Doom Report (Week 41: Further Reflections on Kamala)

This week on The Weekly Show, Jon Stewart interviews Kamala Harris.  She’s been making the rounds, pimping her new book 107 Days, which seems to be framed as an excuse.  Although, as I’ve noted before, it’s more than twice as long as Kier Starmer had over in the UK, and he won handily.  But whatever.  In this interview, she says a lot of things I liked ... and quite a few that made me scream at my monitor.  Worst among them was when Jon asked her if her affection for Biden had prevented her from making her case as to what she wanted to accomplish, separate from Biden, for fear of offending him.  To which she responded:

I felt that the distinction between he and I was pretty clear.

The epithet that came out of my mouth when I heard her say this was very unflattering, and I won’t repeat it here, but I couldn’t help but remember what she said on The View a little under a month before the election:

Sunny Hostin: Well, if anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?
Kamala: There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of—and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact ...

So the distinction was “pretty clear” and yet you couldn’t come up with a single fucking thing when asked about it point blank?  (To be fair to Kamala, she probably gave a better answer in her recent reappearance on The View.  It’s basically the same answer, but at least it’s more complete.  But she also fails to identify that moment as the turning point for her campaign, which I feel is foolish on her part.)

Now, look: I haven’t been shy about saying that I mostly like Kamala.  The first time I spoke about her was on my original blog, way back in August of 2020, shortly after she and Biden won the Democratic nomination.  I noted that I was “a bit more” heartened over the choice of her than Joe—which is a bit of damning with faint praise, I’ll admit, but still.  In November of 2020, I mentioned her again, in the context that Biden retiring at some point (how foolish I was to imagine such a thing back then) might actually work out pretty well for us, as she seemed better poised to accomplish big things than he.  But note that I also wrote that:

The Democrats are exactly half of what’s wrong with the American political system, and I have very little faith in their desire to effect real change, much less their ability to do so.

Which is almost prophetic enough to make up for that whole “imagine Biden stepping down” delusion.  I also noted, before the election, that I was not only going to vote for her for President, but that I had voted for her for Senator, and before that for Attorney General.  I am not anti-Kamala by any stretch.  But, in the first time I brought up the topic of Kamala in these Doom Reports, I pointed out that this moment on The View is not only the point where I think Kamala lost the election, but it’s also the moment that James Carville called out, Chris Christie also mentioned it in week 2, and, indeed, it was one of the main points raised by my Trump-voting friend (who, you may recall, was the impetus for this whole series).  (To be fair, it’s really one of two points where I think Kamala lost: the other being listening to her brother-in-law when he advised her to stop going after corporate price gouging.)  So the fact that Kamala apparently still can’t accept the full weight of that faux pas—other than some weasel words about how she “didn’t understand” how important it was to “other people”—it makes me crazy.

But also let’s not downplay that other reason, which in the preceding paragraph I relegated to a parenthetical.  It didn’t seem to come up much in the conversation with Jon Stewart, so I’m unclear if Kamala recognizes what a misstep it was to back off going after the big corporations.  I understand wanting to listen to a trusted family member (Tony West is married to Kamala’s sister), and I understand wanting to get the perspective of a proper businessperson when you have no business experience yourself (Kamala is a lifelong prosecutor and politician; West is the chief legal officer of Über).  But there is a point where the buck stops with you.  She claims she could understand that people were hurting, she claims she had plans to address corporate price gouging and other malevolent business practices, but yet she made the choice to downplay that stance.

And, not that it has anything to do with the Kamala interview—or then again maybe it does—but Charlamagne tha God appears to agree with me; he appeared this week on The Daily Show’s “In My Opinion” segment, slamming corporate Democrats.  He trenchantly zeroes in on the heart of the problem when he says:

And that—that brings me to the real problem.  Democratic leaders never support candidates who might disrupt the capitalist system.  But guess what? the current system isn’t working.  Americans want it remodeled the way Trump is “remodeling” the East Wing, all right?  Dems act like they’ll get a cookie for being the most rational people in the room.  No one cares.  You’re trying to win voters, not get a signed headshot from Ezra Klein.

The shot at Ezra Klein aside (I still think Klein and the hard progressives are saying more things in common than either side realizes), Charlamagne is dead right.  When Bernie ran in 2016, the Democratic leaders disavowed him—and it cost them the election.  When Mamdani blew Cuomo out of the water in the primary for NYC mayor, leaders either ignored him or outright attacked him ... though it seems like, if polls are to be believed, they’ll end up on the wrong side of history.  Again and again, they ignore what the people want in favor of what their rich donors tell them to do. 

As I say, this exact issue didn’t really come up in the Weekly Show interview, but here’s another thing Kamala said there that irked me:

But, also, we’ve gotta understand that we cannot just be focused on Donald Trump.  We need to not only be against something, but also, we need to be understanding of how we got here, and that it’s a bigger apparatus, and not just the one guy.  But the second point that is equally important, which we’re not emphasizing, is what we stand for.

