The narrative bending activities of previous House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were on full display as she casually delineated the reasons behind President Joe Biden’s rather unceremonious exit from the Democratic race, a development that starkly contrasts his prior affirmations of steadfastness in the contest. Pelosi’s next point of rhapsody centered on the Democrats’ newfound potential of seizing victory in tight House races. Her expansive infatuation with the optimistic electoral statistics coming out of California, catering to an array of demographics such as young people, LGBTQ, Asian American, Hispanic, and Black voters, provides noteworthy content for further dissection.
The circumstances surrounding this turn of events are worth exploring. The Democratic party essentially put a stranglehold on the primaries, rendering any potential competition for Biden virtually non-viable. This puppet mastering, however, was short-lived, and the party hastily deserted Biden, electing Kamala Harris as their new leading light. Their hope? To scrape together just enough voter turnout across specific constituencies to tilt the balance in their favor.
This approach appears to demonstrate a rather blase attitude towards the larger electoral battle, as reflected in the barren Harris campaigning strategy that was notably devoid of press conferences, interviews, or detailed issue positions. Apparently, for the Democratic esta, a litany of state losses in the Electoral College under the banner of Harris is a swallowable pill, so long as Californian Democrats can be paraded to the polls to secure a few pivotal House seats, aiding the democratic intent to reinstate their Congress majority.
Most disturbingly, the Democratic party’s seemingly uncaring attitude towards questionable past indiscretions by their nominated candidates raises eye-brows. Casting a shadow over the glossed-over details of their profiles, is evidence of past wrongdoings, from drunken driving arrests to accusations of embellished service records.
It’s notable that the accused in question here is not a foot soldier but a congress hopeful, allegedly caught misrepresenting his military record. Try as they might to bury such information, evidence keeps surfacing, and video clips have skulked up of the candidate or others suggesting that he retired as a command sergeant major after serving following 9/11. The reality presents a stark and inconvenient contrast.
Far from being cloaked in the glory of his high ranks and supposed combat experience, he, in fact, forsook the position as his National Guard unit was on the brink of deployment to Iraq. Yet another unseemly element emerges from the smokescreen of his myriad disinformation – he was stationed in Italy, not Iraq, and his actual rank at retirement was merely that of a master sergeant.
Peering into the ethos of the Democratic party, one finds echoes of a narrative that positions ‘your neighbor’, in reality an armed gang, embarking on daily raids on your peaceful abode. While such rhetoric may find resonance among the Democratic Socialists of America, it does make one pause and ponder.
Moreover, Harris’s recent revelation in favor of centralized control over food prices suggests an underpinning agenda poised to precipitate the farm states’ inevitable migration to the Trump column. ‘Corporate price gouging’ as the sole villain behind persistently high prices, even in a climate of reduced inflation, was an assertion from Harris that could only provoke skepticism rather than assent from domestic manufacturing reliant states.
It’s paradoxical how Harris fails to grasp the cyclic nature of annual inflation stats. A drop to 2.9% stands for a 2.9% surge in prices, nonetheless. It cannot be used as grounds for price reduction. Yet, this appears to be lost in Harris’s reactionary perspective, even leading The New York Times to adopt a doubtful stance over her proposed ‘federal ban on price gouging’.
The newspaper’s apprehensive coverage of the matter highlights that the inflation surge is accredited to a variety of sources including ‘increased consumer demand fueled by stimulus from the government and low rates from the Federal Reserve’. The real implications of such federal control over food prices would point to a potentially more widespread, federal meddling in price control. The unease among businesses and investors at such a prospect is palpable.
The fearful anticipation and potential, consequent economic downturn would, indeed, be a consoling prospect for Democratic donors seeking to opt out, redirecting their support towards Republican congressional candidates to effectively stonewall any proposed price controls that threaten to destabilize the economy entirely. The essence of this sentiment can be succinctly recaptured in the term ‘poetic justice’, as a reset of loyalty looms on the horizon of a significant faction of Democratic supporters.
Looking ahead to the Democratic convention next week, the time constraint for revamping their candidates might seem overwhelming. Yet, the party has shown considerable agility in discarding its serving president with nothing more than a solitary weekend tweet, attesting to their proficiency in swift decision-making when required.
The landscape of political entities could be illustrated by the Wende Museum in Culver City, a repository of Cold War relics that includes busts of Communist leaders from the bygone Soviet era. An eccentric proposal could be to include a section devoted to Kamala Harris, who recently took over the Biden primary spot.
There could be no more apt a symbol than the representations of Harris to immortalize the political machinations of this ‘machine politician’ from California, a character notorious for her audaciousness in proposing the seizure of the fruits of others’ labor and investment, all for the purpose of securing votes and repaying donors.
This audaciousness, coupled with an aggressive tilt towards socialist policies and an operating system seemingly devoid of empathy for past wrongdoings by Democratic peers, reflections upon the direction of the Democratic party appear grim. And perhaps more concerning remains the party’s apparent willingness to accept a cascade of state losses, so long as critical house seats are secured.
As observers, we can only speculate on the implications of these developments for the trajectory of the Democratic party and the future political landscape. Amid the rhetoric, political maneuverings, and questionable practices, the reality seems to be a party resorting to desperate measures to cling onto fragments of power.