It's been a rough 12 months for me and Monique, full of disease and death and setbacks and sorrow. We are ground down. Tuesday's election results were a perfect capper.
Early on in the Biden Administration -- henceforth known as the Second Weimar Republic -- I remember saying a couple of things. The first was that it drove me crazy that he was having these remarkable policy and legislative achievements, but was utterly unable to communicate those successes to the American people. The second came as they repeatedly failed to deal swiftly and harshly with an armed insurrection and Trump's attempt to overthrow the American government:
"Feckless Democrats and fascist Republicans will be the ruination of us all," I said, donning the mantle of the Cassandra of the early 2020s.
The feckless Democrats have done their part. Now the fascist Republicans have center stage to themselves.
This was the first time I wasn't directly involved in a campaign since the 2000 election shortly after I moved to Michigan. The reasons were mostly entirely unrelated to the election itself, but I hesitate to offer up a post-mortem for Tuesday's Democratic disaster because I hate to be the guy sitting out on the side pointing out what the players did wrong. However, a fair number of people have asked me for my two cents, so here it is:
Several big lies repeated loudly again and again over four years beat out a thousand small truths mumbled incoherently over the same period.
It would be easy to blame Kamala Harris for that, since it was her name on the ballot. But it feels to me as if these results were baked in before she ever took the lead on the ticket. Had she not run a very strong campaign for her hundred days as candidate this could've been an even bigger disaster for the Democrats. Thanks, Kamala. I appreciate the effort.
Joe Biden was a great Senator and a master of the inside game in Washington. But for all that I admire Biden's accomplishments in his first two years, he also failed to communicate those accomplishments effectively. And it constantly felt as if he failed to understand the moment. He kept trying to negotiate with the GOP of forty years ago but never understood that he was getting clobbered in a back alley of the Age of Misinformation.
"We're the American people," he liked to say after some outbreak of general crappiness. "We're better than that."
"No, Joe," I would think wearily. "I've studied a lot of American history and on average we are not better than that. Not unless we are exceptionally well led."
So what next? I don't know. Our best hope for the next few months is the sheer demonstrated incompetence of Trump and his hangers-on and yes-men. But too many of the worst people have been planning the worst things to give me much hope that we'll be as lucky as we were the first time around.
I doubt I'm entirely done with campaigning, but I'm not sure if I'll be ready to come back off the sidelines in 2026 or not. As with 2024, it would mostly be for reasons not related to the election itself.
If I was in charge of Democratic Party messaging for the next four years -- and nobody is knocking down my door asking me to take the gig -- I'd pick two or three brutal truths and shout them again and again and again. And again and again and again. And again and again and again.
Sadly, I belong to a political party that failed to have the stones to deal effectively with the aftermath of an armed insurrection. I doubt genuine messaging discipline will suddenly appear in our bag of skills.
If anybody cares enough to buy me lunch, I'll tell you my nominees for the brutal truths we should be telling again and again and again. But there'll be no lack of terrible things that the Republican Party will do in the next few years. The problem will be picking just two or three. But the real problem is that the Democratic Party never found a truth it couldn't bury under a nuanced 23-point policy statement.
In the meantime there will be plenty of calls to storm the ramparts in protest of whatever's happening. I'll be more inclined to heed them if the elected Democrats still in office look as if they are finally battling on our behalf. For the last four years it has felt as if they were more interested in fundraising off the rising tide of fascism than in actually defeating it. I'm going to need to see something effective out of some of them before they see another dime out of me.
The institutionalists and technocrats have failed us. It's time for a wartime consigliari to take charge.
All in all, not a very cheerful blog post. But it's not a cheerful time. The grey November rains outside my window match my mood melancholy.
Winter is often a time for rest and recovery. Our new year starts around the winter solstice for good reason. I'm planning some rest and recovery for myself this winter. I wish you all the same.
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