Pete Buttigieg did a tour through Eastern Pennsylvania today. He stopped in Philadelphia today with Malcolm Kenyatta, he hung out with Frank Pintabone and Larry Holmes Jr. in Easton, and of course he did an event here with Crooksy. If you’re wondering why Pete Buttigieg endorsed a guy he didn’t know before he got a call from him, Pete’s Iowa State Director was a Fetterman senior staffer with Crooksy’s TV consultants- you know, establishment Democratic politics at play. An endorsement as worthless as the promissory note Crooksy signed to pay back his ex-mother-in-law, according to the judges who rejected his appeal over a decade later.
Since Bob “Crooksy” Brooks brought Secretary Buttigieg to town to stump for him though, I guess it’s worth asking, what does Crooksy actually think of “Mayor Pete?” Look, you might say that’s ridiculous, but I never would have thought a statewide union President would think President Obama “sucked” when his own international union supported him. Then again, Crooksy does have some opinions on outspoken Black men. You see though, Pete Buttigieg was the Secretary of Transportation in the Biden Administration, and we don’t know what Crooksy thought of Biden (yet). We do know, at least if you do a simple google search, that the Pennsylvania Association of Professional Fire Fighters declined to endorse Vice-President Kamala Harris in 2024, with Brooks himself deferring to the IAFF for an endorsement, who also didn’t endorse Harris (simply google “did the Pennsylvania professional fire fighters association endorse Kamala Harris?”). Boy, I wonder what Crooksy didn’t like about her? Oh right, she didn’t know how to speak to the middle class like he does.
Anyway though, enough with “Crooksy Brooksy’s” feelings about Black people and the Biden Administration, and on to some real substance here. I don’t think Pete Buttigieg really knew the guy he was endorsing all that well, and I am not so sure that Crooksy actually likes Secretary Buttigieg. Or at least, if Crooksy does like him, I think he keeps it quiet so he doesn’t upset his “rain maker” in Harrisburg, the Governor. You see, Secretary Buttigieg was the main point person out selling the Biden era Infrastructure Bill that passed Congress. One of the things Secretary Buttigieg really sold hard to the public? Rural Broadband. In fact, Secretary Buttigieg really sold the case for broadband in the bill:
“A connection to the internet is about as important as a connection to the interstate is,” he said. “You need both, you need to be able to connect both digitally and physically in order to do everything; from getting up to date market information on when to sell, to being able to have your kids do their homework or take advantage of telemedicine opportunities.”
The deal would put $65 billion towards expanding the country’s broadband network. Buttigieg said 100 percent of Americans should have fast, reliable, and affordable internet.
“That’s not easy, especially that last couple percent, after you get to 98 percent or so, for folks who are in really spread-out areas,” Buttigieg said. “But it’s important to the President that no one’s left behind and that no one has to wonder whether this bill is going to be for them.”
You know, I couldn’t agree more with all of that. Broadband for all! You see though, there’s some debate about how that went. You see, Governor Shapiro called the program a failure, going so far as to say absolutely no one in Pennsylvania benefitted from it. For real, he said zero people got it. If that’s the case, that is one of the biggest government boondoggles in history. Either Biden’s Administration, and by extension Buttigieg, were a bunch of inept morons, or Shapiro’s Administration was totally inept in applying for the money, or both. Now, I’ve got my opinions on Buttigieg helping Shapiro be successful, but I think it’s fair to say both sides have their opinions on what happened, and they don’t mix.
It may seem a bit inconvenient for Crooksy’s backers that Shapiro says Buttigieg and the team on the infrastructure law were incompetent, especially when they are bringing Buttigieg to the district, but I doubt that bothers Crooksy in the slightest bit. He knows that the Governor butters his rolls in this race, and frankly Buttigieg was just doing a fly in for promotion ahead of 2028. I mean, Crooksy didn’t like Barack Obama, he clearly didn’t like Kamala Harris, by proximity the guy probably thinks Joe Biden wasn’t so bright too, and Pete Buttigieg is just some guy who was junior to all of them anyway. He’s probably glad he came in and gave him a shout out, but he needs the Governor to buy him this office. So don’t be fooled by any of this. It was little more than a publicity stunt, and not a believable one at that.
