easily with people. She may have lost, by a tiny margin, but Biden would have lost in a massive, terrifying landslide.
Biden has always been an overrated mediocre white guy, who managed to get elected to the Senate from a small, insignificant state known only for creating tax shelters for massive corporations. His legislative record includes his disastrous chairing of the Judiciary committee hearing for Clarence Thomas. His callous treatment of Anita Hill earned him my personal, undying hatred. He also famously championed the bill shielding credit card debt, medical debt, and student loans from bankruptcy. By the time he ushered this bill through, I already hated him. In the 2020 election, like Trump, Biden was just another old, rich, white asshole with nepotism issues. He barely won in 2020 because during the pandemic there were just enough people who would vote for anyone but Trump. Biden's win was so whisker thin in swing states, it took days to declare. Biden's failure to acknowledge his age related incompetence, and instead cling to power despite his terrible polling and widespread unpopularity, led to Trump's win.
Harris is not to blame for this fiasco. Biden is the villain in this story. Biden has also claimed he should have been the nominee in 2016, instead of Hillary Clinton. He has been holding a grudge for years about being passed over. Biden has never gotten over his presumption that white male privilege is the only thing that matters.
It's not Harris' fault that the Biden Admin didn't make her more of a spokesperson for the Admin, or give her more responsibility during his term. It's also not her fault that they didn't push back more effectively against the "sleepy Joe" memes that not just the RW, but the MSM ate up. She's right that letting the country see how prepared she was to be President wasn't a ding to Biden, but it's literally what a VP is for.
Now I want to read her book, but thanks to tr*mp's crappy economy, I won't buy it, but get it from the library.
"You’d think the one upside of nominating a 78-year-old for president is that he wouldn’t make impulsive decisions with a longterm impact for short-term gain"
All politics is at the core, like running for high school student council president. The differences are matters of scale, not of kind. You make promises that you may not be able to keep, or never intend to keep at all. You surround yourself with both true believers and/or ambitious hangers on. You try to project confidence and likability. That's it. That's the whole thing.
If you lose, all concerned will backbite and try to rewrite history. In reality, the whims of the electorate are so inconsistent that no one really knows why one wins and another loses. One narrative wins out over time and another disappears, but this is not an easily quantifiable problem. One candidate wins with a message of hope, while another cannot duplicate that result, or somehow becomes associated with a different message through no fault of their own.
And in the end, we all are stuck with Jimmy or Tracy, who promised better snacks in the cafeteria to get elected.
This is all so sad, assuming Harris is basically telling it like it was.
One thing to wonder about: has she killed her political career with this? If so, did she think she was done for anyway, so why not say what was on her mind? Or, given the increasing drumbeat against the old guard of the Democratic Party, does this airing of the dirty laundry potentially help her?
I’d also add that while Team Biden may have set Kamala up to fail, she certainly did a lot of that herself by clinging so close to him in the campaign—when you can’t answer the question “what would you do differently from the president who was so unpopular he had to drop out late in the race” you’re pretty much not ready for prime time. Shame of it I think she’d have been a good or at least decent president but at campaigning she was way too conservative and guarded when the situation demanded boldness and flexibility.
Arguably, the only rationale for Harris as the nominee was that Biden's policies were overall popular but he couldn't effectively champion them because of his age, which was a dealbreaker for most voters. I confess that I shared that perhaps overtly optimistic view after the disastrous debate.
If the Biden *administration* was unpopular and his numbers on the economy would've been underwater even if he were 60, then the *sitting vice president* is hardly the best replacement. You'd need someone who could effectively distance themselves from the administration and its choices. Trump/Vance pretty quickly started hitting Harris on "why haven't you already done the things you've said you'd do?" -- sure, she wasn't the president but it just reinforced how little practical influence she had.
This is frankly clear evidence of the rot within the Democratic Party establishment. Let's be honest: If by some miracle, Warren had won the presidency in 2020 but had Biden-level approval in 2022, there would have been a stampede of mainstream liberal Dems challenging her from the center. No way, they stand around and hope for the best.
