This Just In – “People come and go so quickly here,” said Dorothy Gale of Kansas.
After an exhausting July that was too hot and too stressful with worries about the president’s health, his opponent’s near disastrous shooting incident, all of a sudden the pieces fell into place last weekend and the unlikely launch of the Harris for President campaign was hitting on all cylinders … with precision that Democrats nearly forgot they had.
I envy the biographers and historians who will write the behind the scenes of how all of this went down, but the bottom line is that suddenly the political races that seemed stagnated by an elderly incumbent president are now awash in donations, new volunteers and organizing energy that we haven’t seen since Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses.
At the dawn of this year, I said to anyone who would listen that we all thought we knew what this presidential race would be about. That would be a wrong assumption as so often it has turned out that a race is quickly turned on its head and becomes about something no one could predict.
In 1972, Nixon’s re-election bid would naturally be expected to be a referendum on his first term. He had declared in the fall of 1968 that he had a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam war. It turned out he escalated that war, which did not produce the surrender he hoped to achieve. Thanks to his well-documented dirty tricks and illegal shenanigans, Nixon was able to disparage his opponent and sail to a landslide victory.
In 1976, Americans just wanted to be out of the Watergate era, but public opinion was mixed on President Ford’s pardon of Nixon. When Ford said during the presidential debate that Poland was not dominated by the Soviet Union, it became a flashpoint for rejecting him in his first bid for the job he already had.
These stories go on and on, but it comes down to this: voters make decisions based in large part on what’s right in front of them – not on esoteric philosophies. What will this candidate do for/to me?
We don’t have to reach very far back to remember the early months of 2017 when we’d wake up, pour the coffee and check Twitter to see what crazy … stuff … had been posted by our new president at 3:00 am. It was on one hand an entertainment, but rather quickly graduated into a national anxiety disorder. I get that the president is often disturbed in the middle of the night because of events elsewhere in the world, but when I see him commenting extensively on the ratings of a television show he used to host, I think maybe he’s not taking the job very seriously. When a global pandemic demanded a serious-minded president, we found ourselves with advice about bleach injections.
Joe Biden, it seems to me, takes his job very seriously. He is so earnest about getting the right result for the American people that when he saw in recent weeks that his already slipping numbers were reaching you-just-can’t-do-it territory, he effectively handed his nomination to his vice president.
At last, we do know what this election will be about. It will be about us. What do we want? Just like driving a car—Reverse or Drive? As we learn more about “Project 2025” (which most definitely IS Trump’s platform) what we see is a list of progressive achievements of the 20th and 21st Centuries.
Pick your topic of interest – alleviating poverty, civil rights expansion, equal justice under law, access to healthcare, supporting vulnerable populations, improving public education or strengthening America’s leadership and influence in the world. Just starting with those, Project 2025 has the same solution for all of it:
“Undo”
This is what the election is about — undoing the progress that began with the New Deal and continues through today or shutting down our self-governance. Get registered to vote. Get ready for the gazillion ads and robocalls. We can do this.
(featured image: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and the host of the Weekend Watercooler on 97.9 The Hill. She is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
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