2020 Election: Not Yesterday’s Enterprise

(note: I began this before others made similar points, but decided to clear the cache. I like the two analogies.)

Ever hear of Paul Wylie?

Like most Americans, I only ever watch winter sports during the Winter Olympics, and only then when Americans have a shot at a medal. Which means watching figure skating, mostly.  American men have only won 15 of 75 Olympic figure skating medals, and they were concentrated during two periods. 40% of that haul came from 1948-56 (the Buttons era). Since 1984, just five American men have won medals, 60% of them gold, and 60% from 1984-1992. One last 60% number–that’s how many of the five are straight. Yes, a majority of the US male figure skaters who won Olympic medals the past 40 years are straight. 100% of the British male figure skater medallists are gay (that’s a grand total of 2). But I digress. What was my point? Oh, yes, Wylie.

Paul Wylie’s Alberville medal is one of the greatest Olympic stories in any sport. Long considered a highly talented skater with a life outside skating, Wylie spent over a decade in the top tier of US skaters and five years in the top 3, but he was famous for folding under pressure and never placed higher than ninth in international competition. After graduating from Harvard, he decided to give the nationals one more try, narrowly qualifying for the Olympic team in 92 by a tenth of a point, despite skating quite poorly. The US team coaches regretted his placement, wishing they could give younger fourth place finisher Mark Mitchell some international experience. Wylie had already been dumped from the Worlds, a few weeks after the Olympics, in favor of Mitchell.  Todd Eldredge and Christopher Bowman, the other two Americans, had both been US national champions,  and the heavy gold medal favorites were Canadian and Russian.

But in Alberville, all the favorites fell. Kurt Browning, the greatest skater never to medal at the Olympics, Bowman the Showman, Todd Eldredge, Victor Petrenko, they all had catastrophic errors during their short programs. Everyone except Wylie. For the first time in his skating career, he nailed the short program during a competition. Then in the free skate, with a shot at bronze, his nerves didn’t fail him and he skated the only clean program of the final night. Most people who watched felt he should have gotten the gold, but Olympic judges, always iffy, were apparently determined to give Petrenko Russia’s first gold medal in figure skating. And so Wylie became the oldest figure skating medalist in 60 years by taking silver.

It didn’t matter. Not to Wylie, who would have been ecstatic with a bronze. Not to the people who watched his performance, who knew he’d won in any fair comparison. Not to Scott Hamilton, the 1984 gold medal winner who was mocked for plugging Wylie’s chances after the short. Certainly not to me; the Wylie medal is in my top five great Olympic moments (second only to the 1984 4×200 men’s relay when Bruce Hayes held off the Albatross.)

Donald Trump is not Paul Wylie. But I like this little history for more than its proof that I value second place finishes as extraordinary achievements, often superior to the winner’s. Paul Wylie reminds me that for better or worse, expert opinion has no impact on outcomes. All of us, given the right circumstances, can ignore the naysayers, execute, and achieve far beyond what anyone predicted. So trust me when I say that short of a Trump win, I’m not just pleased with his finish. I’m ecstatic.

At right is just a sample of the conventional wisdom served up by pundits who hadn’t learned a thing in 4 years.

He wasn’t expanding his base. His approval numbers were horrible (based on polls, of course). He wasn’t president to all the people. He was focusing on the hard right “extremist” wing of his voters.

And they were wrong.

Trump grew his voter support in absolute numbers by 16%. This increase registered in every demographic except white males, if we are to trust exit polls. Dramatically. He got the highest percentage of non-white voters of any Republican candidate since 1960.

Understand, of course, he did this with less money. With active media hostility and lies. With a conservative intellectual class at best halfheartedly behind him. With some conservative media outlets and of course, the Never Trump movement, actively agitating against him. With the polls showing him losing  by historic margins in every battleground state.

Trump ignored that and played his game. He did it on his own, with only one real assist: the massive GOP registration effort.