How in the hell does a politician—and, let’s not mince words: she is a politician: has been for 15 years, and normally is a pretty good one—so how does a politician say “we need to not only be against something” and not immediately follow that with “we need to be for something”?  Not to finally wend her way to that point some 40 words later ... no shit you’re not emphasizing it!  When exactly did you plan to start?

I’m picking on her a bit here; the interview overall is pretty good, and you should watch the whole thing.  But also watch the after-show conversation, where Jon’s producers (all women, as it happens) express their own reservations.

Other things you need to know this week:

• On this week’s Strict Scrutiny, we get an excellent run-down of the ongoing trials, and an exquisite summary of the insane Lindsey Halligan text chain.

• And, speaking of the Lindsey Halligan text chain (did I mention it was insane?), the person on the other side of that chain, Anna Bower, happens to work for Legal Eagle, which means that we got a video of Anna herself telling the whole story.  To say that the incompetence is legendary would be underselling it; this one is a must-watch.

• And, speaking of Legal Eagle, Liz Dye has an excellent breakdown of the naked illegality of the DOJ payout that Trump seems poised to receive (if he hasn’t already gotten it).

• Legal Eagle was really killing it this week: on yet another video, guest legal journalist Cristian Farias explains how ICE got to be above the law.

• During one of this week’s episodes, the Even More News crew talks about the Trump regime’s plans to send “election monitors” to California.  (Although, for the most part, joke’s on him: everyone here in Cali gets mail-in ballots, so likely their efforts to intimidate people into not voting will be entirely moot, as Prop 50 will probably have already passed before they even get here.)  While talking about how Trump has constantly complained about people rigging the elections, Cody notes that “And they’ve done it for a long time.  It’s what he did from the start, of saying like, well, they’re going to they’re going to steal this and steal this.  And then when we say it—because he’s doing it—then we sound like we’re being alarmist or hypocritical ...”  This is exactly how I feel about just about everything Trump complains about.  Whenever Trump accuses someone of doing a thing, you can lay money on the fact that that’s exactly what Trump himself is doing.

• And, on yet another episode of Even More News, the crew talk about Kat Abugazaleh being indicted by the Trump regime, and also expose the lie of the “ceasefire” in Gaza.

• This week’s Coffee Klatch features special guest W. Kamau Bell, who’s always a delight to hear from.

• And, as usual, Adam Kinzinger gives another great (and short) week in review.

If there’s any message of hope this week, it’s that Democrats who buck the corporate donor system are starting to break through.  And there’s no greater symbol of that than Zohran Mamdani.  Robert Reich produced another great Substack article this week focussed on Mamdani taking on corporate Democrats, and, as I mentioned above, the polls are looking pretty good for him.  Perhaps my favorite Mamdani moment of the week was his Daily Show interview with Jon Stewart.  Here are some of my favorite quotes.

In response to Jon pointing out that, if he can’t deliver, the New Yorkers who love him now will be his most vocal critics:

You know, it’s often framed as a burden or as an obligation.  But frankly, I think it’s an opportunity.  It’s an opportunity to actually show that this whole campaign where we’ve talked about freezing the rent, making buses faster, free delivering universal childcare—these are not just slogans.  These are commitments.  And when we deliver them here in New York City, it will be also the delivery of a politics that can actually aspire for more than what you’re living through.  And for so many people across the city, politics has just become synonymous with an argument of celebrate the little you have or lose that.  And it can’t be that.

In response to Jon saying that public disorder could be a challenge for him:

I mean, look, public safety is the prerequisite for an affordability agenda.  Right?  People have to be safe.  And we also know that safety is something that you not only deliver with the NYPD; it’s also something that you deliver by ensuring that there are actually jobs that can pay people enough to stay in this city.  All of these things are integrated.

On Hakim Jeffries’ half-hearted (and very late) endorsement of him:

And I think what we showed in many ways was that the days of endorsements deciding elections, those days have come to an end.  It’s the people that build up a campaign.

Finally, on how the current Democratic Party thinks about young voters:

After the presidential election, there were all of these obituaries written about the Democratic Party’s ability to motivate young voters.  And there’s just this condescension in the language that we use about young people.  And I can just tell you that what we found in this campaign is that young people have been at the heart of believing that something could be more than this.  And I would say throughout the primary, this quote from Ed Koch: “if you agree with me on 9 out of 12 issues, vote for me; 12 out of 12, see a psychiatrist.”  And I’m in Washington Square Park.  I’m filming a video with David Hogg.  And this young guy comes up to me and goes, “12 out of 12, baby: send me away!”

And, look: I know he told that story mainly because it’s an amusing anecdote, and he’s very good at that, and he was speaking while on Comedy Central.  And, don’t get me wrong: it is funny.  But it’s also, maybe just a little bit, inspiring.  Is Hakim Jeffries getting that kind of response from young voters?  Is Chuck Schumer?  Somehow I think not.  But the mere fact that someone is ... that gives me a bit more hope than I had last week.