Part of the problem was many people (myself included) couldn’t figure out why Biden was so unpopular. Sure, the post-COVID hangover and its economic impact (including inflation) were bad, but by 2024 all the trends were positive and the opposition had a clear record of failure (2020 literally had “we ran out of space for all our corpses and Asshole calls it a hoax). But like it or not, Biden was incredibly unpopular by 2024.
So unable to diagnose the problem, a lot of wishful thinking took over (“maybe his numbers will increase when economic gains sink in”; “maybe it’s just Biden’s age and Harris can make the sale”). My best guess is Democrats have lost so much ground in the media/communications war that Republicans could defy reality when they needed to.
It's a sad fact that when a candidate is thrust onto the national stage, they often surround themselves with a phalanx of aides and consultants who try to homogenize the candidate into a nonentity. If we have learned anything about Trump, he is immune to shutting up no matter who tells him to do so, and in his case, his mouth breathing followers see that as an attractive quality, and amazingly, it has served him well.
By now, I would hope that Dems have realized that their supporters want candidates who will stand for something and speak out loudly, and take it to the opposition at every turn. If they can't do that, they can kiss the undecided voters goodbye.
Yep—Democrats are still under this idea that voters want carefully parsed statements, bland inoffensiveness and soaring oratory and Trump proved that “say whatever comes to mind and give no shits who it offends” has more appeal. I still don’t think they learned it.
Whatever Biden’s intentions in 2020, it was clear by 2022 that he was unpopular and needed a plan to win in 2024 (especially as he foolishly went easy on Trump’s crimes in hopes that the country had moved on). And even if he thought he was the stronger candidate, it would be crazy to not do everything possible to improve Kamala’s popularity from day one considering voters obviously would think a VP has a good chance of becoming president suddenly when the president is in his 80s.
Just all around failure at the worst possible time.
The whole sordid saga of Joe and Kamala just makes me despise Democrats all the more, especially as this was happening with the backdrop of a fascist restoration campaign.
Ah well, may all be moot as that might have been our last free election for a while.
I won't be reading the book myself, so I look forward to your summary and review!
Confusing, as I read an interview of Biden and he could not stop singing her praises. He declared she was the best decision he made. And, I believe Biden had a very successful presidency, and brought our country back after Covid. His dealings with Anita Hill were horrid, his stance on Israel gut wrenching. Do not profess to be all knowing, but definitely believe, for all his faults, he is being unnecessarily maligned. Will be interesting to read her side of the story. No matter what, there’s much we will never be privy to.
Very good and informative piece. ;)
Now we see the misogyny inherent in the system.
I am going to see VP Harris speak when she stops in Toronto on her book tour. Looking forward to it even more now!
Joe Biden, nice guy, but also frustratingly tepid and milquetoast. I place the failure to hold Trump and his terrorist base fully accountable solely on him.
And his staff!
Enh, I guess it's reckless to have someone 78-year old run for President if they also don't have a rightwing media human centipede to cover for them. After all we don't seem to talk about age anymore, now do we?
We do know at least that there's always going to be someone to leave the nominee twisting in the wind.
I'm just waiting to see who the Dems put up as Johnny Unbeatable in 2028 (well, should honestly be 2026) given the appetite the American people have for sadopopulism.
And I'll say it again; the time to worry about Biden's age was 2019-20.
Ironically, both Haley and to a degree DeSantis both challenged Trump on age. They just still lost
Age wasn't the only issue. I said many times in '19 & '20 that we were on borrowed time with Biden, because we didn't need fucking "healing," we needed accountability for Trump and MAGA.
But Americans like "healing" because there is a very, very narrow space of acceptable behavior for Democrats, under Murc's Law. Democrats ALWAYS have to call for unity because there is massive deference in the political and legal systems for the unreconstructed, who get to be called "Real America."
