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Some stray thoughts about this predictable catastrophe, which so many of us spent the year warning about:
1. Biden will be a very weak president under a cluster of epochal crises, at the mercy of and forced to strike deals with McConnell, whose career's been spent outplaying him
1. Biden will be a very weak president under a cluster of epochal crises, at the mercy of and forced to strike deals with McConnell, whose career's been spent outplaying him
2. Biden, who is mentally well past his prime, has neither the kind of loyal base and grass roots fervor, nor the reserves of charisma and inspiration that, say Obama did, to try overcome divided government. Not sure what follows a failed or conservative Biden administration.
3. Kamala Harris was (supposedly) picked to excite black voters (in reality, donors). Instead, she'll be tarred with the infamy of being on the ticket that lost a large chunk of black voters to probably the most openly racist president since Nixon.
4. This result is even more pitiful when you remember a) not just the landslide-making conditions, but b) the determined, breathtaking leniency with which the media's treated Biden this year, and the ferocity with which it's treated his opponent for the last four.
5. Remember when Trump submitted a historically distasteful debate performance? Remember like two days later, when he got Covid because of his own stupidity, and half the WH was infected? Remember when his VP's staff got it? All of that happened just weeks before this result.
6. There are many reasons why down-ballot Democrats might've got thumped, but hard not to lay a large part of it at the campaign's feet. Biden's problems with Latino voting & reluctance to organise meant high Trump turnout ate into his polling lead, and Trump voters...
... would've voted GOP down-ballot (just as a popular Dem candidate, like Obama, helped his party down-ballot). Explains why someone like Donna Shalala was ousted in a Dem stronghold like Miami-Dade, thanks to Biden underperforming there.
7. As in 2016, what a failure of polling, which particularly shaped and narrowed the political horizons for voters in the Democratic primary, despite proving disastrously wrong again. Biden's clinging to a 1-point lead in WI; 538 and RCP had him winning it by 8.4 & 6.7
8. More to the point, what a colossal, arrogant, total failure across the board by an establishment that refused to learn anything from the colossal 2016 fuck-up: the party that picked the wrong candidate; the voters it hoodwinked; the media echo chamber of smug certainty; etc.
9. It was an open secret that the Democratic upper echelon had little faith in Biden, and they were proven right. And yet they still preferred risking this than running an actual populist candidate on a social democratic platform. The greed and callousness of these people.
10. Here is what your hero, Barack Obama, with his soaring, self-indulgent speeches and his three-point shot, privately thought about the man he aggressively worked behind the scenes to make the nominee. They knew. They always knew.
11. I said this before, but this result is a bigger media-caused failure than 2016. The press went easy on Biden and attacked anyone even mildly critical of him. Instead of choosing the strongest candidate, they picked the most coddled, based on who they pre-decided was the one.
12. How many hours would it take to list the mistakes of this campaign, somehow worse even than 2016? Not door-knocking; a candidate who can barely appear in public; massive Wall St fundraising; aggressively alienating its base; Rick Snyder (!); it goes on and on.
13. The election is over and people can stop pretending. Faced with a 1932-style scenario, the party this time, succeeded in stopping FDR and picked Al Smith instead. Faced with a crossroads in history, people don't always make the right choice.
14. What a capstone to this man's career. Biden inflicted incalculable damage on working people to get to this point, laying the groundwork for the rise of the far right in the process. He ends having neutralised the best antidote to its rise, and empowering it further.