As LBJ flew over Washington on his way out of town in January of 1969, America entered into a very new day. Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush 41 would combine to to occupy the White House for 20 of the next 24 years. The nation took a rightward turn from the FDR-Truman-Kennedy-Johnson paradigm that had ruled Washington for 35 plus years. “Tough on crime,” “family values,” “moral majority,” “shrinking government,” and of course, tax cuts, became the mantra of the time. While the courts maintained a lot of the social progress of the previous period and programs like Social Security and Medicare remained off limits, the nation changed dramatically with Johnson out of town.
A lot of the American left blamed the fall of Johnson and his Vice-President, Hubert H. Humphrey on the Vietnam War and an unwillingness to embrace the left. This was revisionist history and it was stupid. Four years later the Democrats nominated George McGovern, and he got annihilated in historic fashion. In fact, most more liberal standard bearers did. Mondale and Dukakis got crushed. Many others never even got nominated. Meanwhile the only Democrat to win the White House in that period was Jimmy Carter, at that time a moderate Governor of Georgia, and he only won in the aftermath of Watergate by narrowly reinforcing the Southern Democratic vote.
The truth of the matter is that Johnson’s ambitious domestic policy agenda, in particular his Civil Rights victories, as well as societal moves left with the sexual revolution and 1968 riots, were the main contributors to the fall of the Democratic Party. Beginning with the 1966 Midterm, Democrats began to see their share of the white vote decline precipitously. From Kennedy’s 90+% support among white Catholics in 1960, Democratic support with that group fell so fast that Reagan won their votes handily by 1980, and the group still leans right today. “White flight” and the fall of Democratic support with white voters who had supported them for decades coincided almost precisely in the late 60’s and early 70’s. Republicans ran on reigning in the big government of the Johnson era for decades, and even Democratic winners such as Carter, Clinton, and Obama were hesitant to push too far the other way.
Democrats told themselves a story that Johnson lost his popularity and Presidency because he fought the Vietnam War. That argument was not held up by facts. Was Vietnam popular like World War II? Of course not. The idea that Johnson turned away from liberalism and lost everything for it is betrayed though by everything that happened after that. Nixon promised “law and order,” “peace with strength,” and to put an end to chaos in the streets. Humphrey tried to move left of Johnson. Lefties can live in any fantasy they want. Democrats mostly lost the country because they lost white people when they were 90+% of voters. They didn’t lose them because they moved left.
So here we are in 2026, and well, we’re living it again. The DNC was going to put out an “autopsy” report essentially blaming Kamala Harris losing on the Gaza issue. They reached this conclusion by talking to groups who opposed Israeli military action after October 7th. Not based on polling, or demographics, or any tangible thing. It was going to be based on opinion. Look, I think the DNC is a broken and ruined institution, but this is even impressive for them. It is, of course, revisionist history that makes “the left” feel good, by telling them Democrats lost because they didn’t go left on the issue. It is, purely, a fantasy.
We know why Kamala Harris lost. Voters said she was too far left in poll after poll. In fact, that was Trump’s line of attack in paid communications after what was actually a very positive roll out for her. She also lost badly among voters angry about inflation and immigration. She also happened to be Vice-President for a President who was largely unpopular because of immigration and inflation. Harris was hit for her positions in her 2020 Presidential run, particularly her position on transgender prisoners receiving gender affirming care. Trump did not attack Harris in paid communications for her positions on Ukraine or Gaza, because his polling said not to. CNN exit polling showed Trump beat Harris on handling the economy, immigration, handling a crisis, and crime. We can go on and on about this, but the polling was clear about why Harris lost. The exit polls showed what they showed.
One of the main arguments that Harris was penalized broadly for Gaza and not moving far enough left was that she got far less votes than Joe Biden had in 2020. She in fact did get less. The problem with this theory is that 2020 Biden ran from the very beginning of the primary as a moderate. His support dropped as President, and the main reasons it dropped were inflation and immigration. Biden’s brand as a moderate eroded over the course of his Presidency as he embraced more liberal and left causes. As Biden became less popular for these issues and issues like the withdrawal from Afghanistan, his numbers fell. For a brief moment after being nominated, Harris seemed to be defying those trends. Then Trump’s team hit her with ads in the swing states for those same themes. It’s impossible to precisely know why voters don’t vote, but it stands to reason that less people voted for Harris because of the same reasons they didn’t like Biden, since those were the attacks levied against her. Outside of perhaps Michigan, there’s no particular state where Gaza may have made the difference. Even Trump’s gains among younger voters can largely be explained by gains among young men, not the most particularly lefty voting block.
