Kamala Harris Can Win

Edited by Spencer Ackerman

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Hi friends, as you obviously know by now, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. And you know what? Presidential politics of this sort just simply isn't what I cover. Obviously I have opinions about elections-qua-elections, like anyone else, but I don't put a lot of stock in them. You know what I put stock in? Staying in my lane(s) and thriving. So here's someone who is good at this elections stuff: our own Sam Thielman. Maybe I'll do a foreign-policy sum-up of Biden, and I'll definitely dive into Harris' own, but the time for that isn't now, since to do it now would be half-assed. Here's Sam!—Spencer 

JOE BIDEN WILL BE A ONE-TERM PRESIDENT, as everyone sane had suggested would be best, beginning back in 2019. He didn’t want to be that, but then he just sort of spaced out during the debate in June, which was especially bad since the whole thing had been assembled specifically to put him on familiar ground so he could go full Corn Pop on Trump. For weeks after that debacle, his aides kept leaking horrifying stuff to the New York Times and Politico, notably that his memory was so bad he was only capable of performing his duties for six hours a day. That was all troubling enough, but then he got Covid, and it turned out he’d been photographed very likely giving a bunch of other people Covid at a Mexican restaurant in Nevada. 

The death spiral was spiraling, and it seemed like the last person to realize that was Biden, all while he was claiming to have unique political judgment. When you have a run of bad luck that severe, you can count on the only constant in politics: At your weakest, all your most trusted friends and allies will line up around the block to shiv you.

At the risk of stating the obvious, Biden is a unique actor in American politics. There are a lot of reasons for his ascent, but I think in terms of the qualities that give him such a powerful appeal to his base, his deference to Obama is somewhere near the top. He delightedly mugged his way through eight years of having a Black boss, and he’s (however reluctantly) ceding power to a Black woman—hopefully the first to hold his office. Electoral politics are, depressingly, about vibes, and Biden’s vibe is “nice old guy who isn’t racist and can be trusted not to say something horrible to your gay friends.” This is obviously not perfectly descriptive of the man—you can destroy it with any complaint you’d care to make about the crime bill or his horrible record on Gaza or any number of other sins of both omission and commission over his long career—and this is only my analysis, not math. But I think he reminds old people of the way they’d like to be seen and remembered.

I have no idea what’s going to happen. Biden has endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, which, despite a bunch of doofuses reminding us all that his delegates can do whatever they want, seems like a pretty much done deal to me. She’s the only one who can legally spend his $91 million war chest. That war chest will probably get a lot bigger now that it seems like there’s a snowball’s chance in Hell of a Democrat beating Trump.

Dropping out of the race was clearly the right thing for Biden to do. The U.S. presidency shouldn’t be a throne, but it shouldn’t be a vacant chair, either. It’s become increasingly clear that there simply hasn’t been anybody flying the plane for the last several months, and while the stuff that has gone right or failed to burn down is certainly credit due to Biden’s largely competent cabinet and staff, I now wonder exactly how much he even understands about things he could have materially changed, like the genocide in Gaza. Biden’s departure raises the specter of legal challenges adjudicated by the reactionary Supreme Court. But these days clearing your throat funny raises the specter of legal challenges adjudicated by the reactionary Supreme Court. The high court and the Fifth Circuit are increasingly vectors for the kind of screeching red-faced lawlessness we saw at Der Ringenmanie 2024 last week. That the leaders of the Democratic Party can demonstrate that they are capable of ceding power in an orderly fashion, even internally, is encouraging.

I would never have voted for Kamala Harris in the primary. I have a good friend who suffered directly because of the way Harris treated prisoners in California. The Democrats ought to be ashamed of themselves for forcing voters to side with a collection of people as universally dishonest and cruel as public criminal prosecutors. But I also think that purely pragmatically, it would be good to have someone in the Oval Office who will appoint a better and more effective attorney general than the feckless Merrick Garland, and who will be familiar with—and ready to contest—the work of the far right in a judiciary that has already stripped half the population of its most basic bodily autonomy. [Also, the whole not-a-fascist thing—even if the Democratic Party seems disinterested in confronting the material conditions that produce fascism and keep it at the electoral gates.—Spencer.]

Which brings me to the opposition. I’m out of clichés to describe the pure wickedness of Trump and his coalition. Suffice it to say that while Trump is personally a dirt-stupid bigot, both racist and rapist, whose own obvious geriatric neurological problems have not made the news simply because they are no longer new, he is not a patch on the Luftflotte of justly marginalized freaks circling above him, waiting for only the barest sliver of permission to enact their agenda of extermination and retribution. Perhaps the most prominent of these is JD Vance, who has asked that the periods be removed from his name, presumably because he objects to periods on general principle. These are the zealots who want to eliminate gay people even as an abstract concept; who want to make the government a monarchy and reinstitute chattel slavery. I’m not going to print the slur I hear every time Trump talks about Biden and Black people, but I’m pretty sure his fans hear it, too. Bigots are behind Trump because he’s the most likable among them.

Trump may have beaten Hillary Clinton, but he ran against Obama. For years now, “concerns about Biden’s age” have often been code for “fear and hatred of Kamala Harris, who would become president if he died.” There was already and remains a serious threat of violence in November; it seems likely to me that Trump’s army of bigots will respond to her nomination by heightening that threat yet further.

Again, aesthetic concerns ought not to be primary in politics, but, at least in democratic elections, they often are. The question that most matters to the coming election is now whether a Black woman can beat a racist in a popularity contest. I don’t know the answer, but I know which side I’m on.

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