Buck up

It’s what my father used to say to me when I was complaining about something I couldn’t control and felt sorry for myself.  It always happened at the dinner table.  I sat next to my brother and across the table from my three sisters. We ate dinner at that table nearly every night of my childhood, until my last couple of years in high school when I had jobs that ended after dinner time, and I would either eat alone in the kitchen or at the dinner table across from my father, who also often came home late. 

Dinner was the hour when we had “family talk.”  What happened today in school?  How did track or football go?  How was your riding lesson, Susan?  How did you do on that – insert class name – test? 

We weren’t allowed to mumble one syllable answers.  We had to actually say what had happened that day in school or at practice or Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts or whatever activity we took part in. 

My brother Frank and sister Susan would dutifully recount their day, my father or mother inserting questions if they had them.  Then it was my turn.  I was the complainer.  Nothing ever went the way it should have in my estimation.  Looking back on it, I was already a baby Democrat.  I wanted people to act fairly and reasonably, and I got mad when they didn’t.  In English class, Mrs. Crossetto made no secret of her dislike for me.  In retrospect, I don’t blame her.  I was an arrogant little prick who thought he knew everything because sometimes, he did know a few things.  Mrs. Crossetto would consistently mark my essays or poems or book reviews or spelling and definition tests with a B+, even when she knew and I knew and practically everyone in class who had sat there and listened to me recite a poem I had written knew that my work deserved an A.

Buck up. He would boom from the end of the table.

But Dad, you don’t understand, I would bleat from my seat.

I don’t need to understand, boy.  Buck up. Now is your chance to learn that the world isn’t fair and things are not always going to go your way.

But I told you!  Even when I work harder, it doesn’t count.  

It’s not the grade.  It’s your attitude about it.  If you deserve an A, buck up and give yourself an A in your mind, and stop whining.

It didn’t work, of course.  I was 14, or I was 16, and everything was so unfair.  The football coach in 9^th grade wouldn’t put me in the game even though I bested my competition at tight end because the father of the guy I beat invited the coach to go golfing at the post golf course and they had beers together at the Officers Club afterwards. 

Buck up.

The Boy Scout Troop master denied me a couple of merit badges, one of them for leadership, because at a camp out, I took the other guys out gigging frogs after lights out at 9 p.m. 

Buck up.

But dad, it’s a campout!  Nine o’clock is ridiculous.

They’re his rules. Your job is to follow the rules or try to get them changed.  Stop complaining.  Buck up.

*      *      *

This is where we’re at.  We followed the rules.  Kamala Harris and Tim Walz ran a great campaign.  You could count the number of “mistakes,” in quotes, they made on one hand.  They appealed to the better nature of the American people.  The last week of the campaign, they had tens of thousands of volunteers out in the battleground states, many of whom paid their own travel expenses, knocking on doors and writing post cards and staffing phone banks.  They did every single thing a well-run campaign operation should do at the same time the Trump campaign’s GOTV operation was in shambles or nonexistent. 

Kamala did three rallies a day non-stop.  They ran excellent positive ads.  They ran perfectly crafted attack ads pointing out all Donald Trump’s flaws, if they can be called that – felony convictions, sex assault judgements, felony indictments for attempting to overturn the last election, his incessant lying. They went after the decline in his mental capacity.  In one ad, they had audio of Trump, bragging about how his rallies were sold out and nobody ever left his rally, playing over images of completely empty sections of sports stadiums and people flowing through exits with Trump still speaking in the background.

The question Democrats have today is, we had a great candidate, we did everything right, what happened?

There are dozens of postmortems I could quote from, including those from former Republicans like George Conway and Steve Schmidt and a good one in the New York Times by Daniel McCarthy, identified as editor of “Modern Age:  A Conservative Review.”  The former Republican pundits, I guess you could call them, get something about Trump voters that we Democrats have had a hard time with.  Trump’s voters’ hatred of the Washington D.C. establishment is so powerful it overcame any reservations they had with Donald Trump, if they indeed had any reservations at all.  Their hatred was greater was a more powerful force than the love we Democrats had for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, who were thrust upon us late in the game by a party leadership and a president who had problems with age and mental decline that became unavoidably obvious only during and after the June debate.

We could look upon the whole manner of Harris’ elevation to be the Democratic candidate as a mistake, but that misses the point that this campaign wasn’t about hits and misses, bullseyes and mistakes, or who had the most money, or ran the best ads, or had the superior GOTV effort, or put on the best-attended rallies.  It wasn’t even about who could convince that tiny sliver of the electorate who were supposedly undecided.  And it certainly wasn’t a campaign about who was better qualified and suited to become the next President of the United States.

If it was a turnout election, as I said yesterday, the question isn’t even why Democrats couldn’t get enough people to go to the polls, or why people who had voted Democratic before changed their votes this time.  They were all given plenty of reason to vote for Harris and not to vote for Trump.  There are legions of experts parsing those numbers who will tell us who this, why that, and as much as we should know all that stuff and understand it, this election didn’t turn on numbers and reasons and certainly not logic.

Campaigns for president as we have known them are over.  All the technical stuff, the expertise of the so-called political professionals, didn’t matter.  Even James Carville, who has as sharp a political mind as anyone I’ve ever encountered, was left dumbstruck:  “I don’t know what percent of this defeat is because we didn’t embrace the change message or we kept something too long — you know, there was some flaw in our strategy and our presentation,” Carville said this morning on his podcast, lamenting the “tens of millions of people who fell for this shit.  I’ll have to reevaluate. I’m sure I’ll come up with something to make me feel good again, but right now, today, it’s hard.”

The problem with this kind of political thinking is that it’s over, too.  Our loss is nobody’s fault.  Trump’s win was not even his personal accomplishment.  We are living in an entirely new landscape, not just in our politics, but in ourselves.  You can’t fix what went wrong – the election of Donald Trump – without coming to grips with something within us that we don’t yet understand. 

Remember Jimmy Carter’s “national malaise?”  We are living through a national anxiety that hasn’t even been diagnosed, much less treated.  You want to know why four million Democrats didn’t turn out to vote?  Because they didn’t have the sense that their vote would fix how they felt.

Trump’s voters turned out because they believed him when he stood up there at his rallies and claimed that he would fix all their problems, whatever they were.  For them, it was what passed for leadership, so they followed him.  He won’t fix things, he doesn’t even know what their problems are, and he doesn’t care.  But that doesn’t matter right now.

What matters for us is that the time for complaining is over.  Here is how my father told me to get over myself: 

Buck up.  There are things to figure out and work to do.  We have the tools; we’re smart; we can do it.