Roland Is The President Of His Homeowners Association— I Voted For Him To Be President Of The USA

Roland makes friends everywhere in the world--Marrakech

Let’s start with a couple of admissions: 

1. I’m absolutely, unequivocally rooting for Trump to lose

2. If I lived in a swing state, I probably would have voted for Kamala

But I live in California and I sent my ballot in; and I just couldn’t do it. I never voted for her for anything and there’s no reason to start now. She’s a gutless, careerist who will be another mediocre president if she wins. Not horrible like Trump of course, but not someone I would want to see in the Oval Office. So I wrote in Roland. I also didn’t vote for the garden variety mediocre candidate the Democrats puked up for the open congressional seat in my district, Laura Friedman. I just left it blank. No one supporting genocide gets my vote.

In 1867, speaking at St. Andrews, John Stewart Mill could well have been addressing the undecided voters in Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, Iowa and Maine’s second district. “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name and with his sanction.” He didn’t directly say, “choose the lesser of two evils,” he, then a Member of Parliament, implies that good people have a duty to act, even if it means making a less-than-ideal choice to prevent a worse outcome. The statement has often been interpreted as a call to choose the lesser evil rather than allowing the greater evil to prevail through inaction. It’s a powerful expression of the responsibility that individuals bear to actively oppose harm, even in situations where the options are far from ideal.

On Thursday, Nicholas Nehamas and Erica Green looked at a question many of us have been wondering about— how long before her play for Republicans causes her— and the Democratic Party— to start hemorrhaging progressive voters? I mean, I know I’m not the only one, smelling the stench of a political realignment that moves the Democratic Party right. Appealing too much to conservative voters with her policy pronouncements “she risks chilling Democratic enthusiasm by alienating progressives and working-class voters. She’s campaigning with Liz Cheney and Mark Cuban, not Shawn Fain or Bernie. “She has,’ they wrote, “centered her economic platform on middle-class issues like small businesses and entrepreneurship rather than raising the minimum wage, a deeply held goal of many Democrats that polls well across the board. She has taken a harder-line stance on the border than has any member of her party in a generation and has talked more prominently about  owning a Glock than about combating climate change. She has not broken from President Biden on the war Israel is waging in Gaza.”

Bernie, who is campaigning for her— if not with her— says he’s “been alarmed by the number of working-class voters who were asking what Harris would do for them on issues like raising wages or allowing Medicare to cover dental care. ‘They want to hear her to be more aggressive in making it clear that she’s going to stand up for the working class of this country,’ Sanders said. “You lose the working class, I don’t know how you win an election.’”

[K]eeping Democrats unified and energized is especially important for Harris in a race polls suggest is tied, and the consequences for the party could be severe if even a few left-wing voters in battleground states stay home or vote for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate.”

Some progressives point to the vice president’s soft support among  Black and Latino voters as evidence that her message is not breaking through to enough workers. Sensing an opportunity with blue-collar voters who were already shifting toward Republicans, Trump has laid out the welcome mat for them in his advertisements and messaging.

And they worry that Harris— like Hillary Clinton in 2016— is falling into a trap of banking on liberal voters without offering significant policy change.

Elise Joshi, the executive director of the progressive group Gen-Z for Change— which has endorsed Harris and is knocking on doors to support her— said she was concerned that the excitement among many young voters for the vice president’s candidacy had faded.

“The tent is big enough for a guy who got us into a war with Iraq, and then the tent is not big enough for a Palestinian to speak for two minutes on the D.N.C. stage,” said Joshi, contrasting the endorsement of Harris by Cheney’s father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, with the Democratic Party’s decision not to invite a Palestinian American to speak at its national convention.

“The vibes really peaked when she chose Tim Walz to be the V.P. candidate,” Joshi added. “That time feels like it was so long ago.”

The Harris campaign’s move to the center is meant especially to target college-educated, wealthier, white voters who may have voted Republican in the past.

That group is more likely to cast ballot than poorer Black and Latino Americans. Trump has given Democrats an opening to recruit those more reliable voters with a series of bizarre rants, including a menacing threat to use the military against “the enemy within” and an extended riff about a deceased professional golfer that ended with praise for his genitalia. Harris’s team is also investing heavily in winning over undecided voters of color.

“America is ready for a new and optimistic generation of leadership, which is why Democrats, Republicans, independents are supporting our campaign,” Harris said last week in Erie County, Pa., a crucial bellwether region of the battleground state.

Polls show thatHarris’s economic message— which leans on tax breaks for the middle class and on creating opportunities for small businesses— is resonating more with voters than Biden’s did. She has significantly narrowed Trump’s lead as the candidate more trusted to handle the economy. And she has rolled out policies with wide appeal like an expanded child tax credit and having Medicare cover in-home health care, as well as vision and hearing benefits. [Where the fuck is the big one: dental?]

On Tuesday, she said in an interview with NBC News that she supported raising the minimum wage to at least $15 per hour, a question that Trump has sidestepped.

Many of Harris’s progressive and union allies believe she can motivate younger people, the left and working-class voters while also reaching out to Republicans. They are less focused on ideological purity than on beating Trump.

“I do think she’s a progressive,” said Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “I think she is also pragmatic about her beliefs and what it’s going to take to win, and what the polling says it’s going to take to win. I do think that the most important thing for progressives and for the country is that she wins.”

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers— one of six national union leaders who appeared alongside Harris last week in Detroit— said the vice president’s economic policies were focused on “creating wealth for working people.”

“Working-class voters want to be middle-class voters,” Weingarten said.

Still, Harris has made a major turnaround from how she ran for president in the Democratic primary race in 2019, when she supported “Medicare for all,” called for decriminalizing illegal border crossings and opposed fracking.

Progressives from across the constellation of left-wing interest groups say they worry about energy.

“We’ve contacted nearly a million young voters in swing states,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, the communications director for the Sunrise Movement, a progressive climate change group. “And we are hearing that there isn’t the level of enthusiasm that there could be, given the contrast being so clear, and given how dangerous a Trump presidency would be.”

Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, said he had knocked on doors in Pennsylvania and Georgia and said many working-class voters still seemed unsure whether Harris would “fight for them.”

“That requires her campaign focusing with a lot of intensity on the base,” he said.

And Our Revolution, the progressive group founded by Sanders, conducted a survey of left-wing voters that found a significant enthusiasm deficit about Harris, according to Joseph Geevarghese, its executive director.

“Will she fight for the things that we believe in?”Geevarghese said. “I think people aren’t sure. Most will bite their tongue and vote to defeat Donald Trump, and others just won’t be able to overcome their primary objections.”

I guess she doesn't need my vote in California if she has this one Maryland, from the state's former Lt. Governor and also the former chairman of the RNC.