And there is never going to be any meaningful accountability for the pricktator or MAGA because the unreconstructed not only have deference in the political spectrum, they have deference in the legal arena too. That's why the pricktator typically does not get consequences, and gets unlimited appeals like they were Olive Garden breadsticks. And of course the thing that cements it further is Taney Court 2.0.
Look at the difference. Under Biden, Biden's legislation gets some narrow rejections based on *Republican* suits to make life worse for people. Yet this same court is perfectly fine to give the pricktator "official immunity," all kinds of gifts and loss of regulation.
Democrats always have to operate by the letter of the law. Knowing what we know now, I will guarantee you if a Democrat promised to arrest and prosecute the MAGA movement outright, the *minute* that would happen there'd be a Taney Court 2.0 injunction.
I so thoroughly enjoyed reading this "read!"
The quoted remarks in the Axios piece by Alex Thompson from Biden's henchmen is classic white male misogyny. Kamala Harris had a long, effective, successful career in elected offices before serving as VP. To smear her as some sort of ineffective failure is preposterous. It seems we are expected to ignore what we saw with our own eyes. Harris is a brilliant, accomplished, successful politician who spoke with warmth, intelligence, and connected easily with people. She may have lost, by a tiny margin, but Biden would have lost in a massive, terrifying landslide.
Biden has always been an overrated mediocre white guy, who managed to get elected to the Senate from a small, insignificant state known only for creating tax shelters for massive corporations. His legislative record includes his disastrous chairing of the Judiciary committee hearing for Clarence Thomas. His callous treatment of Anita Hill earned him my personal, undying hatred. He also famously championed the bill shielding credit card debt, medical debt, and student loans from bankruptcy. By the time he ushered this bill through, I already hated him. In the 2020 election, like Trump, Biden was just another old, rich, white asshole with nepotism issues. He barely won in 2020 because during the pandemic there were just enough people who would vote for anyone but Trump. Biden's win was so whisker thin in swing states, it took days to declare. Biden's failure to acknowledge his age related incompetence, and instead cling to power despite his terrible polling and widespread unpopularity, led to Trump's win.
Harris is not to blame for this fiasco. Biden is the villain in this story. Biden has also claimed he should have been the nominee in 2016, instead of Hillary Clinton. He has been holding a grudge for years about being passed over. Biden has never gotten over his presumption that white male privilege is the only thing that matters.
Agree. Now we have Biden ironically giving us “misogynoire”
It's not Harris' fault that the Biden Admin didn't make her more of a spokesperson for the Admin, or give her more responsibility during his term. It's also not her fault that they didn't push back more effectively against the "sleepy Joe" memes that not just the RW, but the MSM ate up. She's right that letting the country see how prepared she was to be President wasn't a ding to Biden, but it's literally what a VP is for.
Now I want to read her book, but thanks to tr*mp's crappy economy, I won't buy it, but get it from the library.
"You’d think the one upside of nominating a 78-year-old for president is that he wouldn’t make impulsive decisions with a longterm impact for short-term gain"
Like Merrick Garland?
All politics is at the core, like running for high school student council president. The differences are matters of scale, not of kind. You make promises that you may not be able to keep, or never intend to keep at all. You surround yourself with both true believers and/or ambitious hangers on. You try to project confidence and likability. That's it. That's the whole thing.
If you lose, all concerned will backbite and try to rewrite history. In reality, the whims of the electorate are so inconsistent that no one really knows why one wins and another loses. One narrative wins out over time and another disappears, but this is not an easily quantifiable problem. One candidate wins with a message of hope, while another cannot duplicate that result, or somehow becomes associated with a different message through no fault of their own.
And in the end, we all are stuck with Jimmy or Tracy, who promised better snacks in the cafeteria to get elected.
I voted for Pedro, because he said all my wildest dreams would come true.
Thanks for the much needed levity this morning.
Great case in point! Great movie!