On The Treadmill to Political Defeat?

The Hail Mary pass is a play in American football employed in desperation, usually at the end of the first half by a team behind in the score trying to close that gap, or more likely, at the end of a game when a last-minute touchdown would affect victory. It is a tactic with a low probability of success but one employed when victory is otherwise unattainable. This tactic has the eligible players of the trailing team flood the end zone attempting to catch a long-yardage pass from their quarterback. Likewise, Hail Mary passes exist in the world of politics as well. One of the most memorable political Hail Mary passes of all time was John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as running mate. This development did little to help him with women voters or improve his chances of overall electoral success but it would supply late night comedians with near limitless material for satire. In many ways, the relatively late arrival of Kamala Harris as nominee for president can be seen as nothing other than the ultimate political Hail Mary pass. It was never intended for Harris to be the candidate and the reason she is now is because Joe Biden finally and undeniably revealed his shortcomings in a disastrous debate performance, a development that was in many ways presaged for months beforehand by all manner of cognitive failings and functional mental missteps. Democrats had held on to the forlorn belief that beating Trump was something only Biden could accomplish until it was no longer clear that he could, hence the political Hail Mary pass that is now the Harris candidacy. It was simply too late to find and vet another candidate in the time left between the undeniable problems besetting Biden and November 5th, a situation that could contain within it the seeds of political defeat. I believe the aforementioned to be obvious based on the fact that for all we know of Donald J. Trump, from his being a twice impeached convicted felon to a man who ginned up an attempted coup on January 6 to his outright crack pot commentary and his penchant for authoritarianism; this race is still a dead heat. Sure, you can cherry pick whichever poll results bolster your hopes and dreams for his defeat but the best indicator out there, The Real Clear Politics 2024 National: Trump vs. Harris composite of all polling, which doesn't factor in or out anything, shows the race to be a tossup as of this morning, 2 November. That Kamala Harris is in a dead heat with a man who is inherently beatable is beyond comprehension and a sign of strategic failure on the part of the Democratic Party. To me it shows that the Democratic Party has learned nothing from Hillary Clinton's defeat in 2016. Sure, she led in most polling and she got the popular vote, but our elections aren't based on who wins the popular vote so there was a blueprint in her defeat that seems to have been ignored. Did the Democrats bet all their chips on the hope that Trump couldn't possibly again capture the nomination? The result of this failure to learn the lesson of 2016 or to have prematurely concluded that Trump couldn't possibly make a political comeback may be another colossal defeat for the Democrats on election day. Sure, you can make the argument that a liberal friend of mine has: "You have to admit, Hillary would have been a better president." Of course she would have been, so would I have been or so would any number of other people have been, but so what? Focusing on hypotheticals is a useless waste of time in the world of politics. What was needed was a sound strategy of picking a viable candidate and matching that candidate with a policy platform that didn't include nonsense like defund the police. In the future, Democrats need to adopt a more strategic approach to winning presidential elections in a country so sharply divided as is today's America. Political parties exist for one fundamental purpose, to win elections, everything else they do feeds into that goal. The Democrats should have caucused two years ago to consider the age and health of Joe Biden and the probabilities that, if reelected he could effectively serve out a full second term. Conservative commentator David Gergen once pointed out that no matter how much one tries to stay mentally and physically active, by age 80 the vast majority of people are just not as mentally sharp or nimble as they once were. Our bodies just begin to slow down as we run our final laps in life. Now history shows us how an aging president in failing health would struggle to maintain America's best interests. All one need do is to examine F.D.R.'s final days and his performance at the Yalta Conference in 1945 or the prolonged incapacitation of Woodrow Wilson between late 1919 and into 1920 to see that. The potential for something similar was foretold in Biden's troubles in the period leading up to his disastrous debate performance that ultimately gave rise to the Harris candidacy. As such, it would have been beneficial two years ago to examine who, if anyone, among the Democrats would be a formidable opponent to a resurgent Trump in an electorate as evenly divided as this one, an electorate in which his supporters believe lies and fallacies no matter how many facts to the contrary are piled up against them. Is there a good reason why the Democrats have continued to ignore the fact that for all we know to be true about Trump his followers don't care about his shortcomings and that the leadership of the Republican Party has lost all effective control over the base? Can the Democrats not see that these are factors that need to be figured into any equation that should have been formulated so as to insure the defeat of Donald Trump? I don't think there is anything special about either of our two major parties. I personally believe that the Democrats, lacking a clear and universally popular potential candidate willing to run for president should have gone to someone outside the Party in searching for a candidate. It is noteworthy that by late spring roughly fifty percent of registered Democrats preferred someone other than Joe Biden as their standard bearer. I believe that what was needed was someone of national prominence, without too much political baggage, who could appeal to both sides of the political spectrum and draw supporters away from Trump as well as placate disaffected Republicans. People like David Petraeus or James Stavridis, both retired military flag officers, immediately come to mind. Now this is not because they are men, but because if we