How Uber Drove Away Harris Voters
How Uber Drove Away Harris Voters
Uber's top lawyer helped steer the Harris campaign into a ditch
Nov. 8: Uber lawyer steered Harris campaign away from populism … Harris concedes, but the message remains the same … Sanders and the DNC throw down … MTG to DHS?!? …
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NB: The headline is a bit hyperbolic. Maybe.
Y’know when you think, “Well, boy howdy, I couldn’t feel one drop more volcanic rage than I do right now”? And then, gosharoonie, somehow you do? Welcome to this story, Newsfuckers!
Just a couple of weeks after Pres. Joe Biden dropped out of the race, the New York Times ran a piece that pretty much everyone ignored but Democrats probably should’ve yelled about for a week.
In fact, I was tickled to see one Democrat, a guy I know1 quoted in the piece.
The subject was Tony West, the husband of Vice Pres. Kamala Harris’s sister Maya Harris and the top lawyer at Uber.
West was working on Harris’s campaign. West was there when Biden called to give Harris the news. West jumped on the phone to harvest donors from his network of grassroots activists rich corporate executives.
He had Harris’s ear throughout the campaign, planning to return to Uber when it was over. The guy that I “know,” Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project, told the Times, “I would be alarmed if he ever expresses any direct or indirect views on labor or tech policy.” (West, not me.)
But, the Times reported: “There is no direct evidence that Mr. West has shaped Ms. Harris’s positions on any particular policy.”
Okay, but how about on all policy? Well, if there was no direct evidence before, Newsfuckers, there is now.
Franklin Foer has a new article up at The Atlantic in which unnamed Biden Worlders spill the beans tea. (h/t) Here’s the part I wanted to flag:
One critique holds that Harris lost because she abandoned her most potent attack. Harris began the campaign portraying Trump as a stooge of corporate interests—and touted herself as a relentless scourge of Big Business.
Then, quite suddenly, this strain of populism disappeared. One Biden aide told me that Harris steered away from such hard-edged messaging at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer.
Disappeared! Like, jumped into a car and vanished! And apparently it was a Tesla Uber because it self-drove itself down a non-existent road where voters don’t live.
Personnel is policy. Lobbyists and corporate lawyers and wealthy consultants have been running the Democratic Party. And, look, good intentions all around, I’ll happily stipulate. West very likely wanted his sister-in-law to be president!
In fact, there was evidence back in that July Times piece that West was a good consigliere. On the other hand, consider who was vouching for West:
“I’ve had conversations with Tony and people on their team, and I find them very smart, very open to all business ideas,” said the billionaire investor Mark Cuban.
Cuban, of course, said publicly last month that he’d get rid of Lina Khan, the monopoly-fighting chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Even Vice Pres.-elect JD Vance thought Khan was doing a good job!
Another example: The Lever points out that before getting tapped to run as veep, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) was suggesting that the Harris campaign make mandatory paid family/medical leave one of their driving messages. They didn’t.
Seventy-four percent of Nebraska voters supported paid family/medical leave on Tuesday.
Walz’s progressive policies got sidelined and now the Democratic establishment is saying Harris would’ve carried Pennsylvania with Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) as her running mate…
…even though Shapiro had nothing else to do in the campaign except carry his own state.
Harris Concedes to Trump, Not Reality
Vice Pres. Kamala Harris delivered a concession speech Wednesday afternoon that was lovely and gracious and for Satan’s sake let’s hope the last vestige of that kind of Democraticness, imagining that people want economic opportunity, which no one wants, the way no one wants access to affordable health care.
To be clear, Harris did about as well as anyone could’ve under the circumstances. As your TFN asserted earlier, the blame here falls on the Democratic establishment and its hostility to economic populism, presumably in some measure due to hard feelings about living in the shadow of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
That said, the cognitive dissonance was howlingly loud Wednesday, when Harris urged her audience to keep fighting for democracy…and pledged to assist with handing power over to the threat to democracy. She said, “we owe loyalty not to a president or a party, but to the Constitution of the United States,” which prohibits letting insurrectionists hold office.
Actually upholding the Constitution in this case would be scandalous. Could you imagine if Harris had conceded the race but said she could not countenance a presidential inauguration that would violate the 14th Amendment? Democrats would shame her for it.
It’s this kind of fealty to norms, a load-bearing part of the Democratic Party foundation, that has cost them the presidency and us the next four years +.
Trump’s entire being screamed that he would place the needs of Americans above all norms. It was a lie, but it was at least what people want.