It is not comforting or convenient to say your side lost an election because the electorate thinks you went too far in appeasing your base. It implies limits that most activists and voters don’t want to acknowledge existing. It is not comforting to confront the reality that part of the views of Harris were shaped by voters pre-conceived biases towards women candidates. It is not a happy thing to acknowledge that Harris’ policies on transgender health were unpopular. It is much easier to tell yourself you didn’t go far enough than it is to say your activists and donors want some unpopular things, like “defund the police.” Doing an actual autopsy of losing an election is really hard. It requires you to be honest with yourself. It would require the DNC to acknowledge that putting wages and unemployment ahead of inflation in your economic policy was harmful for the Biden White House. It requires acknowledging the Democratic Party needs to be more like Clinton and Obama on immigration than Biden. It requires crime is perceived as a problem that needs to be stopped, by police. It would require acknowledging that we probably leaned too far in on social issues for where the country is at. A true autopsy would acknowledge reality- the perceived moderate Joe Biden in 2020, like the perceived moderate Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, all were winning candidates, and voters don’t really love a more left leaning Democratic Party. That’s not what the activists working on South Capitol want to acknowledge though.
The problem with repeating the post-Johnson mistakes of the Democratic Party in the post-Biden era is that the Democratic Party eroded and did a lot of losing after that misread of 1968. It might be comforting to blame that on Vietnam. It’s bullshit though. It might be comforting for some to blame 2024 on Gaza. It’s bullshit too though. And if we do this again, we probably end up with President Vance.
As you watch the chaos in Minneapolis, where a completely out of control force is literally killing American citizens in the streets who are not threatening them, it’s worth asking- did we need to be here? Was there an alternative? Could just a few people have avoided this mess altogether?
The answer is yes.
Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans could have put this all to rest after January 6th, 2021. Just a couple of weeks later, with Trump gone from Washington after his defeat, the GOP could have given the Democrats 17 votes to convict him in his Senate Impeachment trial. He could have been barred from ever holding office again. Sure, the hardline base would have hated it, but he would’ve faded out of power, with no chance to return. With the way Biden’s term went, and with Harris as the candidate, they may have won back the White House anyway. They’d have their trifecta right now, but with less chaos. They had a choice. But they’ve been broken since Barack Obama won in 2008. The establishment of the Republican Party threw open the party to radicals almost immediately after Obama’s inauguration. This was always their logical endpoint.
I think most of the criticism of the Democratic Party is shortsighted and stupid. We are criticizing them for doing what an American political party is supposed to do, respecting norms and trying to improve the country through the legislative process and winning elections. Nowhere in the American political system do we expect members of Congress to ride in like knights on horses to do battle with the opponent. With that said, I guess I would say the problem is that a lot of the Democrats aren’t willing to defend themselves from anyone. Seven House members voted to pass ICE funding this week. Eight Senate Democrats forfeited health insurance subsidies for millions of paying customers under the Affordable Care act to cave in and fund the government in December. They have not warmed up to the reality that giving Trump an inch means losing a mile. They should have learned that from their own far-left though. The decision to allow Bernie Sanders to run in a party he is not a member of in 2016 was a mistake. The decision by party leaders to capitulate to extremist ideas and rhetoric has only done more damage. We’ve watched “normie” Dems embrace every stupid idea from abandoning any border enforcement to “defund the police,” and watched Trump’s vote share increase from 2016 to 2020, and then again in 2024. Even Joe Biden, the ultimate moderate, tried to appease these people. It failed. It cost him his Presidency.
And for what? Let’s be honest, the left may or may not have actually had enough more votes to tip the balance of the 2024 Election to Kamala Harris, but given how very close it actually was, they probably did. The number of votes for Jill Stein, or write-ins for fictional candidates, and the crossovers in places like Dearborn. You can’t lump all of the millions who didn’t vote that did in 2020 into one pot, but you know at least some of them were people who just couldn’t be bothered. Whether it was Gaza, or people mad that she “embraced” transgender folks, or people that just “didn’t like her,” they stayed home, voted for him, or voted protest, they made the difference. She was so close. Yet she either was “too left,” or “was a genociding cop.” They didn’t back her. She lost.
