Exterior: a cabin sits along the clearing of foggy alpine woods. A tallish- stocky- bald man splits a log and stacks the pieces along the edge of the cabin before wiping the sweat from his brow. The process would repeat itself like it had 40 times that morning, but the man is interrupted by the cacophony of a black unmarked helicopter ripping across the sky overhead. Shielding his eyes from the sun, the man looks up. The helicopter blazes overhead. Fifty yards out it banks a hard left and halts, holding position briefly before it opens its landing gear and touches down on the grassy flat below. A moment passes as the rotors die then, like clowns, 5 black-suited men filed out of the tightly packed aircraft. Each had conspicuous bite marks and dried dog slobber all over their jackets. The bald man knew this had to have been the security detail for none other than the President.. that ole Irish son of a gun Joe Brandon. The detail ran around and lined up to each side of the bay doors. One man of the dower clown troupe approached the door and opened it. Surprisingly it wasn’t the Irish rogue but rather a smaller Hispanic woman. The group approached on foot and the man wondered who had come calling on him.

“Timothy James Walz?” inquired the short woman. “Yes, siree bob that’s me and who might you be?” The woman left no gap between their words, “Julie Rodriguez, I represent the democratic nominee. Your country needs you” “Oh gee that sure sounds swell. So how might I help you by god?” asked Walz. “The nominee wants you to be their VP,” said Julie frankly. “I gave up being a progressive juggernaut, very sorry.”, said the bald man, “You can tell Mister Biden I’m not interested.” As he finished he turned to grab his ax to resume his cliche chore. “Biden?” she said breaking her business-like mask with a bit of a chuckle ” Oh no Mr. Walz you have it all wrong. Biden isn’t running for president anymore. He stepped down.” Walz was stricken with genuine shock, “But how can that be? He’s incredibly healthy and mentally stable. Everyone knows that.” The small woman responded frankly, “Literally everyone is as shocked as you are. One moment the man was incredibly cogent and then suddenly he was leaking his brains out from his ear for the very first time. No one saw it coming, but we had to move quickly.” The Governor tried to process the shock quickly “But hold the gosh darn phone, if you do it this quickly won’t people think that you had somehow been lying about his condition? Possibly the entire time?”– “Let them think what they may, we have a country to save from fascism and Vice President Harris could use you” — “Where is she then don’t-ya -know” Tim asked. “She’s currently in a total media blackout. We didn’t want to ruin her immaculate lead with any chance of encountering an interview journalist so she is at a CIA black site right now” Tim thought it over a minute, and after a bit of time he turned back to the woman, “So very sorry but I just can’t, no matter how much I love helping black women and all people in general. I gave all that up” Rodriguez smiled wryly. She ended her pitch with a coy eyebrow raise. “But Mister Walz you don’t have to do anything cool or progressive, we just need you to stand around sometimes and the rest of the time ….. we completely ignore you”

This was a very stupid dramatization of what I imagined went on behind closed doors in Kamala Harris’ 100-day campaign, where a myriad of pivotal and baffling decisions were made. This blog post is going to try and unpack what went wrong and what is to be done by those of us who pinned our hopes for the abatement of fascism on one “joyful” prosecutor and her housebroken football coach running mate.

“Kamala ran on wokeness and bottom surgery.”
“The Dems have abandoned the working class”
“Kamala shacked up with the Cheneys and adopted Trump’s border bill of course she ran right”
“They alienated people by saying Latinx”
“I prosecuted trans-national gangs”
“She transed gang members”

Every argument that blames anyone other than the party, candidate, or her former boss implies that they did enough. It ignores the inordinate amount of power and personal agency these organizations and people have in shaping their own outcomes in favor of blaming ordinary people for their missteps. But even still, none of that matters. I originally thought the best approach to dissecting the election outcome was to anthologize her 100 days and look at everything as either failure or victory, but in the week following this election, I have seen a maelstrom of off-the-cuffs. People are in a fevered delirium trying to find the donkey’s ass to pin their opinions. But amongst the tempest, a rough outline becomes almost blindingly obvious. The scattered stabs ricochet infinitely in the dark and sparks shine brightly on the faces of her coalition: a fractured mess of people polarized against Trump but along incompatible lines of ideology. You can see it in the way they fly out in all directions. They had held their tongue but they had “always known all along.” Everyone was holding their nose but it wasn’t until it was time to complain about the taste that we found out that no one agreed on what part was so rancid. Who exactly is the woke, pro-cop, anti-immigration, Latinx, Cheney voter? Who exactly is a candidate that will do everything Biden already did, but move forward? Clearly, even the people who wanted her to win, and had paid more attention than anyone, still had no clear picture of what she was selling and were all regimented and tight-lipped about their criticisms. Ultimately it’s not the target voter’s fault for not existing. What we see in an electorate that turned out 14 million fewer for Harris and 3 million fewer for Trump is a people willing to stay home for Trump. What they needed was a reason to show up for Harris. What they needed was a Democratic party worth more than holding your nose and swallowing.