Harris, meanwhile, vowed to continue “the fight…for opportunity.”
Even after losing, there’s no second-guessing of the bizarre, inside-Washington rhetoric that got us here. It reminded me of Tyler Perry raising my eyebrows late last month, campaigning for Harris, when he said “I believe we all should have affordable health care.”
Perry’s cash and stuff is worth an estimated $1.4 billion. So for him, affordable health care could include, hypothetically, bionic legs, right arm, and eye. But if you have no money, affordable health care consists of the aspirin you steal from work.
Affordability is an equation: Retail cost of health care - what patients can afford = patient’s cost.
Providing affordable health care means determining how much money people have and then adjusting costs accordingly. Which is an incredibly complicated and laborious process for all parties, but especially for poor parties with precious little time for it.
It’s also an expensive process. This country has armies of private and governmental bureaucrats calculating our individual affordabilities. And the private sector has its own health-care intelligence agencies, ferreting out reasons not to make your health care affordable.
And unlike patients, the private armies fighting the affordability war — and especially the denial battles — profit from it all.
UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty earned made got $23 million last year, without even curing cancer.
But we’re expected to believe that it would cost our society more simply to give away health care. Even though we wouldn’t have to pay the armies of affordability warriors, wouldn’t be subsidizing obscene corporate profits, and America’s workforce would no longer be tethered to shitty jobs for the health “benefits.”
Despite all of that, the dream that Democrats dreamt for us in this campaign was not health care that costs America nothing, but “affordable” health care.
And “opportunity.”
Other than corporatist Democratic consultants, no biological human wants or speaks of economic opportunity and affordable health care. No wedding toast has ever wished the happy couple the opportunity for prosperity. No one yells, “Is there an affordable doctor in the unaffordable housing?!?” No one tells Santa the things they’d like the opportunity to get.
People want money and health care.
Just like Europe has. Just like we have in sequestered quarters where it works just fine. (I walked into Shop Rite over the weekend and the pharmacist offered me not the opportunity to access an affordable flu shot, but a free flu shot, which I got with no hassle, no paperwork and without the Earth imploding upon itself.)
But Democratic Party leaders have so internalized the system as it is that even a billionaire can aspire only to “affordable” health care and a vice president with no more campaign to lose can hope only for “opportunity.”
Even liberated as they are, they still can’t dream a future better than that.
Sanders vs. Harrison
The blame game is about much more than what happened. It’s about the way forward.
And for four years, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) pretty much kept his mouth shut as the party went astray. Think about that. That’s, like, one percent of his entire life!
Sanders did it in the name of party unity. Only yesterday, when no one could accuse him of possibly damaging Democratic chances of defeating Trump, the one time when we’re supposed to debate what the party is, only then did the voice of a generational movement, the most popular politician in America, stop toeing the line and finally give voice to his anger and frustration.
It took less than 24 hours for the chair of the Democratic Party to go after Sanders, party unity being a one-way street.
In his statement, Sanders said,
It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well.
Sanders adds that “Democratic leadership defends the status quo.” And then rattles off grim economic stats that don’t show up in upbeat numbers like GDP and employment data.
Sanders cites America’s health-care horror show, the plight of young workers, and the Democratic Party indifference to the Gaza horror show. And then he comes for the party establishment:
Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign?
And then the Democratic leadership peered down and whispered, “No.”2
Future former Democratic National Committee Chair (DNC) Jaime Harrison, apparently with nothing better to do two days after his party’s collapse, posted that Sanders’s statement was “straight up BS.”
This, after Sanders — who opposed U.S. arming of war crimes — kept his mouth shut and actively campaigned for Harris. Did that buy him even one day of the DNC letting him have the mic for a change? Newsfucker, it did not.
And then Harrison helpfully confirmed everything Sanders said.
Harrison rattled off a number of things Pres. Joe Biden did that were pro-worker, which would have been an extraordinarily effective rebuttal if Sanders had argued that Biden was anti-worker. Sanders’s argument was clearly that the Democratic Party had abandoned the working class by defending the status quo.
Feeding your captives does not make you pro-captive. Even if you also give them an extended child tax credit!
Sanders was talking about the system holding workers captive. He wasn’t denying that Democrats provide water and hardtack.
Harrison’s response confirmed even the jerkiest part of Sanders’s statement:
Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not. [Zing!]
Sanders closed with an echo of my prescription earlier this week for moving forward:
...those of us concerned about grassroots democracy and economic justice need to have some very serious political discussions.
