On the Moment.
Notes on Kamala.
1: Harris had to muzzle her history as a prosecuting attorney in 2020 to make it in a world beset by a racial reckoning. To stop the bleeding and rebuild coalitions, she must embrace it in full now. In doing that, she has to say a lot of things that Joe couldn’t. She has to get on a microphone and tell the grassroots workers robbed by BLM that their lives matter more than Shaun King’s. She has to tell the mothers and fathers harassed and abused by the prison abolition grifter class that this is their party, that they aren’t proud boys or tradwives for wanting the streets safe for their children and loved ones, that Kev from Bellevue who set up shop in their neighborhood and grifts in his non-profit isnt the heart of the progressive movement and they are, and that Kev will be fine if he takes his black ass home, but we won’t if we keep abusing working class people. Harris can get a lot of people back in the room and off the non-voting bench if she tells them that the party can make poetry out of the pragmatic again, and dear god I hope she does.
2: I am certain of three things in my life. I’m black, my mama and big mama loved me, and Gretchen Whitmer is a great two-fisted liberal puncher who will verbally beat the fucking breaks off JD Vance if they get in a debate. Vance is enough of a neurotic pathological liar to make Drake look like James Baldwin, and descended into a hardcore, white supremacist-friendly red-pil hell when….gasp…his movie didn’t become a box office smash. You break posers like that when you expose them, when you clinically hit them at their lack of a core when you show them that they aren’t ready for this moment. Whitmer, who has got a lot of shit done in Michigan, is a genuine liberal champion ready for this moment. Vance isn’t ready for anything past a party at Scotty Browne’s.
3: and as I say that a voice comes out of my head and says “Robert, what the hell are you talking about? You know the hysteria of most men. If Whitmer tells even half the truth about Vance and Harris tells half the truth about Trump, the masses of maga and dark web America will do nothing but accuse them of yelling. You know the cruel folly of representational politics. You know the hysteria of most progressive men who see the losses of 75 percent of your friends as some retribution for Hillary Clinton being a flawed candidate. What happens if Kamala loses? What happens when she is human and has an imperfect moment? What happens if she evokes difficulty instead of magic and the Birnam Wood bro and the Birmingham Alabama bro feel she’s a little too bitchy? What happens when she has to be a politician, to compromise and not deliver on an issue they want when they want it, and she has to do the thing that has made man cause havoc in every civilization and millennia when she has to tell them “no”. “
4: I tell that voice that if Kamala takes the risk of gambling on a new America, then that’s the hill I want to die on( and the hill I will die on because if Trump wins, my housing and my disability are gone). That if Kamala is going down, then let her and Gretchen go down swinging. That if the Donald and the Ohio grifter get in the ring with them, then let them leave with less than they came in with. Let them remind the KIRO Jan 6 traitor class who they are voting for, and if they do they are killing America that every Kev from every suburb combined. Then let the rest of the country know that if the ship of America goes down in the last three months, then it will go down with us fighting for the best of our democratic verities. Let a new America come from there.
5: Jon Hamm has to be Doug on SNL.
6: Thanks, Joe.
