Ay Kamala!

The US Election Campaign Explodes

Life, as Ferris Bueller once observed, moves pretty fast, but politics can move even faster. It’s only two weeks since I posted a newsletter suggesting that Joe Biden should resign so that the Democrats would have even a fighting chance of beating Trump. At that point, Trump had just been shot at, and it was beginning to look as though his brush with martyrdom might have gifted him the presidency.

In the week that followed, the MAGA Republican National Convention confirmed the Trump ascendancy with the cult-like fervor that the world has come to expect from such occasions. Delegates accessorised with bandages stuck to their ears to hail the miraculous salvation of the chosen one who ‘took a bullet for democracy’ and still found time for a photo-op. Trump kissed the mounted helmet of the fireman who was killed during the attempt on his life. Only the Pentecostal serpent handlers were missing, but maybe I just didn’t see them

From a British point of view, it was darkly comical to see three of our most notorious political parasites hovering round the rancid corpse of the Republican Party like flies at a dungheap. There was Farage, already bored with Clacton and looking for photo ops with his great friend Donald to boost his international profile, only to discover that his great friend was too busy to see him. Liz Truss also rocked up, exuding her usual glazed conscience-free narcissism in a desperate search for relevance or simply someone who might recognize her.

Eventually that person turned out to be Farage. Not necessarily a dream date for either of them, but beggars can’t be choosers.

Russell Brand, the former leftist revolutionary messiah, alleged rapist and born- again Christian, could also be found slouching towards Milwaukee, ‘reporting’ on the convention for his new scam Rumble. Looking like a cross between the pick up artist character in Magnolia and a swami-cum-sex guru, Brand treated his readers to breathless dollops of his trademark self-regarding, pretentious prose:

To know Christ is the preeminent aim in the life of every believer and to go with Our Lord and Saviour into this event was a giddying thrill indeed. The convention is of course about power. POWER. Proximity to power, need for power, love of power, disgust at power, longing for power, rejection of power.

Goodness. That sounds like something to steer clear of, even if you do have Jesus walking beside you. Despite his attempt to maintain an aloof ironic distance from these proceedings, Brother Russell was clearly entranced:

Hope might be the Spirit within us that reaches beyond time and space to some immutable principle, ever-present yet often lost, a spirit you may find when your life goes up in a phosphorous flash in a war-zone or when your choice for president is shot, or near shot, or resigns, or near resigns, when the country you love is lost, or near lost.

Whatever that meant, it was not a pleasant prospect to think that the author of this gibberish might one day be ‘reporting’ from a White House with Donald Trump in it, drowning in a sea of libertarian tech bros cash.

And then, Joe Biden resigned and everything changed. As US presidential resignations go, this one came in late, and might have been disastrous.

In 1968, against the background of the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson resigned earlier in an electoral year in March, taking his party completely by surprise. This was followed by a chain of calamities: five days after his resignation speech, Martin Luther King was shot dead in Memphis. In June, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan. In August, the bitter contest over who should be Johnson’s successor resulted in the most tumultuous political convention in US history in Chicago.

And in November, the Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey lost the election to Richard Nixon.

Biden’s resignation took place in very different circumstances. For the first time in American history, a sitting president resigned because he was losing his cognitive faculties. For months, Biden had been trailing Trump in the polls in the key states that he has to win. His disastrous debate performance, followed by an equally unconvincing attempt to rehabilitate himself with an interview with George Stephanopoulos, did nothing to help him or his party.

Johnson’s resignation came as a shock to his party. Biden’s was a relief. US collusion in the ongoing massacre in Gaza is as much a stain on Biden’s record as the Vietnam War was on Johnson’s. Nevertheless, in terms of domestic politics, Biden’s resignation was a courageous and selfless act. It cannot have been easy to admit to himself, his party, or his country that he was no longer capable of doing his job. Biden might feel that he deserved better, but whatever his domestic record, it was difficult to imagine him winning a brutal electoral campaign against an opponent who exudes malevolent energy.

And so Biden did the right thing, and his halting delivery and obvious frailty reminded his country why he had to do it. But then he was clever enough to immediately nominate Kamala Harris as a successor, and the Democratic Party has been clever enough to rally round her, thereby eliminating any possibility of a fractious 1968-style convention in August.

And even though Biden should have resigned earlier, the speed with which his party has rallied round Harris has already begun to make up for lost time. Within hours, grassroots and big donor contributions to the Harris campaign had gone through the roof.

Apart from money, Biden’s resignation has also brought voters. By last Friday, more than 100,000 new voters had registered to vote, the majority of whom were under thirty-five. Many of Harris’s voters are women. On the evening the resignation, 90,000 black women logged on to an online meeting to support and raise money for Harris.

Last Monday, 160,000 white women joined a ‘Karens for Kamala’ Zoom meeting, which has inspired more than 30, 000 men to sign up to a virtual ‘White Dudes for Harris’ meeting with Pete Buttigieg last night. Not bad for the woman Brother Russell called a ‘socially inept and empty instrument of intransigent, institutional power, solely offering cutaneous and genetic novelty to a famished pack of secularist devotees.’

