Kamalamania!

The Enthusiasm Is Infectious, but Can It Last Until November 5?

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Boy, did I get it wrong when I publicly predicted on this blog that the political pressure on President Joe Biden to withdraw from his 2024 re-election campaign would sink the Democratic Party’s already slim chances of retaining the Presidency in the November 5, 2024 election.

I thought that the public pressure from various Congressional Democrats on Biden to give up his campaign would fatally destroy his odds of beating Donald Trump in 2024 as he beat him in 2020. Instead, once Biden actually withdrew in a letter (two letters, actually, one announcing his own step-down and a later missive endorsing Vice-President Kamala Harris as his replacement) on July 21, nearly a month after his bizarre and woefully weak performance in a televised debate with Trump, Biden’s withdrawal seemed to release a torrent of energy and support among grass-roots Democrats.

I had expected a fratricidal civil war within the party as various candidates jockeyed to replace Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket. I also worried about Kamala Harris’s five big weaknesses as a Presidential candidate: she’s a woman (and we all know what happened the last time Trump ran against a woman), she’s part-Black, she’s part-Asian, her 2020 Presidential campaign flamed out quickly, and through most of Biden’s term her favorability/unfavorability ratings have been even worse than his. Instead the party quickly coalesced behind Harris and she’s closed the so-called “excitement gap” that was previously favoring Trump.

She’s closed more than that. The New York Times/Siena College poll has Harris leading Trump by four points in three of the key “battleground states” that will decide the 2024 election – Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – though other polls have the races closer than that. She’s invigorated the Democratic Party and convinced many skeptical Democrats that they now have a chance not only to keep the White House but to preserve their Senate majority (important because if the Republicans control the Senate, it’s unlikely that any Democratic appointees will be confirmed to anything) and win back the House of Representatives.

I’m writing this on Saturday, August 17, two days before the Democratic National Convention is scheduled to begin in Chicago. At this time, the convention is essentially going to give President Biden his gold watch and send him off into retirement – even though he’s still going to be President for five more months. Then it will be time to celebrate new nominee Kamala Harris and her anointed running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who’s everything Harris isn’t: a white guy, affable and nonthreatening, who looks like he just stepped out of the world of Leave It to Beaver; a 24-year National Guard veteran; a high-school teacher and football coach.

Walz seems to have got the vice-presidential nomination ahead of the two previous favorites, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. While Minnesota isn’t considered a “battleground state” – the last time a Republican Presidential candidate carried it was 1972 – the way Pennsylvania and Arizona are, Walz’s affable middle-class values are expected to help Harris win over skeptical Midwesterners. Walz also got the nod after Shapiro’s hard-line stance for Israel in the genocidal war in Gaza, and against college students who protested it, alienated Arab-Americans and other voters crucial to Biden’s 2020 win, especially in Michigan.

Also, Harris asked Walz point-blank if he ever wanted to be President, and Walz answered, “No” – just what Harris wanted to hear, given Shapiro’s naked ambition and record of throwing his political allies under the bus to advance his own career. (For more on this read Chris Lehmann’s commentary in the August 2 The Nation at https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/josh-shapiro-vp-kamala-harris-wrong/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%208.2.2024&utm_term=daily). But one of the biggest things that got Walz the nod to be Harris’s running mate is the word “weird.” He’d been posting on the Internet about Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator and Hillbilly Elegy author J. D. Vance (who for some reason likes to refer to himself as “JD Vance”), and their “weird” ideas about the country’s future, especially about how it should treat women. The word “weird” stuck and became an Internet meme.

And both Trump and Vance seem perversely to work hard to live up to the “weird” name. Trump’s odd perorations at his rallies about electric boats and sharks, his seemingly approving mentions of Hannibal Lecter (which as far as I can tell are part of his argument that other countries are flooding the U.S. with mental patients; he seems to be saying that at least some of these immigrants are cannibals), his ongoing insistence that windmills slaughter birds and his invocation of Sarah Palin’s old slogan “Drill, baby, drill” as his solution to virtually every problem certainly sound “weird,” especially to people not locked into the Right-wing media bubble.

Vance, in turn, is on record as saying the Democratic Party is run by “childless cat ladies” and that people with children should have more votes in elections than people without. He’s on record as calling for a nationwide ban on abortion – which even Trump, who boasts about having packed the U.S. Supreme Court with Right-wing justices who reversed Roe v. Wade, realizes is a political loser – and said the only reason for post-menopausal women to exist is to help raise and take care of their grandchildren. (Vance himself was raised by his grandmother, whom he called by the oddly infantilizing name “Mamaw” – pronounced “Ma’am-awe.”)

