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He’s no longer the “change” candidate.

    • Coelacanth
      79·
      3 months ago

      “We’re not going back” is an incredible slogan, probably the most effective and catchy in American politics since “Yes, we can!”. I hope they get even better at incorporating it at their rallies, the crowds love chanting it and you can feel how it energises them.

      A shout-out also has to be made about leaning into the “campaign of joy” concept. I don’t know if it was Walz again or a campaign strategist, but it’s not just brilliant on its own (as contrast to Trump’s dour fear-mongering and doomsaying) - it’s also the perfect response to the right’s attempted attacks at Kamala smiling and laughing too much. Remember when that was a thing? Me neither. They turned an angle of attack into one of their biggest assets.

      Her campaign has been on point so far.

      • The Quuuuuill@slrpnk.netEnglish
        444·
        3 months ago

        It’s also what we’ve been needing for ages. My great big glaring criticism of Barack Obama is he ran on a platform of hope and change and what we got was 8 more years of George W Bush (which itself was 8 more years of Bill Clinton in a lot of ways we’re still waking up to). I think the democrats lost the chance to defeat Trump when Hillary Clinton showed up and said “Huh? Pretty good right! Let’s keep the party going” and everyone, both left and right said “What fucking party are you attending? The cops are murdering us in the streets and the economy is still broken.” Ultimately, that’s why Joe Biden was polling poorly, too. Us Americans, our convictions are simple: We want to eat food and keep surviving to tomorrow. We receive mythologies of hardy frontiersmen making it happen, but the lived reality for most of our ancestors is carving out some small semblance of a life to survive to the next day under a system of oppression. And that’s me speaking as a white dude whose ancestors fled France because the French revolution wasn’t a good time to be Jewish. We chose to come here.

        Just once. I want a president who says america is a mess, but doesn’t want to return to some imagined and made up past. You can’t “Make America Great Again.” America has always sucked. I remember when he first started campaigning on that line how many of my friends were like “What an unpatriotic and horrible thing to say. America right now is as great as it has ever been, and we can finally start making it as great as it can be.” Unfortunately, those voices didn’t win out and the fascists won out and we’re still trying to get back to how good things were in 2015 when the cops were murdering us in the streets but at least the economy kinda worked.

          • The Quuuuuill@slrpnk.netEnglish
            2·
            3 months ago

            Oh for sure. We want to get back to 2015, and then pitch it forward to 2027. Meanwhile they’re thinking 1612 would be the ideal version of our society

        • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
          2·
          3 months ago

          Much of Obama’s administration was the fight to slip the cuffs and put out a bush-fire. It wasn’t a buffet of options he passed up on.

          • CoggyMcFee@lemmy.world
            2·
            3 months ago

            They also had GOP-proof control of government for only about 3-4 months, in which they were just barely able to push through major healthcare reform. Then the Tea Party wave came in and the Republicans made it their mission in life to prevent Obama from having any successes, ever.

  • ccunning@lemmy.world
    49·
    3 months ago

    If you’re compiling a list of the head-spinning, gob-smacking, I’ve-never-seen-this-before events of the 2024 campaign, here’s one more potentially decisive factor to add: A sitting vice president has become the “change” candidate.

    Not really “gob-smacking” when the challenger has already held the office for four years while the VP may have the presidents ear, but very little control over anything in the administration.

    (This actually made me curious so I looked it up, and it turns out Harris has cast more tie-breaking votes in the Senate than any other VP in history and her votes account for over 10% of all tie-breaking votes ever cast [33/301])