It’s customary to call Trump vain and weak. A weaker guy would have folded. He would have given off flop sweat. Loser fumes. The media mocked him endlessly. Poll analyst Nate Silver, who angrily told people after the election to fuck off if they thought the polls were bad, called the Trafalgar results “crazy” beforehand. David Wasserman nattered about how the private district results showed a wipeout.

The media did everything it could to depress Trump turnout by telling the world it was all over. Biden by a wipeout.

Result: Trump got more votes than any Republican or Democratic candidate ever.

Except–alas–Joe Biden.

We can trust counted votes. Maybe. Here’s the growth in Trump vote, by state. Purple bars are battleground states.

I wrote once about the invisible Trump voters, the blue state voters The west coast ones came out in force. California is still counting votes and Trump is still up nearly 33%. Washington’s nearly at 30%. Oregon and New Mexico increased by over 20%. Fifty percent more Hawaiians voted for Trump. The east coast blue states are still counting absentee ballots, but all gave Trump between 10 and 20%  more votes.

As I’ve tweeted hundreds of times, in 2016 California gave Trump more than any state but Florida and Texas. I’ll have to update that: in 2020, California gave Trump more votes than any other state, full stop. Sum up the votes in the 15 least populated states Trump won, and they’re just barely ahead of California. Who knows, the state might even catch up when they find that last vote coming in on the mail boat from Kathmandu.

In the battleground states, his vote count increased an average of 16%, with a high of 33% growth….in Arizona. With Nevada just behind at 30%.

As the jubilant press corps reminds us daily, Trump’s going to be one of just four single-term presidents since 1900. But take a look at his re-election numbers compared to other presidents since Eisenhower.

Nixon’s huge numbers were because of George Wallace’s relatively successful third party run in 1968. And hey, Clinton is the only Democrat president who got more votes in his second run.

I found only one president who improved on his re-election numbers yet lost the election: Grover Cleveland.

We’ll have to wait four years to see if Trump has has anything more in common with Cleveland than increased votes and a much younger wife.

Great stuff. But.

Biden improved on Hillary’s numbers by far more in the battleground states, with an average increase of 24% and a high of 44% growth….in Arizona. So he won.

“It was rather the moment that the American people surgically removed an unhinged leader and re-endorsed the gist of his politics. “–Andrew Sullivan…and a host of other anti-Trump, anti-woke folks saying the equivalent of “the voters removed Trump with admirable surgical precision”.

No. Not with these numbers. This was a blow out election on both sides. There’s nothing surgical or precise about 2020. Biden held on in the right states in much the way this Joplin hospital held on in the tornado:

A shift in 100K votes and Trump wins. Of course Biden got more votes. I wonder if that will be true from here on in, regardless of the winner. Something we once viewed as an anomaly will become the norm. But in the right places, Trump almost matched Biden’s growth.

Almost.

I wish just a few more Trump voters had gotten out there. Or I wish the absentee ballot fraud were less. Take your pick. I am neutral lean fraud on that issue.

I actually know relatives and friends who flatly disbelieve millions more voters came out for Biden. I was a bit shocked. I’m supposed to be the cynical one, but I totally expected a blue wave. I was just delighted there was a matching red one.

Still, do I think it’s possible there was a coordinated Dem effort to manufacture millions of absentee ballots? Sure. The most likely rationale they’d use for the fraud was conviction that Biden had this locked up, but a massive blowout that totally repudiated Trump would be so much better, right? Wipe out the GOP fear of Trump voters, make them see the light and bend over to more immigration, more transgender nonsense, more government health care, blah blah blah. So why not create more votes? It’s not like we’re changing the election, or anything. Biden’s going to win.

Those who follow me on Twitter know that I think voter registration fraud is a much bigger issue than voter fraud, and much easier to work out ahead of time. The Dems’ concerted push to increase mail-in voting, lower the standards for counting, and fight for extended delivery is all in keeping with this. But hey, it’s not like they were changing the results, or anything. Biden’s going to win, right? The polls all say so. This is just beating down Trump voters, making them look fringe.

