I can’t shake a feeling of peace. As I said, we’ll get through it. No one knows what’s going to happen Tuesday and Wednesday, or what will follow a close election in the weeks and months to come. But yes, I believe our institutions will see us through, not because they are strong—they’re battered old things shot through with ideology and self-seeking—but because they’re strong enough for the moment. Our courts, our laws, the free press, the academy, the military—all have taken hits the past decade, many self-inflicted. But they stand, and can do the job. Many unsung heroes see to this each day. There’s more health in our sick structures than we can see.
Here is an institution we helped this year—unknowingly, without really meaning to. In this messy monster of a campaign we enlivened and perhaps even revitalized democracy. It’s the big story underneath the big story.
This campaign with the preening billionaires and the billions raised, with the proud lawn signs and the canvassers, with the old folks online donating money they don’t have to a candidate who might keep the kids safe in the future, with the volunteer door-knockers taking time off and spending weeks going door-to-door in Pennsylvania and having conversations, long ones, sometimes heartfelt, with whoever answers. A friend, a Harris supporter, wrote 2,000 handwritten letters—2,000!—during the past few months. The fundraisers, the rallies, the appropriate grinding-it-out of both campaigns at the end, the tens of thousands at the outdoor Trump rally, the tens of thousands on the Ellipse.
Do we understand what we’re saying here? We are saying we believe in democracy. Everyone, both sides, all ages, all the kids, all the old coots, all classes and colors. We are saying we are personally invested in it and implying we will continue it because it’s what we do and how we roll. We are telling 18- and 24-year-olds, who are understandably skeptical about our system, and often feel alienated from it, that they believe in it too, but actually we don’t have to tell them because they’re taking part too.
It’s a spectacular gesture of commitment. At bottom what it means is: Through all our history we have never given up on each other, and we still haven’t. There was something heartening in this fight.
For our summation of where things are we go to a highly accomplished and rather brilliant veteran of Democratic politics. Anyone who claims to know what’s going to happen is lying, he says. But people wish they had a better choice. “They don’t want him in there, and can’t see her there.” That’s why it’s close.
I found myself this week going back to the hokey and fabulous campaign metaphors of the great Dan Rather. It’s tight as a tick, hotter than a Laredo parking lot. “Are your fingernails starting to sweat?”
Is anyone undecided at this point? I think it more likely they’re just undeclared. They know where they’re going and for whatever reason don’t want to announce it, to themselves or others. I am where I was in 2016 and 2020, and where I said I’d be this summer, writing in. It feels boorish to repeat why. He’s too crazy for me, they’re too extreme. He’s mad, bad and dangerous to know. She and her party continue to move too damagingly to the left. I haven’t felt free to vote for a major-party candidate since 2012, Mitt Romney. I long for the day I can again.
There are for me two Kamala Harris mysteries. The first is why she didn’t give Republicans and conservatives any serious reassurance in terms of policy. I suppose I mean anything at all on cultural issues. She was a California progressive and was part of an administration that frequently bowed to progressives; in a special way it was on her to show to potential supporters some alignment of sympathies. There are many possible examples, but here are six words suburban mothers would have been satisfied to hear: No boys on the girls team. They’re with Ms. Harris on abortion and other issues, but they’ve got seventh-grade girls coming up on the swimming and running teams and they don’t want boys competing with their daughters or in the locker room. Because boys and girls aren’t the same and aren’t built the same. So find a new and humane arrangement. The answer to questions on this is not “I’ll follow the law,” it is, “Believe me, I think we get too extreme sometimes and I’ll push against this.”
The other speaks of something that confuses me as I look at Ms. Harris as a public figure. She slew Donald Trump in debate, live, in front of 67 million people. It was just her, the untried candidate, on a stage with Man Mountain Dean, and she betrayed no fear or tremor. This is someone who can take pressure! Who can think on her feet! If she could do that, why couldn’t she sit down and give an honest, forthright interview, or field questions thoughtfully in a way that coheres, in a live town hall? Why couldn’t she let people in on her real thinking? I don’t recall a single interview she did that didn’t seem full of doubletalk and evasion. When that’s what you give people they assume you’re hiding something. It makes them think, “Maybe stick with the devil I know.”
She veered from simplicity and struggled to answer simple questions. If asked, “Do you like to walk on the street on a sunny day?” She could not say, “Yes, I do.” Instead, she’d answer it in a way she thought a smart person would answer it, full of odd roundabouts and clauses.
“Do you like to walk on the street on a sunny day?”
“I will say that within the general context of weather, and added to that the strolling ability, whether to choose to or not, and reflecting the reality of precipitation, that such strolls, and I’ve always made this clear, are quite possible.”
She’s smart. She’s accomplished. If she loses, her not seeing the needs of potential supporters and not sharing her real thoughts will be part of why.
* * *
We’ll know more soon. I close with the peace I can’t shake.
This week, my own October surprise. A text message, a hospital, a baby due in November decides he wants in on the action now. The family grows, a grandson comes. I hold him for the first time and I hum to him chords and he looks at me with huge-pupiled infant eyes and the chords come from my chest and throat. They are of a song I haven’t thought of in years, “My Cup Runneth Over.”
A friend of decades calls. We started out together, were young together, and he’s just seen on his phone the picture of the baby. There are tears in his voice. “In all the chaos, all the noise, something splendid God has done.” Amen.
It’s what we all know is the real news, always: life happening.
Let’s all make it through. We’ve never given up on each other, ever, let’s not start now. Can’t let the grandkids down.