That’s basically how I read it: among T**** supporters and bots, only 73% would vote for T****!
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Obligatory:
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Dozens?
Still:
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Walz did better than I was expecting. His enthusiasm and authenticity is pretty convincing. The small town, football coach and public teacher stuff got kind corny/schmaltzy for me, but what the hell, it seems to be working!
Bill Clinton went on for too long (surprise surprise), but Oprah was awesome, and so was Stevie Wonder!
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And Shelia E.!
I’m grateful that the really good musicians are not usually fascists.
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Just in case you weren’t able to find it:
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Maybe the tide really is turning!
Twenty-one years ago I wrote, “Cause and effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do, decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal and change comes upon us like a change of weather.” And here we are in the late summer weather of the Harris campaign making joy and freedom its key qualities to defend, celebrate, embody.
And here we are, reaping the fruits of seeds we planted, though we never dreamed there would be a harvest rather than endless diligent sowing and tending. Something shifted this summer. Or rather something shifted so gradually no one quite perceived it until we saw it clearly and almost shockingly–not with the nomination of Kamala Harris, not with her stepping forward with confidence and charisma, but in how she was received.
The rest of her essay
I feared that as candidate she’d meet with the racism and misogyny I’d seen before with candidates who were BIPOC or women or both, but the way she was received and lifted up made me feel that I live and we live in a better country. A country that’s ready to be more equal, more inclusive, more creative in its sense of self. A country ready for a Black/South Asian woman president.
Seeing Doug Emhoff and Tim Walz model how to be a straight white man while being deeply kind and devoted was another piece of that change–not that good (white) men haven’t been around, but something about that is different too. Seeing all those white men on the Dudes for Harris campaign and beyond not complaining that they’re not the leadership, the bosses, the center, but figuring out how to get on board a more decentralized platform, a platform for everyone, also feels new and hopeful and needed.
The dramatic contrast between the Democrats and the Republicans right now is the contrast between resentment and joy, meanness and kindness, repression and freedom. Vance and Trump’s inability to open their mouths without resentment and malice oozing out is striking, and theirs is the politics of hate and exclusion. We were talking last night about how a lot of the charisma of MAGA is its dominance, for people who like dominance, and now it’s not dominant, so it’s not charismatic in the way it was.
I’m not saying it’s guaranteed we’ll win this thing, and I’m glad people don’t assume it and know and are constantly reminded we need to work for it, up and down the ballot. But something changed. MAGA and its leader are fading out somehow, or the little man behind the curtain is mumbling about sharks and batteries. Everything changes, nothing lasts forever, but who knew how and when this would wither away? It’s still dangerous, not over yet, but: something shifted.
I had people coming over for dinner last night, and during prep I had the Guardian’s live streaming of the roll call playing, showing every state’s delegates pledging for Harris. It was MC’d by a dj resplendent in a blue satin outfit, and every state had a song (Minnesota had Prince, of course) and the speakers shouted out what is significant or what they’re proud of about their state, and it was shore to shore shining pride, and the South Dakota delegate spoke partly in Lakota, and one of the guests had a sense of pride in this country, she said, she had not before.
Not the America of militarism and domination and exclusion, but just of ordinary people and landmarks in human rights. Wyoming called out that it was the first state to give women the vote, Maryland shouted out that Frederick Douglass was from there. Texans took the opportunity to talk about reproductive rights. Justin J. Pearson of Tennessee was there speaking of “the movement for justice rooted in love.” There was so much joy and energy. That immense crowd was always ready to cheer the next thing and the next. I don’t know that there’s been a convention like it (and Black music and Black joy was a big part of it)…
And here in these tweets below is a really good point reminding us that the Democratic Party itself is not what it was not long ago. AOC entered Congress protesting in Pelosi’s office with the Sunrise Movement; she would’ve been marginalized in that version of the party; this version passed Build Back Better and did, with Harris’s tie-breaking vote, pass the Inflation Reduction Act modeled in crucial ways after the GND; and AOC’s speech last night was powerful and a milestone in what the party is and who it’s for and by.
In this convention a lot of the old moderates and centrists–Obamas, Clintons–seem to be on their farewell tour. As Biden is, but Biden had sometime between his vp time and his presidency become something else, someone else, who embraced labor and unions and climate action as no previous president has. I found these two tweets below eally striking–a reminder that eight years ago this party was bitterly divided and now it’s not.
Not because, as would often have been the case the moderates/centrists have crushed the progressives but because the party has moved left, I’d argue–not exactly the progressives crushing the moderates, but the party and the polity evolving, once-radical values like queer positivity and climate action becoming more mainstream (and the old binary between jobs and the environment left behind for climate jobs). The old guard is retiring, and passionate young congresspeople like Jasmine Crockett and figures like Olivia Juliana are redefining who and why and what’s possible.
