Democratic Party operative Lindy Li made the news last Saturday (11/9) by appearing on “Fox & Friends Weekend” to whine about how she had been misled into thinking that Kamala Harris was going to win, which caused her in turn to mislead her friends into donating money to the campaign. Here's the quote that got me:
“Jen O’Malley Dillon promised all of us that Harris would win. She even put videos out that Harris would win. I believed her, my donors believed her and so they wrote massive checks. I just feel like a lot of us were misled.”
In other words, Lindy's friends wrote the massive checks because they had been convinced that Kamala would win, and that they'd be amply "repaid" (in terms of influence) after the election.
It's hard to feel too sorry for them.
Of course, this is what campaign finance at the "massive" level is all about. Perhaps the well-publicized fact that Kamala raised and spent a billion dollars (more than double what Trump raised and spent) helps explain her loss -- voters knew that she was going to have to pay all of that back many times over to special interests, at the expense of everyone else.
BTW this may be the first and last English language use of the portmanteau "oblivirony." I was trying to find a word meaning "lacking self-awareness" and nothing good came up; most of what came up just missed the point (e.g. "unselfconscious[ness]"). Oblivirony is derived from the expression "oblivious to the irony," which is what Lindy Li was here.
(The accent is on the second syllable, and thus the "i" in "irony" is barely pronounced.)
Since I'm writing, I'll just say one last thing or two about the election. I've heard a lot of stupid things said, but also a lot of intelligent things. My best synthesis is this:
The democrats should blame themselves over and over again for: (1) selecting Hillary over Sanders in 2016; (2) selecting Biden over Sanders in 2020; (3) selecting Biden over anyone else in 2024; and (4) covering up Biden's mental decline until it couldn't be covered up any more.
The Obamas apparently bear some of the blame in each of these, but so do a lot others.
Biden himself deserves blame for not stepping down sooner and then for anointing Harris as his successor when (apparently) other democrats had let him know that they wanted a contest. Let's hope he goes down in history as the egomaniacal hypocrite he is; although we should be remember that his dementia plays a role in everything he does, I can't help but think he believes that Harris's loss is evidence that the democrats should have stuck with him.
I won't pile on to what others have said about Harris, but I agree with those who say she positions herself to advance herself, as opposed to any particular set of core views or values.
And I also agree with those who say the Biden White House was run by faceless and unaccountable Democratic Party hacks, and the same would likely have been the case of the Harris White House.
So maybe one difference between 2020 and 2024 is that a lot of people in 2020 who were not crazy about Biden voted for him on the basis of "anyone but Trump," but by 2024 most of them had shifted to "anyone but Trump or another unprincipled Democratic Party corporate tool" and just stayed home. And of course some of them just threw in a vote for Trump as an F-you to the Democratic Party.
Seems like it really is time for a new political party to stand up and get organized. I've already heard Democratic Party strategists say that the country has moved to the right, so the Democrats should follow. But that's idiotic. It's really hard to say what's a "right" or a "left" issue any more -- e.g. some of the most important issues, like how to plan for the rise of artificial intelligence, how to reduce income and wealth inequality, how to lower drug prices and the cost of health care generally, and how to limit the ability of corporate greed to dictate government policy are not left/right issues. And I'm not even sure that climate change, immigration and the proper role of the US military are left/right issues either.
A new party could take the rational, pro-public interest positions all these issues, and leave its candidates free to choose on traditionally left/right issues. And let's not let the concerns about a 3-party system get to us -- this would just be a new party, which would essentially render the Democratic Party irrelevant, bringing us right back to a 2-party system. Isn't that what happened to the Federalist and Whig Parties?
