Democrats, Let's Seize This Moment and Make It Work for Us! Do Something!

We got a shock in 2016 when, for just the fourth time in American history, fifth if the contingent election of 1824 is included, a majority of voters did not succeed in electing the President of the United States.  I must admit, I really thought that Trump would fade, as he always had done, after it became clear to the voters, even Republican voters, that he was a fake, a phony, a con artist, a grifter, and that he was in no way either an American patriot, nor a "God-fearing Christian."  But he succeeded in his deception of the Republican party, or his cheating in the primaries, which was alleged but not proven, and won the nomination, and then benefitted from the quirky electoral college to win the White House.  

As I expected it would be, his Presidency was a disaster.  He hung on by keeping his predecessor's economic policies in place at the Fed, living off the prosperous economy that was the work of eight difficult years under President Obama. He raised the taxes on the working class in a devious way, calling it a "tax cut" which only benefitted billionaires.  And his reckless and incompetent leadership during the pandemic caused the economy to crash and the death of more than a million Americans.    His only achievement, if you want to consider it so, was the appointment of three corrupt extremists to the Supreme Court, each one of whom told bald faced lies about their belief that Roe v. Wade was "settled law" and they would protect those rights if appointed. 

Birds of a feather.  Or, as my Mom used to say, "One liar to another is still a liar."  

We were shellshocked.  It took a while to recover from that disaster.  The day the news media finally declared Joe Biden as the President-elect in 2020 brought millions of Americans out into the streets in joyous celebration which was cut off by his illegal, seditious attempt to subvert the Constitution and fight against the peaceful transfer of power.  That should have disqualified him from ever running for public office again, and the fact that still hasn't happened baffles me as a law abiding and patriotic American who believes implicitly in the Constitution. 

Four Years and Another Joyous Celebration

We're being cautious, and I get that.  We are fighting against a media that is, for the most part, owned by and controlled by corporate interests who think they will benefit from a second Trump Presidency.  And let's be honest, we're giving inordinate attention and credibility to a plethora of polling data that is largely being interpreted, and in some cases manipulated, by the media that uses them to support their own contentions.  

Let's let that go for just a minute.  We just went on a political roller coaster ride of unprecedented proportions.  We went from three weeks of seeing the Democratic party split up into factions over whether or not the President should stop his campaign and let someone else "more electable" be the nominee, or whether he should stand firm and keep going.  And along with that, the ideas being floated around of a quick, "brokered convention," mini-primaries and the basic nullification of 15 million primary voters who followed the rules and supported their candidate, or whether there was a "next in line" candidate capable of beating Trump.  

I'm going to say this here because it needs to be said.  The fact that there's any doubt at all about whether or not Trump can be beaten is a sad, sad commentary on the state of American politics and evidence that we have some real hard work to do to clean up what is a gigantic mess and a disparity of wealth distribution that makes it seem impossible to clean it up.  That a man who, by all political standards, was an absolute failure at politics but continues to be supported by Republican leadership, who is an immoral, worldly, antichrist who continues to be supported by conservative Evangelicals who call themselves "Christian," can still be in a position to get enough votes out of our outdated election system to win the highest office in the country is a damning problem for this country that reveals an inherent weakness because we've failed in our responsibility to educate our electorate.  

OK, rant over. 

But what I want to celebrate, and where I want to focus attention, is on what has transpired from the moment President Biden ended his re-election campaign, and endorsed Kamala Harris.  The "brokered convention" talk died down almost immediately.  Almost overnight, the party coalesced around her potential candidacy.  There was a collective sigh of relief, and a collective burst of energy that has only increased in its scope.  If those polls we were so intently watching before the President ended his campaign were as accurate as some of us seem to believe, and we are looking at the data and the trends that have formed since then. we have seen an unprecedented political shift in this election campaign. 

There is no other campaign to which this one can be compared that bears any resemblance to the political transformation that has taken place.  I think the pressure from fear that Trump might actually be able to eke out the support through our undemocratic electoral college system to win the election without a majority again was released when the Democrats came up with a way to make a quick shift without disenfranchising their primary voters or sacrificing a year's worth of their campaign and field a candidate with competence, experience and intelligence far beyond what Trump can compete with, and win.  

Even those polls, skewed, tampered with, manipulated and uninformed as they may be, carry all kinds of signs pointing to a Democratic party win in November, not just for President, but way down the ballot into the Senate and House.  But the difference between where Harris is now, and where Biden was just four weeks ago, is significant and substantial.  She is well ahead of where Barack Obama was against Mitt Romney coming out of the party conventions in 2012, and where Hillary Clinton was coming out of the DNC in 2016.  

Maybe we need to notice some things the media wants us to slip passed without noticing.  Like the fact Trump has remained about the same place through all of this.  There was no "bounce" after the assassination attempt, and there's not a lot of clarity regarding public opinion indicating people think of it as more of an assassination attempt and less of a staged event.  There was no bounce after the Republican convention.  In fact, there hasn't been a bounce on that side of the polling data for quite some time.  On the graphs, the red line is pretty straight, and it has a very slight but visible angle on the down side.  

But I think our best course of action is to take our cues from the convention and its speakers, and experience the joy that radiated out from Chicago over the course of those four days.  Even here among those of us who live in the city, the mood was upbeat, in spite of the doom and gloom dire warnings of possible repeats of the 1968 convention, with police and protester clashes in the streets.  Protesters did show up, though not even in the numbers that they did in Milwaukee last month at the GOP.  It was hard for the media, who wanted so badly to focus on that aspect of this week, to get anything worth the attention they wanted to give it.  

Realizing that we do have fears and doubts generated by the sheer awfulness of Trump and the general attitude that because he's such a predictable scumbag, we just expect that kind of awfulness from him, if we get past that, what we see is that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are now the frontrunners in this election.  The convention bounce they are experiencing, actually acknowledged this morning, shockingly, on a major network's Sunday news program, has put them in a position similar to where Barack Obama found himself in 2008, and in a campaign that bears some similarities to the direction in which that one headed.  Even Nate Silver is saying that she is now favored to hit 287 electoral votes, with trends continuing upward.  

The approach taken by the campaign and the party, which was on display at the convention, is working.  Republicans, by their reactions, are telling us that this worked.  We need to come out of the shell just a  bit, enjoy the atmosphere, don't get overconfident, but help keep pushing this along because it is working!