Kamala's closing message

Today, we the people get to decide ...

From her closing speech in Philadelphia last night:

“We have an opportunity in this election to finally turn the page on a decade of politics that has been driven by fear and division. We are done with that. We are exhausted with it. America is ready for a fresh start, ready for a new way forward, where we see our fellow Americans not as an enemy, but as a neighbor,” she said.

“Ours is a fight for the future, and ours is a fight for freedom, including the most fundamental freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body and not have her government tell her what to do,” she said. And she pledged always to put “country over party and self and to be a president for all Americans.”

“Tonight…we finish as we started: with optimism, with energy, with joy, knowing that we the people have the power to face our future and that we can confront any challenges we face when we do it together.”

“We still have work to do,” she said. “We like hard work. Hard work is good work. Hard work is joyful work. And make no mistake: We will win.”

Now back to the phones to call those harried voters in Philly one more time! 

Here's yesterday's canvassing launch in Reno; these folks are coming to turn out your vote -- with joy!

Getting Out The Vote: a tale

From the UniteHERE phonebank: we're calling into Pennsylvania. The state is most likely to be one of the closest elections in the nation.

The job is to contact all the people who've requested mail-in ballots, identify whether they are Harris voters, make sure they actually received their ballot from the county, help them with any details about how to submit the slightly complicated pile of envelopes and required signatures, and make sure they get their vote in on time. 

UniteHERE union canvassers (you can join them via Seed the Vote) have been helping people they meet at the doors in Philadelphia for weeks to request mail-in ballots -- and naturally, many other citizens request them without our encouragement. But in Philly, a lot of mail-ins come because of this door-knocking program. 

So I'm on my last call of a 3 hour shift yesterday ... what sounds like a nice young man answers.

I'm friendly and he agrees to talk for a few minutes. I ask whether he's for Harris -- "hell, yes!"

I ask whether he's got his ballot yet? "Oh yes. And I already mailed it in."

And then the kicker. "I'm doing what you are doing on the doors ... I'm working with a union -- UniteHERE."

I just laugh and we trade notes for a bit on what it's been like on the streets in Philadelphia. He didn't know we had a whole phonebank calling the people they'd pushed to use mail-in ballots. He did know, a lot of Philly people love them some VP Harris!

This was a true experience of a campaign working the way it is supposed to work: my call closed the loop on a process that is what campaigns call Get Out The Vote -- GOTV. Find the voters who support your candidate and do whatever it takes to make sure they actually do vote. That's the task for the next 12 days!

A heartfelt endorsement of Harris

Like so many of us, I'm working as hard as I am able to elect Kamala Harris. It's gotta be done. 

At every session of the UniteHERE phonebank, group leaders begin by going around the zoom restating why we are doing this work. For most all of us, it's some variant of "Donald Trump gotta go!" 

Yesterday I posted about an affirmative reason that it seems worthwhile to do this work: Harris is proposing a plan for in-home elder care assistance through Medicare! This could ease the burdens and improve old age for so many.

Today I want to pass on someone else's heartfelt endorsement. Patricia Williams is a legal scholar, credited with helping develop that bugaboo of the right, critical race theory which identifies and examines the role of race in our system of law. 

There's nothing abstract about why she is drawn to Harris as she recounts in an essay in the New York Review of Books. She notes that at Harris's Democratic National Convention, among the speakers were the survivors of that racist miscarriage of justice, the Central Park Five rape case. Irresponsible prosecutors, egged on by terrified New Yorkers led by Donald Trump, sent innocent young Black men to prison for the crime amid howls from tabloid newspapers.

... I attended the 1990 trial of those young men. I sat in that courtroom from beginning to end, and it was the saddest spectacle I have ever witnessed, dominated by fear-laced outlaw narratives that proved more powerful than reasoned evidence. It was an object lesson in how easily fact may be bulldozed and buried by passionate narratives of jumbled nonsense. The bottom line is that there was no physical evidence that linked any of the defendants to this very bloody crime. (The jogger lost 75 percent of her blood in the attack.) ...

