I voted for Harris, and straight Dem downballot. But no, Harris did not support M4A. Harris did in fact tack to the right during her campaign to try to pick up more moderate Republicans, and this killed my (and many others) enthusiasm and her campaign.
As said in one of the other replies to this comment, it is okay to admit both parties suck. (I am not both sides-ing this, they are not the same, but they both suck for the average American)
The Democratic party has a problem, and the last 3 presidential elections prove it. The last time a Democrat ran on a message of change (Obama), they won handily. But Obama didn’t deliver, and now if any Democrat promises change…well the masses are disillusioned…they don’t think the Democrats actually want change, and the thing is… they are right. Party insiders don’t want significant change to the systems. Biden barely won on a message of “getting back to normal”…when Americans were dying but the thousands, think about how close that race was. I voted for Biden, and Biden actually did okay, he steadied the ship…but did he change anything? Anything I could see and would effect me in my day-to-day life. No, not really. In fact, in most ways life has gotten worse since the pandemic. That may not be Biden’s fault, but he was the president, fault or not. It was his responsibility. Again, nothing changed. Then Harris ran on a slogan of “Not going back”… There is no promise for a future there. Not going back is just not MAGA. I voted for Harris, I hoped as her campaign got off the ground she would distinguish herself from the failure of imagination of the Biden admin. But she kept tacking rightward, she was showing up on stage with all these “centrist” republicans, she leaned into border policy, pro-business, pro-capital, pro-war stances. The same Democratic Party schlock that keeps killing any enthusiasm for a Democratic president since Obama.
The worse things is, we all know what the problems are, and for many of them we know the solutions. They aren’t easy, but there is nothing unique about the problems facing America.
“Unprecedented” Wealth Inequality has a precedence…see the gilded age and the new deal
Healthcare … Every civilized nation has a form of nationalized healthcare, except the US.
Political Polarization… the yellow journalism caused polarization in the 1880’s. Truth in journalism laws were passed, and not repealed until Reagan.
A stagnant ineffective congress. Repeal the filibuster. Beef up ethics investigations.
A compromised judiciary. Multiple presidents throughout history have decided to just ignore the supreme court, because the court has no means of enforcement, enforcement is invested in the executive branch (checks and balances and all that). Additionally, the SC right to review a law for constitutionality was created whole cloth by the Supreme Court, and does not itself exist in the constitution. Finally, expanding the SC can be done by Presidential Order. I mean the SC can decide that it is unconstitutional…but then what…the president seats the justices anyway. Done.
Money in politics. The president is the head of the Law Enforcement branch. There are already laws on the books to shut down corruption, foreign interference, etc… American citizens commit multiple felonies a day without even realizing it (thanks to our byzantine legal system), this is doubly true of all these Corporations and Super-PACs funneling money to and from campaigns and foreign nationals. The laws are there, the will to enforce them is not.
Most/All of this has precedence in the US or other liberal democracy. I am not saying it is easy, but I am saying that it could have been done if the Democrats wanted it.
And addressing these things has popular support. Everyone knows what is wrong, and everyone can see no one is even trying to fix it.
But instead we get slogans that amount to, “nothing will essentially change, but the other guy is worse”, and then wonder why 40% of Americans don’t show up to the polls.
There are a lot of people who have stopped showing up for the Democrats, not because they like Republicans, but because the Democrats stopped showing up for them.
Please copy and paste here, Good Sir or Madam:
Harris did in fact tack to the right during her campaign to try to pick up more moderate Republicans,
WTF are you talking about? Because I didn’t notice an “tacking” at all.
nothing will essentially change,
She literally had an 82 page plan of economic changes. Were you expecting that the media was going to tell you about all the important stuff? The main stream media buries the important stuff so their billionaire owners can get gigantic GOP tax cuts. That means you have to work extra hard to understand reality. e.g. The 82 page plan of economic changes proposed by Harris. Just because you didn’t know about the plan doesn’t mean that there was nothing in it that would have benefited you in a huge way.
Sure okay, but I am literally looking at the plan now. I don’t see anything about unions, I don’t see any medicare for all or single payer healthcare, I don’t see anything about increasing minimum wage or indexing the minimum wage to inflation. I do see a lot of “helping more people get insurance”, which is exactly the non-solution I was talking about.
I literally see a platform that tinkers around the edges, without making any fundamental changes. But you are here to refute my claims…so tell me/us (everyone else in this thread): What policies in the 80 page policy book I am currently looking at would have been a kitchen table game changer for me? I am willing to be wrong. I agree that the MSM has a profit motive to not inform the public about good democratic policy. So, you came here to make a point. Make your point.
If you didn’t see the outreach that Harris was doing to centrist republicans, you weren’t watching.
<edit, because I am still reading my way through the 82 pages.> There is literally nothing in this plan (that I have seen so far) that is a direct reply to a single topic in the comment you are referring to. Like, most of the problems aren’t even acknowledged.
But most importantly, I watched all of Harris’ speeches. Remember, I voted for her. I was excited to vote for the first black women president. I have too many friends who are gay or transgendered to not vote Democrat. But if she had a solution to these issues (as you have said) and the MSM wasn’t telling me. SHE should have told me. I was there. I was listening.
And finally, while the initial lines of the post were about Harris not supporting M4A, which is empirically true and nothing in the document disputes that. The rest of the post was about the failures of the Democrats as a whole over the last 20 years and nothing in Harris’ policy book could reasonably refute that.
