TGIF: Our Campaign Was Perfect

It’s been hard to find time to do this column: That’s how distraught I’ve been. I’ve been doing somber TikTok dances. I crossed the border just for old times’ sake. I robbed a Walgreens, which in my culture (San Francisco) is how we honor American history and our freedom. At least in Biden’s America. Now, it’s a new day (night), and I’ve brought you here so we can face the news together. 

→ Trump won: Yep. Trumpo won the election thanks to White Supremacy (Latinos) and Disinformation (men). The whole country simply jolted to the right:

He moved every demographic rightward except rich white women (me, your narrator, your debutante, I’m the only one you people can’t blame). I’m also college educated, but you knew that (Columbia College Class of 2010, Comparative Literature and Society major, magna cum laude but it should have been summa, still looking into that). 

It was decisive. It was across the board. Trump moved Hispanic voters right by 25 points. Young men have shifted nearly 30 points to the right since 2020. I didn’t even know they could shift that far, what with their gaming headsets plugged into their Xboxes. 

Trump did it and he did it cheap: Kamala Harris raised three times as much money as Trump. Yes, all the people who tell us that money can buy elections are really quiet now because money didn’t buy this one. And folks tried! They brought the election to the register and they said, “Wrap it up real nice, please, it’s a gift.” The clerk said, “Ma’am this is a Wendy’s,” and “MAGA.” 

You might take all of these shifts and think: Wow, American voters rejected Democrats in this cycle. Or you could have The New York Times’ take on it, which is that we have been conquered.

Never before seen in our 248-year history? He was president four years ago. 

→ A very elegant concession from Kamala: For a few hours on Wednesday, her campaign was silent. They didn’t play games and pretend they were winning. They didn’t give comment to the press. They collected themselves. They grabbed the screw cap Oyster Bay out of the fridge and considered it hard before saying, “It’s a gin night, girls.” And then the next day Kamala Harris delivered a beautiful concession speech, which you can read here. It gave me goosebumps and also made me furious, because she’s a good and fine person who ran a truly terrible campaign. It was a campaign that exemplified all of the delusions of the modern Democrats: that you never need to say what you stand for (because people should just assume you know what’s best for them), that you should never answer hard questions or appear with questionable figures, and that the only issue any American woman should care about is abortion. She refused to go to Austin, Texas, to sit with Joe Rogan, the biggest podcaster in the country, where Trump gave three hours (Kamala agreed to speak with him only if he left his studio and came to her, and she’d give an hour, but Rogan is like a bridge troll where everyone has to come to the bridge and live forever). Rogan is to undecided voters what the Pope is to Catholics. But progressives hate Joe Rogan, so Kamala snubbed him. 

Speaking of the Pope, Kamala also skipped the Al Smith dinner, a Catholic charity tradition for candidates, where she could have made some self-deprecating jokes. She balked when The View asked her how she would govern differently from Biden. She was so scared of upsetting her left flank that she refused to endorse Proposition 36, a new tough-on-crime bill in California—that passed with over 70 percent of the vote in California. Every single county in California passed the tough-on-crime bill that Kamala refused to endorse. Crime is to California what the Pope is to Catholics!

I was genuinely excited about Kamala when she shoved Biden into a refrigerator and emerged, victorious, as the Coconut Queen. I love the idea of a hot-cop president. I liked that she brought a drunk vibe to the party. And it’s true that she inherited a campaign that was in shambles—“We finally beat Medicare, anyone?” But I never found out what Kamala believed in. And I really did try (20 minutes, three Google searches, one text to my prosecutor friend).

As top Kamala adviser and longtime Democratic strategist David Plouffe wrote on X: “We dug out of a deep hole but not enough.” He quickly deleted his entire X account, lest any part of the campaign at any point acknowledge that Biden was imperfect. 

But it’s a good reminder: The real villain of this story is Zombie Biden and his family, I hate to say it. Like, remember how at the end of June, as everything was reaching a fever pitch to pressure Joe to drop out, and the Biden family was away doing a photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz? I do. Remember how Hunter Biden suddenly started showing up in meetings with his dad and top-level aides at the end there? I do. Remember how Jill Biden—sorry, DOCTOR JILL BIDEN—was on the cover of Vogue that very July? Okay, that one was kind of fierce. But she was posing for that when she knew quite well the state her husband was in. 

The Bidens skipped Harris’s official election party, a last jab in Dr. Jill’s reign of terror. (And was Dr. Biden trying to send a message by voting in a bright red suit? Red for Trump? Probably not, but isn’t it fun to get conspiratorial?) What I would give to be a fly on the wall while the Bidens and Harris-Emhoffs trudge around grabbing their old notebooks from the drawers in the West Wing. You know it’s icy in that break room. 

With what Biden handed her, that Kamala Harris managed to get the race as close as she did is impressive. Look at this from RealClearPolitics and what happened after Kamala took over:

All I’m saying is that the villains aren’t always obvious. When Democrats do eventually introspect, I hope they spare a moment for Dr. Jill.