From Semafor: Kamala Harris’ digital chief on Democrats ‘losing hold of culture’
Soon after Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty turned his attention to sports.
The campaign needed to introduce Harris quickly to people who aren’t obsessed with politics. Sports is perhaps America’s last remaining monoculture, and Flaherty and the Harris team decided to book her on sports shows and podcasts.
But one by one, the biggest personalities and shows politely turned them down.
“Sports and culture have sort of merged together, and as sports and culture became more publicly and sort of natively associated with this Trump-conservative set of values, it got more complicated for athletes to come out in favor of us,” Flaherty, 33, told me in an interview last week. “It got more complicated for sports personalities to take us on their shows because they didn’t want to ‘do politics.’”
“That’s not to say Steph Curry and Steve Kerr and LeBron [James] and all them coming out wasn’t impactful or important,” he said. “It was more impactful because it had gotten so much harder. But certainly the culture that has been associated with heavy sports-watching has become associated with right-wing culture in a way that makes it harder for us to reach people.”
The signs were there, if we knew how to look for them.Report
Meh. Let a thousand think pieces flow because just admitting “it was inflation” just like inflation took down almost every single government in power in 2021 in post-2021 elections means we don’t have copy to produce and that means I don’t get paid. Or I don’t get to stroke my chin pompously.
And by just a coincidence, all these think pieces happen to fit the prejudices of thin-skinned middle aged or approaching middle-aged white guys who have their fee fees hurt when not being the center of the universe.Report
Yeah, there’s no reason to change. There’s no reason to believe that anything could have been done differently.
It was inflation. People hate inflation.
It couldn’t be helped.
And by just a coincidence, all these think pieces happen to fit the prejudices of thin-skinned middle aged or approaching middle-aged white guys who have their fee fees hurt when not being the center of the universe.
It’s even worse when those thin-skinned middle aged white guys have spreadsheets.Report
And you hate Occam’s Razor.
Inflation is more than people voting for Trump it is also people staying home.
Harris won about 500K more votes in California than HRC did in 2016. She received about 1.9 million votes less than Biden did in 2020. Meanwhile Trump’s vote totals in CA in 2020 and 2024 were basically static. His big gain was between 2016 (4.4 million) and 2020 (6 million). Democrats flipped three CA house seats in 2024 despite GOP getting a bit of an increase in its vote share.Report
What happened to California’s population in that time?Report
To be clear, there are lessons to learn from “it was just inflation”. None of us have had much experience with high inflation in about 30 years, and the economic conditions are sufficiently different now that some of the old political rules don’t seem to apply any more. Conventional wisdom in the 1950s and 1960s was that inflation was preferable to recessions politically, that doesn’t appear to be true any more (probably because no-one is used to inflation any more).
What this tells me is that governments need to be more careful about running deficits, people might not vote against the deficit itself, but they will vote against its consequences.Report
Yeah it’s been painfully enlightening on the inflation front. It’s also agonizingly ironic- was Trump born with his rectal cavity stuffed with good luck charms? I mean Biden won in 2020, took the inflation wave (and Afghanistan) in the face, fixed everything, got unelected for his trouble and now Trump is getting a goldilocks economy to come back to. I could just barf.Report
Inflation was considered preferable to recessions and depression during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s because everybody wanted to avoid another Great Depression and the radicalization that came from it. You had to go to the extreme right to find pro-mass unemployment politicians who hated Keynesian stimulus. Things started to slowly change during the 1980s. By now, most voters seem to consider recession preferable to inflation.Report
One thing I’ve heard is that high unemployment… let’s say going from 4% to 8% or 9%, gets 5% of the country very unhappy.
Inflation makes pretty much everybody unhappy.
Which makes sense!
If you are willing to run with that, you’re pretty much stuck with “so we chose inflation instead of unemployment and here’s why” explanations and it will take hella charisma to pull that off.Report
It assuredly was inflation but, but the other hand, it wasn’t a conventional republican candidate Harris lost to either nor a conventional campaign. The powers that be in the Democratic Party have to answer for that. A billion bucks was channeled to the movers, shakers and political turnout makers, they worked virtually unopposed and they still got whupped. Likewise, the “open borders or you’re a Facist” crew have been flat out exposed as basically speaking only for college educated latino/a people and not voters en mass. Harris, herself, and her campaign also knew this which is why they went radio silent on normal identarian markers. The hope/assumption was that she could try and run as a moderate with silence without saying anything that’d affirmatively enrage the identarians even after all the things she said in 2020. It just didn’t work.
All that being said it’s not really a tough problem policy wise. It’s not like liberal ideals have to be chucked in total- there just has to be a trim back of what is mostly just rhetorical overindulgences and silliness. We’ll probably get a lot of it just from running a full fledged primary in a non-covid environment with no more legacy candidates. One silver lining: we’re plumb out of ancient legacy politicians to run. Whoever it is in ’28, they’ll be new.Report
The lost might have been a lot bigger against a conventional Republican and the loss was closer because it was Trump.Report
That is a possibility, we’ll see in two years.Report
Do you remember the polling that had Biden losing to Haley by like 12-15 points?
Trump’s unique horribleness but also weird appeal to some probably cause Harris to barely lose instead of losing big time. It also contributed to Republicans basically staying static in the House.
There is a fair amount of evidence that Trump’s coattails are short. His only real Senate victory was probably McCormack given that Montana, Ohio, and West Virginia are deep red now. Slotkin, Baldwin, and Gallego had narrower wins but they had them.
There is also the fact that there are somewhere between 15-45 million Americans who see Trump as truly having no irredeemable qualities and the rest of America sees him as a TV character (yes character is intentional) doing a bit that id not to be taken seriously or literally.
My main point here though is to pushback against JB and his hobby horses because he barely hides his views that he thinks Democrats are out of touch elitist killjoys who complain about videogame girls in bikini armor.
Pointing out inflation killed incumbents around the world, left or right, deflates all the sails of professional and amateur pundit’s from engaging in their hobby horses and the pundit’s fallacy and that is a crime that cannot be allowed to pass!!Report
Sure, and kicking poor JB around is a liberal honored tradition here but I think it obscures more than it illuminates. JB isn’t a conservative (no matter how much you cast it upon him).
It remains true that inflation is the most likely and central culprit for the Dems loss, but the losses in specific demographics? Hispanics? Other minority communities? That bad? It seems dubious and a lot of info suggests that our least appealing and most screechy left wing groups are not just wrong about the voters/communities they claim to speak for but ludicrously, terribly wrong. And that’s a serious problem that needs to be considered no matter whether Jay annoys you or not.Report
He is Mr. Oppositional Defiance Disorder who cannot answer anything except as a middle school class clown and he gets. very upset when anyone pushes back at him.
I don’t see why he deserves a charitable read. He isn’t a scamp. He is a guy in his 50s. And almost everything he writes is anti-anti Trump at best.Report
Upset? Dude. I *DELIGHT* in debate and argumentation when I can’t get debate and quarrelling when I can’t get argumentation.
Are you so starved of such people in your day-to-day life? You’re a lawyer, for Christ’s sake!Report
I think multiple things can be true at once. I thought Harris would eke it out but I also think it’s worth noting that every time I said anything about inflation on OT I was greeted with snark about how odd it was that the impact was so much heavier on white men than anyone else.
Anyway it’s entirely possible that the fundamentals made this unwinnable. I also think you’re probably right that Trump had no coattails, and his candidacy is an unforced error by the GOP, that despite everything else, kept Harris more in it than she would have been against multiple other plausible GOP candidates.
All of these things can be true, and it can still also be true that there have been a lot of unforced culture war errors since the end of Obama’s last term, and it would be a good idea to try to stop making them, so maybe next time we can not just win but also have some coat tails too. But you know, ymmv I guess.Report
he barely hides his views that he thinks Democrats are out of touch elitist killjoys who complain about videogame girls in bikini armor.
For the record, I think that the Venn Diagram that has the “Democrats” circle is *MUCH* larger than the circle that contains “out of touch elitist killjoys who complain about videogame girls in bikini armor”. Most of that circle is in the Democrats’ circle (though some of it overlaps with the Republicans’ circle).
You know what’s nuts? I don’t think that the “swing voters” circle has *ANY* overlap with that circle.
Additionally: What the hell?Report
“My main point here though is to pushback against JB…”
Curse my dyslexia. This made me laugh hard until I reread it.Report
The other aspect to this is asymmetrical hack gap stuff:
Republicans love apostates; Democrats don’t.
Republicans love any random or not so random Democrat going on their media to discuss why Democrats suck and as far as I can tell this happens a lot because political operatives are often ambitious and cynical. The head of Harris’ operations in PA is apparently going on Fox News a lot to throw Democrats under the bus again and again.
Democrats don’t get joy out of this as much.
Electorally, I think it worked out this way. Trump benefits from kooks like RFK Jr, Gabbard, and the Tabibi/Greenwald set campaigning for him because they attract voters who might not be reactionary-nationalists but are kooky about one thing or another and in a smash “the system” mood.
Harris probably did not gain or lose anything from having Cheney campaign fir her but I know plenty of Democrats who weren’t fond of it and reluctant to embrace an enemy of my enemy is my friend thing with either Cheney or McCrystalReport
Sure, and I agree- and have noted elsewhere, that giving any credence to the neocon/libertarian set is a terrible mistake Harris made and that Dems have made for quite a long time. When I think about all the bandwidth and time Harris wasted, flat out wasted, trying to appeal to Cheney centrists who just don’t exist as a voting block, well that is dispiriting.
That’s also not, I think, controversial- I don’t think it’s a mistake Dems are likely to make again if for no other reason than that we’re plumb out of neocon figures, thank goodness, but losing ground with Asians, Jews or Historic amounts of lost ground with Hispanics? I don’t think that can all be blamed on inflation or asymmetrical hack gappery, especially when it looks like a lot of those losses can be laid at the feet of our own avant garde leftist hacks.Report
Harris didn’t lose ground with Jews. She won between 71 to 80 percent of the Jewish vote which either compares to Biden or is s number not seen since 2008Report
According to the Jewish Virtual Library, Harris got 66% of the Jewish vote.
Biden got 68% in 2020.
Clinton got 71% in 2016.
