Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) said one reason he was chosen as former Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate in the recent election was because he could “code talk to white guys watching football” and “fixing their truck.”
Democrat’s use of the vice president to “balance the ticket” is what got us here. Everyone forgets that the entire reason that Biden was Obama’s VP was that there was trepidation at having a black candidate, so to balance the ticket, they looked for the most racist white guy still in the Democratic party, which was Biden. Biden’s staffers were pulling their hair out and complaining in the 2020 primary, saying things like “please, use any other examples of reaching across the aisle to work with Republicans, other than how much you loved Strom Thurmand and worked with him to stop desegregation”. The calculus with Walz was that you get a “bumbling Midwest guy” on the ticket and they can continue to take progressive voters for granted and possibly appeal to purple states, since several of them were Midwestern.
I see 3 main reasons she lost and none of them have really anything to do with Walz.
- She refused to break with Biden on any policy failures even though he was extremely toxic.
- She hired useless Biden strategists who pushed the typical unpopular bullshit like courting republicans (hence Cheney), being pro business, wars are great, “I love cracking”. And her pro working class/anti-corporations messaging disappeared. Remember price gauging talks in the first rallies?
- She ignored a genocide, backstabbed Paslestinians at DNC and promised to continue arming the terrorist state of Israel.
Walz was put in a box and hidden the moment Biden stategist were hired. He literally was nowhere seen after a first week until the debate (which was a total failure as he was forced to repeat her horrible positions) and then last week. He was chosen before Biden stategists joined who hated his guts since they literally fought all their miserable lives against working class policies he supports. They wanted Shapiro.
Shapiro is, quite simply, a genocide apologist. He has compared antiwar protesters to “people dressed up in KKK [Ku Klux Klan] outfits or KKK regalia.” He called for clamping down on anti-genocide voices, especially on college campuses — free speech be damned. He supports a bill to punish colleges that boycott or divest from Israel, including financial punishments. He also condemned Liz Magill, then president of the University of Pennsylvania, after a McCarthyite congressional hearing designed to gin up dishonest accusations of tolerance for antisemitism and before she resigned. As attorney general, he went after Ben & Jerry’s when the company decided to stop selling to Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Source: https://jacobin.com/2024/08/josh-shapiro-israel-palestine-vice-president
I see 3 main reasons she lost and none of them have really anything to do with Walz.
I remember that the week they picked Walz was the one week where we all thought that the Dems could actually run a competent campaign. People were calling Republicans “wierd”, Kamala no-showed a Netanyahu Senate visit, Walz was and still is genuinely popular - there was a lot of hope that she would break with Biden to the point where even cynical people thought she would do it out of pure electoral calculus due to Biden’s unpopularity.
Then
apparently Harris herselfthe Biden staffers they brought on the campaign shut down the “weird” messaging, and she had that blood and soil DNC speech, and we all got brought back to reality.It was Biden strategists not her.
Three weeks into her presidential run was the first time the Biden campaign’s pollsters — now hers — held a deep-dive call with Kamala Harris’ inner circle to discuss what she’s been saying on the stump. Over the line came a lot of praise, but also some suggested tweaks. First, said veteran Democratic numbers man Geoff Garin, summarizing their analysis, stop saying, “We’re not going back.” It wasn’t focused enough on the future, he argued. Second, lay off all the “weird” talk — too negative.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/18/politics/kamala-harris-presidential-campaign/index.html
Oh whoops.
So, she was stupid and naive enough to embrace the most destructive and losing campaign she could have possibly chosen and give up everything that was working? Weird how it is a constant refrain that tacking towards the right is the winning move that all campaign advisors point out, and even though it always loses, Obama was the only Democrat after Bill Clinton to not follow this advice, it is not a damning condemnation that a Dem candidate always listen to this advice, despite its obvious failures. Litterally, Biden could not have won on this playbook (only Democrat since Clinton to win with this) if the combination of COVID and BLM made Trump seem obviously failing, through no virtue of Biden.
No, we should glorify and defend Harris for selling out to the most loosing and useless tactics possible, because being polite and positive is more important that defeating, in her words!, fascism.
It’s hard to pin down what she actually believes in, but if I had to guess she was forced to take those strategists on and their policies to maintain access to the funding that came from Biden.
Even if she didn’t believe in many of the popular policies she mentioned in the early days, I think she had okay instincts, but was too afraid to go against the whole Democratic machine.
Being a strategist is a business and they get paid no matter if they win or lose, so their interest lie in protecting that business model inside the aparatus.
P.S. Nowhere did I defend the Harris or her loosing strategy. I just pointed out factual mistake.
I wasn’t blaming Walz as much as saying that putting Walz on the ticket was, in their eyes, enough of a sop to progressives and midwesterners, that they should be able to give nothing else to those constituencies.
Apparently not because they explicitly cozied up to Dick Cheney
That was calculated. Who among us working class folks has never shot a person while hunting?
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Quail hunting. Also quayle hunting.
So they used the best guy for the job of president for trying to get votes from people who prob weren’t going to vote dem… looovely.
If their goal was to get those votes they should have said their plan was to win and then have Kamela step down for Walz to become president. Unless the whole thing about Kamela being the only one who could legaly be listed as canidate for president was a lie. There was never going to be a win with an african american woman if they needed the votes from the retardicans…
if they needed the votes from the retardicans
True but this if is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. The Democrats never needed Republican voters to win; it’s just their excuse for cockblocking progressives.
You could code talk to losers, I saw fucking JD Vance hand you your ass. How does that even happen?
To be fair, he was intentionally gagged by the Kamala’s useless strategists during the debate. You could see how uncomfortable he was repeating her talking points instead of talking about working class people issues he championed and achieved.
