SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
One of the takeaways from a new account of the 2024 US presidential election is that Joe Biden told his vice president, Kamala Harris, “let there be no daylight between us” after she replaced him atop the Democratic ticket.
In their book, Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes report that publicly, Biden encouraged Harris to do what she had to do to win. Privately, he warned her not to throw him under the bus.
Harris’ failure – perhaps inability – to differentiate herself from the unpopular Biden presidency contributed to her defeat. At a time when Americans wanted change, Donald Trump was allowed to establish himself as the “change candidate”, not Harris.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in August 2024. Credit: AP
But last week, in her first major speech since losing office, Harris offered no reflections on where she and her campaign erred in the fight against Trump. She warned it would be wrong to dismiss Trump’s first 100 days as “unleashing chaos”, arguing it was actually a calculated, “high-velocity event” to enact a right-wing agenda.
And while she praised progressive Democrats for fighting the good fight, she had little to say about the scale of the challenge facing Trump’s opponents at a critical juncture in American history.
A few nights earlier, however, another Democrat did. J.B. Pritzker, the larger-than-life billionaire governor of Illinois, and heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune, went to Manchester, New Hampshire, to speak at an annual party fundraiser called the McIntyre-Shaheen 100 Club dinner.
New Hampshire plays a special role in American politics: the Granite State holds the first primary elections for presidential candidates, attracting significant media coverage. Last year, the keynote speaker at the dinner was Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who went on to become Harris’ running mate.
Amid a Democratic Party grappling with how best to respond to Trump’s agenda, Pritzker unleashed an emphatic call to arms and a devastating indictment of many of his colleagues.
“In this fragile moment, the direction of this nation will turn on who we choose to listen to, whose stories we decide to tell about what is happening. Who we elevate, and who we ignore. Who we find noteworthy, and who we label as just noise,” he said.
Pritzker condemned “do-nothing political types” and Democrats who were more interested in writing “tortured op-eds about party messaging”, “hand-wringing over which battles to pick”, or appearing on podcasts and cable TV shows to admonish other Democrats for prioritising social issues over the struggles of working families.
He accused those Democrats of hypocrisy and being too timid to prosecute the case for reforms that would benefit the people they professed to care about.
“They didn’t want to fight the health insurance companies and the drug manufacturers,” he said. “They didn’t want to demand an increase in the minimum wage, or require paid family leave. They cave in to the powerful hedge fund managers and tech bros whose blind pursuit of profits is now destroying everything that matters to middle-class families.”
Pritzker said this reluctance to take on vested interests must end.
“The reckoning is here. Now that this culture of timidity is on full display, those same do-nothing Democrats want to blame our losses on our defence of black people, of trans kids, of immigrants, instead of their own lack of guts and gumption.
“Voters didn’t turn out for Democrats last November – not because they don’t want to fight for their values, but because they think we don’t want to fight for our values.”
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker delivered a rousing speech to a Democratic Party fundraiser in New Hampshire.Credit: AP
Americans protesting against the Trump administration across the country were doing what people were taught to do from a young age, Pritzker said.
“When you see a danger, you yell for help at the top of your lungs. We Democrats, we shouldn’t be comfortable ignoring those cries for help. The fact that so many are speaks to the real reason we lost last November.”
Pritzker said it was the first time in his life he was calling for mass protest and disruption. As for Trump and the Republicans abetting the president, Pritzker was uncompromising: their portraits would be relegated to “museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors”.
“These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. We must castigate them on the soap box and then punish them at the ballot box,” he said. “We may have to fix our messaging and our strategy, but our values are exactly where they need to be. We will never join so many Republicans in the special place in hell reserved for quislings and cowards.”
The speech represented the most full-throated call to action yet made by a serious Democratic figure – one who may contest the party’s presidential nomination in 2028.
Three months after the inauguration and five since the election, Democrats are beginning to voice ideas and priorities, and mark out territory, as they start a long process of renewal ahead of next year’s midterms.
California Governor Gavin Newsom, whose state’s economy recently overtook Japan’s as the world’s fourth-largest, has launched a new podcast on which he regularly interviews MAGA personalities such as Steve Bannon, who went to jail for defying a subpoena, and Charlie Kirk, co-founder of the right-wing political group, Turning Point USA.
Kirk featured on the first episode in March, and Newsom made headlines by agreeing with him that it was “deeply unfair” for transgender women to participate in women’s sports.
“I completely align with you, and we [Democrats] have got to own that. We’ve got to acknowledge that,” Newsom said.
He also agreed it was a major mistake for Harris to support publicly funded transgender surgery for prisoners, and lauded a “brilliant” and “brutal” campaign ad from Trump that said: “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”
In subsequent interviews, Newsom said these were his genuinely held beliefs, and he was not trying to send a signal about the need for Democrats to abandon identity politics and neutralise one of the Republicans’ key weapons.
But his comments, and his willingness to sit down with MAGA personalities, have been seen as a deliberate repositioning from left-liberal California Democrat to centrist figure ahead of a possible presidential run.
Newsom told the Los Angeles Times it was vital for Democrats to talk to Republicans and be self-critical because the Democratic Party was getting its “arse kicked”, and its brand had become toxic.
“People don’t think we make any damn sense,” he said. “They think we make noise. They don’t think we support them … They don’t think we have their values. They think we’re elite, we talk down to people … They think we just think we’re smarter than other people, that we’re so judgmental and full of ourselves.”
Two-time presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders has been on a speaking tour with New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a leading progressive Democrat firebrand, rallying voters to “fight oligarchy”. Their pitch focuses on the influence of billionaires in Trump’s White House, the havoc Elon Musk has wrought on the public service, and the corrosive effect of big money and corruption in politics, including the Democratic Party.
The tour has attracted tens of thousands of frustrated voters at rallies from California to Arizona and Montana to Pennsylvania. But it has also irked some Democrats, such as Michigan senator Elissa Slotkin, who see it as counter to winning back centrist voters in swing states such as her own.
Those such as Ocasio-Cortez who demand a more visceral response had “a lot of words”, Slotkin said at a town hall meeting in March, “but what have they actually done to change the situation with Donald Trump?”
She said her job required her to be more than just an activist. “I get it that it makes people feel good to see people yelling. But not one of those words is stopping the actual things that Donald Trump is doing.”
Slotkin will begin a series of speeches next month outlining a vision – a war plan, in her words – for the Democrats to regroup. She told political digital newspaper Politico the party must escape its perception as “weak and woke”, and instead adopt “goddamn Alpha energy” and embrace patriotism, or “f—ing retake the [American] flag”.
Slotkin may have an ally in Pritzker, who told his New Hampshire audience the Democrats had to ditch their attachment to poll-tested language and “stale decorum”, and “abandon the culture of incrementalism”, which garnered a standing ovation.
Mary Anne Marsh, a Democratic strategist, describes Pritzker’s remarks as an exceptional contribution. She says Democrats are “just starting to find their sea legs” after the bruising 2024 defeat, but the majority of supporters want a fighter to take it up to the president.
“Every poll is saying that,” she says. “I don’t think Democrats should have waited for this, but they have every reason now to fight Donald Trump. Now is the time to do it.”
It is more difficult for governors such as Newsom, Marsh says, who is encumbered by his status as a California Democrat. They are always seen as too progressive by large swaths of the country, and have to portray themselves as more moderate.
Similarly, in Michigan, she says, Governor Gretchen Whitmer has evidently decided she needs to work with Trump to get things done for her constituents.
But Marsh believes raising hell is the winning electoral strategy.
“If you’re not going to fight now for your country and the people you represent, then when are you going to fight?”
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