Obama got 69% in 2012 and 78% in 2008.
Kerry got 76% in 2004.
Gore got 79% in 2000.
You have to go back to Dukakis in 1988 to get a number lower than Harris got: 64%.Report
Do we actually think that 66% is meaningfully different than 68%?
By that logic, everyone except Clinton lost _even more_ ground with Jewish voters. Kerry lost 3%, Obama lost _7%_, and Biden lost 3%.
Sure is weird we’re now talking about a 2% loss. It’s almost as if there’s a narrative that people are desperately trying to make.
If there is actually a narrative, it is that Democrats have slowly been losing the Jewish vote, with a small blip as they very slightly came back for Clinton. That’s it. It’s nothing to do with Harris in particular. (And I’m not even sure that itself is a correct understanding of the situation, but it certainly is better than anything about Harris in particular.)Report
Depends on what we’re talking about.
“She held steady!”
Well, in that case, we could easily say “yeah… 66% vs. 68% is holding steady…”.
“She won between 71 to 80 percent of the Jewish vote which either compares to Biden or is s number not seen since 2008”?
Well, in that case, a “nope, you have to go back to 1988” is appropriate.
“What claim is the statement clarifying?” is an question worth asking if the accusation is “you’re picking at nits!”Report
I sit corrected, I saw so many folks inveigling that she lost ground on both sides because of Bidens’ actions on Gaza that I assumed without looking that it was true. The point stands, just leave Jewish voters off the list, bless them.Report
Here is the thing, I think voters can make bad decisions and should be held accountable for them.
I don’t think any campaign is perfect and every campaign admits mistakes but I don’t think Harris made as many mistakes as you put it below. As JVL at the Bulwark noted numerous times during the election, what do voters want? People said they wanted Biden to drop out so the Democrats worked together and got Biden to drop out and the Democrats then nominated the person most likely to be a unifying figure for the party. A boar on the floor/open convention might give reporters and pundits (amateur and professional) sex dreams but it would be a disaster for party unity.
Maybe Biden should have announced he wasn’t running for reelection after the midterms but the chances of that happening were slim. People who run for President have tremendous ego and self-regard, even the ones we like.
I think Harris broke from Biden as much as she could and she did acknowledge various splits among Democratic groups.
Two more thoughts:
1. I will go to my grave think Trump and Co. thought they were going to lose the election during the last two weeks. They were not acting like a confident campaign and the knives were already out. You can’t say the same for Democrats this time. Harris and Co. ran a tight as ship as tight can be. Trump’s campaign did some things correct like encouraging rural ballot mail-in voters in Nevada (he really brought them out of the woodwork) but other parts of his GOTV were omnishambles.
2. I would posit that a big issue with the Democratic coalition is that it is hard to move forward but easy to fracture because of its diverse complexity and this might be a problem going forward. I’m a believer in Devurger’s law so I don’t think breaking up the Democratic Party is a good idea but I think a lot of the staying home was local ire over issues where it is very hard to square the circle. I think systematic racism against Black people is very real and two areas where you see it the most are policing and education. Reforming the police to you know shoot black people less has been a nearly impossible task. On the other hand, there is a lot of evidence that Asians are targeted by criminals more because they are seen less likely to fight back and also if they are naturalized citizens, they have experience with educational systems where relentless cutthroat competition is the norm and they don’t always appreciate concepts of equity and fairness.
2b. You are I are in agreement about NIMBYism being a curse unfortunately it is a curse of many different causes leading to the road to NIMBYism and NIMBYism seems to have the same relentlessness as Ulster Irish during the Troubles. NIMBY will fight and NIMBY will be right. The YIMBY coalition is unfortunately filled with people who have busy lives. Interestingly, there were some issues in SF this year where Asians were NIMBY voters because they were most opposed to shutting down the Great Highway (SF’s highway to nowhere) and turning it into a park.
FWIW in my district, the progressive board of supes candidate won reelection over the moderate tough on crime candidate and I think NIMBYism pushed her over the edge.
2c. For Hispanic voters, JB is going to mock this but there is a hell of lot of evidence for them going “The leopards won’t eat my face” despite Harris and others telling them “No, the leopards are going to eat your face.” LeeEsq posted the Propublica article where the undocumented woman said she is glad her daughters voted for Trump even though Miller is looking at ways to nullify Birthright Citizenship/14th Amendment and the woman requested to be quoted by her first name only as a safety concern. She did say that Trump knows how to separate the good ones from the bad ones, you know, like Santa Claus. She seemed to really resent the newer undocumented immigrants getting the same perks she got as an undocumented immigrant and she blamed Biden and the Democrats for not having a magic wand to push immigration reform through Congress.
She is not the only Hispanic person I have seen interviewed express this view.
It is probably a very unfashionable attitude here in the land of Green Lanternism but the mood I am seeing from a lot of normie Democrats, is “Okay, I guess you do need to F around and find out. Go at it!!!”
Again, there are about 15-45 million people who probably think Trump and Co are as bad as Harris said they are and take what he says seriously and literally. I think the rest of the country, including many Harris voters, see Trump as a TV CHARACTER (again the word character is key here) and do not take him seriously or literally. And they might just need to learn the hard way that this is wrong.Report
A boar on the floor/open convention might give reporters and pundits (amateur and professional) sex dreams but it would be a disaster for party unity.
How is party unity doing?
I mean, beyond the whole “we still are the Resistance to Trump!” thing?
There was a great scene in Lord of the Rings where Theoden says something like “I will not risk open war!” and Aragorn responds “Open war is upon you, whether you would risk it or not.”
The stuff you didn’t want to happen if you dumped Biden? Happened.
The stuff you didn’t want to happen if you dumped Harris and had an open convention? Happened.Report
“The stuff you didn’t want to happen if you dumped Biden? Happened.
The stuff you didn’t want to happen if you dumped Harris and had an open convention? Happened.”
Flat out wrong Jay. What Dems feared happening if we dumped Biden was a wild internal fight, disunity and a landslide defeat. That didn’t happen.
What the Dems got was a very narrow defeat caused both by inflation and by the legacy of 2020 which Harris wasn’t able to overcome. How much of that failure was “she didn’t try to overcome it” and how much of it was “she tried to overcome it but chose the wrong strategy/couldn’t do it” is open to debate.Report
Have you seen the breakdown of the voting demographics?
I’ve got no problem showing them again:
You’re having a wild internal fight right now. You’ve got disunity right now. The difference between losing every single toss-up state and a landslide will need to be explained to me.
How much of that failure was “she didn’t try to overcome it” and how much of it was “she tried to overcome it but chose the wrong strategy/couldn’t do it” is open to debate.
There are people who have no desire to debate it, believe it or not. But I digress.
I’m a fan of the whole “chose the wrong strategy” thing.
The rumor about Harris choosing to not go on Rogan due to not wanting to upset her staff?
That strikes me as being exceptionally related to the root of the problem… specifically, the leadership doesn’t know where the North Star is and is paying attention to its compass but the compass is not True!
But… alas. Maybe that’s something that the Democrats can wrestle with once Pelosi dies.Report
The answer lies in the VERY small margin of victory Trump achieved, and the very slim majorities in the House and Senate the GOP eked out. Were this a landslide, all those gaps would have been larger.Report
I hear you, Phil, but I don’t think that matters. Maybe in 2016 that could be said, but not now. We spent the last 4 years saying that putting Trump back in the oval office was the unthinkable. And then it happened anyway.Report
Still not a landslide by any measure. The GOP has a smaller margin in the House then they do presently. Their Senate majority will require them to constantly flirt with the filibuster. And Trump’s margin of vicotry is still inside the margin of forecast error.Report
I get that too. But the goal of the party should not be retaking Congress with narrow majorities or trying to come out on the right side of the margin of error for electoral college purposes. It should be the kind of trifecta Obama won with in 2008. I have no idea how anyone could expect us to get there from where we sit today, or where we have sat at any time since 2016. Not without some pretty significant changes.Report
I agree on the need for change. I’m distinctly unhappy with the Democratic Party. But I’m not going to sane wash Trump by saying he, or the GOP, won a landslide. They didn’t. Saying so plays into his hands. He’s not worthy of that.Report
I think there are other possibilities. It’s possible that the real inflection point was Biden’s decision to run. I think his legacy is going to be downright destroyed because of it. I don’t love saying that because he’s a politician I have some fondness for, but the truth is what it is.
It is also possible that the fundamentals of this election around inflation were so bad that it was unwinnable, or very close to it.
Now, I obviously am a fan of hashing this out. The Democrat brand has found a way to alienate a lot of people over the last 15 years, including a lot of people that should be considered core constituencies. It’s worth understanding why that is and correcting. Indeed, correcting after a defeat is the only thing worth doing. However this does not preclude the possibility that this was doomed anyway.Report
I am 100% down with saying “Harris could not possibly have won this election”.
But I have to square that with the complete and utter failure of anyone saying “it is not possible for Harris to win this election” before the fact.Report
I guess it depends on how committed we are to talking in terms of certainties. I did not think people predicting Harris blowouts were credible, and there were plenty of people out there saying that such predictions were not credible.
There were also plenty of people predicting things with no apparent basis in the humdrum reporting of the polls that floated within the margin of error all the way down the stretch. However no team goes into a contest predicting they have no chance at all. It just doesn’t happen.
All of which is to ask, what is it you’re looking for exactly?Report
The same crap that I looked for after Clinton.
An acknowledgement that there were somewhere around 3-5 things that were stupid, were said to have been stupid at the time, and the people who said “this is stupid” at the time were right and were not, in fact, trying to undercut the only person willing to stand up to Hitler 2016.Report
Heh I mean, I can acknowledge that sort of thing but I’m probably not the person or type of person you’re looking for to do it, given my own stated priors and history of commenting here.
I will say that one of the most disorienting things for me about aging is the way issues just kind of vanish. Something can be the all encompassing thing for years and then one day it’s just not and even bringing it up gets you confused looks. Ymmv but I think the healthiest way to adapt is to just accept that collective amnesia is a constant of the human condition. So you go out every day and make the case for whatever you think the right thing is, and hope that sometimes you get it or something near enough. The last thing anyone should expect is an accounting, not in this life anyway.Report
I’m there with you in laying much of this at the feet of Joe Biden and I’m there with being mournful about it because I really did like him and loved his administrations performance in many policy areas.