Here’s the thing though- what you’re watching in Minneapolis now, that’s the consequence of it. You fucked around, now you are finding out. Trump told us he was going to do this, his backers wrote Project 2025 as a blueprint for this Presidency. Anyone who believed him that he didn’t know what it was is a willful idiot. The only person who had a chance to beat him on the ballot was Kamala Harris. There was no third outcome. Now Jared Kushner is going to turn Gaza into luxury condos. Now ICE is deporting young children. Kyiv is suffering a brutal Winter as Russia commits war crimes against their people. Medicaid is being decimated. The Department of Education is closed. Trump’s name is on the Kennedy Center. She only really needed a percentage point or so in four out of seven swing states, and none of this would be going on. Was uncommitted worth it? No. Anyone saying otherwise just refuses to admit their truth.
I’ll go on record again- I think Josh Shapiro would have been a horrible pick to be Kamala Harris running mate. If they had selected him, they would have been swallowed whole with questions about Gaza and foreign policy. As with any VP pick, I find it questionable that he would have actually converted over any voters who didn’t vote for Harris, in Pennsylvania or elsewhere. This isn’t really a knock on Shapiro, I think we can say Tim Walz really didn’t add anything positive in the end either, and he was the selection. I find it questionable that J.D. Vance, Kamala Harris, Mike Pence, Joe Biden, or Dick Cheney really moved the needle for their bosses, and they were all winning VP’s. Honestly, the selection is basically an albatross around the nominee’s neck under almost any circumstances, and most of them don’t even carry their home state for the nominee unless they were going to win it anyway. Shapiro would have been the same, which probably makes him no better or worse than anyone else she could have picked. I think Harris was going to eat a shit sandwich no matter what.
I think it’s obvious that the pot-shots both Harris and Shapiro have taken over the selection process for VP is entirely about 2028 primary politics. Now I also think they may genuinely dislike each other, which isn’t shocking to me, but we shouldn’t put a lot of real stock in what either says. She wants people to view him as a self-absorbed, overly ambitious white man and he wants to paint her as anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli. Well, both probably succeeded with some people, though I find both kind of silly. If anything, both are making Gavin Newsom and J.B. Pritzker look like good options.
I’ve said this for a long time, and I think Donald Trump has proven it- it’s easier to get nominated for President than for Vice-President. Voters can decide what they care about from your baggage, but when you are considered for Vice-President, one person gets to judge your baggage. That person’s team gets to comb through your life and probe anything they want- and often all they are trying to do is see how you’ll react to being exposed, attacked, and prodded. They asked Shapiro about his connections to Israel, they asked Walz about his connections to China, God only knows what they asked Mark Kelly about. In 2020, Karen Bass was called a communist sympathizer in the press during the selection process, for a job she didn’t end up getting, and didn’t even end up with a cabinet job as a consolation. Is that worth it? I would say no.
If Vice-Presidents were picked in some other way, it would actually be a pretty good job. Your entire job entails breaking ties in the Senate and going out in public and selling the administration’s initiatives. You live in a great house at the Naval Observatory, you have a motorcade everywhere, and you have the top clearance in the government. It’s a great job. Getting there sucks. Frankly, it’s not worth the trouble. If I were interested in running for office, I wouldn’t bother with the Vice-Presidency. Is it worth all of this noise? No, just run for President at that point. If you’re going to take the beating, you might as well take it with a much more forgiving audience where you can make your own case. But I’m not psychotic enough to run for either right now.
My new newsletter on Substack will be a less frequent, more big picture items type of outlet. You can subscribe at “The Dark Side of the Dawn.” This is the first piece.
Do you remember 2020? It’s ok if you don’t, it really was a long time ago, and it was not a pleasant time for anyone. But if you can get just a little further back, to 2019, you might remember the Democratic Primary race for President of the United States. There was literally more than 20 candidates running, and they held debates where literally all of these people participated in one form or another. Moderators asked them to raise their hands if they agreed with statements like “defund the police,” or if they pledged to implement “the Green New Deal,” or if they would enact reparations for descendants of former slaves, and all kinds of different stuff. For the most part, everyone on stage raised their hands. Candidates who had spent years carefully building their public persona were suddenly racing each other to show they were further left, more “woke” I guess is how some people would put it. The one who basically refused to raise his hand for most of this stuff was Joe Biden, the former Vice-President of the United States and guy who progressives like Larry Krasner called dumb, while others said he was out of touch, and others yet questioned his mental fitness. Hell, he was called racist for working with Dixiecrats in the 1970’s, with the obvious moment everyone remembers being his confrontation with Kamala Harris during an early debate. One by one though, all of those candidates dropped out, rejected by a primary electorate of Democrats who gave Joe Biden the cleanest and clearest primary victory for President since 2004. Progressive heroes like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, supposed young up and comers like Julian Castro and Cory Booker, and moderate stalwarts like Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg all had varying levels of success, but Biden had either knocked them out of the race or sealed off their pathway to the nomination by the end of Super Tuesday. The Democratic Primary voters picked the older than hell moderate guy. Then the older than hell moderate guy picked the “cop” prosecutor lady from California as his running mate and guess what? They’re the only Democratic ticket out of three that managed to beat Donald Trump in a Presidential race.