“Project 2025”: The Right’s Apocalyptic Blueprint for America’s Future

It also doesn’t help that, while Trump is trying to distance himself from “Project 2025,” a 900-plus page white paper the ultra-Right Heritage Foundation prepared as a guidebook for the next Republican Presidency (much the way they wrote a similar document in the late 1970’s that was largely adopted as a playbook by Ronald Reagan when he took office in 1981), its executive director, Kevin Roberts, wrote a book about it called Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America. The original subtitle was Burning Down Washington to Save America. Dawn’s Early Light was scheduled to be published on September 24, but it’s been put off until after the November 5 election. As much as Trump tries to edge away from Project 2025, at least 200 people who worked on it were former members of the Trump administration – and the foreword to Dawn’s Early Light was written by J. D. Vance.

The full Project 2025 report – called Mandate for Leadership, the same title the Heritage Foundation used for the set of recommendations they gave Reagan in 1981 – is available online at https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf. It begins with a preface that explicitly links it to the Reagan agenda: “Today, America and the conservative [sic] movement are enduring an era of division and danger akin to the late 1970’s. Now, as then, our political class has been discredited by wholesale dishonesty and corruption. Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today: Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of Transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.

“Overseas, a totalitarian Communist dictatorship in Beijing is engaged in a strategic, cultural, and economic Cold War against America’s interests, values and people – all while globalist elites in Washington awaken only slowly to that growing threat,” the preface continues. “Moreover, low-income communities are drowning in addiction and government dependence. Contemporary elites have even repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970’s ‘radical chic’ to build the totalitarian cult known today as ‘The Great Awokening.’ [No actual Leftist or liberal I know calls it that. - M.G.C.] And now, as then, the Republican Party seems to have little understanding about what to do. Most alarming at all, the very moral foundations of our society are in peril.”

Among the most alarming parts of Project 2025 are its calls for the legal redefinition of the American family to include only traditional heterosexual families: a married man and woman, and their children. “The next conservative [sic] President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors,” Project 2025 reads. “This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI), diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”

The document then goes on to attack pornography. “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of Transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare,” the report reads. “It has no claim to First Amendment protection.” It calls for revival of the 19th century Comstock Act, which has not been used for decades but is still on the books, not only to ban pornography but to abolish medication abortion altogether through its clause forbidding the mailing of any substance or device usable for abortion or contraception. Project 2025 also calls for abolishing the Department of Education and replacing the Department of Homeland Security with an agency more single-mindedly focused on securing the border.

One key part of the Project 2025 agenda – the blandly named “Schedule F” – was already enacted by President Donald Trump in an executive order in October 2020. This called for the removal of civil service protection for 50,000 top-level federal government employees and their reclassification as “at-will” employees whom the President could fire at any time. Trump and the architects of Project 2025 that served in his administration were frequently stymied by career bureaucrats in the federal government who were loyal to the country and the ideals of good government, not to Trump personally. (Richard Nixon had much the same problem during Watergate.) Trump’s solution was to unilaterally abolish civil-service protection for 50,000 federal workers, returning us to the so-called “spoils system” by which administrations were filled with people who owed their jobs to the party in power, and knew it.

The “spoils system” lasted until the 1880’s, when President James A. Garfield was assassinated by a man who had volunteered for his campaign in hopes of getting a job out of it, then turned bitter and angry when he didn’t. In 1883, two years after Garfield’s assassination, Congress passed the Pendleton Civil Service act, which according to Google “required government jobs to be awarded to individuals based upon merit and not political affiliation.” Because he was busy first campaigning for re-election and then, after he lost, plotting illegal means to stay in power regardless of his defeat, Trump never had the chance to implement “Schedule F,” and on January 22, 2021, two days after he took office, President Biden rescinded Trump’s executive order. But turning the apolitical federal bureaucracy into an instrument of his political will has remained a major priority of Donald Trump’s – and we can expect him to do just that if and when he returns to the White House.

Harris, Walz and “The Politics of Joy”

When Vice-President Harris announced Tim Walz as her running mate, she said at a joint campaign rally in Philadelphia, “We both believe in lifting people up, not knocking them down. Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it? We both know the vast majority of people in our country have so much more in common than what separates them.”

And Walz added, “Thank you for bringing back the joy.”

By contrast, Trump recently told a rally audience in Manchester, New Hampshire, “We are a nation in decline, we are a failing nation. We are a nation that has lost its confidence, its willpower and its strength. We are a nation that has lost its way.” And on his social-media site, Truth Social, he posted this screed against Governor Walz: “TIM WALZ WILL UNLEASH HELL ON EARTH! He’s already pulling in MILLIONS to WIPE MAGA OUT.”