Another man eventually admitted he had committed the crime, alone. Trump has never conceded that he pushed for a grotesque miscarriage of justice.

Williams continues: 

... it is Harris’s consistently ethical track record as a senator and as a prosecutor upon which I base my deepest support for her. She has described the often difficult but necessary function prosecutors perform as officers of the court, and she has made clear her belief that a major qualification for public servants must be the ability to see beyond preconceived boxes.

She speaks of dealing with victims, families of victims, and perpetrators themselves; grieving mothers who lost children, whose deaths were not taken seriously, children of children whose trauma reproduces itself in yet more trauma inflicted; people who have served their time behind bars but are released back into the world with little more than a bus ticket and no job skills.

She has dedicated herself to reenvisioning homicides as more than mere statistics, more than deaths foretold, more than the humdrum inevitable outgrowth of stereotyped urban landscapes. Most importantly, in deciding when and how to bring charges in a case, she cautions that if you can’t see that random teenager walking down the street as a possible honor student, or “Tamir Rice [as a child] or Atatiana [Jefferson] as an auntie in her own home, it can have lethal consequences.”

We are all ethically required to “figure out the diaspora,” she said in an interview—years ago, as though speaking to Donald Trump in the present tense. “Your limited view of who people are—don’t put that on [them] because you don’t have the ability to see the variety and the diversity and the depth.”

This comprehensiveness of vision, this capacious balance of law and order and sanity and proportion, this disciplined command of human possibility, is what I hope we restore to our political landscape with her election. There is still a long way—if a very short time—to go.

For a good summary of the Central Park Five story, see the History.com.

Harris has a policy!

Why doesn't Kamala Harris spell out her policies? The legacy mass media keep loudly demanding this.

I'm talking to voters on the phones, at least the ones who don't hang up on me. The Harris voters who I'm helping to navigate Pennsylvania's mail-in ballot maze have two concerns that don't seem to arise from lack of policy plans: they want to be done with Trump and/or to ensure that women can make their own decisions about our bodies.

So you can count me among the surprised when I learned that Kamala Harris was articulating a serious effort to make possible in-home care for elders. That really is a novelty. 

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris ... proposed a major new initiative: expanding Medicare to cover the cost of long-term care at home.

Such a plan could mean the option of staying at home, rather than in a nursing facility, for the millions of seniors and people with disabilities who need help with the daily tasks of life.

It could also mean physical and financial relief ― and new opportunities for school or work outside the home ― for the millions of working-age Americans who today provide so much of that care on their own without much in the way of outside assistance.

If the proposed legislation is enacted, such a program would represent a substantial boost in federal support for caregiving and, by any measure, one of the largest one-time increases in American history. HuffPost

This could be huge for most all of us. Most old people want to stay in their homes as they age, but the way assistance has been structured has made this incredibly difficult. At present, eligibility for government assistance for home care usually requires spending down all you have to become dependent on Medicaid. Naturally most people don't want to do this. Many feel that they would be robbing their children, besides naturally wanting to stay in home surroundings.

I watched this in my own family. My mother-in-law didn't have much savings to retire on. Rent took up more and more of her budget. As her chronic illnesses worsened, she needed help -- not medical help, but help with the tasks of daily living, food shopping, some cooking. But she certainly didn't need to be in a nursing home. Yet Medicare did nothing for her. Ever ingenious, she realized that if she went into hospice care, she could get some home assistance ... so she schemed to qualify. She then survived longer in hospice care than anyone her workers had ever seen, being a tough and artful old bird. It took a special sort of person to pull this off; she should not have had to find a way to game the system.

What Harris is proposing could be life changing for elders and families. I have to ask, why aren't we hearing more about this policy proposal?

In answer, I suspect is that in-home elder care is a burden that falls more on women than on men. Women live longer and find themselves in this fix more often; daughters live with the expectation they'll take up the task of caring for family members. This is coded (and actually is) a women's issue -- perhaps we only get one per election and this year it is bodily autonomy? That's good, but we need more.

