No more Mr. Nice Guy

Let me tell you how badly wrong I was about the presidential race back on August 6. It was the day that Kamala Harris picked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. Putting Walz on the ticket as the Democrats’ choice to be Vice President didn’t raise any problems. He ticked off a whole list of boxes – he’d been a teacher and a football coach; he came from the middle of the country; he was not too far to the left for centrists or too close to the center for progressives; he was amiable and folksy and thought to be a good contrast up against Mr. Yalie Double-speak, J.D. Vance.

To make the formal introduction of Walz, the Harris campaign held a rally in a key city of a key state, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Democrats needed to carry Pennsylvania if they were to win in November, so it was a smart move. Tracy and I watched the rally. We were excited by the Walz pick and by the contrast between the Democrats’ joyful celebration and the typical “grim” Trump rally, as I described it.

After watching the rally, I sat down and wrote a column I titled, “The political power of the smile.” I celebrated the “enthusiasm and delight” on display in Philadelphia that night. “Kamala Harris and Tim Walz reminded Democrats who they are,” I wrote rapturously. “Empathy is energy. Humor is energy. Dedication to freedom and justice is energy. Being willing to fight for what you believe is energy.”

All of that is true, as far as it went. But what I failed to see then was that Democrats had followed their choice of a nice guy in 2020 with another choice of someone nice to run as their candidate this year. Kamala Harris’ smile, on display everywhere she went, was genuine. So was Tim Walz’s jolly demeanor.

But voters didn’t want someone nice to take command of an economy and a country they saw as failing them. What was the right-track/wrong-track polling figure for this presidential race? Exit polls on election day revealed that about 70 percent of voters thought that the country was “on the wrong track.” Two-thirds felt the same way in September polls. People don’t care how nice you are when they’re hurting. They wanted someone who had an attitude that was as sour as they were feeling, and they went for him on election day.

If they want to win, Democrats have nominated their last nice guy candidate for president. Donald Trump went out there on the stump and spent months calling Democrats “enemies,” “evil,” “dangerous,” “radical leftists,” “communists,” “Marxists,” “the enemy within.” He did it over and over and over. Kamala Harris called Trump “increasingly unstable and unhinged,” and told voters that “A second Trump term is a huge risk for America.”

That’s about the worst she came up with. I’m not saying Harris should have matched Trump like a couple of kindergartners on the playground calling each other names and saying “I’m rubber and you’re glue.” But if you stand there and let your opponent call you ridiculous shit like “communist” and “Marxist” without at least pointing out how desperate it sounds, you’re just letting him embed those words in the minds of voters using sheer repetition.

During the debate, instead of turning toward Trump and calling him a liar to his face every time he opened his mouth and a lie came out, Harris relied on the tried and true Democratic tactic of countering his lies with rational argument. When Trump said he wouldn’t sign a national abortion ban, instead of laughing in his face and turning to the camera and telling the audience they had just heard the man who appointed the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade tell the fifty-seven thousandth and possibly biggest and worst lie of his career, Harris listed some examples of disastrous outcomes women had faced when seeking care for troubled pregnancies in states with abortion bans. When Trump said Democrats support “execution” of babies after they are born, instead of calling Trump a damn liar, Harris waited for one of the moderators to correct him with the statement, “there is no state in which it’s legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”

I sat there watching that debate and kept asking out loud, “why doesn’t she call him a liar?” as she missed opportunity after opportunity to call out his lies. I kept waiting for her to say something like, “That’s just bullshit, Donald. Stop insulting the American people.” I waited in vain.

I don’t care who the Republicans nominate for president next time, we can’t have a Democrat up there who isn’t willing to stand up and tell people “he’s full of shit” every time the Republican says something that is full of shit.

And while I’m at it, no Democrat should ever again counter some line of racist or xenophobic or sexist cant from a Republican with the lame denial, “that is not who we are.” You don’t respond to racist garbage with a denial. You respond by calling out the racism and asking them, “is that what you teach your children?” Democrats should deploy shame as a political tactic far more than they have for the last dozen years. It works, especially when it’s repeated again and again.

I’m not trying to do an autopsy on the Harris campaign, and I’m not saying that she should have tried to “out-Trump” Donald Trump. Let Republicans do that to each other the next time they have a primary. But Democrats need to convince people that we get how they’re feeling and why. People need to know that we are aware of the problems that they face in their lives, and that we can deal with them. People don’t want to know about plans. Publishing “white papers” with lists of policies doesn’t do it. Telling people that you have a “plan” that’s going to solve this or that problem is a dead end. They’ve heard too many plans.

Trying to tell people that inflation is down, even when it is down, when they can’t afford their rent or are paying more for gas to get to work than they are for lunch is an insult to their intelligence. Citing all the figures in the world that show reduced crossings of immigrants at the border doesn’t work. Even though it was true, telling people that immigrants pay taxes and contribute to the economy and that immigrants are not taking their jobs didn’t mean anything, because voters weren’t concerned with numbers, they were responding to the boogey-man word “immigrant,” not to facts. And whatever Democrats do from now on, don’t try to find a solution to any problem in the United States Congress, unless by some miracle, you get control of both houses. Republicans learned from the masters, Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell, that it’s hard as hell to get anything done with legislation, but the easiest thing in the world is stopping the opposing party from enjoying the tiniest victory.

Gingrich and McConnell were fucking obstructionist assholes, but we know their names, don’t we? Is it too much to ask for Democrats to have a few obstructionist assholes in our arsenal of political talent? Gingrich used to be called a “bomb-thrower.” Where the fuck are our bomb-throwers?

My old friend Joe Klein wrote a column a few days ago he called "On Strength." It’s nominally about the idea that Biden’s pardon of his son was, if you’ll pardon the expression, unpardonable. Klein says he’s known Biden for 37 years and always found him to be “a really good politician, which is high praise in my book.” Klein follows that rather faint praise with, “Biden was the sort of quarterback that football players call a ‘game manager’ as opposed to a game-changer. He was reliable. He wasn’t dynamic. He certainly wasn’t charismatic.” Klein goes on to say that he doesn’t think Kamala could have won the election, even “with a full running start because we are talking about the passive, sensitive, recumbent DNA of the Democratic Party here,” as opposed to “its exact opposite, a lucky con-man, who raised his fist above his blood-spattered face with the American flag flapping in the background on a sunny summer day in Pennsylvania—if an image can win an election, that may have been it.”

What Klein says about Biden between the lines is that he has always been a nice guy, a kind of perfect exemplar of the nice political party into which he was born and that rewarded his decades of loyalty with a presidency for which he was too nice and too late.

Politics ain’t paintball, a game where somebody gets hit by an exploding glob of paint and there’s a blue stain on their shirt and they’re out of the game. After eight long, miserable years of Donald Trump, the game doesn’t even have any rules anymore. If we haven’t learned by now that this Republican Party plays for keeps, it’s on us, not them, because they’ve been out in the open about it at least since Donald Trump arrived and started shooting people in the middle of Fifth Avenue and asking, “What are you going to do about it?”

That’s the question for Democrats, isn’t it? What are we going to do to beat this gang of authoritarian thugs who want to shred the Constitution and put tanks and soldiers in our streets? As the old saying goes, nice guys finish last, and we’re at the stage in our history where finishing last means the last of our democratic way of life.