As for Harris? I have no resentment. She did a remarkable job considering the hand she was dealt. She spun up an impressive campaign in very little time. As for her ideological baggage? That falls back to Joe who put her in the veep spot to begin with. I feel none of the aggrieved, sorrowful “damnit lady” energy I feel for, say HRC. Harris is done and she lost but I think the party and the ideology got a pretty good performance from her and she doesn’t owe us much in the way of apologies.Report
Sure, the internicide fight is happening now. GOOD. That’s what is supposed to happen after a party loses an election. It didn’t happen before the election when it could have caused a landslide defeat. The bad thing was avoided. You’re just wrong about that bud.
As for the difference between losing every tossup state and a Landslide? In a Landslide Trump would have 60 senate votes and a huge house margin, not the tiny edge he currently barely eked out.Report
You and I don’t actually disagree about the voters getting what they vote for and getting it good and hard. I’m all for the Dems using the filibuster in the modern mode that the GOP invented and requiring that everything that they don’t enthusiastically support gets 60 votes but otherwise, yeah, they shouldn’t be trying to soften the blows the GOP looks set to be raining down on their own constituencies.
I agree that the party did a remarkable job all things considered. Getting Biden to drop out once it was absolutely clear that he had to drop out, selecting a successor and uniting behind that successor without wild internicide fights was a remarkable achievement. In any standard story or script that achievement would have been rewarded with victory but in our bleak real work it was rewarded, instead, with a narrow loss.
I disagree that Harris broke from Biden as much as she could have. She could have had coherent answers to the questions about what she would have done differently. She could have taken a more hawkish posture on immigration. She could have had a better answer on the inflation question. Let us note, however, that a LOT of this is Captain Hindsight thinking and I do -NOT- think that Harris stumbled or fumbled into this approach through some kind of incompetence of foolishness. It seems pretty clear to me that Harris and her campaign chose this strategy purposefully and executed it pretty well. To be clear the strategy was this:
-Try to offend no one to the left of the current GOP and also go after centrist GOP voters by making appeals to how awful Trump is and trying to use the neocons support to poach some number of persuadable voters that were represented in the protest vote Nikki Haley got.
This strategy manifested in a couple of ways. To appeal to centrists and the theoretical Haley voters all the identarian stuff was de-emphasized. Pro-Americanism was put front and center. All the 2020 nonsense was memory holed. To appeal to the leftists, however, silence regarding the 2020 policies was the order of the day. Not renunciations. Not reversals. Just saying nothing on the subject.
With hindsight we know this strategy was probably the wrong choice. Brief reasons why:
>The persuadable neocon voters are a fiction- like principles libertarian voters. There just aren’t very many of them on the ground. The time spent feting the neocons was, at best, wasted and, at worst, counterproductive because it activated people, left and right, who justifiably HATE neocons.
>The border stuff was a mistake. The left-wing border groups are full of it and flat out wrong. Latino voters hate open borders or anything close to it. The only masses who appear to appreciate that posture are people who can’t vote.
>the 2020 policies couldn’t just be walked past with silence. Not with Trump and his propaganda networks blasting them repeatedly. There’s not really much evidence that the identarians command masses of voters support- just masses of noisy people on the internet and masses of staffers in the political apparatus, the academy and NGO’s.
I do not think Harris’ strategy was crazy or insane, nor do I think Harris was stupid or inept. You don’t spin up a campaign in as short a time as she did and get as close as she did if you’re demented or inept. She just chose wrong and possibly was stuck because of her own past. Frankly if blame has to be laid anywhere it should be laid at Bidens’ feet.
To address your very fine numbered points:
1. I think that’s plausible but it just gets us a cup of coffee if you add on a couple bucks. I don’t subscribe to the “Harris was inept” crew, the only difference is I also don’t subscribe to the “this couldn’t have been done less perfectly, failure was baked in from jump” crew either.
2. Let’s not pussy foot around it. In addition to the fine points you’re bringing up Asians, much like Jews, are getting the wrong end of this identarian bullsh*t stick and they justifiably don’t like it. Coddling drug addled homeless people enrages poor people who have to put up with them and drug addled homeless people don’t vote but poor people who have to put up with them do. Eliminating academic excellence tracks lets local officials preen for their bubble on social media but it looks awful for the left as a whole. Jewish people and Asian people treasure achievement (as do most other people) and the number of people who vote in favor of it outside the internet fever swamps is a rounding error.
2c. We can’t scream about the electorate we have and expect something different. The actual voters hate the lefts chosen “if you’re not for open borders you’re racist” posture and not even enough relatives of actual undocumented immigrants seem to agree with us. Shrieking at them about it has failed failed failed. Absolutely they’re going to get their faces eaten and thermostatic opinion will swing back again but Biden let the groups dictate his immigration policy and it was disastrously wrong. We do NOT have to go to some kind of Trumpian “build the wall” or “immigrants are criminals poisoning our demographics” racist madness but something closer to Obama’s immigration policy or the deal that Trump sank just this year is NOT unconscionable racist or electoral poison and the leftists claiming that have now horrifically discredited themselves and have royally fished over the very people they claim to be looking out for.
As for your closing thoughts? I agree pretty much in total.Report
The identarians keep getting caught doing some really embarrassing things in public. The University of Michigan’s DEI chief was just fired for basically saying “Jews Don’t Count” at DEI conference. Meanwhile, a DEI conference for private schools, ended up doing a lot of anti-Semitism and saying that “Israel was founded on racist principles” while apparently Arab and Muslim states are fine under DEI principles.
These people do not understand how hypocritical they seem to everybody not remotely sympathetic towards them. They have the groups they believe are the wretched of the earth and everybody else can pound sand.Report
Yes which is why their ideology is going to peel back like burnt wrapping paper and is already doing so. Sinecured academics and excessively compensated DEI department employees and consultants are neither numerous nor sympathetic enough of a constituency to have much clout long term in an electorate this big.Report
I don’t know. They seem to be on a march to me. Jews have been explaining to them with great patience on what they seem to the shortcomings of intersectionality towards Jews for years before 10/7. Nothing seems to get them to pause and reconsider things.
If anything they seem to be at lost worse after 10/7/ Lots of reports from public and private schools of teachers doing some very ideological and without context teachings of the I/P movement that completely ignore the conditions that led to Zionism in the first place. Not just in America but abroad and nobody can make them stop.Report
10/7 clouds the matter because Jews =/= Likud/the Israeli right and Likud/the Israeli right is bound up deeply in the 10/7 question and all matters Israeli. Moreover you, not to be too harsh, keep measuring this indicator by the discourse you read online rather than what is actually done by the lefts political actors in the real world.Report
Diaspora Jews might not like Netanyahu or Likud but most of us hate Hamas more and did not like a bunch of people out and about celebrating the massacre of Jews as kinetic decolonization. I really doubt that many of these types could tell you how many Jews are there and how many of them live in Israel.Report
My point is simpler than that my friend: it’s that in these modern times even the liberal (not the left wing identarian but actual honest to god(ess?) liberal) stance on Israel involves a lot of nose holding and genuine moral struggle with regards to Israel. And that’s because of the Israeli right. That’s not something you can blame on the professors or the Arabs or the luntatic lefties- that’s on the Israeli right.
You’re angry because you remember a time, only a decade and change ago, when every thoughtful person was pro-Israeli and it wasn’t even very close- well those times are past and I don’t see many signs of them returning. That’s something you’re going to have to make peace with and hope that those cracks and chips in the surface vibes you feel aren’t precursor tremors of a deeper, and much warned about, shift.Report
There have also been credible reports of teachers taking it upon themselves to do teach ins about the I/P conflict that are basically “Zionism is settler-colonialism” rather than an actual honest history of the Zionist movement and what it was responding to and trying to do. I do not see these people as mere people on the internet but people who are educating people and basically keeping out the Jewish perspective of what happened.Report
Why don’t you just make the leap to accepting that for whatever merits intersectionality the theory has (it probably has none and the people that think it does are probably not very smart, no matter how many degrees they have), ‘intersectionality’ as politics is just an excuse for vicious racism and a-holes to act like a-holes? Tell everyone who asks you about it that’s what you believe, unapologetically.
You can still support other liberal stuff like everyone getting decent health insurance and SNAP and equality before the law and that kind of thing. These aren’t mutually exclusive. It also ain’t 2020 anymore and there are no consequences for telling these people they’re morons. I don’t even agree with you on Israel and I can still comfortably say these things. For example, I think the Biden admin should have completely cut off military aid to Israel, but you don’t see me supporting college students that put on those dumb rags and shout at Jews, as if any Hamas militant wouldn’t lop their heads off and put a video on YouTube of them doing it.Report
I oppose these a-holes all the time but it feels like being a trench soldier against an enemy that won’t quit.Report
If it’s any consolation you can be sure they say the same thing about you.Report
They out number the global population of Jews in the United States alone, so that isn’t much of a consolidation.Report
I think the problem might be that you’re in the same trench.Report
Democrats don’t get joy out of this as much.
Depends on the Democrat.
Harris seemed to revel in the fact that she got Dick Cheney’s endorsement.Report
Of course she did- that was the strategy they chose- to embrace Cheney and try and make a play for what proved to be a fictional contingent of principled neocon persuadable rightist voters. Not reveling in getting Cheney’s endorsement would have been bad execution of the chosen strategy.Report
Someone pointed out that Harris’s budget was not $1 Billion but one-and-a-half (the NYT: How Kamala Harris Burned Through $1.5 Billion in 15 Weeks).
If Harris was not trying to win but was, instead, trying to give one last retirement-sized payday to a bunch of Clintonite-level staffers and cronies, what would Harris have done differently than what she did?
If this was a “we ain’t gonna win, might as well have fun and spend money!”, is there a significantly different playbook she would have used?Report
Now you’re just changing the subject and projecting. We’ll have to wait for the tell all books but probably even those won’t be saying “oh we knew we were going to lose so spent a month partying on the donors dime for luls”.Report
It’s difficult for me to reconcile “it was an impossible election for Harris to win” with “nobody was able to guess that Trump was likely”.
