Photograph Source: The Hoya Online – CC BY 2.0
“Y’know, it’s not that I object to your being a bastard, don’t get me wrong there. It’s your being such a stupid bastard that I object to.”
– President Art Hockstader
Gore Vidal’s “The Best Man”
In 2016, John Podesta, as conflicted and duplicitous a hack as ever befouled the most pestilential corridor of Tammany, strode onto the Javits Center stage and instructed the faithful to piss off. Eight years later, Cedric Richmond, a funhouse mirror version of M.L. King and the walking embodiment of fossil fuel cash masquerading as concern for economic justice did the same. On election nights at least, it seems the Democratic Party does conform to assigned gender roles – the tone deaf female secludes herself while the ethicless male clears the room.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Not with the 1.5 Billion the Kamala brain trust spent on providing Republicans and conservative Democrats with a permission structure to support her. Unfortunately, the rest of the vote getting operation possessed the tactical brilliance of Charles Schumer’s electoral delusions smeared in feces on an asylum wall: For every young person struggling with debt or working class Pennsylvanian unable to afford daycare & eggs or Muslim Michigander repelled by Netanyahu’s barbarism that we lose, we’ll pick up two suburban housewives with diversified portfolios who consider the Cheney family noble. Stunningly, as late as 11AM on Election Day, a CNN reporter breathlessly intoned that the Harris Campaign was feeling “caveated bullishness”.
As it turned out, the caveat had to do with votes cast, and at that precise moment, with every swing state about to lock Trumpian, the race should have been characterized Too Late To Call. So what will happen now? Will Keith Olbermann re-wrap himself in the flag? Will Tina Fey eat another sheet cake? To be honest, it would not be possible for me to care less.
For the only thing I do know is that no one, NO ONE tasked with decision making over any aspect of the Harris/Walz campaign will be anything other than financially fine.
To be fair, what I think about the Democratic Party hasn’t mattered since 2016. That was the year I enthusiastically supported Bernie Sanders based on what I considered eminently defensible grounds… I found his opponent to be a horrible person proposing horrible policies which mirrored the governing approach of her horrible husband whose horrible policies she herself had helped engender. This, unbeknownst to me, made me sexist.
And during that campaign, as Hillary fought to avoid mentioning class lest she offend anyone with a Goldman Sachs Partnership, I learned a great many additional things about myself. Not just that I was politically delusional by wanting Medicare For All (Ironically, now that I’m 65 I realize anyone who has to pay out of pocket in order to hear or see or chew already has a form of Medicare For All.), but that I was a misogynist and a racist and an antisemite and transphobic and my subtweeting was synonymous with stalking.
So I am indeed a flawed messenger. Yet a simple truth remains. The Democratic Party has constructed three straight Presidential elections around delaying conversation on anything that matters to working people and they are 1 for 3. Many are responsible for this and none will be called to account. For in today’s Democratic Party no one pays for failure except those who can least afford it.
Nancy Pelosi will certainly be fine. Finer than any semblance of discernible reality would warrant. As she told the New York Times on November 9th in thoughts just shy of coherence, Hakeem Jeffries will be Speaker “in a few days” and Democrats are “set up for what comes next” and people “need a little rest from elections right now”.
And then, there’s Joe Biden.
Perhaps history will see Biden for what he was – a self-reverential fiend who re-defined elder abuse as the maltreatment a President may foist on the powerless rather than confront his personal failings. Watch him now when he sets sail on one of his ever less frequent public appearances, tacking manically between lucidity and gibberish, and try to remember that as late as July 20th he intended to serve a second term.
Soon, he will be humanely transported back to Delaware to dodder out his days planning the library and muttering paid speeches. And when he dies he will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda and obsequious things will be said.
Yet he deserves to lie in quite a different place. Surely the Gaza Strip (and the entire West Bank) will soon be re-colonized as a part of Greater Israel. But in some desolate crater next to the shell of an obliterated hospital there must be a pit reserved for the unknown and unmourned fragments of limbs and entrails no one is alive to claim. And it is there, amid human offal, that his carcass should be pitched, to rot in the hell he created.
Fortunately for the Pardoner In Chief, Democratic strategists have moved on from anything as minor as consequences for war crimes. They’re currently arguing over the efficacy of Identity Politics while ignoring the fact that the Party itself has no identity to articulate, and that transgender rights are not used to foster honest discussions of economic issues but to misfocus them.
Which is why, if you knew where to look, there was something hysterically funny in Trump’s most successful campaign ad against Harris. It attacked her for her supposed openness to funding gender affirming surgeries for prisoners. But she never said that. What she actually said was every transgender inmate in the prison system would have… that most quintessential consultant word and promissory note for nothingness… “Access”! Hoist on her savvy petard, Harris paid the political price for something she never intended to provide.
And speaking of quintessential nothingness, watching Senior advisers David Plouffe #affluent and Stephanie Cutter #well-off and campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon #deep-pocketed commiserate with the PodSave millionaires of the Obama administration over what went wrong with the race was like watching the murder weapons tape off the crime scene. Cutter’s summation of their efforts was magisterial in its idiocy – “We were trying to tell a story and give the impression that she was different without pointing to a specific issue.”
The poor and powerless have no need for Cutter’s stories or impressions. They have quite enough of their own. They would welcome specifics on bettering their lives. They will get none. Only roll-up-your-sleeves-and-fight memes from wealthy consultants who tremble at throwing even one angry punch lest they hit a billionaire benefactor.
Perfectly, after Cutter told her tale of the team’s failed efforts, everyone shared a chuckle that, at least, they aren’t Republicans. It was a deep and satisfying chuckle. The kind reserved not for voters who take elections seriously but for the superior beings who conduct them risk-free.
With apologies to Gore Vidal and his magnificent creation Art Hockstader, the bastards running the Democratic Party are something far more objectionable than stupid. They are monied. And they will prove the most difficult of bastards to dislodge.
