Tactical Victories and Strategic Losses
Well I sure didn’t see THAT coming.
The morning before Biden stepped down I had breakfast with a dear friend who was very worried about Biden’s chances, so I repeated much of “Why Biden is Going to Win” to her. After Biden stepped down I texted her “forget everything I said, I have no idea what’s going to happen now.”
The dust has settled, and with it there’s good news that is also bad news. We have a definite tactical victory, but it emerged from a strategic loss.
The good news is that my concerns about the clown car of the Democratic Party did not come to pass. I was terrified that Biden stepping down would lead to a fatal “Democrats in Disarray” media blitz that would only be aggravated by a half dozen Democratic candidates throwing the party convention into, well, disarray.
Clearly I failed to factor in Biden’s political acumen. The handoff from Biden to Harris was an example of flawless political jiu-jitsu from which the GOP and Trump have not and may never recover. It’s as if the clowns piled out of the Democratic Party clown car only to execute a perfect performance of ‘Swan Lake.’ And the revelation that along the way Biden was also orchestrating a complex multinational hostage swap with Russia was simply the coup de grace.
So now I’m even more confident that Biden — that is to say now Harris — is going to win. A reelection-free Biden is steering the ship, while an energetic and frankly quite cheerful Harris is shining a spotlight on the crawling absurdity of the Trump movement. By November 6th all GOP tigers will be eating each other’s faces.
But what are a few of the longer-term implications? What can we learn from this?
That’s the bad news about the good news — yes, Harris is an even better candidate, but the American people have meanwhile been robbed of the second term of a vital president. Biden has demonstrated that while he sucks at televised debate, he is still a very effective senior statesman. And who robbed us of Biden’s second term? The oligarch owners of the mainstream media, and the oligarch megadonors who have bought our political parties. Strategically we have lost, because democracy was overwhelmed by oligarchy.
The media had adopted and was maintaining a propaganda drumbeat about Biden’s age that threatened to overturn his candidacy — indeed, it’s part of why he stepped down. Shielded by the First Amendment and engorged with cash from foreign owners and contributors, the mainstream media ignored everything bad about Trump and everything good about Biden and would have pounded the “age” drum up until election day. I still think Biden would have won, but I’m not a Beltway insider with access to all the data — clearly Biden felt there was a risk.
But beyond the media was the money. Megadonors and not-as-mega wealthy donors both pressured Biden to step down, in large part due to their being soaked in the propaganda mentioned above. As Hal Sparks described it on the Stephanie Miller Radio Show, they threatened Biden’s campaign directly immediately after his disastrous debate performance and “he told them to pound sand” as Sparks put it. But then they came back a week later and threatened all the down-ticket Democratic races around the country. While Biden may still have been confident he could win, he would now, Sparks suggested, feel responsible for a much softer victory at the expense of the rest of his party.
I thought Sparks’ analysis a good one, straightforward and matching the timing of post-debate events (an initial strong anti-Biden outcry, a cooling of that criticism, and then a sudden renewal of that critique after a couple of weeks.)
And what it tells you is our electoral system has been bought. So yes, Harris may now win, but we have serious, serious problems with the system itself. Let’s be clear — Biden has been an excellent president. He has turned around both the US economy and our foreign relations following the one-two punch of Trump and Covid. More importantly he has at the same time put the lie to the fifty years of Reaganomic trickle-down policies and revealed them for the oligarchic shell-game they always were.
But our excellent president will be limited to a single term, because a monopoly mass media owned by extranational and national oligarchs decided he should no longer be the candidate for re-election. His time in office has been cut short by People With Money extorting down-ticket support out of the Presidential candidate, and that’s a serious strategic loss.
Now, I’m not naive and I’m not crying for Biden — the presidency of the United States is the realest of realpolitik. Every backstabbing move is on the table and if you’re gonna try you gotta be ready. Biden certainly knows that. So he played, he won, and then he lost, and then on the way out he won again. Fine.
But WE suffer, as a people. I can’t compare Harris to Biden and maybe she’ll be better or maybe she’ll be worse as a president, but she will certainly be different as a president. And whatever Biden was going to do for us, he’s not going to do it now, and the people who decided on that change weren’t us. And that should enrage everyone in a democracy. The wealthy and the international oligarchs didn’t shoot him, but they definitely shot down his candidacy, and what they did is no less antidemocratic.
So okay, one of the important notes is we must get money out of politics. Stick it on a post-it on your screen. Citizens United must be overturned. Antitrust laws have been seeing some enforcement, and that enforcement must grow. Regulations limiting financial chicanery that were overturned under Reagan must be re-established. If we keep our democracy this election we’ll be lucky to do so, and our luck won’t hold out forever.
And the last thing to keep in mind is that we have to be ready to pivot on Harris as soon as she wins. On November 5th she’ll be our best friend, and on November 6th she’s got to become the target of our many demands. We don’t have time to fool around. Citizen’s United must be overturned. Women’s reproductive medical privacy must be re-established and secured. Election laws strengthened and gerrymandering eliminated. SCOTUS must be cleaned up. Trump’s administration and its crimes must be investigated. Trump must be jailed for the crimes of which he already has been and soon will be convicted. We have to expand the Supreme Court, raise the federal minimum wage, levy windfall taxes on the corporations that have been gouging Americans, and accelerate programs to address climate change and pollution, and on and on and on.
Harris is going to win, and Trump’s name is going to be mud. Let’s celebrate that when it happens… and then we really, really need to get to work demanding our government fix the many, many problems that it’s facing at the federal and state levels. Harris winning will be the end of Trumpism and hopefully the turning point in the latest world-wide authoritarian push, but it’s only going to be the beginning of a LOT of very hard work. And we have to start it right away.
Because all the tactical victories in the world won’t save us if we don’t alter the strategic playing field by reinforcing sustainable pro-democracy policies. If we don’t fix the rigged game we will inevitably lose.