It’s all 20/20 hindsight.Report
It was a tie right down to election day. Obviously it was, in theory, winnable for Harris. I also didn’t see anyone anywhere being silly enough to say Trump was impossible, it’s not like it was 2016.Report
I didn’t see any “Trump is impossible” takes either.
But here we are, in the cold light of morning, and the debate is over whether something could have been done to beat Trump and, it seems to me, the “Trump was Inevitable, like Darkseid” position is to pretty much defend one’s own side from having to do any introspection whatsoever.
Why introspect?
Trump was inevitable.Report
That is the defense sure. It doesn’t work of course. Not with the narrow win Trump turned in.Report
I think this is the correct take. There’s a lot of Dem self-flagellation over a point and a half popular vote loss. DJT is such a bizarre phenomenon, and I’m not sure how any cogent analysis can be done for an election in which he’s a participant.Report
I’m not profoundly concerned about the self-flagellation. The Democratic Party narrowly lost after running an orderly billion dollar campaign against a shambolic Republican operation headed by a carnival barker.
Introspection is a useful thing to do at this point in time for the party. When one factors in the remarkable demographic swings that made up this narrow loss introspection is even more merited. Some very comfortable, loud, strenuous Democratic consultant and advocacy groups have some serious explaining to do.
I wouldn’t suggest that a stem to stern ideological revamping is needed but a lot of specific individual stuff needs to be really carefully questioned. Also a lot of old deadwood probably needs to be trimmed- thankfully this loss represents a pretty clean break. There’s probably not going to be some blast from the past figure stepping forward to try and lead for ’26 or ’28.Report
Yeah, it seems to me like the election was winnable! But the prereq for that belief is that it might have been possible for Harris to have done something other than what she did.Report
Uh yeah, I meet that pre-req obviously.Report
A look at how inflation has worked on elections across the globe in 2024: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/12/11/global-elections-in-2024-what-we-learned-in-a-year-of-political-disruption/
“Inflation was an especially important issue in this year’s elections, although economic concerns were prevalent in many countries before the post-pandemic wave of global price increases. The past two decades have seen financial crises, the Great Recession, the COVID-19 economic downturn, inflation and ongoing economic inequality, all of which may have shaped the mood in nations around the globe.”
But the problem is all the incentives of American political and media culture, both professionally and among armchair pundits, is to avoid Occam’s Razor by all means necessary because how does that get you in the news or with a chance to get on the news. It ends up being a 30 second to 2-minute segment. Writing something about how Democrats have a sports or culture problem allows for endless pontificating and airtime or press.Report
I try to restrain myself from saying ‘the reason your party lost is…’
But I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to say, ‘you might want to consider additional reasons to the only one you’re bringing up.’ Like, in the spirit of fraternal help.Report
Those Democrats whose decisions have a measurable impact on election outcomes should definitely be taking a cold hard look at the numbers; but for us random internet commenters, I think the equation might be different. Questioning your own beliefs & actions can be painful, and even if you do that, the world probably won’t visibly change anyway, so why not just find a story you can believe that makes you feel better?Report
Yes, it is extremely unsatisfying to realize that the proper alignment of ideas to party does not lead to electoral success but fitfully. Especially in a two party system.
The good news of not changing is that it may very well work in the next cycle. The bad news is that it will continue to remain an unreliable prediction until the next politician who carves up the previous assumptions into a better winning coalition.
First party to the Upper Left quadrant wins.Report
I’d still bet on the Dems over the Republicans on that question because for the Dems to get to that quadrant requires, by and large, simply being unfashionable to a noisy but electorally small set. For the GOP to get requires that they cross an electorally small but very financially powerful (in the GOP) constituency.Report
Yes, you’d think. Both parties have plausible paths.
My counterpoint for consideration would be that the Dems still have quite a few orthodoxies that would need dismantling while Trump has already dismantled quite a few Republican orthodoxies. The post-Trump party is already deconstructed…
That doesn’t mean R’s will come up with a winning coalition/policy mix… but their iterations have fewer constraints (good or bad).Report
Sure, that is possible but some seriously important and central people in the GOP would have to have their oxen really
(primarily around taxes) significantly gored and considering that Trump seems to be going in the opposite direction with DOGE and Ryanism seeming to be in the offing; and seeing as Trump himself is one of those people who’d have their oxen gored if taxes went up on them I’d not bet for it.
The identarian set is noisy and well connected to the Democratic activist and staffer class but if they’re angry the worst they can do is contact staffers or media figures who can contact/get the attention of actual Democratic decision makers and politicians. Whereas if the GOP money men get angry they can have GOP Senators and Congresscritters and Governors on the phone in minutes.Report
https://www.marketplace.org/2024/11/14/incumbents-are-losing-around-the-world-not-just-the-u-s/Report
It is also interesting as an example of American exceptionalism.
1. Here is a chart of incumbent governments losing power across the globe in 2024 and inflation being a key reason;
2. Americans: Wait, that can’t be correct for us.Report
There’s an old adage: if you want to get the maximum amount of rubble into a dump truck, load the boulders first, then the big rocks, then the small rocks, then the pebbles, then the gravel, then the sand. Some people, though, just seem to like shoveling sand.
And this is a particularly bad example, even from the perspective of sand-shovelers. The Harris campaign reached out to a demographic they wanted to reach, sports fans, that were not inclined to vote for her. Maybe it wasn’t Joe Rogan, but it was a fine piece of sand shoveling.
But it didn’t work, and predictably so. When people whine about not wanting politics in their sports, what they really object to is someone else’s politics in their sports: Colin Kaepernick keeling is politics; denouncing Coin Kaepernick for kneeling isn’t, dammit. And as any significant consumer of sports and sports media can tell you, the prevailing tilt of sports politics is rightward. Just last week, for example, when I made my 15-minute drive to the train station with sports talk radio on, I spent an entire ride hearing nothing about sports and tuning out the drive-time host’s rant about Daniel the subway choker Penny. And I’d bet he thinks he hates politics in sports.Report
And as any significant consumer of sports and sports media can tell you, the prevailing tilt of sports politics is rightward.
Seems like the smart thing to do would be to cater to the audience. Or, I suppose, stop talking about politics.
Seems like talking about the opposition politics to your audience would be a good way to make your ratings go down. I can only imagine the mindset of someone who would argue that *THAT* would be the way to go…Report
Seems to me that those who whined and complained about all the missed opportunities from the Harris campaign by not going on podcasts hat were right leaning or right adjacent may want to rethink their conclusions.Report
I think that’s backwards. If we’re going to concede sports and sports media as the cultural territory of the right then the Democratic party should simply disband. It will never win a national election again. We need a party up to the challenge of talking to regular people including *gasp* men.Report
So we are back, firmly, in “only Democrats have agency” territory huh? that didn’t take you long.Report
What?Report
Well, there are two ways to go on a podcast.
1. “This is the *OBVIOUS* moral position to have and people who don’t have it are *STUPID*.”
2. “My name is Kamala Harris and I support some policies that you might not support but I also support some much more important policies that you do. I think you should vote for me and here’s why voting for me is to your benefit and to your family’s benefit and to your culture’s benefit and, yes, to the benefit of the Denver Broncos, winner of Superbowl 50.”
If the only message you can imagine your candidate making is the first one, it’s probably a good idea to stick to the chick podcasts.Report
see my comment to InMd above, and then ask yourself whose fault it is that podcasts the campaign WANTED to go on said no.Report
You mean Joe Rogan?
He said “come to my studio and my setup” and Harris said “no”.
And given the way things worked out, I’d say that Harris needed Rogan’s audience a hell of a lot more than Rogan needed Harris.
I suppose it’s unfair that Democrats are expected to have to make their case to distasteful people…Report
You posted a story about the campaign trying to get on sports podcasts – and being turned down. I’m commenting about that story. Can you really not keep up?Report
Obviously not! Let’s assume that I’m really stupid.
As a stupid person, I think that Rogan said “come on my show for three hours!” and Harris said “no, how about you come to me and we talk for one hour and I get to edit it!” and Rogan said “no”.
How stupid is that position, do you think? How stupid is it to have interpreted what happened that way?Report
They said they didn’t want to talk to her about politics. Not that she couldn’t come on and talk about the 49ers or the Warriors.Report
And yet sports podcast apparently routinely discuss politics. Which would be the point of having a candidate appear on a podcast in the first place.Report
Why are you so defensive about all of this?
I don’t listen to any podcasts but I do listen to a good bit of sports radio. They have politicians on periodically for discussion of non-partisan issues (stadium stuff for example, maybe some light commentary on whatever situation at the officials alma mater). Usually it is no longer than 10-15 minutes and is pretty superficial.
Living where I do most of the politicians who do this are Democrats, so I know the suggestion that Democrats are incapable of some non expressly partisan outreach isn’t true. But if it’s becoming true then man do we have issues.Report
You can not conduct outreach through podcast that turned you down. You also can’t be held responsible for being turned down by those podcasts.Report
You misunderstand. SportsWorld is suffused with bullshit right-wing politics pretending it isn’t politics. I have no interest in trying to change that, let alone introducing bullshit politics more to my taste. I’m enough of an adult to understand that not every minute of an hours-long sportscast will or should appeal to me and I don’t whine when something doesn’t. SportsWorld, however, is the toy store and screaming kids are a fact of life.Report
They should run an experiment: Put politics that lefties like on the sports channels for a couple of years and then put some politics that the righties like on the sports channel for a couple of years.
Or, better yet, have two sports channel shows that have lefty and righty politics. And then we could compare ratings!
If the lefty shows pull down a 2.7 and the righty shows pull down a 2.3, then we know that the way to go is to put lefty shows on in that slot!
And if the righties don’t like it, hey. Don’t watch! Not everything has to cater to your extra-sensitive sensibilities!Report
Why? The professionals have made their decision– and it is their decision — and are content with the results. And I’m OK with that. Whoever you think you’re arguing with, it isn’t me.Report
Well, I just take one of two positions:
1. Hey, if we need to talk about politics, we’ll talk about politics but, for the most part, we’ll talk about sports.
2. We’ll talk about sports and politics and we’ll talk about the politics of the guys most likely to be listening to our show.
