Chronicle of a Defeat Foretold

This article was originally published here

What does history repeat itself as after it does farce?

Kamala Harris proved too cowardly even to address her supporters Tuesday night, as her loss to Trump became more and more inevitable. But what could she really say? She couldn’t honestly say she’d run a vigorous campaign that championed the poor, the downtrodden, and the voiceless or that she’d fought for peace, and human dignity, and to fix an unraveling climate. I’d be really interested to hear her say what she thought her campaign was all about, but even Harris probably couldn’t have pinpointed the purpose or the meaning of her doomed run…

From the outside, Harris’s entire campaign seemed to be about saving an economic system (neoliberalism) that she described falsely as “democracy,” which isn’t working for large segments of both the political left and right; at the same time she and Biden were flouting an international system of laws in order to arm and finance a genocide in Gaza. The hypocrisies were too transparent to sustain.

This was a fatal moment in the friendly confines of the Stephen Colbert Show around the time that her post-convention/debate bounce began to deflate and she never got any better…

Stephen Colbert: “Under a Harris administration, what would the major changes be and what would stay the same?”

Harris: “Sure. Well, I mean, I’m obviously not Joe Biden. So that would be one change. But also I think it’s important to say with 28 days to go, I’m not Donald Trump.”

Like Hubert Humphrey, Harris was saddled with an unpopular war (a war & a genocide in her case) that her own boss was waging. Humphrey tried to break from LBJ on Vietnam but too late. Harris never did.

Read the full piece at CounterPunch.

Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3.