Democrats inhale the whiff of victory in Kamala Harris.
So, I wake up in London last Sunday to a dramatic change in the American political landscape. The phalanx of texts from friends and colleagues that greeted me as I was six-hours ahead must stand as some kind of record. President Joe Biden, presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party, and winner of millions of primary votes (not to mention the 2020 election) had dropped out and endorsed his Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place. Harris took the reigns as if this had been going on for weeks, even months, without missing a step; assumed the president’s ample war chest and consolidated the bitching contingent of her party, and most importantly, opened the coffers to mega-rich donors holding additional booty hostage unless a change was made. This, for all intents and purposes, was a bloodless coup. And, quite frankly, I don’t care, because it worked and it is working… famously.
Still, it was a coup.
While not done all the time here, the bloodless coup has been a winning combo in most Central American countries and often in the Middle East. For much of the post-WWII period, we pretty much engineered all of them – either through the illegal machinations of the CIA or in some cases out in the open through the State Department. Shit, the Dems pulled one of these in 1944 against “the will” of the voters at that year’s Democratic Convention to place an unknown Missouri Senator named Harry Truman in the VP chair in one of – if not the most – consequential backroom deals to ever emerge from the dark corners of American politics. Truman, of course, would become president upon Franklin Roosevelt’s death and lead the country through the final months of the Second World War, which included arguably the most important decision to ever confront an American president: drop the atomic bomb on millions of innocent Japanese to effectively end the war and subsequently plunge the planet into a perpetual tinder box.
With less consequence to the planet, but immense implications for the future solvency of this republic, the Democrats gambled big time – but at least took my partial advice to not throw the party into a convention battle á lá 1968 by contemplating the always dangerous yet enticing “mystery ticket” many were calling for by stepping over a sitting VP who happens to be a Black woman and as a consequence alienate the party’s two most reliable and powerful contingents.
Fast-forward to later Sunday afternoon: I’m in a cab with my wife and daughter heading back to the Bloomsbury district where we were staying and Harris is on the radio and she is thanking Joe Biden for his selfless service to the country by stepping down; the whole thing rings hollow, because the president was willing – for good or ill – to see this out, and despite a dismal debate performance and more than half the party (echoed by a shit ton of Democratic voters) publicly pissing on him, he remained within striking distance of victory – as many of the polls cited. The only issue in these polls were those holding out to make it appear it was necessary to enact a coup. I maintain they would have returned home, as Trump’s latest KKK level of racist palaver performance at the National Association of Black Journalists convention attests. At some point, the nation would have chosen the Empty Gatorade Bottle over that monster. Biden was forced out. If it works, great, but that is what happened.
Irrespective of this ugliness, I would have to be a complete fool to not acknowledge that Harris’ dynamic appearance from the ashes of the past three weeks has flipped the entire 2024 presidential race on its head. Not since before the debate has the Democratic nominee been consistently leading national polls and in the battleground states (some cases for the first time). Moreover, the numbers of young and minority voters are flooding back. The move, as the party insiders who conducted the coup surmised, has reenergized Democrats, and shifted many of what pundits have deemed “double haters,” who were unimpressed with having to vote for two old white men again, back into the 2020-level fold. This seemingly irrational maneuver has gone remarkably well. Strangely so, especially for a candidate who was abysmal when running for president four years ago and who, because of her job as being the deciding vote in a deadlocked Senate the first two years of the administration, has been mostly invisible.
However, Harris came right out of central casting as the vibrant, shiny new candidate. She emerged slickly taught, impeccably styled, displaying an unerringly strong comportment, offering rousing rhetoric that’s been expertly performed. Kamala Harris has never looked or sounded better. She is, again, for all intents and purposes, a transformed party avatar – and the response is measurable. The VP and now presumptive nominee with nary of quibble from the masses, stepped right in and began doing what Biden detractors were convinced (and I still argue with this part) he could not or would not do: take the fight to the bully, Donald J. Trump. And although, as one colleague put it to me the immediate response to Harris resembles “a starving man treating a cracker like a three-course meal,” there is something else going on – something powerfully attractive to a maudlin electorate tired of the same noises emanating from the same old places.
It is this incredibly professional and unhindered roll out that convinces me this entire ordeal was less organic panic than an institutionally engineered switch-a-roo. Democrats have historically been sloppy with almost everything. Republicans blithely walk around as if there’s nothing to see here while they run a domestic terrorist, a convicted criminal lunatic who tried to overthrow the government three years ago. Democrats watch their old man candidate stumble through 90 minutes of a shitty debate and they run around like their hair’s on fire for a month, but cooler minds somewhere beyond George Clooney were deployed and the results are hard to refute.
Again, except for political junkies like me, the sausage making is hardly the matter. The true goal here remains: Stop a deranged psychopath from entering the White House again and continue to hang loses on Republicans until the reproductive rights of women are restored nationally. For at least the first three weeks, that appears to be a distinct possibility with room to build out – a pending VP pick, a showbiz convention, and the guarantee of more incredibly dangerous and wildly stupid shit coming out of Trump and what appears to be his spectacularly putrid VP choice (J.D. Vance, whose entire talking points thus far have been the kind of alt-right Christian fascistic nonsense that quadruples down on the MAGA bullshit that coughed up the 2022 midterms for Republicans, who at the time were barking that Trump was electoral poison). Worse still, for a media whore like Trump, Vance is a dud, a terrible soundbite and stumper, a wooden gaff machine that makes Ron DeSantis sound like Billy Graham.
Within days Donald Trump went from the strongman, the less feeble candidate, to an old fat pathetic goof without a playbook taking on a feisty, young, capable opponent. Suddenly the 2016 change-agent candidate tag is not his. He is old and bad news. “We’re not going back,” intones Harris on the trail, somehow balancing the incumbency shield without lugging the baggage of economic or international complaints – people (especially the ornery youth vote) don’t even see her as the unflinching supporter of the Israeli war machine that straddled old Joe.
Look, the Harris move, if this continues and she beats Trump in November, worked and was genius. If she loses, it was rash and ill-conceived. The proof is not in an explosion of excitement for three weeks, but the staying power of the next ninety days and through Election Day. That is the measure of the move, but it still stinks that a man considered too feeble to run or act as president by much of the media and even those in his own party has taken Joe Biden out and his opponent, a proud fascist, racist, convicted criminal, gets to hang in there. Even the New York Times does not call for him to leave the race.
Why?
One left the race because he was losing and the other gets to keep being a horrible danger to the republic because he is – was – winning.
If that isn’t the most American thing I’ve written in my nearly 30 years manning this space I don’t know what is.
