I’ve written before about how the Olympics serve as a signpost for my life. The weird thing about the 2020 Olympics was that they were in summer 2021, during that weird interregnum where we hadn’t moved into the new house yet and had just lost both my parents-in-law and where the Biden era hadn’t found its groove yet (but hope was already going away) and I was actively seeking employment elsewhere. So from that standpoint, my own life is more stable and arguably better (even if work is no more fun than before).
But these Olympics will always be tied up with what I can only think of as the emerging Kamalanomenon. I cannot explain how it is that defenestrating Biden in favor of a Black woman has lit a fire under the party, nor how her selection of a midwestern Ted Lasso has kicked it into high gear, but it’s happening. The numbers are no longer terror-inducing, even if they aren’t as good as they ought to be in a sane world (Harris-Walz should be up 70-30 at a minimum), and the success of American women in the Olympics – and the pushback against spurious anti-trans bigotry of Russian origin – just pays into the HW message of “women are great, America is great, foreign misinformation is bad, and our opponents are not just bigoted, but weird.”
It’s hard not to feel like the scales have fallen from the Democrats’ eyes, and they’re finally ignoring the rules on the inside of the game box lid and fighting fire with fire. No more adhering to the expecations of the Sunday Gasbags, no more cowering at the reproof of the New York Times. Just one big wave of “fuck it, we ball.” It’s entirely possible that the GOP has finally disappeared up its own deranged ass beyond a point of no return, and it sure looks like Ed Earl Brown might just no longer be willing to tolerate the extremely online conspiracy shit when faced with a reasonable sounding gal that his kids love and a man literally called “Coach Walz” who can hunt pheasant and break down why the 4-4 defense was the best route to a state championship.
I want to believe. I want to have hope. The Zoloft probably helps with that, but I don’t feel inherently doomed. I’d sure rather be on our side than theirs right now, with their creepshow VP candidate and their mentally deteriorating bag of orange goo at the top of the ticket who’s just trying to stay out of tennis prison. I’m sure “22-time club champion” is very very relatable to Ed Earl Brown. Probably a lot more relatable to the owner of the dealership who keeps screwing him on the service on his F-150.
It doesn’t take much. Reagan’s 1984 blowout was 55-45. Obama’s success was 53-47. Geographical sorting has made it a lot harder to get the big electoral college numbers, but there are multiple paths to 270 – and the important thing is to use more than one of them, so one state’s bad actors are not enough to screw things up. If this is going to work, HW really needs to win every state Biden did in 2020, because if the margin of victory turns on a purple state with a GOP legislature, there’s no telling what shenanigans they will gladly perpetrate to get their way.
Clock’s running. For the first time in who knows when, we actually have a compact sprint of a campaign. It’s time to lace ‘em up, tie ‘em tight, and run like Hell to the finish, because everything hangs in the balance.