And then the stunner: Trump voters come out en masse, and Biden might lose. Stop the counting! And then got to the cities, where Trump did pretty well, and ask them to manufacture just enough votes. City machines are totally up with that sort of thing.

Do I think this happened? Eh. I don’t know. I’m just as willing to believe it was authentically that close, with the usual marginal fraud in cities.

I do know that Megan McArdle and any other media figure who castigates reasonable skepticism “immoral” can whistle disapproval in swing time for all I care. Swim in outrage until they’re pruny. Dunk their faces in smarmy self-righteousness while eating shit. I don’t care.

Because here’s what I’m absolutely certain of: if any “journalist” learned of an effort to rig the election for Biden, he or she would not expose such efforts but instead ask, “How can I help?”

And that’s why so many Trump voters are convinced there’s fraud. Fuck you all, media folk. You are the ones who have discredited America. You aren’t speaking for America. You’re entertainers, shucking and jiving for the people who pay. Once again, you got your hats handed to you with the enormity of Trump’s vote count. Biden win or not.

I wish Trump had less slimy advocates, but then I always wish that. Because of Trump, other GOP pols will see the advantage in being and getting better advocates.

Back in the early days of Trump’s presidency, I wrote:

The first Star Trek “reboot”  took the bold act of altering the past in a famous fictional timeline. The new movies have the freedom to reinvent, while we watch the movies, fully aware what “really” happened. This got taken to extremes for “Into the Darkness”, when the last half hour echoed word for word the greatest Star Trek movie ever made with a character swap, but it’s still pretty clever.

Ever since Trump won in November, I’ve felt like we’re all living through an alternate timeline. Like Tom Hanks’ “Doug” said in that sublime Black Jeopardy skit, “Come on, they already decided who wins even before it happens”. Everyone of any importance knew Hillary would win.  Jobs were accepted. Plans were made.

But while I see it as a reboot, an opportunity to rewrite the future, all the people with any voice or influence think of the election as Yesterday’s Enterprise. Just as the Enterprise C slipped through the temporal rift and forestalled the truce between the Klingons and the Federation, so too did a whole bunch of voters escape the notice of the Deep State.

…….

The media wants to change the world back to way it was.  What’s happening now is all wrong, they’re not supposed to be here, they have to  fix it.  If they can just keep the pressure on and play for time, someone who “wasn’t supposed to be here” will drag the wounded Enterprise C back a hundred years to be destroyed.  The timeline can be restored.

Sure, I’d have rather Trump won. But  Trump ended his presidency with numbers that force the GOP to accept the reboot. There’s no shoving the voters and Trump into the rift to fix the timeline. Republicans have been worried about their “demographic destiny” for years. Trump’s showed them a way forward. (Something I predicted more than once, incidentally.)

History will, I think, be kinder to Trump than the current moment, but I wonder if they will understand his greatest achievement.

Trump faced down media and elite howls of disapproval and outrage. He didn’t apologize. He ruthlessly attacked anyone who insulted him for his views. By refusing to back down, he  showed all Americans how much the media, intellectual class, and even our political parties were throttling American policy by narrowly defining boundaries of acceptable opinions and proposals to their own political demands. He restored balance to American discourse almost singlehandedly. In doing so, Trump gave all Americans a real choice.

I was grateful back in 2016. I’m grateful now.

2020 Election: Political What Ifs and Other Gasbaggery

First, thanks to Kyle Smith for writing part I of my planned article.

If the polls are right, Biden wins. All the endless nattering about “Trump’s window closing“…no, wait, that’s from 2016, this month the meme is “Trump’s running out of time”, is so much idiocy. The polls are either right and Biden wins in a landslide, or they’re wrong in Trump’s favor and he’s got a shot. The point is, he’s got a shot if the polls are wrong, not if he takes whatever sage wisdom various conservative pundits dish out about constructing a good closing story.