Can this get passed into law? Certainly only if enough Democratic Senators and Congressmen win to ensure majorities. And it may take a few legislative rounds for such a major expansion of the government's duty of care to become law. But this is a worthy goal.

Here's Harris making the pitch for her plan. I like the bit about how she cooked for her dying mother, searching for foods the older woman would find appetizing. That's the real stuff!

Don't erase the women who made this possible ...

The excitement, shading toward euphoria, of this unlikely campaign season seems to have settled into something more like a dedicated slog toward November 5. After the Biden withdrawal, the Harris-Walz coming out party at the convention, and anxious anticipation of a debate at which Kamala demonstrated she could wipe the floor with Donald, many of us are just working away at ensuring she wins. It's not a sure thing, but we are on track to elect Kamala Harris our 47th president so long as we do the work.

But before it gets lost, I want to share snippets of Rebecca Traister's thoughtful account of "How a women-led movement, born in the devastation of 2016, put Democrats on the brink of making history." Many women have worked for years laying the groundwork for the Harris groundswell.

... Harris is benefiting from the intense ground-level electoral engagement provoked by Clinton’s loss. It’s worth noting how much of the 2016 result, in which Clinton did win a majority of American voters, stemmed from the certainty on the part of those running her campaign, the Democratic Party, and the political media that she would take the White House and that Trump could never. Millions of Americans didn’t act in advance of November 8, 2016, in part because no one had made clear to them that they had to, that this was an emergency — and they then awoke on Wednesday morning to an emergency. At which point legions of them began to change their relationship to politics and civic participation.

The Women’s March took place the day after Trump’s inauguration, and the sea of ordinary people was so much larger than Trump’s party that it became the original trigger for the former president’s obsession with crowd size.

Kamala Harris, having been sworn in for her first Senate term not three weeks earlier, spoke at that march. “Even if you’re not sitting in the White House,” she said, “even if you’re not a member of the United States Congress, even if you don’t run a big corporate super-PAC … you have the power. We the people have the power. And there is nothing more powerful than a group of determined sisters, marching alongside with their partners and their determined sons and brothers and fathers, standing up for what we know is right.”

... “Women-led grassroots organizing gets dismissed by the Beltway class,” texted Katie Paris, who founded Red Wine & Blue in advance of the 2020 election. The group organizes multiracial suburban women, a Democratic response to the Moms for Liberty groups driving Republican turnout; Red Wine & Blue now has 500 groups nationwide, compared with Moms for Liberty’s 310. “But they really may have no idea what’s been going on in the middle of America,” Paris said. “Do they have any idea that we organize in our communities year-round and not just around elections? That we pay attention not just to presidential races but to school boards and school levies and whatever else needs tending in our communities? I was just listening to NYT Nate [Cohn] on The Daily and it’s like they have no comprehension of any dynamic outside of the candidates and their campaigns. It’s like they’re trying to report on the storm without checking the weather.”

It’s true that too few in the upper reaches of American politics take this level of organizing seriously, even as these efforts have, more than once in the past eight years, saved the Democratic Party in elections that everyone predicted it would lose, corrected its long-term failures to build state and local power, and ushered a new generation into office — composing a Democratic winning streak that stretches back not just to Dobbs but to Democrats flipping 15 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates in 2017.

... It’s hard to stress how unprecedented it is for a presidential campaign’s official launch to be powered by Black-sorority and abortion-related groups. There was no elaborate advance planning for this, but that’s sort of the point: Where was Harris when the music stopped and she became the nominee? Already talking to Black women and abortion providers and storytellers. ...

Yes, the joyous hope that we might, finally, rid ourselves of the felon and rapist who incites so much hate unites a multitude of improbable allies. But the women have been here from the beginning ...

• • •

Sign up to help Harris win in a battleground state with Seed the Vote. And if you can't travel, contact me; I'm good at pointing people to what they can do that might help.

Harris calls out Trump, Vance and the GOP for their hate

 She tells you what she really thinks -- and feels.

pic.twitter.com/UudOeI5fV5

— janinsanfran (@janinsanfran) September 18, 2024

The assault from Donald Trump and JD Vance on the community of Springfield, OH, got to her. I don't usually post videos of this length. But, in an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists, meet our next president.