Zachary D. Carter
@zachdcarter
Harris seems to have finally ended the intraparty split from 2016. This DNC is comfortably pro-union and anti-monopoly, with AOC and Gina Raimondo making perfect sense on the same stage talking about working families on behalf of an ex-prosecutor. Crowd fired up for everybody.
Michael A. Cohen (NOT TRUMP’S FORMER FIXER)
@speechboy71
I think Biden deserves most, if not all, of the credit for this. One of the underappreciated aspects of Biden’s presidency is that he smoothed over the divisions between the Clinton and Sanders partisans. He bequeathed Harris a much more united Democratic Party
Strikingly the Republican Party’s younger figures rode the wave of bile and spleen that MAGA produced, and older figures corrupted themselves to fit in, and they’re mean spirited and often shady–Marjorie Taylor Green, trafficker Matt Gaetz, Josh Hawley, George Santos, Vance himself, --and I’m not sure there’s going to be such a market for them, going forward, for what they’re selling. Because in a way MAGA has always been “Make America 1958/1858 again”–an effort to roll history and time themselves backward to a nation and culture in which straight white Christian men reigned unchallenged and the rest of us shut up. They were always swimming against the demographic tide, and every four years we have a significantly different electorate as more old white people who vote red die off and more young nonwhite people who vote blue (or greenish) come of age. Maybe we as a nation are coming of age. Becoming more what the promise was from the beginning, getting closer to living up to that promise.
Moe Davis (U.S. Air Force, Retired)
@ColMoeDavis
·
12h
Watching the
@DNC
roll call you’re seeing the faces of America! Black and brown and white and male and female and transgender and nonbinary and old and young and rich and poor and Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and not religious … all are at home with
@TheDemocrats.
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Pehaps the phrase “banana republic” is falling out of use?
If the phrase is on its way to obsolescence, one can only hope it’s a sign of progress.
Typically, a banana republic has a society of extremely stratified social classes, usually a large impoverished working class and a ruling class plutocracy, composed of the business, political, and military elites.[3] The ruling class controls the primary sector of the economy by way of exploitation of labour.[4] Therefore, the term banana republic is a pejorative descriptor for a servile oligarchy that abets and supports, for kickbacks, the exploitation of large-scale plantation agriculture, especially banana cultivation.[4]
A banana republic is a country with an economy of state capitalism, whereby the country is operated as a private commercial enterprise for the exclusive profit of the ruling class. Such exploitation is enabled by collusion between the state and favoured economic monopolies, in which the profit, derived from the private exploitation of public lands, is private property, while the debts incurred thereby are the financial responsibility of the public treasury. Such an imbalanced economy remains limited by the uneven economic development of town and country and usually reduces the national currency into devalued banknotes (paper money), thereby rendering the country ineligible for international development credit.[5] …
Oh.
Damn.
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I have a theory.
Full disclosure: I worked in commercial kitchens professionally for over a decade.
A lot of Americans have grown up eating food that was frozen, canned, heavily processed, definitely not fresh, “fast food” WTFTM, and food not made from scratch. Their palates are not cultivated. This phenomenon is not limited to one’s economic status. 
has had a lifetime intake of… ketchup and hamberders and he’s not alone:
Hmm, that’s not what I was expecting.
Yikes.
Their margin on tourists is probably pretty good, in addition to profiting from the people I theorized about. Pat’s gets its money, one time at least, from the noobs.
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Making the “US politics = team sports” statement a blanket one is incorrect. However, I have directly observed this behavior in low-information voters. You see it when they know that one party is working against their interests, and the other party promotes and actively works for policies they support pretty much across the board, yet they vote against their own interests for the “home team.”
Even the friend I have who won’t vote for T**** still votes straight ticket (R) down ballot, and they are the same kind of assholes.
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Robert Reich on a hot streak here:
… Gore made the same moral choice his predecessors made at the end of every previous American presidential election, and for the same reason: he understood that the peaceful transition of power confirmed the nation’s commitment to the constitution, which was far more important than his own loss.
Trump has had no such qualms. When he lost, he embarked on a coup against the United States and instigated an assault on the US Capitol, resulting in five deaths.
At this moment, Trump and his lackeys are installing loyalists in state and county election offices to deny certification to the Harris-Walz ticket and other Democrats down the ballot.
The essence of Trump’s failure as president – and the fundamental reason he doesn’t merit a second term – is not that he has behaved in childish and vindictive ways or is “weird”.
It is that he sacrificed – and continues to sacrifice – the processes and institutions that undergird America to achieve his own selfish aims.
He abused the trust we place in a president to preserve and protect the nation’s capacity for self-government.
Trump is a traitor.
He and the Republican party – now a personality cult based on Trump’s “big lie” – violate everything America stands for.
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