Correction: Mark Kelly, What the Fuck Are You Doing!
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
I want to make it clear that I still stand behind the logic of yesterday’s column trying to recreate my Joever magic in kinda sorta calling the vice-presidential race for Senator Mark Kelly. I am no fan of anyone who has to be offered one of the highest offices in the land to reach the floor it takes to call yourself kind of pro-labor, but as I stated in my coconut-based future column, when you are trying to regain control of a car careening off a mountain, ideology takes a backseat to getting all four wheels back on the road, and it is difficult to dispute the broad appeal of an astronaut.
But now that we’re stabilized and have a sentient human who hopefully has moved past whatever issues she had with voters that caused her to drop out of the Democratic primary before anyone could vote for her (fingers crossed!), we can focus on how to best contrast our new Democratic standard-bearer. Lefties, I’m sorry, but it’s pretty clear that we have to reduce our expectations for the Veep. The coconut is our prize.
Kamala Harris has always had a semi-interest in moving left, and her climate record is good. She hasn’t moved left far enough or with any consistency to convince anyone she’s a true believer (but her dad is a Marxist economist…), but she has made enough attempts to tack left that she has at least demonstrated an understanding of what Biden did with his Bernie/Warren/Biden policy councils: the lefty plurality is a lot if you can get it all, and electoral politics is a game of numbers.
As Biden knew in 2020, table stakes in the lefty electoral sphere is lefty policy, and we make our priorities clear. We have drawn a line in the sand in Gaza, and speaking as someone who firmly believes domestic Joe Biden to be by far the greatest president since Lyndon Johnson, he still is a huge net negative president in my book by backing a genocide. How is this still even a debate?
But it is, because we have a bunch of clapping seals in the State Department and Congress willing to back a genocide in the name of American and Israeli imperialism, which brings me to the clapping seal I thought had the vice-presidential nomination locked up yesterday, Senator Mark Kelly. ABC News reported that it was down to him and Josh Shapiro, the first-term governor of Pennsylvania. I figured since replacing Kelly with a Democrat was easier than replacing Shapiro with one, and because Shapiro has antagonized the pro-Palestine movement, that Kelly had a layup.
He was an astronaut! He was a Navy captain! Turn your brain off, man. This is America. He is so obviously a good campaign choice for a position whose very nature is superficial. Put a space troop next to a cop, how could this country not love it?
But as I wrote in the ending, you must align with Democratic values first before you get to exploit your optics advantage to low propensity voters, because the rank and file of this party do give a shit about making things happen, and Kelly’s biggest obstacle was him being basically the most anti-labor Democratic Senator. That doesn’t fly in the post-2020 Democratic Party, and Kelly called up the good folks at Ariana’s former Huffington Post yesterday to bend the knee and say yes I will support the signature legislation every union and Democrat in America wants passed that I helped kill, now please make me VP.