Mainly because of my track record of successfully coordinating a number* of presidential campaigns, I’m confident you’re waiting with baited breath for my impressions of the upcoming 2020 presidential election. (* Zero is a number, right?)

(See also my recent entry about proposals for election reform, crucial if we hope to maintain any semblance of democracy. But the news of the week is presidential contender Joseph Robinette Biden selecting Kamala Devi Harris as his running mate, so let’s go with that.)

Pessimism As The Secret To A Happy Life

For the record, the “optimism” in the headline is only there for goofs. I’m not optimistic at all, about almost anything. But that’s not as bad as it sounds. It’s merely my secret to avoiding constant disappointment. I sometimes forget, but most of the time I manage my expectations about everything by being as pessimistic as possible. That delicious ice cream I just bought? It might be rotten or filled with metal shavings from a factory accident (I tell myself). Then, when I open it, scoop it into a bowl, and dig in, and everthing’s fine — as it almost always is — I can be pleasantly surprised that nothing went horribly wrong.

I realize this might sound like a joke, but it works for me. I expect my new car’s fuel economy to be worse than the sales sticker’s claim. I expect my property taxes to be higher next year. I expect high winds will damage our fence or roof at some point, resulting in costly repairs. I expect at least one of my children will grow up to be a Lex Luthor-esque criminal mastermind or, even worse, an advocate for tax breaks for billionaires.

So I’m not optimistic at all about November. I expect election shenanigans and court challenges. I expect a slew of exaggerations, outright lies, and personal insults in the next few months. I expect certain persons to refuse to obey court orders to leave the White House. I expect civil unrest. As long as I fix in my mind right now that TAINTUS could very well continue being president, then maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised at some point. Further, I am also pessimistic about what happens even if the Biden-Harris ticket wins overwhelmingly, and even if the Democrats magically take over the Senate while holding onto the House.

I fully expect neither party to do the work to combat climate change, to reform our criminal injustice system, or to tackle the myriad of power imbalances and societal injustices that continue to wrack our nation. I don’t expect any progress on healthcare, taxation, pollution, poverty, corruption, police brutality, women’s rights, or any other topic. Even if one party (probably Democrats, if we’re being honest) does some work in one or more of those directions, I expect the other party (and here you know I mean Republicans) to dillute, obstruct, stymie, and in all other ways work against any progress.

That’s just how I roll. Will I end up pleasantly surprised? It’s possible, and it happens sometimes happens, though more often with ice cream and chocolate candy than with politics or Windows updates.

What I Wanted Versus What I Got

Way back in early 2019, which now seems like a decade ago, I wrote about the vast number of Democratic primary candidates for the 2020 election, and tried to compile pro/con lists for each of them. I probably didn’t make it clear in that entry, but Elizabeth Warren was my preferred candidate, with Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders as close seconds. I would have accepted most of the people on that list.

Along with Marianne Williamson and Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Biden stood out to me as someone on that list that I would not be happy with as a candidate. He seemed like the least liberal, most gaffe-ridden candidate among the options. From the beginning, I thought he’d be the one that TAINTUS supporters could throw the most mud at, and the one least likely to push for or achieve any meaningful progress. He also seemed (and still seems) the one least able to differentiate himself from TAINTUS in terms of coherence. So it was almost inevitable that he ended up being the candidate.

Still, as I have said in other places, I will vote for a rotten fence post over the current office-holder, so Biden it is.

The next question was VP. I did not want Biden to choose a sitting senator — because we need them in the Senate — which automatically excluded Warren, Harris, Gillibrand, Klobuchar, and Booker. But he did choose one of those, and (fortunately) chose the one most likely to be replaced in the Senate by a liberal/progressive. In that sense, Biden’s VP choice was not horrible.

It is also not a horrible choice when it comes to representation. As much as no one wants to be reduced to a demographic, our presidents and vice presidents skew 99% white male, and Harris is neither. Biden could have chosen a white man and most voters would have shrugged off the outcries from activists. But he chose a woman, and a woman born to two immigrants (mother from India, father from Jamaica), and a woman with both Asian and Black heritage. So, it is already “historic” that a major party has such a person on the ticket, and would become even more notable if they win. (I mean, we remember how racists peed their pants over Obama living in the White House; now imagine that same energy but with misogynists and racists.)

Harris has a track record as a competent office-holder, as San Francisco D.A., as California’s Attorney General, and as a U.S. Senator. Regardless of policy positions (which I’ll get to below), I think this election is likely to be dominated by questions of competence, corruption, and coherence — if I’m right about that, then Harris is a huge addition to the ticket and should probably be the first name listed.

