Here's another attempt at doing a post-mortem on the Harris campaign - an interesting exercise as us Canucks are due for a spring election and the Liberals seem dead set on running a candidate that will promise to be exactly the same as the one the public despises right now. Anyways, I came across an interesting tweet. It's a good argument - the expanding of Israel's fun-time bombing into Lebanon in October and the materializing reality of the dreaded "wider regional war" really highlighted Trump's argument about how the world was going to hell under Biden.
I think it was especially damaging to Harris because of their whole argument for getting elected in the first place. If you recall it went something like "wow, that Trump guy sure was a lot of nonsense. Wouldn't you like to return to a more normal world where America isn't the butt of jokes? Look, the Democrats are running the boring-est, most cookie cutter standard old white guy possible." Going back to normal - that was the actual value proposition. "Build Back Better" - a brilliant slogan of returning to the way things were before Trump fucked it over.
And in Joe's defense - he delivered on this, except on foreign policy. It wasn't just Trump that was causing instability, COVID messed the world up something fierce. And Biden did fix this. He was a great steward of the economy despite being given enormous issues to deal with. The rate of people dying to the mysterious disease dropped, and maybe Biden didn't do much to make this happen as this is the pathway for all pandemic diseases over time - the fact that he treated COVID like a real threat was a breath of fresh not-contaminated air. Deferring to experts instead of promoting horse paste and injecting bleach is exactly the type of thing Joe promised in the 2020 campaign.
Now to be clear - he did not fix everything (other than foreign policy), The housing crisis got worse. A lot worse. That probably hurt the Democrats chances. Also, he did basically nothing on criminal justice reform - but that probably didn't hurt them much as this was more of a return to the way things were - an embracing of the good old days when police brutality was something you only pretended to disapprove of. And wildly - that worked. The anger and outrage in the summer of George Floyd just quieted down as people continued ignoring how racist and garbage our police forces have become. A return to normalcy.
And also - Joe very rarely featured in the monologues of late night talk shows. The president wasn't the butt of jokes all day, every day. Just occasionally, as it was in the olden pre-Trump days. One part of this was that Trump lied all the time. Just big fat whoppers every time he opened his YUGE yapper. Trump is the reason so many people now know who Daniel Dale is - his existence elevated "fact checking" to a lofty position in the discourse. Even harmless shit like pretending that "covfefe" actually meant something, to crazy nonsense like making up a brand new hurricane track forecast with a Sharpie just to avoid acknowledging that forecasts sometimes change.
Let's acknowledge the truth here - Joe was never a strong candidate. Even four years ago before his age really started catching up to him. He was never charismatic and he did not project an image of leadership. He is a self-acknowledged "gaffe machine" that also says stupid shit all the time. His main selling point as a politician is that he is likable - and also, that he is not Donald Trump.
And then October 7th happened and Joe's Israel-Palestine policy flushed the whole thing down the crapper. The Biden administration just kept feeding tens of thousands of tons of bombs into the suffering factory being run by the most fascist far-right government Israel has ever known. A coalition that literally includes someone convicted for terrorism as the Minister of National Security.
Sure, the pre-Trump world had a lot of violence in it. Obama was the king of drone warfare and the use of high tech death machines to unalive brown people was a feature in the way things used to be. But Gaza is different. Even people who acknowledge that it is genocide keep downplaying how fucking horrific the situation in Gaza is. How incredibly sick and twisted the IDF has been and how we are all seeing it play out in real time.
And as noted - an October surprise of the expanding Middle East war, with the threat of Iran getting actively drawn in and the possibly US boots on the ground with the flag draped coffins that implies - that probably did not help the Harris campaign in the least bit. It completely undermined the entire foundation of the campaign - that they were not Trump. Chaos in the Middle East had started to grow under Biden and threatened to force the US into sending in the troops. And the Biden administration was coming out regularly and telling Trump-sized lies in order to defend it all. The campaign was basically saying "but Trump will lie to your face with zero sense of shame - and also Israel is doing way more than required in order to protect civilians."
The entirety of the appeal of Democrats was to be the steady hand on the tiller and just keeping things calm and normal - to being not-Donald-Trump. Their slogan might well have been Orange Man Bad. And then they just fully embraced bombing hospitals and sniping children. They looked at the horrific images and videos coming out of Gaza and going viral across the world and said "we're paying for that." Thousands of videos of IDF soldiers playing with children's toys and women's lingerie in the burnt out husks of houses was explained by the State Department repeatedly insisting that Israel is minimizing civilian suffering.
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