Vice President Kamala Harris's first rally speech yesterday as the presumed Democratic nominee for president was remarkable for several reasons. In Milwaukee, which was a special fuck-you to the savage Republican National Convention that was there last week, you could watch in real time as she grew into the role of nominee, moving from slightly stilted delivery to full-on warrior preacher by the end, latching onto the chanted phrase that will no doubt become her slogan: "We're not going back." That's a perfect distillation of the significance of this moment in electoral and American history. The audience there lost their goddamn minds with glee.
Until this past weekend, there was a feeling of dutiful drudgery to the presidential election, along with a frisson of dread, for me and pretty much everyone I know. As I said over on the Threads, we understood the assignment: vote for Joe Biden to be re-elected president with the full knowledge that there was a very real chance that Vice President Kamala Harris would have to take over at some point. And it made sense, even to someone like me who wanted Biden to withdraw. Biden has been a strong president, a consequential one, and, even if I disagreed with him on some things (like Israel's war on Gaza), the man had a hell of a record to run on. But, goddamn, it sucked to have to worry that every time he made an appearance, we had to just be thankful he didn't stumble too much.
I also always said it had to be Biden's decision whether or not to stay in. While that meant it would have been a terrible idea to push him out through some kind of effort to get delegates to go rogue, it didn't mean that people couldn't try to convince him to drop out. I thought how it played out in public was unseemly and unnecessary, and that it had gone on too long, but, as I told a few people, I didn't think Biden would stand down until after the Republican convention and after assuring that Harris would be the nominee. But the longer Biden waited, the more I thought that it was getting too late to do it. I dreaded the possible fight over the nomination, especially with too many Democrats calling for some kind of stupid fucking "blitz primary." Democrats can be Machiavellian motherfuckers when they want to be. Sadly, too often, it's with members of their own party. I was ready to just get back to the forced march feeling and live with the anxiety of whether or not enough Americans would come through when voting happened.
But you know you felt it on Sunday the second that Biden dropped out, that mixture of "oh, fuck" and "holy shit," and then when he endorsed Harris a half-hour later and then when Democrat after Democrat and caucus after caucus endorsed and then when the donations pretty much tsunamied in (including one from me), you kept feeling it. Unless you were the hardest Ridin'-with-Biden stan, it was a quick journey through surprise, confusion, realization, and release. Think of it like you've been with the same lover for 30 years, fucking more or less the same way, and then they tell you they want to try something new in the sack, like role-play or ben-wah balls or nipple torture. You're taken aback until you understand that it's fucking awesome, that those clamps feel incredible.
I've been watching politics as closely as anyone who isn't in the shit themselves for the last 40 years, and I've never seen the Democratic Party do anything with as much unity and grace as the insanely quick coalescing behind Kamala Harris. It was so perfectly-timed, so skillfully done, that it bears all the hallmarks of a well-planned operation. In the end, I want to believe that Biden and Harris outplayed everyone and fucked over everyone who needed to be fucked over.
I don't know if it's true, but if Biden, who has been at this game for over a half-century, convinced Trump and the Republicans that he was not going anywhere so that they would waste millions of dollars and their entire convention attacking him and make Trump choose fascist dullard JD Vance for his running mate, it was brilliant. If the pants-wetting Democrats were really worried that the country was still too sexist to elect a woman (a non-white woman, too), Biden and Harris made sure that she was about as inevitable as they come. But it could just as easily been a spontaneous action that spurred more spontaneous actions, and it definitely was Democratic voters saying, "Oh, fuck no" to a primary or an open convention. Like I said, we understood the assignment. If it wasn't Biden, it was Harris.
Of course, the outpouring of support for Harris was relief that the forced march was over. Even more importantly, Biden's act of extraordinary patriotism completely took back the narrative on the election. True or not, fair or not, what was baked into every single thing that Democrats did was the corporate media's obsession, fanned by Republicans and even some Democrats, that Biden was suffering cognitive impairment and he should drop out. That was the narrative. That was what every Democrat running for every office would have to answer for. It was fucked up in the extreme, but, sorry, it wasn't unwarranted.
In an instant, the entire narrative changed. Hell, it was burned to the ground. Now Trump is the very old man. Trump's criminality, venality, and incoherence are now front and center because nothing overshadows it. And by being a woman who is Black and AAPI, Harris represents a huge part of the population of the country and the huge number of us who ache for the end of the rule of old white men. If you wanna call that DEI, fine. Fuck, yeah, I love diversity, I think equity is imperative, and there's not a goddamn thing wrong with inclusion. Blow me if you use DEI in a pejorative sense. If someone votes for her because she's Black, well, shit, how many fucking white men have been voted for because they're white men? Wait, I know the answer: all of them. Plus, she's also a former prosecutor running against a convicted felon and rapist. That's its own narrative, too.
So now all of these constituencies are activated and are ready in a way that I honestly have never seen, not even when Barack Obama became the nominee. In addition to the ridiculous haul of campaign cash (which is great, but shows just how fucked our campaigns are, thanks to the Supreme Court), Harris's nomination has energized Gen Z, millions more of whom will be able to vote than in 2016 (on top of the millions of Boomers who have died since 2016).
The thing is that Gen Z and a whole bunch of the rest of us won't give a shit about the attacks that desperate Republicans are going to throw at Harris. You're gonna attack her race? Her sex? Her having sex? Good fucking luck. None of that will have any effect. And the idea that they are going to use Willie Horton-like attacks on her is absurd coming from a criminal who is literally out on bail and awaiting sentencing for his felonies.
See, we live in a time of vibes, where people want to part of where the vibes are. We want the feeling of belonging, of community, of actual joy without the burden of hate. We want to feel like we're moving forward, not, you know, going back. And that's a powerful attractor. When we get more of them post-Biden, polls are going to show a tight race, possibly with Harris a little ahead. Then comes the Democratic National Convention, and the vibes will continue.
There's a long, long road ahead, and if this election season has taught us anything, it's who knows what the fuck is going to happen. Harris's position on Israel's war with Gaza could kill some of the Gen Z buzz. Republicans with blistered asses are always dangerous. Trump is an elephant with a raging hard-on in the middle of a crystal factory. Who knows how much he'll bust up the joint until he gets off?
But I have one more thing that Harris offers and it relates to Trump and the MAGA bullshit and JD Vance and all of it. It's a simple idea: Don't you want all of that to be over already? God, don't you want it to be done and gone? We can do that. We've already defied all the expectations about how this was supposed to go. We can defy them all the way through to turning the goddamn page at last on the old narrative and living in the new one.