Keep those cutaneous novelties coming, I say. Because the Democrats now exude determination, optimism and belief that have been conspicuously absent these last few months.

This transformation is also due to Biden’s nominated successor. Despite her vulnerabilities in previous campaigns, Kamala Harris has so far shown herself to be relatable, inspirational, tough, energetic and focused, and fully aware of the historic importance of the campaign that she now finds herself heading.

In less than a fortnight, she has become a rallying force for the broad electoral coalition that might just defeat Trump. That outcome is by no means guaranteed, and no one should think it is. Harris still trails Trump in many national polls, though some have put her ahead. But until Biden resigned, the Democrats were drifting towards a painful defeat.

Trump and his team had built their campaign on ‘Sleepy Joe’. Now they have had to pivot against a candidate who has the potential to reach constituencies that they cannot even dream of - a woman of colour, the daughter of a Jamaican father and Indian mother, who, unlike Hilary Clinton in 2016, does not act as if the presidency is ‘her turn’, but knows that she has to win it.

Now the felon has to run against the prosecutor, and even though Harris has not always done well in previous campaign debates - she was unravelled by Tulsi Gabbard in the 2019 nomination process - she and her team will know how to prepare for any encounters with a man who can barely put a coherent thought together.

Already, Trump and his supporters have responded to Harris in exactly the way you would expect them to, with misogyny, racism, lies and stupidity. Overnight, Harris has become a ‘radical leftist’ and a ‘Marxist scholar.’ Do these imbecilic lowlifes know what a ‘Marxist’ is? Clue: it’s definitely not Harris.

Birtherism has also reared its head again. A chorus of Republicans have called Harris a ‘DEI hire’ - because a woman of colour who becomes a district attorney and vice president could never have any abilities of her own.

Megyn Kelly has called Harris a woman who ‘slept her way to the top.’ According to the far-right ‘commentator’ Laura Loomer, Harris used to be an escort, and can’t have children because she has ‘had so many abortions that she damaged her uterus.’ Loomer is one of those rare ‘commentators’ who is vicious enough to make Katie Hopkins sound like Joni Mitchell. Not many people would post a tweet like this, about the wife of Senator Mark Kelly - one of Harris’s potential vice presidential nominees - who was shot thirteen years ago:

There’s only one person without shame here, and it isn’t Harris or Kelly. If these MAGA trolls sound vile, it’s because they are vile, and their vileness is likely to become even more strident and unhinged in the coming months.

But right now the vileness, stupidity, dishonesty and sheer insanity of the MAGA movement is beginning to receive a far more significant pushback than Biden managed, even when he scraped to victory in 2020. Because if Harris continues to cut through with women voters, then Trump the rapist may come to regret overturning Roe v. Wade and tangoing with the grotesque moral vacuum that is JD Vance. One minute Vance is sneering at ‘childless cat ladies’ and suggesting that Harris is some kind of welfare queen ‘collecting a government paycheck’, the next he can be found back in 2022, saying things like this:

Every day George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California. And, of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity – uh, that’s kind of creepy.

Personally, I suspect that voters who are not antisemites and racists will find statements like this ‘creepy’, and will avoid the rent-a-hillbilly like the plague. Many of the objects of Vance’s contempt may also be galvanized to show up at the ballot box and vote against the good old boy who once compared Trump to Hitler until he found that it was no longer in his interests.

Harris already has Beyoncé, and before long she may well have Taylor Swift. She has political momentum and grassroots support from voters who could not rouse themselves to go out and campaign for Biden. Depending - in part - on her choice of VP, she has the ability to win key states in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and North Carolina.

As things stand, Harris is now at the centre of a movement sizzling with a positive political energy that Trump and his legions cannot even begin to emulate. To put it baldly, everything nice, decent, human, and cool about America is flocking towards her, while everything that is rotten, cruel, and corrupt is coalescing around Trump.

I am not naive enough to believe that fascistic nationalist movements can be defeated with smiles, hugs and laughter. But elections can be won by left and left-of-centre coalitions that engage and inspire voters with a positive and optimistic vision of the future, particularly when such coalitions are up against a movement like Trump’s, which cannot do any of these things.

The next four months will reveal whether Harris and the Democrats are able to sustain this. But if they keep it up, then America may well see its first female president - and a woman of colour at that.

Last year, many pundits believed that the right and far-right would be the main beneficiaries of the 2024 ‘year of elections’. But then last October, Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition saw off the Law and Justice Party in Poland. A left-green-centrist coalition has stopped the National Rally in France. Modi has lost his majority and Labour have crushed the Tories.

It remains to be seen whether the Democrats can continue this trend. But if they do, then Laughing Kamala will be the one who laughs loudest, and whatever happens next, there will be millions who will laugh with her.