Did the Democrats always know Kamala Harris would lose?
Or: When will America get its first female president?
I suspect the Democrats knew all along that Kamala Harris could not win.
They knew she was a bad candidate.
I have no evidence, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they intentionally threw her to the dogs. I suspect Gavin Newsom and Josh Shapiro thought about running when Biden stepped back, but knew they did not have time to make a case for themselves in such a short time, and that Trump was already too strong. So instead they let Harris take the fall.
Will we ever have a female president?
I am a little disappointed that Americans have not had a female president so far. I had wished Hillary Clinton would play that role.
When I compare Kamala Harris (and even Hillary Clinton) with female leaders like Angela Merkle or Maggie Thatcher, I see a huge difference.
While Harris is always smiling and nodding, cackling and giving off trendy feel-good sayings – in other words, while Harris is basically goofy – Merkel and Thatcher came across as serious, strong and self-confident, even frightening.
You got the feeling, when Thatcher told her kids to clean their rooms, you knew the rooms were going get cleaned. You knew Harris’s kids would have lured her into a long pointless discussion and in the end she would have needed up cleaning the rooms herself.
More politics than hate
Merkel and Thatcher could also easily and naturally explain policy and theory. You asked them about the economy, they would tell you how it worked and how it needed to be fixed. They talked in a way that you felt was specific to them – not vague sayings or generalities, but what they spent a long time thinking and discussing and worrying about.
You ask Harris, on the other hand, and you would get an answer clearly designed to be “the right answer”– yes on fracking, and he has a gun at home.
Or she had gifts to give to her voters: You asked her about the housing crisis, and she said she wanted to give but 20,000 to first-time homeowners. But she didn’t explain where the housing crisis came from, or how to solve it. Thatcher and Merkel gained the trust of voters because they could answer those kinds of questions, and they could answer them because they spent a lot of time thinking and talking about them.
Both Thatcher and Merkel spent more time explaining their reasoning than attacking the other candidate. That made them appear to know what they were doing. Harris spent 90% of her time disparaging Trump – teenagers can do that (I know teenagers who do it just as well as Harris does), it’s not a reason to vote for them.
In the end, I suspect that the first female President of the US will be a conservative, like Merkel and Thatcher.
Will the Democrats learn anything from their defeat?
I think the election was also in a big way a referendum on the social direction the country has taken.
The Democrats went too far left, embracing stupid ideas like boys in women’s sports, or changing the language in a way meant to be inclusive of minorities but excluded the majority, and yes I am talking about Wokism.
A lot of Americans never bought into it and in fact felt threatened to it. I agree with them: Wokism and the current extreme left are not trying to save anyone, they are trying to destroy a good section of American society. I believe the conservatives and the majority of Americans reject all that and tried to express their anger at it and fear of it by voting for Trump.
The best thing that can come from this election would be if the Democrats learned their lesson and took a step back from identity politics that they have gone too far, which is dividing society into groups and pitting one group against the other. (This is all stuff I described in detail in my book Call Me Toxic.)
Will the Democrats return to the middle?
I suspect not – to judge from the doubling-down I am seeing already, they are more convinced than ever that half off America has to be re-educated.
I think Democrats are too in love with themselves – the educates classes deluded into thinking they are smarter than anyone else and therefore are the rightful rulers of the universe and the uneducated must obey.
My thoughts on the next four years?
My stomach turns when I think of the next four years. Not because Trump is going to establish a military dictatorship, but because it will be as stupid, hateful and discouraging as the years of his first term.
It will be filled with everyone constantly screaming and yelling at each other, throwing mud at each other, beating each other over the head in an amazing variety of ways.
But please remember this:
We survived the first Trump term, and we will survive this one.
We live in the best world that has ever existed on this planet, full of more equality, rights, opportunities, knowledge and luxury than the planet has ever seen before.
America, Europe, the West in general are strong and can react to and overcome a crisis. Even if worst comes to worst her in Europe – if Trump drops Ukraine and Russia marches to the border of Poland – that would be terrible, but even that we can overcome. It just takes some doing.
I’m sorry this happened, but I’m still looking forward to the good that might come of it, and I know we can all overcome any challenges we are given.