Stay tuned.
Holy shit, Newsfuckers, it’s happening.
Finally, Steve Bannon and I Agree on a Thing
Longtime Donald Trump aide and abetter Steve Bannon on Wednesday asked Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) about the alleged rumor Bannon was starting by pretending it existed that Greene was a possibility to run the Department of Homeland [sic] Security.
Greene deflected, but let’s be clear that this is (a) a fantastic idea and, with any luck, (b) a harbinger of things to come.
I know, Newsfucker. You’re aghast and appalled. But far better than someone competent, strategic, and organized getting the reins at DHS.
The great fear about Trump2.0 has always been that this time he’ll get it right and hire people who know what they’re doing. A truly terrifying prospect.
Greene, however, would quite possibly defang our domestic militarized 9/11-traumatized internal police state more effectively than any Democrat could get away with. Doing it by accident counts!
We got Trump2.0 because America has gotten worse at empiricism and logic. The dangers of that include the inability to recognize when you’re hitting bottom. Greene will make it easy and provide the American fruit-fly memory with multiple reasons to recall how bad Trump is at running things.
Recommended Reading
WOMEN’S LIT AND ALSO MEN’S LIT As a white guy with mild bro tendences3, it’s easy for me to cling to the hope that racism and misogyny didn’t keep Vice Pres. Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton (or Shirley Chisholm) out of the White House. So, it’s important to continually challenge that presumption with voices and arguments to the contrary. Salon’s Amanda Marcotte is always worth reading, but her latest piece isn’t quite an answer to my pollyanna-ish beliefs about how America sees people named Polly and Anna. But I found a lot of value in Marcotte’s suggestions about what women can do to fight back against the undeniably rapey and violent repugnant subculture that’s now emerging in Trump’s penumbra.
FICTION There’s a lot of fanfic about things that Pres. Joe Biden can/should do in the two months left with the unprecedented presidential power the right-wing Supreme Court left at the door for Donald Trump. Today’s Democratic Party, alas, is more invested in norms than in utilizing even legal power to its full extent.
But Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is out with a really stirring piece of non-fiction about what Biden Democrats literally everyone can do. Right now. (h/t)
SPONSORED CONTENT If you missed it, TFN also offered thoughts about what we do now.
TCB
WAPO Indie media — including soloists such as TFN — have an obvious, selfish interest in shitting on legacy media. We want the money you pay them. So it’s important to acknowledge that they do good work, too, in addition to whatever might chafe our political sensibilities. That Tony West New York Times piece from July was really important and TFN everybody should’ve paid more attention instead of policing the paper’s adjectives.
I say all that because I don’t want to praise big media only when they’re nice to TFN. Which I’m about to do. Because TFN got quoted in the Washington Post yesterday, Newsfuckers!
The Rise of the Planet of Newsfucking is under way, Newsfuckers. Specifically, the Post quoted TFN’s kidding-on-the-square poll-bashing. You can check it out for yourself at this gift link. And much appreciation for WaPo’s Erik Wemple recognizing the sardonicism and not gotcha-ing us.
MORE TFN We’re in prime firehosing season. A lot is happening! TFN is always committed to protecting you from the bullshit, but we do expect to have some bonus TFN content writing for you this weekend. We try to minimize the number of emails, so keep an eye on your notifications if you want to catch them when go up, and we’ll have links to it in Monday’s TFN.
GASTRO-INTESTINAL DISTRESS Y’know what twists my insides? TFN is growing every day … because Trump won and people are seeking oases of sanity. It fills my metaphorical heart that TFN can be that oasis for people, but it’s agonizing to know that TFN’s growth is a mirror of our collective pain. That said, welcome and thank you. Your support sustains me. Thank you.
Especially now, it’s important that we speak to and hear each other. So please keep commenting and sharing. I see pretty much everything Newsfuckers are saying on Substack, but I’ll also see it if you’re tagging us on all the socials: Threads, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, Spoutible, and (still) Twitter.
I still maintain that the vast majority of Americans are not evil and didn’t vote for evil. They and we need something good to be for. The only way there is not to despair.
Go get ‘em, kids.
Okay, online-know
Obviously the comic was better, but the movie works better for a gif.
C’mon, who doesn’t love a good Jason Statham movie?
Would love to read the WAPO article but more comfortable creating an account with them to read a gifted article…..enjoyed your post, though
Nah. You just have a bunch of racists who like having a racist in charge.