I’d prefer #1 but I understand that, hey, sometimes you’re going to wander into #2 if you’re going to be talking about the Army/Navy game, for example.
The position that “we should talk about politics and sports and we’re going to be talking about the politics that our HR department wishes our listeners had” strikes me as a position that will lose money.
Way back when, during Trump’s first administration, someone made the argument that “it’s only politics if you disagree with it… it’s just normal if you agree” and I suppose that that argument is fine as far as it goes, but if all of the “politics” on the shows agree with the majority of the HR department instead of the majority of the listeners, then they’re deliberately being “political” instead of “normal” and that seems like a pretty good way to lose viewers which will lose advertisers which will lose money.
And, ironically enough, it looks like that is what actually happened.
And now the pendulum has swung back a little bit (certainly not all the way) and people who were used to “normal” shows are now complaining that the shows are becoming more “political”.
And the ratings seem to be in a place where advertisers are thinking about getting some of those eyeballs for themselves.Report
If you pick both sides’ arguments for them. you can’t lose.Report
You might lose eyeballs! And then you’d lose advertisers!
WHICH IS WHAT HAPPENED!!Report
With whom, exactly, do you think you’re disagreeing?Report
Back during the ESPN argument, there was a weird undercurrent that people who didn’t want “politics” on their sports show wanted to be “coddled”.
There’s a similar undercurrent in your “I’m enough of an adult to understand that not every minute of an hours-long sportscast will or should appeal to me and I don’t whine when something doesn’t. SportsWorld, however, is the toy store and screaming kids are a fact of life.”
If we’re talking about adults with a little bit of disposable cash to spend, it always struck me as odd that there were folks out there who thought that catering to these people was “coddling” them.
Imagine antagonizing people whose eyeballs you wanted and, when they got antagonized, comparing them to screaming children!
I imagine that, eventually, it’d result in managerial pushback.Report
I missed the part where you say it wasn’t true. Impolitic, maybe, for people in the business to admit, but I’m not in the business, I don’t want their eyeballs, and I don’t have to “cater” to them. And I’ve never disagreed with the actions of those who are and do. I’ve simply described them.
So, again, with whom, exactly, are you disagreeing?Report
It strikes me as being in a different place than “true”.
Are mushrooms a good pizza topping?
Seems like “yes” or “no” is the wrong answer. I mean, *I* like them. I don’t like olives.
So, for me, a pizza that has mushrooms would be pretty good but one that has olives would get me to shrug and move on.
Responding to me saying “nah, no thanks, I don’t like olives” with something like “YOU’RE A FREAKIN’ CHILD IF YOU THINK THAT FOOD HAS TO CATER TO YOU!” strikes me as being a mistake.
True? False? It seems like we’re not in True/False territory when we’re this deep into matters of taste.
It’s definitely a mistake, though.
The good news: More olives for you.
So, again, with whom, exactly, are you disagreeing?
The guy making the mistake.Report
It strikes me as being in a different place than “true”.
Why am I not surprised?
Do you get upset that the local pizzeria offers olives? Or pepperoni? Isn’t it enough that they let you have mushrooms? It should be. If not, you are a freakin’ child. The pizzeria owner has good business reasons not to tell you that. The rest of us don’t.Report
In which we learn that Yes/No questions no longer exist.
SMDHReport
Yes/No questions exist.
But so do category mistakes.Report
I don’t get upset if they offer it.
If they tell me that they only make pizzas that have olives on them, I get confused and shrug. I don’t get upset… I just don’t buy a pizza.
The guy who calls me a child for not wanting a pizza that has olives on it is making a mistake.
The pizza shop owner who calls me that is *REALLY* making one.
“You’re not addressing whether it’s true.”
“Oh, it’s because I’m in my 50s. Whether or not I’m a child should be obvious and, if it’s not, that’s a you problem. I find the issue of wanting to cater to customers to be far more interesting that whether I’m a child.”Report
There are people who get upset if someone offers olives to people who want olives. If there are enough of them, then catering to them means no more olives. Even if they’re being childish.Report
There are indeed such people.
There are also people who don’t eat pizza but when they hear that the local pizza place has decided to not put olives on every single pizza they serve say something like “are their customers children that they don’t like olives?”Report
If the numbers are large enough, you have to cater to the anti-olive pizza eaters. You don’t have to cater to pro-olive people who don’t eat pizza, no matter how numerous.Report
I absolutely and totally agree with that.
It’s surprising how many non-pizza eaters were upset by the idea of oliveless pizza, though.
The folks who argued “just serve pizza without olives, maybe?” got some *WEIRD* pushback.Report
So?Report
If they were just nuts out in the peanut gallery, that’d be one thing.
But, like, they were actually pushing policy and pushed back *HARD* against the move to go “not particularly political”.
Even the ones who didn’t watch ESPN!
You know the “why do you care?” question that pops up sometimes?
That’s a good question for here. Why did *THEY* care?Report
So?Report
Because the whole pushback against there being areas where you don’t have to talk about politics spills over into entertainments of my own.
It reduces my quality of life.
As such, I push back against that.
(Have you ever bothered to argue why someone who doesn’t want ESPN would actively want there to be partisan arguments taking place on ESPN shows? Like, not even balanced partisan arguments but arguments for only one side? Is the reason related to how you understand wanting partisan politics on Sportscenter but you can’t understand how someone would *NOT* want that?)Report
There is no general principle of no politics in sports, and no one who claims that there is — very much including people who don’t watch much sports or consume much sports journalism — can say that with a straight face given the actual political content of SportsWorld. They don’t object to politics in sports until someone sprinkles in politics they don’t like. They don’t want no politics and they don’t want balanced politics. They want their politics, and they get bent out of shape if anything is offered to people with different tastes. It’s not enough that they get mushrooms; they whine when someone can get olives.
That said, I haven’t said a word against the business decision to cater to the whiners. If they had asked me, I’d have told them that the whiners would whine, and the olive lovers, being used to not getting olives, would suck it up if they took the olives away. Unlike the whiners.Report
There is no general principle of no politics in sports, and no one who claims that there is — very much including people who don’t watch much sports or consume much sports journalism — can say that with a straight face given the actual political content of SportsWorld.
I think that the argument is that deliberately trying to inject Olbermann-level partisan politics is a deliberate doing of a particular thing and while it might be impossible to never discuss issues that touch on politics, it might be possible to avoid deliberately trying to inject Olbermann-level partisan politics.
Remember what the original ESPN article said: “The network also says its research finds that fans, regardless of political affiliation, do not want to hear about politics on ESPN.”
Regardless of political affiliation!
Maybe what they mean by “politics” is not “this game is played in the United States” but stuff like Olbermann yelling about how Trump is the Designated Hitler.
Keep in mind: That’s what ESPN’s own research found.
This is, like, the private polls done by the campaign.
Is the problem that ESPN actually changed direction based on its own polling instead of using it as an opportunity to explain that Republicans are bad, actually?Report
How many times do I have to say that I have no issue with what ESPN did or why they did it before you catch on? That’s not “the problem.”Report
If you didn’t want an answer to your “So?” question, then why did you ask it?Report
I asked, you answered, and I responded to your answer. That’s how it works. If you have something to say that addresses my response, you’re welcome to say it. That’s how that works works.Report
Your response seems to be something like pivoting between “Why do you care about whether X is a problem?” and “Well, *I* am not a supporter of X”.
X is still a problem, whether or not you are a supporter of it.Report
What is X, why is it a “problem,” other than that you don’t like it, and why is there any need for a solution beyond network executives reacting to ratings, which we all seem to agree is OK?Report
Why is stuff becoming crappier a problem?
I’ll flip it around? Why do you see stuff becoming crappier as not a problem? Why do you see stuff becoming crappier as not a big deal?
I’ll note: We’re not in a place where the crappier stuff is more popular than ever.
We’re, instead, in a place where an overwhelming majority finds it crappier to the point where the company does some internal polling and finds “yeah, even people who agree with us think that it’s crappier”.
And this crappier philosophy is metastasizing across multiple entertainments and you cannot comprehend how someone might think that that’s a problem?
Why in the hell do you *NOT* think it’s a problem?Report
I don’t accept the premise that things are getting crappier. I accept that they may be going in directions I don’t like, or that you don’t like, or that other people don’t like, and if you’re in a business that requires catering to people’s actual likes you are entitled to react to what you find that sufficient numbers of people don’t like. “Crappier” doesn’t enter into it. Experiments sometimes fail. The market speaks. You move on. That’s why it’s not a “problem.” Or, if it is, it’s a self-correcting one.
That sometimes has the unfortunate effect of depriving me of something that I want, sometimes not merely because other people prefer mushrooms, which is just my bad luck for having minority tastes, but because they don’t want me to get olives even when they get their mushrooms. I think that’s a problem, but a very different one.Report
The great Chicago columnist got this exactly right in 1972. Here’s the piece in question:
“Patriotism” At The Stadium
3 January 1972, by Mike Royko, Chicago Daily News
Both teams were on the field. The crowd stood for the singing of the National Anthem.
Everybody except one man. He just sat and studied his program.
The band began playing. The singing was led by a TV star who had been up all night drinking gin. Ten jets swooped over the stadium. Fifty majorettes thrust out their chests.
The one man stayed in his seat and looked at his program.
Somebody gave him a nudge. He ignored it.
“Stand up,“ somebody else hissed.
“I`ll stand for the kickoff,“ the man said.
Another man glared at him. “Why don`t you stand and sing?“
“I don`t believe in it,“ he said.
The other man gasped. “You don`t believe in the National Anthem?“
“I don`t believe in singing it at commercial events. I wouldn`t sing it in a nightclub, or in a gambling casino, and I won`t sing it at a football game.“
A man behind him said: “What are you, a damn radical?“
He shook his head. “I`m not a stadium patriot.“
“I`ll make you stand up,“ a husky man said, seizing his fleece collar.
They scuffled and struck each other with their programs. Somebody dropped a hip flask.
“What`s wrong?“ people shouted from a few rows away.
“A radical insulted the anthem,“ someone yelled.
“I did not,“ the man yelled. “I will not be a stadium patriot.“
“He says he`s not a patriot,“ someone else roared, swinging a punch.
