So much for that series
So much for that series
A reminder that voting for a president is about more than an individual
Well, so much for my series “Reasons to vote for Biden that aren’t Joe Biden,” now obsolete after a grand total of one installment. I was pretty confident he was going to stick it out until the end, but was pleasantly surprised by the announcement on July 21 that Biden was stepping down.
In fact, I feel bad for Biden. Not for Biden the politician, who has a habit of being too stuck in the near-present to foresee the potential long term consequences of his actions. But I feel bad for Biden the human being, who does care for this country and its future, to the extent of sacrificing his reelection bid. You’ve got to have quite an ego to run for the nation’s highest office, so it’s got to be a pretty deep wound to realize that the best action for the country is for you to step aside.
I’m also surprisingly optimistic after seeing the left’s and center-left’s initial response—dare I say excitement—to Vice President Kamala Harris’s ascent as the heir apparent to the ticket. Harris is already leading in some polls against Trump and raised a record-breaking $81 million in the 24 hours after Biden stepped down and endorsed her. Harris’s nomination has mobilized Black women, Black men, and a Zoom-breaking number of white women.
But I say cautious because we still have several months of campaigning to go. (WHY DO WE DO THIS??) And it didn’t take long for the racism and misogyny of the right come into play. The right’s reaction is going to be exhausting as all the tired tropes about women of color get trotted out. The only real vulnerability I’ve seen is about the border; assigning Harris to “fix” a problem decades in the making without substantial reform passed in Congress was an exercise in futility. Anyone with half a brain can see that, and that the so-called “crisis at the border” is a xenophobic talking point divorced from law, history, and reality.
Other than that, the right-wing attacks so far are pretty hacky, even for the MAGA crowd. Trump’s Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance claimed that he was “pissed” he wouldn’t be debating Harris, in the same speech where he made a joke about Diet Mountain Dew that would fall flat with even the yelling-drunk-uncle-at-Thanksgiving crowd. He’s tried the “childless cat lady” trope, which is a) so tired, b) sounds like a better time than being married to men like JD Vance, and c) as any thinking person knows, there’s all kinds of reasons why a couple wouldn’t give birth, and it’s frankly none of anyone’s business.
Trump’s initial insult against Harris is that she’s “dumb as a rock,” when she’s obviously not. If she’s so dumb, why is he already trying to weasel his way out of debating her? Probably because he knows that if he tries that stalking technique he did to Hillary Clinton, Harris will just turn around and say, “Why are you being so weird?” That is the elephant (ha!) in the room at the Republican Party—they are deeply weird, not in creative, original, or interesting ways, but in “you need to go learn how to be people again” ways. Most people do not spend this much time and energy obsessing over other people’s gender presentations, sex lives, reproductive choices, child rearing, and generally how they choose to live their lives, much less try to regulate them into conformity.
Congressional Republicans are floating the “DEI candidate” talking point, even if House Speaker Mike Johnson is telling them to cut it out because it's a turn off for the elusive swing voter, a group that’s practically extinct in American politics today. And frankly, if their vote is swayed by whether the racism and sexism at play is a dog whistle or a bullhorn, fuck them. The better political strategy, which wins elections in reality, not just in theory, is to invigorate nonvoters by giving them a candidate who makes them want to vote. Who inspires, instead of laying a guilt trip on the electorate.
As long as the left and center can muzzle any dingbats who want Hillary Clinton to run, or any dingbats named Aaron Sorkin, Harris’s nomination to the top of the Democratic Party ticket should, hopefully, be painless. A little cringe if you spend too much time online. But maybe even energizing? Or, god forbid, hopeful?
However, the bigger point of the “Reasons to vote for Biden that aren’t Joe Biden” series still stands: the individual at the top of the ticket is one part of the larger picture of how our future is shaped by elections. A significant part yes, but the right has held their nose and voted for candidates they didn’t care for with other goals in mind—specifically packing the courts with hack judges. The left needs to stop hoping for some special candidate who will fix everything and keep their eyes on the bigger picture of how that person will shape the government. Namely, the people they choose to run different departments.
If there’s one thing I can say full-heartedly in support of Biden, it's that he’s done a great job choosing people to head government departments. (Except Merrick Garland.)
Top of the list: Lina Khan. Khan has taken the sleepy Federal Trade Commission, which most administrations have treated as a rubber stamp-factory for corporate consolidation, and actually put it to its intended use: as a check against corporate power. Under her leadership, the commission has voted to enforce right to repair, gone after non-compete clauses, cracked down on pharmacy benefit managers for driving up the costs of prescriptions, fought to restrict Facebook parent company Meta's practice of monetizing user data, and filed antitrust lawsuits against Meta and Amazon.
Also, Pete Buttigieg. I never got the “Mayor Pete” hype during the 2020 primaries. He was making the leap from small city mayor to President, on the basis of being a centrist fantasy candidate: a politician with a mix of left-ish qualities and right-ish qualities from a place coastal liberals assume must still burn gay men at the stake.
However, I am 100% on board with anyone who is pro-trains. (See what I did there?) After decades of having to listen to Republicans call passenger rail a boondoggle, the recently-expanded Borealis route from Chicago to the Twin Cities with frequent stops in Wisconsin, made a profit in 11 days. Also, I was really impressed with Buttigieg nerding out on infrastructure and policy on 99% Invisible. Now if we can get a train that stops in Madison, ideally that would connect with the line from Chicago to Kansas City, he could win me over for future runs for higher office.
Finally (for now) Deb Haaland, the first Native American to lead the Department of the Interior, the department that handles tribal relations and led the cultural genocide against tribal nations. In addition to her work to make the agency recognize its history, Haaland has had to undo the environmental harms of the last administration, and help tribal nations become more resilient in the face of climate change.
Meanwhile, Vance at a rally in Ohio on Tuesday mocked Indigenous Peoples Day, Indigenous two-spirit queer culture, and promoted revisionist history in defense of Revolutionary War Maj. Gen. Anthony Wayne, a colonizer who directly committed genocide against the tribes in what is now Ohio. A forest in Ohio is named after Wayne and when Haaland’s department tried to return the forest to an Indigenous name, at the request of local tribes, Vance spoke out in opposition.
“(Wayne) fought wars and won peace for our government, the government you now serve, and hewed Ohio out of rugged wilderness and occupied enemy territory,” Vance wrote.
There’s a lot to unpack there. That “rugged wilderness” and “occupied enemy territory” was the home of people who’d lived on that land for millennia, and who still live there today. People who Wayne murdered so colonizers could steal that land.
If keeping that Vance schmuck out of the White House isn’t a good enough reason to vote for Harris, I don’t know what is.
Except maybe this:
Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson’s team published this cursed image of Johnson being interviewed by Russell Brand during the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. This is the future conservatives want, Brand’s bare feet on your cream-colored pleather couch and all.