Ordinarily, Americans like candidates who feed them a message of hope and optimism. In 1980 and especially in 1984, when he won a landslide victory and carried 49 states, Ronald Reagan’s campaign proclaimed “Morning in America” and managed to make Right-wing politics seem cool. Taking office in the middle of the Great Depression in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt said in his first inaugural address, “[T]he only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

But, according to CNN political analyst Stephen Collinson on August 7 (https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/07/politics/harris-walz-happy-warriors-analysis/index.html), “Running a campaign rooted in hopefulness and good cheer at a time when many Americans feel demoralized and tired could backfire. After all, years of decaying economic security exacerbated by high inflation and elevated grocery prices during the Biden administration created the kind of conditions in which Trump’s populist demagoguery can prosper. If the vice president misjudges the national mood, her campaign could come across as oblivious to the concerns of many voters. It was noticeable, for instance, that while Harris pledged to bring down prices and fight for the middle class, her speech on Tuesday [August 6] was light on details of exactly how she would alleviate the economic stress that many people are feeling.”

That’s exactly what happened to the Democrats in 1968, the last time an incumbent Democratic President withdrew from his re-election campaign and installed his vice-president as the party’s new nominee. After a galvanic year marked by the assassinations of civil-rights leader Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Democratic Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, and a convention in Chicago (also where it’s going to be this year) that literally turned into a bloodbath in the streets, Hubert Humphrey emerged from the convention and proclaimed the “Politics of Joy.” Later he realized how out of touch that sounded and changed it to the “Politics of Hope,” but he lost anyway as Richard Nixon and George Wallace between them got 57 percent of the vote to Humphrey’s 43 percent (a dramatic reversal from Lyndon Johnson’s liberal landslide just four years earlier) and set the stage for a Right-wing political and economic ascendancy that has continued, with only minor interruptions, ever since.

So I’m torn about Kamala Harris, not in terms of whether to vote for her – I’ve already voted for her in every election in which I could (for California Attorney General and U.S. Senator) – but in terms of whether she can win. My heart is with her, while my head thinks it’s preposterous to believe that a part-Black, part-Asian woman who bombed badly in her first Presidential campaign (though, then again, Biden bombed in his first two) and has been generally less popular than Biden can get elected President could actually get elected President in 2024. It’s comparable to believing in Santa Claus.

So far the Right in general and Donald Trump and J. D. Vance in particular have not been able to settle on a strategy to attack Harris. Trump made a big to-do when he addressed the National Association of Black Journalists and acted – or pretended to be – surprised that Harris is now identifying as African-American. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said. “So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

For once, Trump had said something with which I could identify. I certainly knew Kamala Harris was [East] Indian-American – that first name alone gave it away – but I didn’t realize she was Black as well until she said so in an early debate in the 2020 Democratic Presidential primary campaign. At the same time I think it’s preposterous that Donald Trump is saying, “Is she Indian or is she Black?,” without considering the possibility that she could be both. I even posted on my Facebook page, “How can Kamala Harris be both Black and Indian? The same way Donald Trump can be both German and Scottish.”

But the attacks on both Harris and Walz are surely coming. Already J. D. Vance has criticized Walz for retiring from the Minnesota National Guard months before his unit was deployed to Iraq. Walz served 24 years in the National Guard and Vance served six months in the Marines, though neither of them saw combat. Walz was stationed in Italy and trained soldiers to use weapons of war, including AR-15 style rifles, while Vance did his tour of duty in a comfortable, air-conditioned office in Baghdad’s Green Zone (the ultra-exclusive American enclave which Iraqis were not allowed to enter) writing press releases.

It’s not surprising that Trump’s campaign resorted to attacking Walz’s service record given that one of his campaign managers, Chris LaCivita, was behind the heinous “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” effort in 2004 that tarnished John Kerry’s service record in the Viet Nam war and made it at best useless and at worst counterproductive. They even trotted out the old military insult, “stolen valor,” to denounce Walz. It’s also not surprising that Walz didn’t make Kerry’s mistake of waiting three weeks to respond. Instead he was on it almost immediately, saying it was wrong for either himself or Vance to attack the other’s service record and thanking Vance “for your service and your sacrifice.”

More to the point are the attacks coming from the Trump camp against Harris for having once advocated for a single-payer “Medicare for All” health care system and a ban on fracking during her 2020 Presidential campaign. Trump’s people have claimed that these “radical” stands prove that Harris is a closet Leftist who will destroy American values and undermine our aspirations for energy independence. Only in the topsy-turvy world of American politics could supporting a guarantee of health care for all Americans (something every other advanced industrial country in the world does for its citizens) and stopping a uniquely environmentally destructive means of fossil-fuel production when we should be moving away from fossil fuels be considered negatives.