A policeman pushed through. “What`s going on here? Break it up.“
People yelled. “He insulted the flag. . . . He refused to stand. . . . He`s radical. . . . Sit down, I can`t see the girls.“
The policeman said: “Why wouldn`t you stand?“
“Not at a football game,“ the man said.
“Hear that?“ someone yelled, shaking a fist.
“Let`s go, fella,“ the policeman said, leading him away.
He was fined $25 for disorderly conduct, and the judge lectured him on his duties as a citizen.
The next week he had a better seat for the Stupendous Bowl game.
Both teams took the field and the crowd rose for the National Anthem. They were led in song by a country music star, who had been up all night playing dice. A dozen jet bombers flew over. Sixty majorettes thrust out their chests.
This time the man rose with everyone else, and he sang. He sang as loud as he could, in an ear-splitting voice that could be heard 20 rows in any direction.
A few people turned and looked at him as if he were odd.
When the song reached “the land of the free“ his voice cracked, but he shrieked out the high note.
Then it was over, everyone applauded, yelled “Kill `em“ and “Murder `em“ and “Belt `em,“ and sat down to await the opening kickoff.
Everyone but the one man. He remained on his feet and began slowly singing the second stanza in his loud voice.
People stared at him. But then they jumped up and cheered as the ball was kicked off and run back.
When they sat down, the man was still standing and singing.
He paused for a moment, took a deep breath, and started the third stanza. “Hey, that`s enough,“ someone yelled.
“Yeah, sit down, I can`t see through you,“ said somebody else.
He kept singing. People called out:
“Knock it off.“
“What`s wrong with him?“
“I can`t see.“
The game was underway. Three plays were run while he sang the third verse.
Everyone jumped up for the punt return. When they sat down, the man was still singing.
Everyone around him was becoming upset. People stood and shook their fists. Somebody threw a hot dog wrapper.
An usher asked him to take his seat. He shook his head and began the fourth stanza as a touchdown was scored.
The people behind him were outraged. “I couldn`t see that because of you. . . . Make him sit down. . . . He must be crazy. . . . He`s a radical.“ He went on singing.
Somebody grabbed his shoulders and tried to push him into his seat. They scuffled and swung their programs. Somebody dropped a hip flask. The man struggled to his feet, still howling the fourth stanza.
A policeman pushed through. “What`s going on? Break it up.“
“He won`t sit down,“ someone yelled. “He won`t stop singing,“ someone else yelled. “He`s trying to start a riot. He`s a radical.“
“Let`s go, fella,“ the policeman said, leading him away as he finished the final stanza, holding the note as long as he could.
The judge fined him $25 for disorderly conduct, and warned him about not shouting in a crowded theater.
The next week he went to the Amazing Bowl. The crowd was led in singing the National Anthem by a rock star, who had been up all night with three groupies. A squadron of dive bombers flew between the goal posts.
He stood with everyone else. As the music played, he moved his lips because he was chewing peanuts, and he stared at the chest of a majorette. Then he sat down with everyone else.
The man in the next seat offered him a sip from his flask.Report
That’s great.
Relatedly, I grew up in the South in the 80s and 90s, in a conservative small town, and not standing for the anthem was fairly common, especially among young people, and was generally unremarked upon. I don’t think I stood for an anthem from like 1992 until the early Aughts, when 9/11, the “War on Terror” and the Iraq War made “patriots” fighty about such things. In fact, I distinctly remember going to a baseball game in “liberal” Austin, TX in spring 2002 with my (then 4-year old) son, not standing for the anthem, and getting some choice words from a bunch of students and a few people my grandparents’ age.Report
Is the guy complaining about Olbermann better analogized to the guy who refuses to stand or to the guy who’s yelling for a guillotine?Report
The guy complaining about Olbermann is the guy listening to Clay Travis.Report
Thinking about Clay Travis, one of the best entries into this benighted discourse came from his friend Riley Gaines, the former mediocre college swimmer who gained fame through her mixing of politics and sports. who said on Twitter “No one was asking for Caitlin Clark to position herself as a right-wing hero. All she needed to do was remain neutral.” Travis also weighed in on Clark’s Time Magazine interview, of course, asking whether people would be less likely to watch her games now that she’s used the phrase “white privilege.”
What “remained neutral” here means, of course, is not say anything that would offend reactionaries, which is a pretty thin tightrope to walk these days.Report
I really liked Caitlin Clarke before that interview. I like her even more now.Report
Clark should “remain neutral” on simple decency? Good to know.Report
White privilege in pro basketball? Even womens’ pro basketball? LMAO.Report
She wasn’t talking about on the court.Report
Harris tried to reach everyone she could in a broad anti-Trump coalition and I am not sure that was a bad call. It might have led to her barely losing instead of losing bigly.Report
Here is a breakdown of gains and losses made by Harris:
She made inroads with:
White 45+
White College Men
White Urban
Post Graduate StudyReport
A broad anti-Trump coalition is self limiting.
The coalition should include people who aren’t anti-Trump but people for whom you could make a case that your presidency would be good for them.
She never really made a case, she tried to not make a case that she would be as Liberal as she was in 2019 by *not* saying anything that might imply that. But, she never made the affirmative case of what she’d do differently from 2019 Harris.
As a result the only person who beat Harris convincingly was 2019 Harris being broadcast relentlessly across the airwaves.
I heard some talk of concerns about The Left not voting for her… I think it’s instructive that Trump took the concerns about the SoCons dropping him over his abortion stances and said f*uck it, who are they going to vote for instead? He wanted his coalition to include Biden/Harris voters…. and sonuvabidge if it doesn’t.Report
Yeah Harris tried to reach everyone AND alienate no one to her left or in Bidens’ administration. I think a pretty good case can be made that:
A) the attempt at appealing to neocons was a perennial failure. Ignore Nikki Haley’s protest vote, the Bulwark crowd and their ilk. The neocons don’t command an actual constituency of voters that aren’t already in the tent. Every second on Cheney was a wasted second.
B) The attempt to keep the Biden crew happy was probably a mistake. She should have thrown the old man under the bus on immigration policy and possibly on the inflation question (though she might have been able to finesse that one if she’d directly faced it without blaming Biden necessarily). She wasn’t going to lose voters for hurting Bidens’ feelings.
C) She was wildly over considerate of the left wing groups. In hindsight we know she should have probably broke ranks with them on some elements of immigration policy (like dropping back to Obama era stances) and gone even harder on crime questions. Instead she campaigned as a moderate by not saying anything on those issues, which let her get painted by her past 2020 positions. If she hadn’t run as she did in 2020 maybe it could have worked but with that record. No, wasn’t going to happen.
D) and the final error was getting sucked into Trumps gravitational well. Every minute spent talking about how awful Trump was, was probably wasted. Everyone who knew was already onboard, anyone not on board would consider it irrelevant or funny or just part of the conspiracy against him. This is probably Trumps political super power- tricking his opponents into talking about how he’s a pile of excrement in a human-ish shape instead of talking about things the persuadable voters actually care about. Hilldog fell into it, so did the entire GOP lineup in 2015, and so did Harris.Report
I’m not sure how Harris could have thrown Biden under the bus when she was his VP. Many Democratic voters did not want Biden to run again but they actually think that Biden is a good President. Totally throwing Biden under the bus would cause a big fissure in the party. There is no way to communicate we are throwing him on the bus for electoral purposes only to the millions that need to hear this.Report
She couldn’t have.Report
Are there ways to disagree with Biden that don’t amount to throwing him under the bus?
If not, I think we’ve found another one of the problems.Report
Based on the outcome of the election, where a good many people including regulars here, were lamenting the lack of daylight between the two on policy statements, I’d so there is little way for a sitting VP to disagree with the sitting President publicly that aren’t at the “bus throwing” level.Report
Sure there is, when you’re the nominee and on the campaign trail….”I disagree with the president’s policy on x, though while VP I’m obliged to carry out those policies, as President, I would do X”. What’s the downside?Report
You could lose the election.Report
Yep. I’m sure that’s what all her consultants and advisers said, and she still lost. Yeah, hindsight is 20/20, but the margin she lost by might have been recovered by some bold actionReport
Psst it was intended to be ironic. 🙂Report
Do you believe she had time for bold action?Report
I somehow do not believe that Biden announcing that he was not running for reelection came as a shock to her. Rather, she was briefed ahead of the announcement. She also got focus group data and internal pols. She could see the closeness of the race (or if the internal pols were that way off, there should be some after election firings). So you could plod along or take a risk. Then it comes down to personality. Maybe she’s not a risk taker. I don’t know the woman.Report
“I think we should have done more on inflation… I think that we should have taken it more seriously.”
Is that throwing Biden under the bus?
I don’t think it is, mind. But if your argument is that it is, we’re talking about enforcing a level of lockstep that will result in the loss of an election if maintained.
Which strikes me as unhealthy.Report
So Al Gore, George HW Bush, and Hillary all lost because they didn’t throw the President they worked for under the bus?
Fascinating.Report
Al Gore? I think a *VERY* strong case could be made.
Herbert Walker? Well, he was out of the loop, of course, but I blame his loss on the tax hike and the Perot.
As for Hillary… I blame stuff like her quotation where she was bragging about putting coal miners out of work. I can link you to some of the arguments that we’ve had about Hillary, if you like.
But, when it comes to Harris, I’m not saying “She should have thrown Biden under the bus!” as much as I’m saying “She should have had a freaking answer to the question of what she’d do differently!” and if something as anodyne as “I think we should have done more on inflation… I think that we should have taken it more seriously” qualifies as “throwing Biden under the bus”, I think we’ve found the root of the problem.
And, get this, it’s not with Harris.Report
A charming belief in the efficacy of empty and anodyne blather. Cicero had something to say about this.Report
The argument is that Harris shouldn’t even have engaged in empty and anodyne blather LEST SHE THROW BIDEN UNDER THE BUS WITH IT.Report
That’s certainly an argument, but that’s about why Harris wouldn’t engage in empty and anodyne blather, not about whether it would have been efficacious. And if it wouldn’t have been efficacious, why do it?Report
Well, there seems to be an underlying prior here.
