Kicking the can down the road
Nominating Kamala Harris falls far short of solving the problems of a two-party constitutional oligarchy
“In her most extensive remarks yet about the political earthquake over the last five weeks, [Nancy] Pelosi said that [Joe] Biden’s June 27 debate debacle and the aftermath revealed two troubling signs making it all but inevitable that [Donald] Trump would return to the White House: The president was performing poorly as a candidate and his campaign operation was also flawed.
“‘My goal in life was that that man would never set foot in the White House again,’ she said of Trump, pounding the table nine times for emphasis and to explain why she acted. She added that she couldn’t stand to see ‘an unfolding of events that were just putting rose petals in front of him to go there.’”[1] (Washington Post reporter Paul Kane actually counted the number of times she pounded the table?)
The truth is we still do not have a proper explanation for Joe Biden’s debate performance. Some had previously perceived a decline in his cognitive abilities. Some, including Pelosi, had not.[2] For want of solid evidence, I had dismissed the suggestion as ageist—yet more ageism from ageist kids whose ageism I have experienced myself.
The immediate problem was that people thought he suffered some form of cognitive decline, whether you call it Alzheimer’s, dementia, or anything else. That perception handicapped him and his debate performance strongly reinforced that perception.
The editing on the Post piece is poor here, but it appears Pelosi was also critical of the campaign[3] for its mind-bogglingly arrogant and authoritarian response to the criticism, essentially just telling people to fall in line—hardly a good look when one of their arguments against Trump is that he’s authoritarian and it was hardly a tactic likely to work with rich donors—they aren’t rich so people can tell them what to do—anyway.
In essence, this is one of the few times I agreed with Pelosi—a leader in the Democratic Party’s neoliberalism—and I have to give her tactical credit for refusing to be a “messenger” for the “hundreds” of people calling her: She insisted instead that they should call people (presumably high up) in the campaign,[4] let them deal with the deluge and, of course, force them to confront a problem that they had refused to deal with. She thereby avoided being the “bad guy” who could be dismissed as a single individual “betraying the president.” This was very well played and I need to learn from it. She’d have outfoxed me here.
In the longer term, the questions return to what they were: Will the Democrats ever give up their ruinous embrace of neoliberalism that leads them to embrace appalling candidates? That they ran Hillary Clinton in 2016, leading to the very problem we face today of keeping Trump from returning to the presidency, points to a far larger problem than Biden.
And, will the Democrats ever actually start building a record of accomplishment rather than disappointment? Particularly galling was their failure to pass voting rights reform that then seemed to be the only hope of even keeping them in the game against a longstanding Republican project to establish a competitive authoritarian regime in which election results are effectively rigged to ensure single party hegemony. But, as well, failures to address the climate crisis, rein in white supremacist gangsters (so-called “police”), codify Roe v. Wade, raise the minimum wage, and curtail social inequality are existential to many voters Democrats supposedly rely on, all reinforcing my conviction that Democrats as a whole very much prefer sitting in opposition where they can complain about the Republicans but no one actually expects them to accomplish anything.
But, damn the record, I keep seeing pundits and #VoteBlueNoMatterWho folks, that is, people with the privilege of being able to tolerate the status quo, point to Biden’s record of supposed “accomplishment.” Seems like a participation trophy to me.
For now, though, it appears Trump has plenty of problems of his own,[5] even before you get to the criminal charges and convictions against him, so very much for the moment, it appears we’ll probably manage to kick this can down the road. (Yes, this is a very low confidence prediction of a Harris victory in November.)
[1] Paul Kane, “Pelosi on Biden: ‘We did not have a campaign that was on the path to victory,’” Washington Post, August 7, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/07/nancy-pelosi-joe-biden-dropped-out-reelection-campaign/
[2] Paul Kane, “Pelosi on Biden: ‘We did not have a campaign that was on the path to victory,’” Washington Post, August 7, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/07/nancy-pelosi-joe-biden-dropped-out-reelection-campaign/
[3] Paul Kane, “Pelosi on Biden: ‘We did not have a campaign that was on the path to victory,’” Washington Post, August 7, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/07/nancy-pelosi-joe-biden-dropped-out-reelection-campaign/
[4] Paul Kane, “Pelosi on Biden: ‘We did not have a campaign that was on the path to victory,’” Washington Post, August 7, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/07/nancy-pelosi-joe-biden-dropped-out-reelection-campaign/
[5] Mary L. Trump, “The Worst People,” Good in Us, August 8, 2024,
