Had a campaigner text me to join a watch party for the debates 40 minutes away. Told them I don’t support those who arm fascists and support genocide. The Dem party has become too far right and now the party of Bush and Cheney and I’ll be voting Green in Michigan.

Campaigner actually was considerate and said they’d send that up to the campaign. Just too many ‘good Germans’…er well meaning people caught up in the D/R trap.

I don’t think she’s going to win Michigan. Maybe a lot of FIRST WOMAN BLACK ASIAN PRESIDENT. I remember Obama fever. Thinking we somehow evolved as a society. Oh oh!

All she had to do was stop arming Israel.

this is definitely not true. americans absolutely do not give a shit about or vote based on foreign policy. at the level of the entire electorate, the american public is a bunch of goldfish brained nitwits. dem voters say that they want a ceasefire, but if kamala were to say ‘no more weapons’ there would be an enormous blacklash of aipac nazi propaganda. that would whip public sentiment sufficiently back that she would buckle and walk back any policy promise, appeasing nobody.

further, she is literally the vice president for another 5 months. if somehow she got a brain transplant and started fighting for a ceasefire now, there is no way there would be enough uptake from the bloodthirsty american electorate that it would be worth the votes she would gain. a campaign promise of not arming israel would mean she would be going up against both biden and the GOP. she would not net gain voters in that fight.

I’m not making a prediction about whether kamala wins or loses, but I am making a prediction that whatever happens will not be driven by electoral pushback about american war crimes. on the whole, americans do not give a shit about war crimes.

i don’t buy it. you only need to look at the precipitous drop in Biden’s polling after the only unambiguously good foreign policy development in years (exiting afghanistan) to know that Americans are antagonistic to, or at best unmoved by, a humane approach to the world.

Harris is doing bad because Biden can’t close on Ukraine or Israel – flipping the messaging, withdrawing support, the issues in-and-of-themselves don’t matter, no one votes on foreign policy – but what matters and is detrimental is that withdrawing support, that flipping the messaging – “Losing”-- looks weak and incompetent, which Harris can’t afford as a female candidate, which she can’t afford against the racist, “crisis of competency” framing of the GOP.

it might be one thing if Harris ran as an unambiguous anti-interventionist champion – she would look strong and principled – but as VP she can’t run away from the current administration, which means she is tied to biden who is tied to Blinken’s blinkered view of the world, which assumed that one could just let the Israelis could tire themselves out with a little, incredibly disproportionate amount of violence – not understanding that 10/8 is Bibi’s pretext for clinging onto power indefinitely, not understanding that the most evil and vile people on the planet will use it to excuse a final ethnic cleansing.

Not even that. Not saying anything or sticking to some vague non-committing platitudes would have been enough.