We have to pick one of the two:
1. Harris could have won had she done something differently
2. Harris could not have won no matter what
If your fundamental assumption is #2, then *NOTHING* would have been efficacious. Nothing.
Not campaigning more on inflation, not *ANYTHING*. Going to the right wouldn’t have helped. Going to the left wouldn’t have helped. Having celebrities actually sing at her rallies instead of giving short speeches wouldn’t have helped.
Nothing could have been done. Why are we even talking about this?
But if, instead, you assume #1, you’re stuck asking “what, then, could have been done?”
And then that leads to stuff like “Well, when she was asked what she would have done differently, she should have said something instead of nothing.”
And if people start screaming that saying something instead of nothing is throwing Biden under the bus, then we’re in a place where the #1 is actively being crowbarred back into the #2 space.
Nothing could be suggested to have been done differently.
And I am assuming #1 rather than #2.
Are you assuming #2?Report
My how we complicate simple things. And how easily avoidable if you said what you meant the first time.
Whether Harris was doomed because of larger forces or not is irrelevant to whether her campaign should have done things calculated to win. That’s just professional pride. I have been handed unwinnable cases and still do what is best calculated to win. And then I lose, because the case was unwinnable. So nothing I said depends on whether I make assumption 1 or assumption 2.
The issue, then, is whether Harris saying, and I quote: “I think we should have done more on inflation… I think that we should have taken it more seriously,” was, and I quote: empty and anodyne blather, or something that might have improved Harris’s chances to win and, therefore, should have been done.
There doesn’t seem to be any dispute that what you originally said she should have said counts as empty and anodyne blather unlikely to move the needle. You now suggest that had she said it anyway she would eventually have to say something more, presumably something specific and substantive.
If you want to revise and extend your remarks and give us something specific and substantive (preferably truthful) that she could and should have said — not empty noise about feeling your pain or what have you — please proceed.Report
You now suggest that had she said it anyway she would eventually have to say something more, presumably something specific and substantive.
I’m not suggesting that yet.
I am suggesting that saying that this bland and anodyne statement is “throwing Biden under the bus” is taking a potentially winnable election and turning it into an unwinnable one.
If you want to revise and extend your remarks and give us something specific and substantive (preferably truthful) that she could and should have said — not empty noise about feeling your pain or what have you — please proceed.
First off, I need to know if the assumption is that the election is unwinnable.
Because if that is the fundamental assumption you’re making, then there is *NOTHING* I could suggest. Nothing.Report
How long have you had this reading comprehension problem? I said very plainly that whether the election was winnable or unwinnable has nothing to do with what moves you make. You do what gives you the best chance to win regardless. I said as clearly as I know how that I was not basing anything I said on any assumption about whether the election was unwinnable.
If you don’t want to, or can’t, provide some specific and substantive remarks about inflation and what, if anything, Harris would do differently from Biden that you — not me, you — think she should have made, well, that’s your prerogative. As long as it’s clear what you’re doing. Or not doing.Report
And I am still hammering on whether something as bland and anodyne as my inflation statement is “throwing Biden under the bus”.
So I will ask you:
Do you think that such a statement amounts to “throwing Biden under the bus”?
A “yes” or “no” would suffice!Report
You can continue to hammer on what you choose. You have made your choice. That is your prerogative. Thanks for playing.Report
Do you think that such a statement amounts to “throwing Biden under the bus”?
A “yes” or “no” would suffice!Report
It would be damn silly for a politician to put it that way. There are two possibilities: (1) she has specific, substantive differences with Biden on how to handle inflation; or (2) she doesn’t. If (2), she can’t, at least not truthfully, throw him under the bus by saying that. If (1), she can freely say what she would do going forward without casting aspersions on what Biden has already done. (Since most of the reasons for inflation had little to do with policy that she might have disagreed with, this also has the virtue of being honest. Or, at least, I think that’s a virtue.) That wouldn’t be throwing Biden under the bus.
Harris saying exactly what you said and nothing more would be throwing Biden under the bus, and for no likely gain. That’s why no sensible politician would do it that way.
Your turn.Report
Harris saying exactly what you said and nothing more would be throwing Biden under the bus, and for no likely gain. That’s why no sensible politician would do it that way.
Well, when Harris was asked what she’d have done differently than Joe Biden, she answered “not a thing”.
Now your criticism of my bland and anodyne statement is a good one! I, personally, consider it “bland and anodyne” rather than “throwing Biden under the bus”.
For one thing, my statement deliberately said “we” rather than “he”. A statement that says “Biden allowed himself to something or other and this prevented him from something or other and impacted something or other negatively and I, for my part, would have handled it differently because I, as a woman, am built different.”
Something like that would have been throwing Biden under the bus.
But answering “not a thing” for “what would you have done differently” was something that no sensible politicians would have said in response to that question.
And if you want, I can find you examples of left-leaning critics calling it a mistake on her part.
My bland and anodyne statement doesn’t strike me as being a bigger mistake than the stupid mistake that she made.
“So you’re saying that she should have thrown Biden under the bus?”, someone might ask.
I’m in a place where I don’t see my bland and anodyne statement as throwing anything anywhere.
It is, however, a less offputting answer than “not a thing”.
But if we’re in a place where the rule is not only that Harris not throw Biden under the bus but saying something bland and anodyne throws him under the bus, we’re effectively saying that she cannot say anything but what she said to the question “what would you have done differently?” and thus establishing her as no sensible politician.Report
So (2).Report
If that’s your assumption, that’s your assumption.
It effectively means that Harris could have done nothing but what she did and… well, Trump was fated to be President.
The great man of history, destined to sit behind the resolute desk a second time.
(Personally, I think that free will exists but… dang. It doesn’t seem to scale.)Report
To make it easier to work around your reading comprehension problem, I’ll pull out the relevant text:
There are two possibilities: (1) she has specific, substantive differences with Biden on how to handle inflation; or (2) she doesn’t. If (2), she can’t, at least not truthfully, throw him under the bus by saying that.
If there’s a possibility I missed, you can point it out to me.
If, as you accurately point out, Harris wouldn’t have done anything differently than Biden, then (2) applies, and she can’t truthfully say what you want her to say. And to lie and say it anyway is throwing Biden under the bus.
She could have done something other than she did, but not truthfully. I happen to think truthfulness is relevant to what you can say. Not everyone agrees, and we’ve seen that that can work. At least twice.Report
Please understand, I’m assuming that my example relies rather heavily on her statement on The View.
The View, if you don’t know what it is, is an afternoon television show that is infinitely more “chatty” than “wonky”.
So when she was asked, on The View, “What would you have done differently?”, my assumption is that she’d give an answer appropriate to The View and not one more appropriate to give, say, Planet Money on NPR.
I can find you the clip from The View where she said that she wouldn’t do anything differently, if you like.
CNN ran a segment on it back in October.Report
Yes, I get that. I got it the first time. So (2).Report
No, I actually believe that her saying something bland and anodyne on The View would have been better than the answer she gave.
Indeed, I even believe that it wouldn’t count as throwing Biden under the bus.
It’s the people who say that it would have thrown Biden under the bus that I consider to be wrong.
Additionally, I think that it wasn’t the venue for giving a detailed and wonky answer.
Maybe she could have given a detailed and wonky answer on a podcast somewhere. “I want you to expand on what you said on The View… do you have a wonky answer?”, and then she could have deftly and eloquently explained her wonky answer.
Unless, of course, she’s such an awful candidate (like, Hillary Clinton awful) that going on a podcast would have harmed her more than it would have helped her.
You know, the way that you consider a bland and anodyne answer on The View would have done.Report
Do you think the answer she actually gave was true or not? Or do you think the truth isn’t relevant?Report
I kinda believe that Harris is an empty vessel. That’s why in 2019, she was “woke” and why in 2024 she was campaigning with Liz Cheney. She has no inner beliefs or principles or anything like that.
She is a hollow person. An empty suit.
So when asked “would you do anything differently than Biden?” and she answered that she’d do everything the same, she was absolutely telling the truth. She’d have the same advisors whispering in her ear and she’d follow their advice the way Biden did.
As such, it was one of the most true answers ever given by a politician and her rejection by the voters was as authentic as her answer.
But if I wanted her to get elected, I would have had her say something else.
If I wanted Trump, I’d defend her answer.Report
So (2).Report
No, I actually believe that it would have been possible for her to get elected.
She’d have had to do some things that you might find distasteful to witness… but, in my opinion, they’d have been less distasteful than the Cheney stuff.
For one thing, she’d have had to say that she’d have done something different from Biden.Report
But we’ve already established that that would have been a lie. So (2).Report
Like I said, stuff you might find distasteful to witness.Report
At least we now know.Report
Were you really not aware until this point that sometimes politicians tell untruths in the process of running for office?
Or did you believe that it was rare?
Or, wait, did you believe that that was only something that Republicans did?Report
If you continue to do my work for me, I can take the holidays off.Report
I still don’t know what your fundamental argument is.
“If it required Harris to lie to get elected, it’s better for Donald Trump to get elected”?
“Nothing Harris could possibly have done would have resulted in her picking up a single swing state so it’s good that she lost with her integrity intact”?Report
Now you know how the rest of us feel.Report
I can state my thesis fairly simply:
“I believe that, if it was possible for Harris to win, it would have required her to have acted differently than she did.”
If I can get an agreement with that, I can probably move on from there and point out specific significant mistakes that should have been handled differently (such as “answering ‘not a thing’ when asked what she’d have done differently than Biden”) and, from there, getting people to either agree that that was a mistake *OR* argue that, no, it wasn’t possible for Harris to win.
But I still don’t know what you’re doing except disagreeing. You’re disagreeing with both P and ~P.
Hrm.
Maybe that’s a better representation of the Democrats at large than I thought…Report
We can agree that you believe that. We don’t have to agree that it’s true. You can try to establish that it’s true by pointing out specific mistakes, telling us what should have been done differently in enough concrete detail to grapple with, and explaining why your suggested changes would likely have moved the needle enough to make the changes outweigh the costs of not making them. You have been asked for that. You have declined. That’s your prerogative. And your habit.
As for disagreeing with both P and not-P, you beat me to it.Report
I believe that this one is absolutely true independently of my belief:
“I believe that, if it was possible for Harris to win, it would have required her to have acted differently than she did.”
