Let’s not ignore the Tim Walz pick when she could have gone with the Pennsylvania guy. If she’s going to run as a coalition president, she has to offer every part of the coalition something they will like.

But yes, I do hope it is mostly campaign rhetoric. We’ll see.

Harris is doing multiple campaign events with Liz. Fucking. Cheney. A warmongering, anti-LGBT, anti-choice neocon. Remember when she threw her own gay sister under the bus to try to win an election (which she lost anyway)? I do. Now I personally haven’t decided if Harris is right to use Cheney like this, but it doesn’t feel great to a base voter like me who remembers 9/11 and her family’s Iraq hawkery. The Cheney family used to be universally reviled on the left, and this effort is doing a fair amount to rehabilitate her reputation with some dems, and I’m not thrilled about that.

i have similar memories & thoughts pertaining to biden & clinton with 10450; doma; don’t ask, don’t tell; ICE & immigration reform; etc. experiencing first hand how our collective memories about biden stop working before 2008 shows that reality of the past doesn’t matter at all. every time we’re in this situation we collectively agree that there’s a problem; but then we opt to do the same things over and over again (eg democrat or republican) instead of trying something new.

no one knows what the right answer is; but we know what the wrong ones are because we keep doing them and here we are; each time squabbling all over again and thinking that the next time will be different despite doing nothing different to make it happen.

I’m voting for Harris, without a doubt, but she is already moving to the right, at least as a political strategy. FFS she has already promised to put a Republican in her cabinet!! If she goes any further in that direction she’ll be at a serious risk of losing some dependable progressive base voters. But as some other comments have mentioned, if she wins there’s no reason to believe she won’t continue rightward.

here’s one of the clearest examples: we know democrats are moving rightward and we know that they’re usually the lesser evil. so we support them more often in the hopes that they don’t fully embrace a rightward movement and they move rightwards anyways and we have no leverage to get them to change because we’re going to vote for them anyways.