There’s an uncomfortable truth for progressives and “establishment” Democrats alike about this period after Barack Obama’s Presidency, a period dominated by in all aspects of American life by Donald Trump. Donald Trump did better with many core Democratic leaning demographic groups than Mitt Romney or John McCain literally from the beginning in 2016. Trump has improved his standing in each subsequent election (albeit, not always by a lot) as a percentage of the vote with African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians. Trump has received more votes in each of his successive elections than the previous election, and he has received a higher percentage of the vote in each election than he did in the last. You don’t have to like it, but the truth is that MAGA has appeal to a lot more people than Democrats want to believe, and many of the truths Democrats held as gospel about demographics and the future of the country after 2008 and 2012 were simply not true, or at least are not true anymore. The country did not reject the personal failings, the crass language, the confrontational, bullyish style of Trump. They didn’t care that he trampled norms, or that he’s nasty, or that he even broke the law. There was something appealing about what he put forward, and that appeal actually cuts across demographic lines. In fact, Democrats in 2024 did not really have a particular “white voters” problem- Kamala Harris even won college educated white men, a first for a Democrat since the days of Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter.
He did lose once though, and that once was to Biden/Harris. To hear the DC group think though, by 2024 Trump would have defeated them in a rematch, and he did end up defeating Harris. There is an arm of the Democratic Party that Biden defeated in 2020 who wants to fill in the blanks about why. They want to blame Gaza, they wanted to blame student loan forgiveness being struck down at one point, and they basically want to point the future of the party in the direction of the populist left. They point at rather small data points like Dearborn, MI (where Gaza probably did make the difference) to back up their point. They point to victories by progressives in deep blue municipal elections, without point out that their candidates didn’t really do that great, relative to what a Democrat should do. They point to unrest amongst younger voters with Biden and Harris, without pointing out what a tiny share of the electorate that really was, compared to the whole. They’ve created a case for a party that embraces big government liberalism, abandons traditional central points of American foreign policy dating back to the end of the Second World War, and more closely resembles something like Corbyn’s British Labour Party or a European Social Democratic Party in policy and rhetoric. Some of them make the case quite compellingly. The problem is their case is fiction.
Saying that Harris lost because of Biden being old, or that she was too moderate, or any of the go-to’s of terminally online leftists and radicalized coffee shop folks is comforting. It’s false. The truth is that while voters knew about Trump’s first term, his part in January 6th, his alleged crimes, his role in overturning Roe v. Wade, and really everything about Trump, they viewed Harris as more extreme (while this links to a Fox article, the polling was from the New York Times). Post-election surveys showed an electorate that thought Harris and the Democrats had their priorities wrong and took far left positions, even in cases where she didn’t. In fact, Harris was literally caught up in a bad brand. She was too generic Democrat, in part because of her own failed 2020 campaign, and she simply couldn’t overcome that.
To the extent Joe Biden did hurt her, I think it’s been overblown that it was because he stayed in the race too long. The truth is that most voters picked Biden in 2020 because he wasn’t like the generic Democrats that they imagined, something that was born out in Biden winning and House Democrats actually losing seats from their 2018 majority. I think this portion of “The Liberal Patriot’s” critique of Biden and Harris actually hits pretty close to home with my experience on the campaign:
Finally, Harris’s refusal to distance herself from President Biden likely complicated her efforts to fashion herself as a moderate. Though Biden ran to the center of the 2020 Democratic primary field, he made a conscious decision at the beginning of his presidency to swing left. He demonstrated this early on by hiring staffers who had worked for Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in an effort to ingratiate himself with the party’s progressive faction. Meanwhile, he shunned moderates like Rahm Emanuel and Larry Summers, veterans of the Obama White House.
This was also evident in how he governed. Biden made a concerted effort to push policy ideas that thrilled the progressive wing of the party, such as the COVID stimulus package early in his administration, which has since been linked to the subsequently higher rate of inflation. He also acquiesced to their demands on a liberalized asylum policy and student debt forgiveness, neither of which went over well with the public. Biden additionally took controversial actions related to race and social justice. One of his first acts as president was signing several executive orders related to advancing “equity,” one of which called for “an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda.”