If you believe that this proposition is false, please explain how.
Starting from that premise, I then jump to whether it was possible for Harris to win.
We can assume that it was impossible for Harris to win.
If so, we can wonder why we didn’t know this in the days coming up to the election itself, I guess…
We can discuss that, if you’d like.
I prefer assuming that it was possible for her to win.
Which one of those do you think is false?Report
Objection. Non-responsive. You remain perfectly free to explain what you think Harris could or should have done differently and why, in your view, it would have helped her win. You don’t need anyone’s agreement on your assumption to do that; indeed, doing a good job would enhance the believability of your assumption. You have been asked to do that. You have declined. That’s your prerogative and I take your declination seriously.Report
Well, one of the things I think she should have done differently is differentiated herself from Biden instead of saying that she would have done the same stuff he did.
I mean, is it safe to assume that she would have done the same things that he did had he resigned on Day One?
“Not a thing!” leaves it open that the answer is “yes”.
Which is why I see “not a thing” as a mistake that could have been rectified by saying “Yes, I would have addressed the (checks polling) #1 issue most important to voters, the #2 issue most important to voters, and the #3 issue most important to voters differently.”
Well, maybe not the #2. She was the immigration czar, kinda.Report
But what, specifically, would she say to differentiate herself from Biden on issue number 1? Did she, in fact, differ from Biden? You’ve made it clear that you don’t consider the truth relevant and we’ll just have to agree to disagree on that, so let’s play it your way. What lie should she have told– concretely and specifically? And if, instead, she should have given us empty bafflegab, why do you think she could have sold it?Report
Well, let’s go back to The View.
I would have had her talk all sorts of touchy feely crap about understanding how hard it is to deal with rising prices when your paycheck rises but not as quickly as the prices are rising. I was raised in a middle-class family! We had bad inflation during the 70s and I know my parents had it rough! My Mother! My father! Middle class middle class, pain pain pain, I understand how tough it can be. It’s hard out there!”
I think that something like that would have played well on The View and, by extension, among The View’s audience.
Empty bafflegab? Eh, I could see how a male of a certain age would think so. But I also think that a decent soundbite would have played better than “not a thing”.
Could she have sold it?
Well, to The View?
I think that if she couldn’t have, we’re well within “she could not have won this election” territory and it’s worth wondering if an open primary would have done less damage than a loss is in the process of doing.Report
That’s what you’ve got?Report
That’s your response?Report
Both HW and Obama left office with decent (and by recent standards quite good) approval ratings and Clinton’s were stellar. Different situations call for different approaches.Report
For some reason, my comment isn’t going through. I sent it twice, thinking I screwed up the first time. I like the second better.Report
I tried again because I saw this comment come up. Didn’t work.Report
It was in “Trash” and not “Spam”.
I think I fished it out.Report
ThanksReport
I wouldn’t say that the Left has ‘lost control’ of the culture making apparatus. It hasn’t. I suspect, however, that the culture making apparatus was never as Left as the Left hoped. That said; the culture making apparatus mostly wants to make money more than it wants to re-make culture.Report
Isaac! Over here!!!
Isaac, you left the comment “lol. I have no memory of writing this” in your “Between Nagorno-Karabakh and a Hard Place” essay.
I have questions about that!
Does the essay strike you as something you would have written?
Do you stand by it in the current year? Like, would you say “man, I made a lot of bad assumptions a million years ago!”? Would it be something closer to “I got it mostly right, excepting a couple of things nobody could have foreseen?”
What would you say about the essay *TODAY*?Report
A reminder that everyone here talking about ‘inflation’…the problem is not inflation.
Well, not exactly.
There is a problem with inflation, but the problem is actually for several decades that wages have not kept up with it, not that it exists. Low levels of inflation are fine, but low levels of inflation plus slow wages are a disaster. The government takes so long to react to this that by the time anywhere managed to get a $15 min wage, it already was outdated. This is not a recent problem, it’s just one that is constantly becoming worse.
Meanwhile, there is a more recent problem of price-gouging in food costs, where food suppliers realized they could raise prices and no one would do anything about this and the free market has not corrected this yet (Because, of course, market corrections can take quite a long time if the number of suppliers is very small, which we have allowed to happen.) If you want, you can argue that’s not ‘price gouging’, but it doesn’t really matter what you call it: They decided to make us spend more money on food for no real reason, and no one in the market has stood up and said ‘Wait, I can underbid them and make a bunch of money from volume!’ You can argue that _will_ happen, eventually, that’s how markets work, but it hasn’t happened yet.
Now, you may wonder why I mention that, and it’s because it’s two problems that Democrats flatly refuse to address: Low wages and extreme lack of competition in the market.
That is the only way this situation actually gets fixed, not yammering about inflation, but directly addressing those two specific problems somehow. I won’t even try to propose anything, because it doesn’t matter: Nothing will happen.
This is something that some alternate universe Harris could have done, or at least promised to do. However, it’s something that _this_ Democratic party cannot and will not do.
And now we are in the downward fascism spiral, where it is in the fascist’s party best interests to make the economy worse so people cling to it even more, and the opposition party has decayed so much it can’t even figure out a logical opposition.Report
Oh, sorry, and I failed to mention the third thing that looks like ‘inflation’, but isn’t really, the cost of housing. Again, a specific thing that…no one is willing to do anything about.
The problem is not some vague amorphous ‘inflation’ that just magically started happening. It’s wages _not_ going up for decades, housing going up way more than it should for slightly shorter than that (With acrash in the middle), and a bunch of pretty recent price gouging. All of which needs to be addressed as individual problems, but, perhaps more important for a hypothetical past Kamala Harris, need to be _identified_ as problems and not the abstract concept of ‘inflation’.Report
The Federal Government does not set housing policy. Perhaps it should but housing/building policy is the power of the State Governments.
Housing is an interesting issue because I think it is an area where you are likely to fracture Democrats, including, and maybe especially in blue states and cities. You have the YIMBY crowd which is starting to organize effectively but is generally homogeneous to me: they tend to be formally educated, middle-income and upper-middle income professionals who are priced out of buying their first home in their desired locations much of the time. In short, they tend to be bougie yuppies.
Then you have NIMBY/PHIMBY. This group is interesting because their strength comes from how diverse they area:
1. You have rich homeowners who don’t want their property values to decrease. That is simple enough.
2. You have various minority groups that worried about being displaced because of their crumbly apartments being taken down and their neighborhoods being “gentrified”
3. The really interesting crowd behind NIMBY/PHIMBY is the romantic bohemians. These are people who can remember or wish they were back in the the 1970s and 80s and perhaps early 90s when cities were rough and ready but filled with dynamic exciting spaces for artists, musicians, etc. Instead of restaurants offering 300 dollar tasting menus, you had CBGBs, the Mudd Clubb or Danceteria or the local equivalent. Or had lofts and cheap apartments, sure you had thirty locks on your door but you can work as a bike messenger, afford rent, go to play a gig with your band, and then spend a lazy afternoon at Zeitgeist drinking beers and flirting with the cute, sassy bartender in a mini-skirt and pixie haircut. Plus you had hair!
The thing # 1 does is have resources to file CEQA lawsuit after CEQA lawsuit. What groups #2 and 3 have is passion and the time to go to meeting after meeting and gum up the works of new housing. Group # 2 is also very good and used to political and community organizing from various civil rights struggles.
YIMBYs tend to be people with demanding jobs and/or young families who do what they can when they can but are generally not used to political organizing and community activism.
In SF this year, it was the YIMBYs who generally did better but there were exceptions and that is not always guaranteed.Report
I’m not saying that Harris needed to come up with policy to address it.
I’m saying that Harris needed to identify it, needed to break the things that were grouped together as ‘inflation’ into discrete things and promise to try to fix them, individually.
It’s weird how no one seems to understand this: The way issues are presented makes a difference, both in how people understand them and, thus, vote. AND in what people think is solvable and worth trying to solve.
If the Democrats made it clear just how destructive some of the housing policies are, there would be pressure to fix them at the levels they can be fixed.
Also, you, like Democrats, have made the very incorrect assumption that the problem is cities and NIMBY. Yes, that is what causes problems in cities. But housing is at absurd prices literally everywhere, mostly because of the consolidation in the market and, just like food, the limited number of people owning the supply has decided to hike up prices to insane levels to make a profit because they understand that people cannot do without and it it takes a decade for serious competition to exist. (And nothing is stopping them from buying that competition either.)
The Democrats need to, uh, point this out. Explain this. And come up with something to stop it, either via existing antitrust laws or at least proposing new ones.
You know, a reason people would have to vote for them instead of against Trump.
But the people who give them money to get elected are exactly the people doing those things. And thus the Democratic message and policy is: More of the same!
BTW: Rural communities are exactly as worried about being ‘gentrified’ as urban places, they just don’t use that word. They talk about ‘traffic’ and ‘over-priced groceries’, and are less worried about being driven out because they own houses. But it’s exactly the same concerns, and most of them are not about abstract things, but the very real problem that they don’t have anywhere else to live, no one is building cheap housing for them to move into, either in in their existing location or anywhere else they could possibly live, and even if they have somewhere to live they have to be able to afford to live there.Report
This is very true and it is a direct result of Democrats misguided belief that moving right to chase the GOP and it’s donor class was and remains a good idea.Report
Oh, it was a good idea. It worked out great for everyone. Democratic consultants made a ton of money, elected officials have a great career ahead of them as lobbyists and make plenty of money while in office, too. And because Democrats are never actually fully in power, they get built-in excuses to never do anything at all that might piss off their donors…not that, at this point, the American people even _understand_ what’s going on. It’s much easier to just be angry at immigrants and trans people and wokeness.
And now they get four years of, they assume, more #Resistance LARPing. (I am sad to inform them that some of the LARPing this time will be with live ammunition, but they are extremely unlikely to catch any flak and might want to just retire safely to the stacks of money.)
When something works out great for someone and they retire extremely wealthy, it seems a bit silly to assume their actions were ‘misguided’ in any sense. It seems much more likely people just made some stupid assumptions about where those people wished to be ‘guided’ to.Report