"... my heart breaks for these children ... a whole community put in fear. ... your words have meaning. ... when you are bestowed with a microphone that big, there is a profound responsibility that comes with that. ... you are responsible for your words, [for] how you conduct yourself. ... it's a crying shame what is happening to those children in that community ... the American people deserve better than this. ... I know that regardless of their race, their gender, their location, that people are deeply troubled by what is happening to that community in Springfield,Ohio ... We have got to say that you cannot be entrusted with standing behind that seal of the President of the United States of America and engaging in that hateful rhetoric .. that is designed to divide us. ... I think most people in this country are beginning to see through this nonsense and to say let's turn the page on this. It's exhausting and it's harmful. ... Let's turn the page and chart a new way forward and say that you can't have that microphone again."

This is presidential.

The vibes are getting better

 

When I've been told by news media that US majorities believe Donald Trump will be better for "the economy" than Biden and now Kamala Harris, I'm gobsmacked. 

 

And when I'm now shown, by the Financial Times via economic historian Adam Tooze that we now, slightly, think Harris would be better at the economic job, I'm also gobsmacked.

 

By the sorts of measures used by economists, the American economy has been chugging along happily for at least 12 months with something close to jobs for everyone who wants one, rising wages, low inflation, even a happy stock market (though how much this last has to do with the economy I don't know.) 

But for all that time, many survey respondents have been insisting that Trump would be better for "the economy." I can only conclude that mostly what people mean by "the economy" is confidence that they'll able to eat and have shelter, all with some degree of comfort and expectation for a future. 

Maybe sign boards advertising gas prices and perhaps boarded up storefronts figure somewhere in that, as well as Joe Biden's weak communication capacity and his age.

But the change in the polling tells me that surveys on "the economy" don't solely measure an economic reality. Apparently, in some part, they do heavily measure vibes. If we feel hopeful about the future, the world around us looks better. This can't entirely hide material realities, but it actually does help change our perceptions. (I'm sure some physicists have thoughts about how this works.)

In light of what's happening with current economic opinions, I can finally make sense of this amazing chart from last spring: 

Majorities of people polled in the electoral battleground states have thought their personal economic well-being had been getting better for a couple of years. Yet something was also convincing them that the country at large was doing poorly. I always was gobsmacked by this finding too. (As far as I know, no one has published an updated version of this question.)

Kamala Harris's attractive candidacy is apparently measurably restoring confidence in our future.

Time to push this guy into our past

Trump is crumbling. What he speaks to, the id of our society, is going strong.* But Kamala Harris unmasked his increasing personal weakness. 

Some of my favorite summations of what happened to that whining man on Tuesday: 

Anita Chabria, Los Angeles Times:  

What struck me most about Trump was how tired he looked — and acted. Seriously. Not being snarky here. I’ve been noticing this when watching his campaign stops.

Something of the raging fire that helped ignite the Jan. 6 insurrection is just gone. Yes, he’s got his well-worked lines and his delivery retains his huckster polish. But he seems deflated, almost like he’s bored with it. Like the only time he really cared was when it turned personal.

Tuesday night, he was hunched over, scowling, easily led into traps by Harris that devolved into rants when he felt slighted.

At one point, after she baited him that world leaders were laughing at him, he came back with Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban (who has cracked down on freedom of the press, LGBTQ+ rights and immigration) as proof that wasn’t true.

“Look, Viktor Orban said it. He said, ‘The most respected, the most feared person is Donald Trump. We had no problems when Trump was president,’” Trump said.

It wasn’t a dumpster fire performance. But it seemed sad, a refreshing change from scary.

Charlie Warzel, tech and media reporter, The Atlantic:

What Harris’s campaign and debate style propose, however, is a different view of Trump, not as the central figure in American politics but as a vestigial element of a movement that’s so curdled by grievance and enmeshed in an alternate reality that it is becoming not just culturally irrelevant, but something far worse: pitiable.