Perhaps all this is why in the early part of summer, just before Biden dropped out, polls showed that more voters saw him as “ideologically extreme” than said the same about Trump—and why Harris’s insistence on embracing him during the campaign may have hurt her. Indeed, Blueprint’s polling found that among the other reasons voters chose not to support her was that they viewed her as too closely tied to Biden.
I’m a huge Joe Biden fan and proud alum of his 2020 campaign- hell I was a delegate for him in 2020. He campaigned as the most moderate Democratic candidate in the primary field, but that guy never governed. Right around the time he had basically secured the nomination and Covid hit and shut down our headquarters, the campaign underwent a leadership shift that brought with it an influx of staff from Beto, Warren, Sanders, and others. Many Hillary alums who hadn’t been on the team were brought in as well. During the long “work from home”/”virtual campaign” period, many of these folks took fairly important roles. That continued right on into the administration. Biden, like Hillary before him, sought to bring progressive Democrats into his fold for the general election by promising to be the new LBJ and promising bold action. Was it unifying to Democrats and sounded good in 2020? Sure, I guess. Over time though, the Biden that governed seemed a lot more similar to an AOC than a Blue Dog Democrat, and people weren’t really excited about that outside of the party faithful. That was even more true as inflation hit in 2021 and 2022, and the administration had made a conscious effort to prioritize employment an wage numbers over holding down inflation. Basically, they started to tune him out then.
Look, I’m of the opinion that it was the kiss of death to try and appease Bernie Sanders in 2016, but that’s long over with. The truth is that 2026 will be about the Trump Administration, and Democrats should be able to win that election if they can talk coherently and plainly about health care premiums, continuing rising inflation, housing, and kitchen tables issues. Literally don’t mix this stuff up with activist speak, talk prices and affordability, and we’re good. In the longer run, like say 2028 though, I’m not as sure right now. Sure, the public hates ICE and the Trump Administration’s actions on immigration. Will they vote against it if we go back to Biden’s more liberal policies on asylum and immigration though? I doubt it. If we’re able to get out of our own way and admit that Barack Obama’s orderly, humane, and due process driven deportation policies that deported a shit ton of people here illegally actually did work pretty well, we might be able to win the issue. I’m not sure though. We have mini-Mamdani candidates and people trying to run as clones of John Fetterman in 2022 popping up all over the place. This isn’t sustainable. Even if it doesn’t kill us in 2026, and realistically it shouldn’t, it’s poison for 2028.
It’s fairly easy after your rejected to recoil and take the position that you weren’t true to your values. That doesn’t mean it’s true. Democrats get a minimum of 48% in literally every Presidential election, dating back as far as 1996, and while there’s meaningful divides in that electorate, the reality is that a large majority of those votes are not terminally online activists. That’s even more true for the voters who are not consistent Democratic voters. Those extra voters that pushed Biden and Obama up over 50% are not closet liberals waiting for a Bolshevik Revolution, they really don’t want to hear about the virtues of Hamas, giving taxpayer funded gender re-assignment surgeries to prisoners, confiscating guns, taxing churches, making all cars electric, or open borders. I’m not saying liberals are right or wrong on those subjects (I have some nuanced views of what is actually right there), I’m saying the voters who voted Obama/Trump/Biden/Trump (or didn’t show up in Trump’s wins) don’t love the Democratic Party, and would prefer we not cater to our activists. We can ignore them, that’s certainly an option, but that option probably doesn’t go well.
Look, we all know that both Josh Shapiro and Kamala Harris have their eyes on the 2028 Presidential race. I don’t expect them to be friends, and far from me to sit here and tell people to be nice in a political race. So I’m kinda good with them going at it a bit. A bit is the key here. Sounds like she really pissed off the Governor.
The writer shared with Shapiro that Harris had “accused him, in essence, of measuring the drapes, even inquiring about featuring Pennsylvania artists in the vice-presidential residence; of insisting ‘that he would want to be in the room for every decision’ Harris might make; and, more generally, of hijacking the conversation when she interviewed him for the job, to the point where she reminded him that he would not be co-president.”
His guard down, Shapiro blurted out about the art, “She wrote that in her book? That’s complete and utter bullshit.”
“I can tell you that her accounts are just blatant lies.”
He defended his actions during the interview with the former California attorney general who he had known for more than 20 years.
