POLITICS

Keeping Up With The US Presidential Elections

An alternative to the Kardashians show

I love the US election season. It’s like watching reality shows. There’s drama, suspense, performance, euphoria, and heartbreak. There’s an entire apparatus of political commentary, polls, podcasts, advertisements, and other paraphernalia built around the show.

Some seasons are just pure drama, like the Bush/Gore recount dispute. I wonder how the world would have turned out if it were Al Gore and not George W. Bush Jr., who was the POTUS when 9/11 happened.

Being the climate leader that Gore is, I’d speculate he would at least have opted for an EV tank before rolling into Iraq or Afghanistan. Perhaps he would have avoided attacking the oil and other industrial assets to avoid a pollution hotspot. Considering human beings are the biggest carbon emitters, I wouldn’t expect him to take human lives so kindly.

There are also some seasons that are intellectually stimulating, like Obama/Romney. For a change, there were no longer two white old men in the cockfight. They could both speak in complete, coherent sentences that were grammatically correct, although that wasn’t such an unusual phenomenon back then. And neither were scrambling to hide any skeletons or panties.

The shows since then have been disappointing. But even The Bachelor doesn’t promise consistency across its seasons.

Despite the matchfixing by the Democrats in 2016 to prop up Hillary Clinton, I was mildly excited to have a season that wasn’t just two men sparring each other. The scattered shards of the broken glass ceiling were exhilarating.

I was so caught up in the euphoria that, for a brief period, I entertained the thought of flying to Washington, DC, to watch her take office. But the flight ticket prices elbowed me out of my reverie. So, when I cried my eyes out on that cold January day when Trump took office, I didn’t also have to regret a wasted expense.

Playing the game of what ifs, I wonder: what if they hadn’t fixed the game and instead let Bernie Sanders win the primaries? Would Trump have been elected? Would the US be talking about criminalising abortion or about universal healthcare?

I don’t watch cable TV. Living in Germany, I might have learned a word or two of German if I had that vice. Instead, my poison during the elections is podcasts, usually the left-leaning ones.

It isn’t that I’m intentionally locking myself in an ideological echo chamber. But even the pop psychiatrist, Dr.Frasier Crane, might advise me against listening to conservative radio. Hypertension, palpitation, and frustrated screaming fits might follow.

So, I hadn’t seen an old and withered Biden for a really long time — not until a frightened friend sent me the highlights of the presidential debate. My friend was deeply invested in the election.

As a naturalised citizen from one of the shithole countries, as Trump put it, getting a US passport was my friend’s ticket to a stable existence. He was grateful for the upgrade. And seeing it crumble in the arthritic hands of two senile white men was painful for him to watch.

But after watching the debate clips, I could no longer unwatch them. Could people really understand the slurring words coming out of Biden in stutters? Standing next to him, even the braggadocious Trump sounded smart, as long as one didn’t check the facts. But in a world of alternate facts, why would you do that?

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: And — did you ever watch the debate afterwards?

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I don’t think I did, no.

Oh, thank God. He must have spared himself some horror. Perhaps if he had rewatched the circus, at least as a debate prep for the future, he may not have claimed he gave it his all.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: And if you stay in and Trump is elected and everything you’re warning about comes to pass, how will you feel in January?

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.

So, without being able to unwatch Biden’s slurs, when I also watched him call Zelensky President Putin, I started wondering if the reality show would replace the contestant. There have been loud whispers about his replacement for several weeks now. But for reasons undecipherable to even God, the matchfixers in the Democratic Party are still behind Biden. Or at least they shy away from coming out clean.

Even when they rally the voters on their duty to protect democracy against the pathological liar, they seem to have forgotten their part in it, of presenting at the minimum a lucid candidate. Their strategy is to have people vote against someone instead of for a compelling leader.

With Biden’s gaffes and calls for his replacement mounting, one name I keep hearing is Kamala Harris. I could already see Indians celebrating her victory. It doesn’t matter whether she cares about an Indian heritage; her Indian name is all we need. But the dreams of a victory aside, I was wondering if there was any chance she’d get elected.

Apart from Biden, she is the Democrat with the most name recognition, which is a common argument. If name recognition is all we need, then Anthony Wiener might do the job. Most Americans knew more than they’d care even about his wiener.

In the four years that she was VP, I’d hardly seen or heard of Kamala Harris. I wouldn’t discount the possibility of negative press coverage. After all, as the only black woman to hold the federal elective executive office, the press corps must have found itself without a standard operating procedure.

Or perhaps that’s the role of a VP — the behind-the-scenes courtier, which in today’s parlance is a ‘key advisor or governing partner’. The vice presidential onboarding memo might instruct in screaming red: don’t steal the President’s thunder.

So, when scrambling to find a replacement for Biden, I’m bemused to hear Kamala Harris as the most viable candidate. Aside from being hand-picked by Biden to be his running mate, what’s the qualification?

Without even a formidable participation in the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primaries, where’s the proof that she can survive even a debate with a non-convicted fact-speaking candidate, let alone Trump’s slanderous campaigns? What inspires trust that she will defend democracy against the boogeyman?

The other disturbing undertone in propping Kamala Harris as the replacement candidate is an age-old tradition of asking the woman to clean up the man’s mess. Even in a stable political environment, if we ever experience that, I’m unsure if the US will choose a black woman to be its president.

But 2024 is light years away from a stable political landscape. Granting Kamala Harris the task of defeating Trump when there’s less than four months remaining until the election is akin to giving her an impossible task, knowing full well that she will fail.

I’m not cynical enough to believe there can’t be a black female POTUS. After all, there were naysayers even when Obama ran in 2008. But for that to succeed, the candidate needs time to campaign and inspire the voters. The party and its PR apparatus will need to prime the public. Without any of that, dropping Kamala Harris into the frying pan of defeating Trump is to crush any presidential aspirations she can muster in the future.

Even as I hate myself for saying this, to defeat a white supremacist such as Trump, the Democrats might need another white man, preferably a straight, young one, and ideally someone with a vision for the future that goes beyond just killing the White Walkers.

A reality show it might be, but one that has real-world implications even in countries that are several oceans away. Like Squid Game, the outcome of this election might decide how many will live or die across the world. Unfortunately, in the winner-take-all election, an increase in voter turn-out may not tilt the election results the way it did in France or the UK.