David French, New York Times columnist on Xitter:

It's like she's debating MAGA Twitter come to life. Victor Orban, dead pets, Ashli Babbitt, "J6." She's debating Catturd.

Josh Marshall called it before the debate even began:

... I do think there’s a decent chance a lot of people will get a wake up call tonight not only about how weird Donald Trump is but about how much he’s deteriorated. It’s been many years since he’s shared a debate stage with anyone who could be called a young and dynamic figure. But if you’re really sensitive to signs that Donald Trump is a sundowning degenerate freak, you wouldn’t be a swing voter. Tonight’s about Kamala Harris. That means risk but also opportunity. ...

•  The DOJ has indicted a fly-by-night "media company" for funneling millions in Russian money to right wing media personalities to stir up that American id.

The power demonstrated at the DNC

I'm loving the Dem fiesta in Chicago. How could I not?

And trying to think about what this happy turn toward looking forward might mean.

Lester Spence is a professor of political science and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins. He looks at our society and polity from within a thoughtfully critical frame: 

Over the past 40-50 years we’ve seen a sharp rise in income inequality. Rather than being a natural function of cultural capital or education, with some populations being better able to adapt to post-industrial America than others, this sharp rise is a function of politics, of public policy that reduces the scale and scope of the US welfare state, of political rules that simultaneously increase the mobility and power of capital and reduce the power of labor to organize, and of political rhetoric that lauds the entrepreneur over the citizen. In short, the rise is the result of the neoliberal turn. And during this period, not only has inequality within black communities increased, there’s more inequality within black communities than there is between black and non-black ones.

In his newsletter The Counterpublic Papers, he wrestles with this happy, strange moment: 

... this election is about defeating Trump, but [also] about establishing better democratic conditions going forward.

If we don’t have two fully functioning parties, then we need to create the conditions that ensure the one functioning party continues to win at the federal level, to ensure the one functioning party wins at the state level, and that the one functioning party institutes policies that promote and extend democratic practice. Nominating Harris was the best way to create these conditions. It sends a signal that they trust Harris and the population she’s thought to represent. Further it pushes people like us past spectatorship and into something a bit more robust. This increased responsiveness has the potential to transform the party. Perhaps not radically…but just enough.

• • •

One of the ... aspects of the Harris candidacy pundits and scholars are likely to examine to bits in the future is how quick the rollout was. Her support among black women and men have to be accounted for here. Within days of Biden dropping out, a group of black women who’d already been doing standard political organizing held a zoom call that topped out at somewhere around 44,000 participants—so many that Zoom had to stretch its technical capacities to enable the call. The women were able to raise somewhere around $1 million dollars. Less than 24 hours later a group of black men held a similar event, organized by media personality/journalist Roland Martin. Approximately 50,000 people signed up for that call and raised around the same amount. (I was on that call, and even though I opposed Harris in 2020 I wrote a check.)

We can and should read this as an example of black elites mobilizing to ensure that Harris wasn’t discarded (and we don’t have to look hard to see examples of this—the same day women met on Zoom, Aaron Sorkin suggested in an NYT op-ed that the Democratic Party nominate Mitt Romney), with black men following suit. ...

The delightful DNC is about pulling together the many strands of buried hope and aspiration among us. This sort of coalition can be fragile, but it is immensely powerful in its moment.

The Harris agenda is freedom for this time

Pamela Herd, a professor of Public Policy at Georgetown University, has taken a stab at laying out what our new Democratic presidential candidate offers as a positive vision for the country. I found her observations a helpful summary:

“Weird” might be effective political messaging, but it tells us little about what a Harris presidency would look like. ...

Harris promotes a different vision of freedom, a version that evokes, but updates, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s definition of freedom, where people are free from want and fear and have freedom of speech and religion. With Beyonce in the background, Harris calls for:

• The freedom not just to get by, but to get ahead.

• The freedom to be safe from gun violence.

• The freedom to make decisions about your own body.

• We choose a future where no child lives in poverty.

• Where we can all afford health care.