are really on the brink of an election that could see the erosion if not the end to democracy as we know it, shouldn't we do what is necessary to preserve the democracy that so many of us dearly value? Are we not already in effect in an environment of political damage control based as it is on the very state of American political reality? I fully understand that the Democrats want to make history again by electing a woman of color to the presidency after having successfully elected and reelected Barack Obama, but is this in the realm of the possible given the current political climate? The razor thin margin separating Harris from Trump in the polls suggests that it might not be. Is it the fact that Harris isn't the right woman for the job in the first place? Honestly, I can't imagine a woman politician in America today that has more appeal than Harris, except, perhaps Gretchen Whitmer, but again, the fact that we are still in a dead heat suggests that we still don't have the right candidate, male or female, at the present time. Such are the problems inherent in the tactic of desperate political Hail Mary passes. The current plight of the Democrats is succinctly summarized by Keith Naughton as follows: "At heart, Democrats’ biggest problem is that their insularity is much worse than that of their Republican counterparts. Yes, both parties are living in their own ideological media bubbles. But it’s worse for the Democrats. Within their bubble, denial has reigned supreme as they have pursued their own hobbyhorses. Instead of addressing voters’ concerns, the Democratic political class and their friends in the establishment media continue to focus on Trump’s threat to democracy, his odd behavior and their own supposed victim status. In short, the Democrats are running on issues they care about, not issues that voters care about. The Harris campaign has become comfort food for an anxious, bewildered political class." In the end, 2024 is about two campaigns featuring mediocre candidates who refuse to listen to the voters, stumbling toward the finish line. But if Kamala Harris and the Democrats lose, they have only themselves to blame." The tightness of this race reveals, that from the standpoint of the Democrats, it seems as if the party is almost on auto pilot when it comes to what many voters want. Much of this is of course true for the Republicans as well but since we are worried about a Trump victory I will focus on the plight of the Democrats as being the more important. Recently there have been rumblings among the those on the far left that Harris is spending too much time courting disaffected Republicans. Now it was posited last spring that about a third to a half of Nikki Haley's supporters would vote for Biden if Haley dropped out. Thus, Kamala Harris going after this segment of the G.O.P. base, many in traditional Red or swing states, along with other disaffected traditional Republican makes perfect sense. At the same time, why haven't the Democrats done more to woo back the non-college educated working class? Despite the fact that people with college degrees now make up forty percent of the population, the sixty percent that don't have a degree still matter. To ignore their defection to the G.O.P. was a fundamental strategic mistake on the part of the Democrats. To deride these people as deplorables was even stupider. See the Brookings reference below: "Still, when asked which president in recent decades had done the most for average working families, 44% named Donald Trump, compared to just 12% for Joe Biden." If Kamala Harris goes down to defeat it won't be her fault, it will be the fault of a strategically inert and myopic Democratic Party which has been largely sleep walking through the past decade and which has failed to adequately address a changed political landscape. With the exception of one or two minor faux pas, Harris has committed nothing in the way of fatal mistakes. Sure, she has talked in broad sweeps about policy goals but then again, she hasn't had sufficient time to delve into comprehensive legislative particulars and run a national campaign in the final months at the same time. She has also had to continue serving as Vice President. Again, this can only be seen largely as a problem inherent in the political Hail Mary pass. Lacking a defined and well-articulated public policy platform Harris' single most compelling campaign pitch is her uplifting appeal that, for the good of the country and its civil society, it is time to turn the page on a decade of divisiveness, derision and derogatory political discourse. Donald Trump's increasingly unhinged rantings of the last few weeks simply make Harris' appeal all the more urgent and compelling in its message. Steven J. Gulitti New York City 2 November 2024 References: Progressives warn Harris must change her closing message as the election looms https://daytondailynews.com/nation-world/progressives-warn-harris-must-change-her-closing-message-as-the-election-looms/S6TGXKR4QBB27JXREATWHY6TFM/ Pennsylvanians “seemed to have only a vague idea how the Democratic Party is trying to woo them back,” George Packer writes from Charleroi, Pennsylvania. “A politician has to show up, look voters in the eye, shake their hand, and then deliver help”: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/how-win-pennsylvania/680302/ Republicans and Democrats both need the support of the working class, but neither party is asking the crucial question of what these voters actually want, George Packer writes: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/01/democratic-republican-parties-working-class-economy/676145/ 2024 National: Trump vs. Harris; https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/trump-vs-harris What today’s working class wants from political leaders; https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-todays-working-class-wants-from-political-leaders/ Why are the Democrats losing? Hubris. https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4949797-why-are-democrats-losing-its-simple-hubris/ Steve Gulitti is a political independent and graduate of the State University of New York at Buffalo and the University of Illinois. He is a retired Chief Warrant Officer in the United States Coast Guard Reserve with 25 years of total service including active duty. He is a retired union ironworker as well. He currently lives in New York City where he presently works as a stagehand under the auspices of IATSE Local 1. He voted for Kamala Harris in early voting and had previously voted for Joe Biden.