“I did ask a bunch of questions,” he told Alberta. “Wouldn’t you ask questions if someone was talking to you about forming a partnership and working together?”
Shapiro has a well-known reputation as ambitious. But Harris seemed to portray him in other ways – “selfish, petty, and monomaniacally ambitious.”
Asked if he felt betrayed by Harris, Shapiro dropped the gloves.
“I mean, she’s trying to sell books and cover her ass,” said to Alberta.
According to the author, there was a long pause.
“I shouldn’t say ‘cover her ass.’ I think that’s not appropriate,” Shapiro said. His tone was suddenly collected. “She’s trying to sell books. Period.”
Gosh damn, bro. I kind of appreciate the honesty, Shapiro was being honest when he said “cover her ass”- he thinks she didn’t run a great campaign, and I’m sure one of her bad decisions was picking Walz over him, in his eyes. Hey, he’s entitled to feel that, and maybe, just maybe, there’s some truth to that. He’s probably better off though having not been on the ticket, since they probably would have lost anyway. On the other hand, I mean he is hyper ambitious. I’m not saying that as though it makes him somehow worse than her, Walz, or anyone else at that level of politics. He’s always been ambitious and eyeing the next step though, since he reached the State House. Maybe nobody is lying here. “Utter bullshit” and “blatant lies” is pretty strong language from a guy who usually acts like he’s totally unbothered.
I don’t see how the Governor can get nominated, in no small part because I don’t see where he wins an early primary, whether we stay with South Carolina first or come to our senses and keep it in the opening four, but not first. He’s not winning South Carolina or Iowa, seriously. The question is though, is she? There’s a lot of goodwill towards her in the party, but do we really think things will be different in 2028? Is dumping on the people you didn’t pick for VP helping that?
Look, I’ve found some of what Kamala Harris has had to say so far in her book to be hilariously funny. When I read the excerpt about why she didn’t pick Pete Buttigieg as her running mate, I definitely found her logic to be sad and maybe even cynical, but also probably correct from a purely strategical manner. Her “criticisms” of Biden for staying in as long as he did basically miss reality for me, but I think from her perspective are almost a necessary rationalization of why things went how they did.
Then there’s the screenshots above about her book, which are basically a good enough reason for me to not read it. Look, I voted for Kamala Harris, and I would again. She’s got tons of good qualities. The fact is though, if they weren’t prepared for her to lose by election night, she and her team are the most delusional people I’ve ever seen. Yes, I knew we were going to win for Biden/Harris in 2020, because Joe Biden was not only consistently ahead in state and national polls, but was usually over 50% in most polls, regardless of his margin. At no point was Kamala Harris ever really there. She was behind in the polling averages in almost all of the swing states, well within the margin of error, but behind. Her numbers in the polls looked eerily similar to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Election Results, and they basically finished exactly there. Many Democratic donors, activists, and even operatives have spent years getting excited at every “gotcha” moment for Donald Trump, every bad debate performance or speech, and every new scandal that arises around the guy, and every time they get excited and proclaim “this is the time” people finally turn on him. They never do. The only campaign that ever put forward a viable alternative that a broad enough cross section of the country might vote for instead of Trump, was Biden’s 2020 campaign. Hillary and Kamala both sort of relied on the country finally decided Trump was too stupid, evil, corrupt, or wrong to vote for. That was never, ever going to happen.
There’s a really ugly truth that maybe Vice-President Harris didn’t want to write about, or maybe it was cut from the book, or whatever- Kamala Harris was never going to win the 2024 Election. The country had soured on the Democratic Party as a whole. Inflation had put them in a bad mood. They had soured on Biden, in part because of inflation, in part because he was old, and very largely because they felt he had governed less moderately than they hoped he would when they elected him. Harris was his Vice-President, in a party where really no one had made a move to stand against Biden’s Presidency, making her the most vulnerable to his negatives of a party full of people who were vulnerable to his negatives. Then there is the simple fact that Harris herself was viewed even more negatively than Biden through virtually his entire Presidency until Democrats ran away from him (like cowards) after his debate performance. And yes, since I named every other reason, let’s just state the obvious demographic reasons. Hillary Clinton was possibly the most qualified, most universally known nominee the party ever put forward in 2016, and Barack Obama was still very popular, not to mention she was the first female nominee in the history of the country. Just read everything after that last comma and get the point, because none of the stuff before it mattered. Hillary Clinton lost, as about the best woman nominee anyone could have come up with at that time. The country is very, very resistant to electing a woman. That’s a bad thing, but it’s a thing that isn’t changing on it’s own. Kamala Harris was not only the next woman to run for President, she was also a Black woman. This country’s history of racism is well chronicled. It’s a large reason why one of our first forty-seven Presidents wasn’t white. Harris, with an avalanche of things already against her, was asking the country to elect a Black woman. I don’t know if it was impossible for her to win in a neutral environment, but the odds were pretty high against her. Stack all of the other negative things I mentioned here on top of that, and Kamala Harris was basically trying to swim up Niagra Falls in this race. She never had a chance.