But the attacks on Harris from the Trump campaign serve a double purpose for Trump and the Republicans. At once they make her seem like a dangerous stealth radical to large numbers of Americans who have been conditioned to believe national health insurance is “socialism” and a fracking ban is a dangerous sellout to environmental extremists, and a hypocrite to progressive voters (like me) who supported her old positions and resent how she’s pulled back from them.

We can expect a nasty campaign from Donald Trump, just like the ones we got in 2016 and 2020. The more Republicans like former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy; Brendan Buck, former aide to two previous Republican Speakers (John Boehner and Paul Ryan); Republican pollster Frank Luntz; and his own former aide, Kellyanne Conway, try to tell Trump that he can win on the issues of the economy, immigration and crime, the more he launches personal insults. So far he’s questioned her racial identity, denounced her laugh as “insane,” claimed that footage of a Harris rally at a Detroit airport showing 12,000 people was faked with artificial intelligence while his own rallies are drawing the biggest crowds anybody’s ever seen (they aren’t), and even proclaimed himself “better looking” than Harris.

Antics like this, which remind many voters of why they voted for Biden over Trump in 2020, led The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser to dub Trump Harris’s most effective campaign surrogate, “Donald Trump talks about Joe Biden constantly,” Glasser said August 16 on the PBS-TV show Washington Week. “He is also almost frenetic with the shifting of the media's attention and the public's attention, the excitement and crowds that Kamala Harris has generated. He has demanded, basically, pull the spotlight back to me, me, me. And, of course, when Donald Trump then talks and talks and talks, as he did just yesterday, he gave another press conference at his home in Bedminster, and, you know, this is the opposite of a disciplined, focused message about Harris. He's making the campaign about himself in a way that is very likely to benefit the Democrats.”

Some Things to Look Forward to About Harris

From my point of view it will be really nice to see Kamala Harris, not Donald Trump, take the oath of office as President of the United States on January 20, 2025. After Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 (a race I called correctly, largely on the basis that thanks to three decades of Republican propaganda attacks on her, Hillary Clinton was one of the most hated women in America) I didn’t think there’d be a serious chance of a woman getting elected President in my lifetime. Now there is. It’s also nice that Kamala Harris is a decade younger than I am. I thought I’d reached a generational milestone when Obama got elected – the first President who was younger than me (I was born in 1953, Obama in 1961) – but since then Trump (born 1946) broke Ronald Reagan’s record as the oldest elected President and Biden (born 1942) broke Trump’s.

It will also be nice to see a genuinely liberal President from California, the state where I’ve lived all my life. So far the only California-born or California-resident Presidents have been Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan: not exactly a record to be proud of. And it’ll be nice to see a part-Asian, part-Black woman be the one who denies Trump his long-hoped-for second term. In fact, Kamala Harris unwittingly personifies everything about the new, struggling-to-be-born America that Donald Trump loathes: a mixed-race woman who’s professionally competent, and who can legitimately proclaim that she once prosecuted criminals while Trump is one.

In fact, one of the things I love about what’s happening to Trump is that the charge to hold him accountable is being led largely by strong, capable, powerful Black women. New York Attorney General Letitia James brought a case against his business, the Trump Organization, and won a judgment that the entire company was a fraud. Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis is heading a prosecution against him for leading a “racketeer influenced and corrupt organization” in his attempt to steal the 2020 election. Washington, D.C. district court judge Tanya Chutkan is presiding over special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump for interfering with the 2020 election results nationwide. And now Kamala Harris has emerged as his principal opponent in the 2024 Presidential election.

In 1927 Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, was a member of the New York branch of the Ku Klux Klan and got arrested at one of their rallies. Donald has never let us forget that he is the son of a Klansman both literally and spiritually. I love the karmic debt Donald Trump is currently having to pay for his decades of racism, sexism, moral rot, narcissism and corruption. There’s always a chance that he’ll be able to weasel out of it once again, as he’s done so many times before, aided by a large slice of the American voting population that has virtually accepted him as a new Messiah. (After the attempted assassination on July 13, both Trump himself and a lot of Republican supporters claim he had been spared literally by divine intervention.)

But for now, it’s Harris who’s riding high, gaining in the polls and looking more and more like a winner. And that’s a good thing, too, because while Trump looks to take America backwards (his slogan remains “Make America Great Again,” or “MAGA” for short, which led Hillary Clinton in 2016 to ask rhetorically, “Just when Donald Trump think America was ‘great’ and when does he want to return us to?”), Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to take America forward to a multi-racial, multi-cultural, environmentally responsible, economically healthy future in which every American has a shot at the dream. And isn’t that what America is supposed to be about?