Glyn Ford on losing an election
“107 Days” by Kamala Harris published by Simon & Schuster
Gerald Kaufman’s mean labelling of Labour’s 1983 manifesto, The New Hope for Britain, as “the longest suicide note in history”, now has a challenger in Kamala Harris’s autobiographical take on her 2024 evisceration by Trump. It marches the reader through the countdown to defeat, once Biden fired the starting pistol with his belated withdrawal after that train-wreck of an early debate with Trump. Cognitive decline was closer to cognitive collapse, and his close coterie long knew it. He was the Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Presidency, the parallel to that liberal justice, who, in staying on the Supreme Court to death at 87, helped gift the Court’s control to Republican fundamentalists.
Biden’s promise to be a transitional President was overridden by the self-interest, self-denial and sheer selfishness of family and close confederates to the cost of the American people. Consequently, Harris, in playing solitaire, dealt herself a bad hand and played it worse. She did all she could to obstruct any selection process that would have given her the political space to put clear blue water between herself and the deeply hated Biden. Objectively, he had good deeds to his name. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act didn’t reduce inflation, but offered $900 billion of jam tomorrow, while voters battled today’s bar-codes of rising prices. For Harris, her ace was that she was a different person; young(er), black and female, from the male, stale and pale President. All is incommensurable with the concerns of those voters not already captured by the two-party camps. They were looking for different policies, not personalities, and they were nowhere to be found.
Throughout, there is a staccato refrain of “if I’d only had more time”, “in a longer campaign, I might have had time to better bring the message home”, and “I did not have time, in 107 days”, drumming through, but the problem was the message, not the messenger. For Harris, becoming the candidate was supposed to free her. “I would finally have control of the podium to reclaim my narrative and my identity’. The policy prison doors were opened, but she lurked in her cell. She boasted that she was “the only person who would preserve his legacy” and in a campaign death moment, when asked on live TV what she would have done differently, to Biden said, “there is not a thing that comes to mind” and sucked the last breath of life from her campaign. She had been horrified by her running mate’s love-in debate with JD Vance when he fell into Vance’s consensus trap, but not as affright as Walz should have been by her confession and concession.
Was there an alternative path open? Kamala was tied in knots of her own making. Her desperate seeking of Biden’s endorsement, when the ticking clock was on her side, was unneeded. She was way out in front of a race that, as yet, had no runners. From a standing start, there were no clear challengers that could have bested her in the days or at most weeks available, for a mini-primary. The very process would have broken the umbilical link with Biden and his clique. Yet she was never, despite her pronouncements, her own person, but rather the creature of machine and money. She wouldn’t have been in the position she was if there were any doubts about that.
In denial, Kamala’s prescription is to sell to the Democratic establishment and the country’s voters, the idea of “one more heave”. Do the same, but do it better, and longer. Yet the Biden victory in 2020 was a practical demonstration of “dead cat bounce’. The future terrain will be tougher, with gerrymandering and an increasingly supine media, mountains of Musk money and a quisling Supreme Court. While recent elections in the States have shown some mid-term blues for Trump, there is little to suggest any existential threat to the coming election of a Republican successor of the same kindred ilk, save for the mayoral election in New York of Zohran Mamdani. The US is not a one-size-fits-all political constituency; for House and Senate, bespoke politics is in order. The answer depends on the question, and it’s not the same every time. Rather, there are lessons for the Democrats across the country in Mamdani’s style, focus, and going back to basics. In 1992, Bill Clinton was right, “It’s the economy, stupid”. In this coming year’s midterms and again in 2028 in the battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, it will be right again.
All this has global import. Trump’s new National Security Strategy has Washington boosting the far-right, “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory” and lauding, what they term, as “the growing influence of patriotic European parties”. In the US, the Democrats and the Republicans are emblematically represented by a donkey and an elephant. The elephant is clearly in musth, berserkly raging at the dying of America’s global dominion, while the donkey, at least, in 107 Days is all but dead. We have to hope, in all our interests, that somewhere out there is a next-generation Bernie Sanders capable of performing the kiss of life.