10/29/24

An American Dream
          HARRIS WINS!
        United States elects its first woman president;
      Voters reject Trump’s dark vision of the county.

WE’RE ONE WEEK AWAY from Election Day.
     I’ve been thinking about what will happen. Here’s my vision:
     Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, wins both the popular vote and the Electoral College count – both by decisive margins.
     The headlines and stories reflect astonishment.
     The polls, once again, got it wrong.
     As  did the political soothsayers, who usually opt for pessimism, cynicism, and skepticism - not without reason, since the world is savage place - and because they're scared silly of being wrong.
     And surely, the pollsters and experts never want to be accused of the ultimate sin of being soft-headed, sentimental and impractical.
     Both the commentariat and the polls had indicated a discouraging outcome, in which the momentum in the final days belonged to Donald Trump.
     Even Harris’s supporters, when asked how they were feeling about the election, gave a candid one-word answer: “nervous.”
     Many of The Nervous remembered but never recovered from the shock of 2016, in which Trump illogically, and against the best polls and the wisest punditry, gathered enough Electoral votes to become president.
     Trump’s presidency had been a disaster,  even worse than imagined. Yet, here he was again, with a resume that had more in common with a criminal’s rap sheet than a list of presidential qualifications; more popular than ever;  a survivor of twin impeachments and two attempted assassinations;  filling auditoriums and stadiums; spewing racism, lies, vulgar jokes and promising a brutal, cruel authoritarianism.
     How could so many millions of Americans be enthralled and devoted to such a repulsive figure, who promoted so many un-American beliefs?

THE ANSWER, ON ELECTION NIGHT, was that Harris had upended all of that.
     How?
     Once again, Americans proved that they believed in the American dream.
     It’s a dream often defined by material prosperity – the house with the picket fence, the car(s)  and affordable eggs.
     But the important part of the dream has always been about more. The American dream, from the beginning, is about hope. Hope that in one country, ideas and ideals count. Hope that things could, would and will get better.
     America’s sins are real and lasting. Slavery powered the country's original economy, and its “manifest destiny” was realized by slaughtering and betraying Indians.
     But generation after generation, the country sought to better live up to its founding language.
     Now, in the election of 2024, all “men” really meant that everyone really was equal; a woman was elected president; finally, the country had doubled its chances of electing a capable leader.
     With a mixed  background, Harris was more representative of the country America was becoming: mixed-race, mixed faith, mixed origins, all in service of the American dream.

 LOOKING BACK ON IT ALL, Harris’s win was all the more inspired and astonishing because it was born out of an unprecedented political crisis.
     Joe Biden, an accomplished, and wildly underappreciated president, had been showing his age and/or health as he sought a second term, and when he confronted Trump in a  TV debate, Biden disintegrated.
     Under immense pressure from fellow Democrats, Biden on July 21 withdrew from the race, leaving his largely unloved vice president – Kamala Harris – as the only viable replacement as the Democratic nominee.
     From that moment on, Harris emerged as a confident, competent and capable leader, instantly eloquent and in control, never making a strategic stumble or verbal misstep.
     At the Democratic convention a month later, on Aug. 23, Harris succinctly summarized both Trump’s weakness and threat:
     Fellow Americans, this election is not only the most important of our lives, it is one of the most important in the life of our nation. In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences — but the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.
     More than any policy position or stirring speech, Harris demonstrated that she had what it takes to be a president, and in  their single TV debate, she demolished Trump.
     But Harris’s personal qualities were not the only factor in her win.
     During the three-month, exuberant and desperate campaign, millions of American rose to the challenge. Progressives mostly held their tongues as Harris reached out to conservatives. Conservative icons, like the Cheney family, set aside their ideology for core democratic principles. People from solidly blue states traveled to the seven battleground states to knock on doors. Volunteers made phone calls, wrote postcards and prayed.
     On election night, it was too early to tell whether Harris would be among the good presidents; or whether she would be admitted to that rare group, the Washingtons, the Lincolns, and, with my bias is showing here, the Bidens.
     But what we did know is that Harris’s election opened a new, promising chapter in the American story.
     Now we would be able to confront a brutal economy, which leaves many American impoverished, homeless and hungry. Now we would be able to confront climate change, Russian aggression, deadly conflict in the Middle East and all the surprises and challenges that are the ordinary, everyday elements of American life.
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IF YOU HAVE READ THIS FAR, you may say that my vision of what we’ll be experiencing next Tuesday is a fantasy, born of wishful thinking and spacey sentiment.
     Maybe.
     But my American dream is based in our country’s difficult, aspirational and inspired history.
     And without this dream, we will never have the country that we want for ourselves and that our children deserve.