Policies, Positions, & Potential

Already, the various factions that vote Democrat are at each other’s throats. A friend complained to me via email this week that “our side” might throw the election by over-discussing Harris’ identity and platform. As an example, take this Vox piece about how Harris is an “awkward fit” given “some of the most urgent racial justice issues today”. (Which is a weird flex, given that Joe Freaking Biden is a much more awkward fit on the exact topics being discussed.)

The biggest complaint about Harris that I’ve seen from the left is that “she’s a cop”, which of course isn’t literally true, but refers to her often hard-line stances when she was a prosecutor in California. For example, she laughingly locked up parents whose children didn’t go to school often enough. She severely resisted attempts at criminal justice reform.

Something changed, though, when she became a Senator in 2017.

Within minutes of Biden announcing Harris as his VP choice, conservative news outlets began releasing stories like this one (Fox News): “Kamala Harris Scored As Most Liberal U.S. Senator In 2019”, because they know that accusing someone of the L-word (liberal) riles up the conservative base. Regardless of whether Harris was actually the most liberal of all senators (remember, that includes Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren), she has been liberal in the Senate. For example, she signed onto Sanders’ Medicare-For-All legislation (and also proposed her own healthcare plan, which was slightly less liberal), proposed the LIFT Act, is in full support of women’s rights, and even supported the Green New Deal. She wants to raise the federal minimum wage and close the gender pay gap.

So it’s important to remember that the few points on which Harris is allegedly not liberal enough are vastly outweighed by the points on which she’s plenty liberal.

It’s also important to remember that the DNC emcompasses a much wider range of political belief than does the GOP (hence the “big tent” moniker that Democrats apply). Democrat voters in the U.S. run the gamut from full-bore socialists to center-right corporatists. No one’s going to please all of them, energize all of them, unite all of them. The party’s ideological factions are so disparate that any idea will alienate some fringe or another.

The Crucial Thing In 2020

My perception is that most of us agree on one thing as the 2020 election approaches: we need a new president. This applies to the bleeding-edge activists who want to abolish the police as well as the fence-hugging middlers who just want their 401Ks to keep producing. This is the crucial thing going into the election, no matter how poorly we think of Biden or Harris: we all agree that TAINTUS is worse.

Progressives like me will continue to complain whenever Biden and Harris lean too close to center, if they can’t be pinned down on specific goals to combat climate change or refuse to value citizens’ lives over billionaires’ property. That’s okay. It doesn’t mean we’re not voting. We know the other side is worse, we know there isn’t a viable third party, and we know that failing to vote is nearly as bad as voting for the other side.

If It Does Go As Badly As It Could

On the off-chance my self-imposed pessimism turns out to be correct this time around, then what? What if the polls in swing states are wrong, and voters don’t swing to the DNC? What if the hyped-up reports of “Texas is in play!” turn out to be mere hype and this state’s significant number of electoral votes go to Republicans as usual? What if GOP voter suppression efforts (like the ongoing ones in Houston) succeed, and hundreds of thousands of ballots are thrown out? There are many realistic scenarios in which the incumbent emerges victorious.

I’m not as down on that outcome as most progressives seem to be. They’re crying that if TAINTUS wins another term, our experiment in democracy is over, that our country is finished, that all the progress we fought for will be overturned. I think they’re wrong, and here’s why:

I think most of that already happened. The election in 2016 already pulled back the curtain on our country’s pretense at “a government by the people”, when the winner by millions of votes was constitutionally declared the loser (and many more millions didn’t vote at all). The past four years already “finished” our country in most ways that are meaningful — the ongoing rampant corruption that no one with any power has done anything to stop, the destruction of democratic “norms”, the packing of the highest courts with ludicrous appointees, and so on. A lot of the progress previously gained has already been overturned, including the repeal of environmental protection rules, the refusal of the Justice Department to do its job at almost any level, the dismantling and/or neglect of important federal programs, etc. Though the chicken haven’t come home to roost just yet, I think the massive tax cut for the ultra-wealthy might turn out to be the most destructive of all, with ever more wealth hoarded into fewer hands, the national debt skyrocketing in ways we couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago, and how difficult it will be to undo that particular change.

There’s no coming back from some of it, even if the DNC ticket wins. Some people have already been irreparably harmed and some level of climate change is now permanent. Another four years can’t “finish” what’s already been finished; it’ll just push us further down a path and make it more difficult to return.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would rather have had Harris as the presidential candidate than as VP candidate, but as a VP candidate she is *not* as disappointing as some people are making out. None of the people under consideration were going to entirely please you, or me, or anyone else. Every single one of them has something that’s “off” for this moment. Harris checks a lot of boxes — competent, coherent, accomplished, not a white male, unafraid of the zany attacks she’s certain to encounter, and bending more liberal these past few years. It could certainly be worse.

I’m not worried, because I fully expect each stage of this to go wrong. When it does, I will link to this entry and say “I told you so”. If something does go our way, I will be pleasantly surprised and happily admit I was wrong.