• We believe in the promise of America and we are ready to fight for it.

This isn’t just a laundry list of policy goals. It’s a coherent vision of what government should, and should not, do. ...

... In her stump speech, a key line is that “we’re not going back.” Audiences have responded by chanting “not going back” in response. ...

I can live with this -- even thrill to this.

It seems to me that Joe Biden offered a vision suitable to his age and experience. As the last of our politicians formed in the before-Reagan times, he harked back to a New Deal-influenced vision of using the state to grow an economy which spread its benefits more equitably and broadly. And we should be more grateful than we are for his leadership.

Harris came up in a different time, with politically active immigrant parents of color, influenced by the liberation movements of the '50s,'60's, and early '70s. An optimistic vision of freedom for all, unbounded by old verities, was the fruit of those heady days. Harris's themes seem to me to derive from that moment -- and I love it!

The civil rights struggle of Black Americans for full citizenship made her candidacy possible. The struggle for women's liberation underpins her constituency and appeal. And the LGBT+ struggle for liberation has unleashed the potential to re-imagine society in novel configurations.

I doubt very much that Harris can fulfill all the hopes her vision of freedom offers. But I can enthusiastically get behind a leader from a new generation whose person was impossible under the old rules -- and who looks forward to new rules. Bring on the Harris campaign. I'm on board.

There's something about the women ...

Since Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee for President, it's been fun for your vacationing campaigners (that's EP and I) to read about an outpouring of enthusiasm, anchored by women. We feared this was going to be a death march against impending MAGA fascism -- ethically necessary, but entirely defensive rather than uplifting.

They met in January as veteran campaigners do. They knew they would have to take up this fight for decency and sanity. I hope most can now share the new hope

Apparently there are plenty of people who are now feeling engaged. 44,000 Black women jammed a zoom call. 40,000 new voter registrations -- most likely young people -- in one day. 

Sure, there will be bumps in the road; many of us will wish Kamala were more able to break free from the inclinations of the administration which brought her here. 

But she gives us a chance. When you've been terrified you were condemned to a MAGA world, the relief is energizing.

Frank Bruni of the NYTimes catches some of this: 

... [Women] still don’t enjoy full equality with men in America, but we sure have been leaning on them lately to save American democracy. The appallingly stymied attempts to hold Trump responsible for his crimes have rested largely on the efforts of women, a few of whom did vanquish him in court, as my Times Opinion colleague Jessica Bennett noted in an essay in April. She did a roll call of his pursuers: “Letitia James. Fani Willis. E. Jean Carroll, and her lawyer Roberta Kaplan. And, of course, Stormy Daniels. The five women who are living rent-free in Mr. Trump’s mind these days.”

I’d add “crazy Nancy Pelosi” — Trump is still regularly calling her that, unable to purge her from his thoughts — to the list. (Jessica wrote about Pelosi in an essay this week.) Also former Representative Liz Cheney: Nobody on the House panel investigating the events of Jan. 6, 2021, was more forceful or impassioned than she was in exposing Trump’s actions and inaction on that day. She, too, squats somewhere in Trump’s gray matter, so much so that he recently amplified social media posts that accused her of treason and urged that she be subjected to a televised military tribunal.

... Women’s reproductive rights are in the foreground of this presidential election, Harris is practiced and eloquent in her defense of them, and that could widen a gender gap in a way that works to Democrats’ advantage. Women voters could be the barricade between Trump and that first-day dictatorship.

Also, as my Times colleagues Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan wrote recently, and as I discussed with two prominent Democrats in a conversation published on Wednesday, women opponents bring out the ugliest in Trump. Harris will quickly take up residence with Pelosi, Cheney and the gang.

And Trump will have to build an annex, maybe to his frontal or occipital lobe, to accommodate the sorority.

Unless the law gets further twisted to accommodate Trump's crimes, New York State Judge Merchan has now scheduled sentencing in his hush money felonies for September 18. 

It's the crook v. the prosecutor now -- and she's a girl!

*Title borrowed from the 1970s "women's movement" anthem.