February 12, 2025
I've been mulling it on and off for the last couple months, and I think I've got my thoughts together on the November 2024 election. I'm not saying they're right, just that I'm pretty sure of what I think about it now.
First off, Joe Biden being in mental decline was overblown in my mind. He's always had a stutter and needed to pick his words sometimes. But it looked plenty bad that he was caught flat-footed by Trump's cascade of bullshit: If there's one thing you should expect from Trump it's for him to try to bulldoze you.
Working from the assumption that Biden was no longer up to the job as of the debate, it was too late to have a true primary -- most states' primaries had happened, and no serious competitors showed up to run a serious primary against the incumbent. And from what I saw online, transferring the race to Kamala Harris was the only way of using the already-raised money. So I'm going to start from there.
I think Harris's initial instincts were correct, and were well-executed by her and Walz (who I think was a good choice for veep). Call the Republican leadership a bunch of weird little creeps, because they're a bunch of weird little creeps. Calling everything they wanted to do a regression -- "we're not going back" -- was also a simple and, to me at least, effective way of getting it across.
And then the consultants got their claws into her. The same people who got caught flat-footed during the 2004 midterms and have been ceding the narrative to the Republicans for the last twenty years. Calling them weird was too negative, they said. "We're not going back" isn't forward-looking enough, they said. Don't talk too much about minorities' rights because it'll alienate people, they said. Bunch of fuckin' idiots.
One big place that Harris was hamstrung by Biden was Israel/Gaza. It's tough for a vice president to publicly push back against the boss, so everything she said on the matter was very tepid. (Being afraid of AIPAC throwing a bunch of cash into the ring might have played a role, too.) I don't think all the people who said they stayed home because of Gaza actually did so, progressives have been "teaching Democrats a lesson" with disastrous consequences for two and a half decades now, and their only consistent stance is Owning the Libs. But she sure didn't help herself, either. Would have been nice for Biden to say that she should campaign on her own foreign policy instead of his, but it's too late for that now.
Would all that have flipped that handful of votes in swing states to give her the win? Hard to say. Incumbent administrations took it in the chin pretty much everywhere last year, it may have been doomed from the start. A press that was in the bag for the GOP made things harder, and I think it led to more acceptance of Republican framing.
So, there we are. Mistakes Were Made. Now what?
Right now the Democrats are demonstrating their one true talent: Punching themselves in the dick. Their general fecklessness is even more frustrating than usual, given Trump's extremely narrow margin of victory. My two senators are particularly useless right now, Warner and Kaine and both all-in on "go along to get along". Over in the House, the minority alleged-leader, Hakeem Jefferies, is urging the caucus to avoid "distractions" like all the unconstitutional executive orders Trump has issued in the first week of his administration, and focus on the economy. And then they're not even doing that.
What should they be doing? Every single one of them, House and Senate, need to be grabbing every member of the press they can get their hands on and yelling about every last piece of awful shit being thrown around. Incompetent and just plain compromised cabinet picks, unlawful executive orders, stupid and harmful policies, all of it. Make it so loud that it can't be ignored by the people who like Trump for the ratings and work for people he's giving tax cuts to.
And for fuck's sake, vote against all his crap. There's no excuse for supporting the Laken Riley Act, or voting to confirm any of his appointments. Make the Republicans own every last bit of it. Either we were voting against fascism or we weren't, and for the record we were; just rolling over and letting Trump have his way suggests we weren't. If he's that bad, and he is, why are we being nice to him?
They also need to get loud about their values, assuming they have any that wouldn't give Neville Chamberlain a chubby. Trans rights are human rights. Health care is a human right, and that includes HRT and abortions as much as it includes insulin and prostate exams. Corruption is bad, and that includes when Dems do it. Pelosi absolutely needs to be out on her ass for the inside knowledge she used to get and stay rich. All of that, all the time. Drill it into everybody's heads so they know what they're getting if they vote for you in 2026.
Finally, the Democrats need their own way to get the word out. I'm not sure what form that needs to take; the so-called Fox News of the Left, MSNBC, is only leftist in the sense that everything else is so far to the right. You can't really call a network that hires Joe Scarborough left-leaning. Maybe it's podcasts, maybe it's email newsletters that don't include panhandling, maybe it's physical mail. I don't know the best way to reach people who aren't online all that much, and I don't know the degree to which those people want to be reached. But we have to do it somehow, just to counteract the nonsense coming out of CNN, the NYT, the Post, etc.
Oh, and listen to their constituents instead of James Carville or Rahm Emanuel. Just a thought.
