Hope and Change for Real

    

    As some of you know, my laptop gave up the ghost for good last night. However, I wouldn't be much of a political blogger if I let even that stand in the way of my writing something, anything to commemorate the historic importance of tonight.

     And it's not just historic and important because Kamala Harris is a black woman, although the significance of that is unavoidable. 

      For a month now, it's been rightly said in this forum and others that Harris' presidential run carries with it and generates more excitement than any other since Obama first ran in 2008. People still talk, 16 years later, about how great his acceptance speech was that year (I still haven't seen it nor does it matter, any more).

      And I have to admit I was never once taken in by Obama's soaring rhetoric because I knew it was all style and little substance. After the nightmarish eight years of the illegitimate Bush administration, the nation was indeed ripe for hope and change but Obama turned it into a bumper sticker and nothing more. I was so disillusioned by Obama that I didn't even vote for him in 2012.

     I also didn't vote for Hillary in 2016 nor Biden in 2020. I don't reflexively vote for anyone with the capital D after their name because it's often a cynical appendage.

      Kamala Harris was guilty of a bit of that soaring rhetoric tonight. But long before the balloons fell, I'd gotten a suspicion, a glimmer, that perhaps Harris' recollections of her late mother, her childhood in Oakland and elsewhere and the life lessons imparted to her from her mother were... Genuine.

      Political speeches always have been highly cultured, curated, stage-managed, delivered by impeccably coiffed liars and other performers. It's in the blood of American politics. We all want a good show, something executed professionally and slickly, to be told that which we're quivering to hear.

     We feel it's our due.

     But tonight felt different.

     And by different, I don't merely mean it had within it the air of the inevitable, although it's screamingly obvious by now that Harris will get elected and by a landslide. 

     No, there was the unmistakable ring of the genuine in her acceptance speech and that she wasn't merely telling the huge crowd in Chicago tonight what they wanted and needed to hear (and they certainly needed to hear it).

     The urgency for hope and change is greater and more exigent than it was in 2008. At the time, we thought Bush was the worst we could possibly do.

     We were so, so wrong.

     But the urgency to elect the Harris-Walz ticket should, and does, consist of more than just, "Look at the alternative." Biden essentially got away with that in 2020. Harris doesn't have that luxury.

     But aside from a constant stream of jabs from Harris' rapid response team on Twitter (which is doing an excellent job), Harris and Walz are running a flawless or near flawless campaign and one predicated on actual hope and change.

     As professional politicians do, they turn circumstantial factoids into campaign selling points. But Walz' history as a teacher, football coach, Guardsman and Congressman is, if not uniquely, an All American story that resonates with everyday Americans. Harris' own middle class background and how she presents it is also catnip to a Democratic electorate sick and tired of sneering Republican crooks and liars who were educated at Ivy League universities and look down their noses at large segments of our society.

      Walz and Harris are middle class America and they really do care about you. That empathy and compassion is something you really can't fake, cultivate or manufacture. Either it's there or it isn't.

     Despite tonight's expected hysteria over the woman of the hour, when she gets elected and sworn in, she will inevitably disappoint us, whether that disappointment is legitimate or not. But listening to Harris tonight, and looking at the looks on the faces on the delegates, it was obvious she was resonating with the people in a way we haven't seen for far too long.

     Biden was elected by over 7,000,000 votes because of fear of a second Trump term. Harris doesn't need fear. She only needs the hunger for hope and change and she feeds that.