The 2024 Election was decided when party elders like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama decided to be influenced by the politically blind, such as George Clooney and other wealthy donors, and basically pushed Joe Biden out of the race. No one but Biden had a prayer in hell of beating Donald Trump. Biden knew that, that was why he had continued running for President well after his 80th birthday. Biden also knew that if he didn’t run, the only way to avoid a complete Civil War level meltdown within the Democratic Party was to coronate Kamala Harris and hope for the best. He had much better instincts than any of the other “elders” in the Democratic Party. All of this is what bothers me about what Harris is saying here. She’s criticizing Biden for being the adult in the room. She also wants us to believe she really had no idea she was going to lose. The day Biden dropped out, I knew she was going to lose. I know she was smart enough to know that too. I am willing to bet a donut to anyone that if you could get a candid answer out of anyone senior on the analytics team, they would tell you their numbers showed they were losing. As cynical as I am about analytics, even I would be stunned if they were so bad that they actually believed anything else.
Ok, I have to admit that when I first heard about Kamala Harris new book, I was annoyed. All of the early descriptions made it sound like she was ripping President Biden for running. She did go further than I liked, but she clearly wasn’t actually criticizing him.
Harris described Shapiro, one of three finalists for the post, as “poised, polished and personable.” But she was put off by his ambition — and his request to be in the room for every major decision — and worried he would not settle for the number-two job.
Harris twice describes Shapiro as “peppering” her and staff with questions, not just about details of the job but also life as vice president. He asked the residence manager a number of questions about the home, ranging from the number of bedrooms to “how he might arrange to get Pennsylvania artists’ work on loan from the Smithsonian.”
She also accused Shapiro of exhibiting a “lack of discretion” in the veepstakes, recalling that his official vehicles with Pennsylvania plates were filmed by CNN in front of the vice president’s residence, despite efforts by her staff to arrange for less attention-getting transportation.
Manuel Bonder, a spokesperson for Shapiro, pushed back on the governor’s portrayal.
“It’s simply ridiculous to suggest that Governor Shapiro was focused on anything other than defeating Donald Trump and protecting Pennsylvania from the chaos we are living through now,” Bonder said in a statement. “The Governor campaigned tirelessly for the Harris-Walz ticket — and as he has made clear, the conclusion of this process was a deeply personal decision for both him and the Vice President.”
I could’ve called this in like 2008. The Deputy Speaker of the Pennsylvania House in 2007-2008 hasn’t changed a bit. Which doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be President, by the way. It just gave me a good laugh.
Bob “Crooksy” Brooks is the kind of working class hero who stiffs his mother-in-law for $55,000, so you know he’s an authority on helping out the little guy. Like his hero, Deadbeat Bernie Sanders, Crooksy thinks the Democratic Party sucks. They apparently don’t want to talk to working class people, Crooksy says:
His campaign is playing up his volunteerism as a youth baseball coach and his tattoo: a bulldog in a fire helmet.
“The party of labor, I believe, is the Democrat Party, but I don’t think the Democrat Party talks about or to the working class people anymore, and I think we need to get back to that,” Brooks said in an interview. “The Republicans, they talked about us, they talk to us, but then they go down to DC and they vote against us.”
Here’s what you need to know- Bob Brooks is a fraud, he’s a poor man’s version of John Fetterman. “Oh look at me, I have tattoos, Bernie Sanders loves me, and I say the word middle class and how the Democratic Party sucks, three times in every paragraph that comes out of my mouth!” Of course I was against John Fetterman in 2022, but you know, that’s history. Brooks has the same media team trying to create a picture of him that is very similar to the one Fetterman began with. They’re flat out lying to you. This guy is a blue collar hero like milk from last month is still good for you. Kind of like he’s “endorsed by Josh Shapiro,” but Shapiro has said that nowhere.
Apocalypse Vibes 