Not afraid to say it: Kamala Harris for President. Tim Walz for Vice President. (via Wikipedia)

This blog has existed through five presidential elections. Perhaps they have all felt existential. Certainly, the most recent three presidential cycles have felt that way. That is because one major party’s candidate has been the same for three election in a row. Complete liberation from this déjà vu is not certain, but one step could help break it.

That step is electing Vice President Kamala Harris the next president of the United States. This blog freely admits we doubted how adroit she was politically and how effective she could campaign. No more. To that end, we are fully confident in her ability to lead this country and, perhaps, help end this dark period that dates to Donald Trump’s ride down the gilded escalator.

The last few months have proven Harris can do the job. Her choice of Governor Tim Walz to be her Vice President fits the moment. We have learned about her role in international affairs such as the war in Ukraine. Her encounter with Trump at the debate showed not just an ability to manhandle Trump, it showed discipline in fraught situations.

The opposite is true of Trump, who has rambled, stuttered, hallucinated and threatened his way through this campaign. Then he more overtly than ever announced his target would be “the enemy within” this country. Not migrants entering the country or foreign nations bilking us. Americans. Your friends, your neighbors, critics, journalists, indeed, your editor-in-chief.

This is to say nothing of the toxicity the Trump era has drained into all layers of public life. We could feel it in Massachusetts and in our home of Springfield.

We already know Donald Trump wanted to shoot protesters in 2020. Only the good sense of his then-staff stopped it. Next time he will be surrounded by extremists, grifters and, most importantly, the weak. As Ezra Klein recently observed, the terrifying thing about Trump’s dance party in Pennsylvania this month was not that he was paralyzed on stage. It was that everybody around him on that stage was “frozen” and did not know what to do to stop this bizarre and disturbing event.

The only view we want to see of Trump. (via The New Yorker)

What lucid elements of the Republican party that remain are hostage to Trump lest they be sent out into the cornfields as others have been.

To be clear, we are not naïve. Trump’s rise speaks to something deeper, darker and more confounding than any one policy or man, even one as central to this period as Trump himself. What Trump could do was merge it with celebrity. But every TV show confronts cancellation eventually.

We confess a concern with President Joe Biden declining reelection after that June debate was that it would inevitably leave the race to Harris. This fear was misplaced. She has shown energy and verve and, yes, joy even as she emphasizes the stakes for bodily autonomy, for the economy and for the American experiment.

While much hinges on the Senate, we know Harris will work to restore women’s right to make decisions about their own body. This is not just about abortion on demand. This is about receiving emergency care as we have seen in countless tragic circumstances. Trump, by contrast, pals around with people who want to monitor pregnancies closer than ever. The party of small government’s coalition includes supporters of  intrauterine surveillance.

On the economy, we are confident that Harris will continue the skepticism of corporate consolidation and space for unions to grow and prosper. We acknowledge that Harris has shown more openness to cryptocurrencies or artificial intelligence, which, when talking about large language models, seems more scam than revolution. She is closer to skeptics of Biden’s industrial policy and anti-trust appointees. However, among her advisors are supporters of the activist chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan. We hope she keeps Jennifer Abruzzo, Biden’s active general counsel at the National Labor Relations Board.

This assumes Trump’s right-wing Supreme Court lets the NLRB stand. This fetid court will only get more medieval if Trump fills the next vacancies.

But these concerns are piddling compared to Trump’s sellout government. Despite professing skepticism of trade and monopolies, too, his administration was too incompetent to rebuild industry at home. Meanwhile, his people did not fight consolidation. They pushed old court orders into the dustbin, like the Paramount Decision, which blocked monopolies in the entertainment industry.

This is even before getting into the idiotic tariff policy he is proposing. It will immediately hit all Americans. It will not suddenly bring textile and toy manufacturing back to the United States. Everything will just cost more and everyone will become poorer.

Perhaps a more thoughtful policy could support domestic manufacturing to compete—oh wait, that’s already happening under the current administration! Harris will continue this without mindless Smoot-Hawley reruns.

Finally, we must return to the question of democracy. Trump has refused to acknowledge his own loss in 2020, an action which culminated in the first attack on the Capitol since 1812. It was the first non-peaceful transfer of power in this country’s history, not counting the prelude to the Civil War. Now there is no one to stop his worst impulses.

Trump launched an attack on the republic itself. If a return to office is his reward, nobody is safe. (Reuters)

Your editor-in-chief was at the Women’s March in Boston on January 21, 2017. Would this nation be better if the United States Army had opened fire on Beacon Street? Or, if that is too overwrought, would this country be better if people become too afraid to register their displeasure because he had promised to root out the enemy from within?

If your answer to either of these is yes—and blithe dismissal of this fear is as good as a yes—this editorial is not for you. We take seriously the risks before the country.

Unless you think a mob crushing a police officer with a door is a peaceful protest, there is no reason for President Harris’ critics to fear physical harm under her government. As Harris herself said at the debate, Trump will be manipulated and cowed by foreign dictators. That will put the United States at risk, to say nothing of innocent countries the likes of Putin wish to bully or even annihilate.

We need not dwell on the dark.

This country has not been perfect. The United States has fallen woefully short of its ideals. Whatever the masonic symbolism, the unfinished pyramid on the dollar bill emphasizes that the work is not done. The arc is always bending toward justice. The task is eternal.

Harris, like all presidents, will make mistakes. However, we believe she can lead us out of this muck that Trump and then the coronavirus have left. It may not break the fever that has taken hold of this country’s party on the right. However, it is the far better wager to lead us away from oblivion.

Without dignifying Trump’s groundless accusations and refrains, Harris is sharp and capable. Rather than drag us deeper into the mud of our past, Harris will lead the United States into the future and whatever possibility that holds.

We recommend Vice President Kamala Harris for president on November 5—or before if you vote early.

Harris for America. (via Wikipedia)