Election of losers
There was a moment late in tonight’s presidential debate that perfectly captured the strength — and weakness — of Kamala Harris’s performance. Responding to Donald Trump’s comments about her race, Harris said:
This is the same individual who spread birther lies about the first Black president of the United States. And I think the American people want better than that.
If you are the sort of person who reads this blog then you may not have even noticed the problem here. But if you are an ordinary American who does not read socialist blogs or watch cable news or pay much attention to politics at all between elections, you may very well be asking yourself: what on earth is a “birther?”
This just isn’t a term that most people use! An overwhelming majority (81%) of Americans express a definite opinion about where Obama was born which suggests that they’ve heard of the controversy, but “birther” itself is an MSNBC term from 8-16 years ago. That means a significant number of voters were still in high school when the word was still in circulation.
What makes this error particularly egregious: “Trump said Obama wasn’t born in the US simply because he is black” sounds way more damaging than “Trump spread birther lies.”
But this is the sort of mistake you make when your implicit target audience is political news junkies rather than your typical American. Harris’s plan tonight was clear from the outset: rage-bait Trump into getting mad and sounding crazy by needling his ego. And it worked — if you already recognized that what he was saying was delusional. But clearly a whole lot of Americans are extremely confused on that point and don’t know how to believe. What did they think was going on?
Anecdotally, here’s what I saw: at a small bar in central Virginia, I watched a whole lot of people looking on in quiet uncertainty at Trump’s rants. Occasionally he said something too bizarre to miss, like his “trans aliens” comment, and that won some laughs. But when Trump said things that were more subtly insane — like his repeated claim that crime dropped in the rest of the world and rose in the US — it seemed to me that very few people interpreted that as him being baited into a rant by Harris.
It’s extraordinarily depressing to watch how far on the back foot Democrats have been pushed on issue after issue. Harris sang odes to fracking. She has wholeheartedly embraced the confused establishment Democrat line of healthcare, which simultaneously calls it a “right” and insists that the private health insurance industry should still get the opportunity to deny customers that “right.” In what was easily the most predictable moment of the night, Harris sandwiched vague toothless concern about the IDF’s ongoing slaughter of Palestinian civilians between slobbering professions of love for Israel. These have always been the party’s positions, of course, but the party is so out of touch with the base on all of these issues that it’s impossible to read this as anything other than a complete capitulation to the Republican line.
Trump, meanwhile, just doesn’t have the juice he had in 2016. The fighting spirit that Americans found so attractive eight years ago is now utterly mired in bitterness and a pathetic persecution complex. His salesmanship — constantly talking about how his administration will do everything bigger and better, and everyone’s gonna love it — is almost completely gone, and his laugh lines are rarer and weaker. When Trump ran against Clinton I could easily see what Americans found so attractive about him, even though I wasn’t particularly impressed myself. Now it’s hard to imagine who, outside of the deadenders, could be pleased with his performance tonight.
My guess is that pundits will say that Harris won tonight - she’s certainly up in the betting markets now — but in the end, this is an election of losers. The best campaign by a mile will lose, if Trump wins Americans lose, and if Harris wins Americans still lose. The only question at this point is how much we’re going to lose, and nothing that happened tonight leaves me optimistic.