According to news stories, with less than three weeks to go, the U.S. presidential election is a dead heat. And since I’m not one of those pundits who expects rapturous applause for saying “time may tell” or that it hinges on swing states and demographics, I’m instead going to ask what the heck is wrong with you people.
I don’t mean American voters. Well, not all of them. I mean the political parties. Because according to pundits, many news stories and certainly both parties, your opponent stinks so badly he or she could knock a buzzard off a manure wagon.
Donald Trump is widely and convincingly depicted as a narcissistic bullying fantasist who’s too lazy and self-absorbed to do the work of chief executive, and Kamala Harris as a giddy cackling nitwit who’s too ignorant and flighty to do it. But if it’s true, I ask both parties, why are you struggling so mightily to pull ahead?
It’s not the first election where you wonder how on earth both parties could have found such miserable candidates, nor were they all recent. But putting aside nostalgia for the days when Zachary Taylor versus Lewis Cass was an unappealing choice, I want both to explain why, say, Harris is bleeding support among Blacks and Hispanics, especially men, while Donald Trump is losing white women. Why can neither pull ahead in Arizona?
It might be understandable for Democrats to struggle if the GOP had nominated Ronald Reagan or Republicans if the Democrats had nominated FDR. But you didn’t and you know it.
So I ask again: why aren’t you winning easily if your assessment of the situation is even remotely accurate? If you want to fess up that actually Trump is as decent as Harris is wise, it would explain the polls but very little else. Whereas if you want to insist that your adversary is so awful you wake up every day wanting to shout it at voters who don’t understand when you just say it, and I sympathize, what explains the polls?
I’ll tell you. It’s that the other candidate is as bad as you say, but yours is as bad as they say. When the Democrats chose Harris, albeit in a seedy palace coup not an open convention, I said she was an unattractive candidate but not conspicuously unfit for office like Trump on his record or Joe Biden on medical grounds. But the more I see her, and how terrified her party is of exposing her to a spontaneous setting, including a tough interview, the more I’m convinced she really is a giggling witling. As for Trump, well, what you see is what you get. Ugh.
If either party saw this column, and I don’t delude myself on that score, I imagine with the typical self-defeating “pragmatism” of the political classes, they’d brush it aside saying they can’t worry about theoretical abstractions, they have an election to win. And yes, voting day looms. When an NBC headline recently intoned, “Harris weighing where to put more distance between her and Biden,” I immediately thought, “What the heck are you doing wrestling with this dilemma in the home stretch, let alone publicly?”
On reflection I added, “Do you seriously think the key is what to claim the differences are rather than what they really are?” Because to paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in substance, but substance is interested in you.
I realize most political operatives approach elections with a seducer’s mentality. They’re not thinking about the morning after. But one of the parties currently struggling desperately to defeat a hideous opponent will succeed. Then what?
Their adversary and his or her weaknesses will essentially go away on Nov. 6, with whatever ill grace and even putsch ambiance. (And remember, Democrats started that “stolen election” poison in 2016, not Republicans in 2020.) But their candidate and his or her weaknesses will not. On the contrary, they’ll have their “finger on the button” and a “bully pulpit” from which to babble and rant to the discredit of their party and the detriment of the republic.
So for your own good I ask for some serious, urgent introspection. You must face your own flaws not so you don’t lose, though it might help even now, but in case you win. What if Harris is every bit as ditsy and divisive as Trump is disconnected from reality and dignity? What’s your plan for the morning after?
To have any hope of conjuring one up, you urgently need to assess just how much of the criticism aimed at your candidate, and your party that supports him or her with real or feigned enthusiasm, is valid. If you won’t, or can’t, victory will be a poisoned chalice.
So again, what’s wrong with you people? We need to know … and so do you.
National Post