Let’s not kid ourselves, this was an uphill slog from the get-go. Biden was already becoming deeply unpopular prior to his televised sundowning episode. Harris didn’t even have her work cut out for her. Never had a VP won an election after their President dropped the mantle or died (Biden sort of did both). In historic examples, guys like Hubert Humphrey had a much more powerful track record. Without strong recognition, Kamala was being slotted in to fit that “generic democrat” role that focus groups seemed to love so much. I’m of the opinion that when you said generic dem most people just went off into their mental corners and pictured a politician they already liked or policies they explicitly enjoyed and that all collapses when it becomes a specific Democrat against Trump. This sort of comes out in other data when you slot specific people against Trump. The economy had also fully seized up from the pandemic and our corporate masters were clawing back every dime they could from the loose labor market. –George HW Bush could hardly survive an economic hiccup in his second run, and he had the entire deep state and Bael at his disposal– And the crazed client state of Israel has been flooding the streets of Gaza with blood and rubble. So I’m not saying that Kamala shat the bed all by herself- there is way too much shit in America’s bed for just one person– but George Sr, Hubert Humphry, Henry Wallace all these former VPs didn’t get the great honor of running against Donald Trump, a mincing, stupid, known quantity and real estate scam artist with only slightly better favorables — or cognitive decline– than Biden.

Biden isn’t running the show anymore and that has been made abundantly clear by the fact that no one even knows if he’s still alive right now. I don’t want to come off as dismissing all criticisms or make the mistake of assuming that granular issues can’t build into mountainous problems. I think there was, again, a mountain of shit in this bed. I think it’s incredibly stupid this idea that Democrats were afraid of running on border issues. The only people who could even concoct this argument would have to be someone born from a tube –likely as an experiment to create the perfect Democratic voter that doesn’t require kitchen table issues to “pull the lever”– who hadn’t watched any of the ads cut by down-ticket Dems. I also can’t possibly understate the decades-defining pratfall that is the Cheney endorsement. Think back to how hard people tried to rehab the Bush family image by showing how George Jr. and Michele Obama shared candy. Or how Ellen wanted to normalize going to ball games with the one-time war criminal and Cheney stooge. The messaging of all this couldn’t have been more clear “Trump is a political outsider and WE represent everything shitty about the last 40 years. From NAFTA to now we take credit for it all.” It’s letting the Republican party be reborn not unlike the Democrats were after the “Southern strategy“.

The panic set off by these failures is palpable. Every corner of the media and discourse oozes with it, and I can’t say that I’m not afraid. Afraid for my family, my partner, my niece, and my gay, minority, and activist friends. But I think it’s more important now that we stay vigilant. I think we all need to guard against narratives that want to make us panic, not because there’s no reason to, but because when we scatter that is how these putrid fuckers round up the most vulnerable of us, and that’s how they really win. Anyone telling you to panic is someone with NO PLAN. I think one of the things the Democrats wanted us the most clear on was that Trump represents a threat and they were our solution to that threat. I think the panic is due to the fact that most of us had confidence we shouldn’t have had in people and institutions that don’t warrant it. Even if some of us snarky leftists eye roll from the peanut gallery about how obviously decrepit the Democratic party is, we still thought there was something there. I saw a tweet bragging about a New York DSA chapter having 300 members in their meeting and heard from a friend about how disorganized a local activist group that’s been around for six years is just at hosting rallies. The implication is clear and it’s that we need to build institutions and uplift people who do warrant positive trust. I don’t want to live in a world where two, four, or eight years from now we resort to grasping for firm ground. We need solid grassroots. I know a lot of us are terrified. It’s frightening, but we don’t stop working when we’re scared, we stop working when the work is done. They count on our scattering. Attend a leftist org meeting, organize your workplace, talk with your neighbors, attend rallies, phone bank for bail funds for jailed activists, support those of us who are the frailest, and be fucking kind. We all, now as much as ever, need to reconcile with the fact that we are building bridges we may never live to see the other side of and for people we will never meet. There will be plenty of time to panic but also to love, barbeque, and reconcile, plenty of weddings, laughter, new life, drunken nights and work

Hope seems a distant light but when it’s darkest is when we should most be able to see the dimmest distant lights. I wanted to share quotes from two great American leftists. The first is Michael Brooks, a commentator and public speaker who wanted us to, “be kind to people, be ruthless to institutions..” The other great American was a socialist from the beginning of the 20th century known as Eugene Debs. Debs was a man of unbreakable grit and spirit and a rabid labor rights advocate who would be sent to prison by the federal government for giving a speech to striking workers on the grounds of the insidious Sedition Act. From his jail cell, he would run for President, getting 3% of the vote. But before this, at his sentencing, he gave an incredibly hopeful speech against the background of one of the lowest points in his life. One that I won’t quote the entirety of but for those interested I will leave a full link.

He said:
” Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free…”

“…Your Honor, I ask no mercy and I plead for no immunity. I realize that finally the right must prevail. I never so clearly comprehended as now the great struggle between the powers of greed and exploitation on the one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of industrial freedom and social justice.
I can see the dawn of the better day for humanity. The people are awakening. In due time they will and must come to their own.
When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the southern cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry finger points the Almighty marks the passage of time upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may beat the glad tidings, the lookout knows that the midnight is passing and that relief and rest are close at hand. Let the people everywhere take heart of hope, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.”

Solidarity Forever. Love to everyone.