The Shock of Optimism

Some Sunday thoughts on 'Joy'

“For now, at least, @KamalaHarris has become the "turn the page" candidate--a chance for a new beginning, running against a de facto incumbent with epic scars & vulnerabilities, who so far isn't handling her challenge well. Hell of a turnaround from a month ago.” — David Axelrod

You know that my default position is to warn against irrational exuberance, but it’s Sunday and this is all remarkable, so to hell with it.

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Three weeks

It’s been just 21 days since Joe Biden dropped out. I had to check my calendar twice to make sure I had that right, because the political world has been turned upside. And that odd sensation you may feeling — that twinge of nearly forgotten emotion — is optimism.

Of course, things can still go south¹, but for the first time in a long time, we can let ourselves begin to think:

Maybe Donald Trump is not our destiny. Maybe he is just a parenthesis.

And we had no idea how much we needed this.

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Some of you are old enough to remember what you thought and felt a month ago. For the last year you felt you’d been taking crazy pills every day, because nothing seemed to make sense anymore. Back in May, I wrote that what we’re feeling isn’t numbness. It’s more like airsickness.

We’ve been led to believe that things work in a certain way, that there are mores and norms. We thought our world was right side up, but it now feels as if it’s been turned upside down. Words don’t mean what we think they do. Outrage is followed not by accountability, but by adulation. Standards shift, flicker, vanish. Nothing is stable.

Over the last few days there has been a lot of talk about “joy,” but it’s actually more complex than that: a mixture of relief, hope, desire for change, and a sense that maybe things will make sense again. Three weeks ago, I had the nagging feeling that 2024 would be like 1980, when Ronald Reagan overwhelmed Jimmy Carter. Now, though, it feels much more like 2008, when Barack Obama rode a wave of hope/change to the White House.

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But, since this is a contrarian newsletter, I want to go back to Reagan for a moment…

He was, of course, a fierce partisan and a committed conservative, but Reagan was also an optimist whose vision of America contrasted sharply with Trump’s dystopian image of American carnage.

Here’s a mental exercise. Try to imagine which of the current candidates would say these things (from Reagan’s Farewell Address):

The past few days when I've been at that window upstairs, I've thought a bit of the ``shining city upon a hill.” ….

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it.

But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity.

And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.

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And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was 8 years ago. But more than that: After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.

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One final note. In the quote that opens today’s newsletter, David Axelrod highlights a remarkable shift in this campaign: Even though Harris is the incumbent vice president, she feels like a "turn the page" candidate -- a chance for a new beginning.” No other veep in history — Nixon in 1960; Humphrey in 1968; Bush in 1988; Gore in 2000 — has ever been able to run as an agent of change. But Harris is “running against a de facto incumbent with epic scars & vulnerabilities.”

And it would be history’s condign verdict on Donald Trump if he were to be reduced to a parenthesis bounded on one side by a man named Barack and on the other by a woman named Kamala.

Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride

By now you’ve undoubtedly read/heard of Trump’s fabulist tale about a helicopter ride with Willie Brown. The short version: Trump claimed he was in a near-crash with Willie Brown who, he says, dished dirt on Kamala Harris during their near-death experience. Even though Brown immediately denied that anything of the sort had ever happened, Trump doubled down and even threatened to sue the NYT over the story. He also claimed to have documentation for the story, but — of course — never presented it.

Because it never happened. He had the wrong black guy. Politico reports:

The man who almost crashed in a helicopter with Donald Trump told POLITICO Trump confused him with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown — despite the former president’s repeated insistence it was Brown.

It was Nate Holden, a former city councilman and state senator from Los Angeles, who said in an exclusive interview late Friday that he remembers the near-death experience well. He and others believe it happened sometime in 1990.

“Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco,” Holden said. “I’m a tall Black guy living in Los Angeles.

“I guess we all look alike,” Holden told POLITICO, letting out a loud laugh.

Hilarious. But there are only three possibilities here: (1) Trump simply told a lie because he’s a chronic liar, (2) Trump is so cognitively impaired that he confused two black men and can’t remember what actually happened, or (3) All of the above.

My Finch Obsession

From my wife’s estimable Substack newsletter:

We have a new obsession. My husband now sits in a different chair—a break in long habit—so he can see the finch feeder he bought “for me” as a surprise.

He interrupts serious conversations to point out how many goldfinches are on the feeder. He put out a ball of fuzz for them to line their nests.

He urges me to buy oranges for them, and admonishes me when I suggest cutting down some of the thistles they love that are taking over the ravine. I listen for the greedy peeping of the chicks in the nest in our chimney vent. We look out the kitchen window to count heads peeking out of the top of the nest.

He can see them while he does television hits in front of the mantle.

All true. (And you should really subscribe, because she is an awesome writer. And it’s not about politics.)

Your Sunday dog pictures

Weekend Eli.

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Our French grandpup, Zoke, in Scotland.

Finally

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1. I’m actually working on a rather alarmist piece about what might happen after the election. But that’s for another day.