Liftoff!
It was a coincidence that the film I saw yesterday afternoon was Fly Me to the Moon, a slight but enjoyable summer entertainment set against the backdrop of the Apollo 11 mission.
I’d purchased my ticket late last week, days before President Joe Biden announced that he was abandoning his reelection bid and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him atop the Democratic presidential ticket. But my spirits have ascended since Biden’s bombshell dropped.
What I told one friend in a text is that I feel a bit like Alastair Sim’s giddy Scrooge in the great 1951 British take on A Christmas Carol, waking up from a nightmare to find there’s still time to work toward a better, happier, more equitable today and tomorrow.
It’s clear that Kamala Harris will be the Democratic standard-bearer, soon to be paired on the ticket with a white male meant to calm voters made uneasy by the presence of a mixed-race woman at the top. I get that. I hope Harris will select astronaut-hero Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona or a Southerner with bipartisan appeal such as Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky or Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina. Or maybe Gov. Josh Shapiro of swing-state Pennsylvania. Regardless, I believe the Harris ticket will at least succeed in broadening an Electoral College map that had been steadily reddening under Biden.
Will the Biden-Whoever ticket be able to beat Trump-Vance? Who knows? I certainly don’t. But I like the odds of a Democratic victory a whole lot more today than I did when I woke up on Sunday morning.
Kamala Harris is smart, accomplished and well-equipped, as a prosecutor, to frame the case against convicted felon Donald Trump in a way that Biden showed he couldn’t during that disastrous debate. She’ll have her stumbles, for sure, and Trump’s lies about her will land with some voters. But Harris’s advantages over Trump include her age, her resume and — given Trump’s predatory history with women and his success in torpedoing Roe v Wade — her gender.
Their bluster to the contrary, the Trump Team has been knocked on its heels by this sudden shift in the presidential race. Trump planned to run against an enfeebled opponent and was so certain of victory that he doubled down on MAGA sycophancy and vitriol by naming JD Vance as his running mate at the Republican National Convention. But that was so last week!
This week has brought the dawn of a new Democratic ticket that has turned resignation and despair among the party faithful into enthusiasm and excitement.
I know my emotions will yo-yo between delight and alarm in the coming months, rising and falling with the polls and daily events. Some days, like today, it will seem to me as if anything’s possible. On other days I will fear that all is lost. But what I was dead-certain of until Sunday was that President Biden was going to lose. Vice President Harris may not. That allows for a cautious optimism that I’ll take any day of the week over the feeling I’d had just a few days ago that the Democratic Party was glumly conceding to disaster.
I admire Joe Biden for doing the right thing, however reluctantly, and agreeing that it was time to call it a career. Whatever happens this November, history will prize him for putting his party’s and the nation’s needs in front of his desire to, as he’d put it, “finish the job.” That job has been handed over to Vice President Harris, who may or may not be able to finish it but will give the effort her all.
Now, let’s get back to that movie title, which references a song of the same name on the soundtrack.
Fly me to the moon/Let me play among the stars/And let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars
Frank Sinatra sang those words in 1964, backed by the Count Basie Orchestra. Fly Me to the Moon is a terrifically catchy love song that’s entrenched in the Great American Songbook — a jazz standard covered by scores of artists in addition to Old Blue Eyes. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the lunar surface, played the Sinatra version on cassette during the Apollo 11 mission. It’s therefore of a piece with planting the Stars and Stripes in the Sea of Tranquility on July 20, 1969.
But what you probably don’t know is that when songwriter Bart Howard penned this Yankee Doodle classic 15 years earlier, he dedicated it to his partner, Thomas Fowler. Their romance would last 58 years, until Howard’s death in 2004.
Fly Me to the Moon, among the most mainstream of pop songs, might thus be seen as a celebration of same-sex relationships that to this day are barely tolerated by much of Trump’s base and are vilified by homophobic MAGA diehards who also view trans Americans as abominations.
Things, in other words (In Other Words having been Fly Me to the Moon’s original title) are often not what they might seem. Trump — who’s already called Kamala Harris “dumb as a rock” despite his own questionably earned MBA and caveman’s command of the English language — will spend the next 100 days portraying the Democrats’ change at the top of their ticket as a move of desperation by a party that already has failed the American people.
It’s nothing of the kind. Rather, this is a smart and dynamic pivot by a party with a nearly four-year record of success. And it might yet result in the election of America’s first female president.
Which is why, although I’ll inevitably come back down to Earth, at this moment I’m reveling in this audacious moonshot. I feel like I’m playing among the stars. I’m even allowing myself to wonder what November might be like on Jupiter and Mars.