Political analysts are always retrofitting their reality post-hoc. The night that Trump won, I remember Steve Kornacki and Bill Hemmer talking about the staggering numbers they were seeing out of rural towns and counties in Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. They had just never anticipated that kind of outpouring and it clearly helped Trump win. But after the fact, no one ever mentions this; instead, “Trump won over the most disliked candidate in Democratic history” (who somehow, despite being epic-ally unpopular, got more votes).

So. If the polls are correct, it’s a blowout. If the polls are right, Biden will win Arizona and Georgia, to say nothing of the original Blue Wall states. He might pull out Texas. If the polls are right, Joe Biden will win a higher percentage of the white vote than any Dem candidate since Jimmy Carter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Really?

 

So this next part isn’t for Dems. You Dems do what you do, I grok that. This part is for anyone who was even thinking of voting for Trump or who voted for Trump in 2016, the people who are responsible for the plummeting support for Black Lives Matter looting, the people who get utterly squicked out by feeding 8 year olds hormones to change their gender whether or not the parents approve. The people who support fracking and affordable gas prices and think trying to fix climate change is not worth destroying our country. The people who don’t want the virtual open borders and fake asylum claims and amnesty, much less refugees dumped on states without consent, who loathe antifa, who can’t believe that colleges are ending admissions tests.  The people who don’t want to spend young lives fighting pointless, endless wars in the middle east, who think the 1619 Project is bullshit, who are privately appalled at the media open hostility to Republicans. The people who think unisex bathrooms are a horrible idea, who don’t want the courts stacked, don’t want statehood for Puerto Rico, DC, and Guam. The people who are terrified that cancel culture has gone too far, that free speech is disappearing in America.

But are voting for Biden anyway.

If the polls are correct, and “Trump lost the suburbs” and suburban women in particular, who supported Trump last time, then they are all looking at the city riots and antifa street-blocking and Democrats defunding police and Biden always avoiding answering straight up that he won’t support this until a desperate media pushes him to say something and saying yeah, that’s my guy.

 

 

 

 

 

Really?

 

 

You’re….tired of Trump? It’s just always so much….struggle? You find him embarrassing? You think someone else would handle covid19 better? You just don’t like him? You want someone the French and English will respect?

 

Jaysus. The question is, of course, how many of you are out there. To all those potential Trump voters who just got tired of the chaos and plan to or have voted Biden:  you’re kidding yourself. And if you are so numerous that the polls are correct, you’re going to regret what comes. Worse than the lukewarm Obama voters of 2008 and 2012 regretted it when they patted themselves on voting for the first black President and then  realized holy crap, he’s a leftist and sent the Dems scooting, two midterms in a row. Except this will be worse because the Democrat left is ascendant and the pressure on moderates to go along or be cancelled is already unbearable. Let’s hope you have the opportunity to reverse yourself and undo the damage.

A few Ricochet podcasts ago, Rob Long blew up at James Lileks and Peter Robinson for doing what I just did, in chastising people for switching to Biden. It’s Trump’s fault, he said. Politics is persuasion. Trump doesn’t persuade. He doesn’t understand what it’s about. First, I understand the point. I just cry bullshit. Voters have their own responsibilities. Anyone who holds even some of the views I outline above and votes for Biden will get it, good and hard, and screw them for dragging the rest of us down with them. Again, Dems: not you. You do what you do.

So that’s for if the polls are right. Which, again, they might be.

The polls didn’t move. Not through the insane BLM riots, the mad, uncontrolled cities. The crazy violence and highway blockings. That’s when I began to wonder. In 2016, I accepted the polls.  I saw what Trump was trying to do and hoped like hell the state polls were wrong, but until election night it was a pipe dream. This year, I am really forcing myself to accept the state polls, but my basic stance is doubt.  The national polls I think are realistic. But anyone who thinks an even 10% national lead spells a definite Biden rout is delusional. I’ve been pointing out for four years that every Republican in California, New York, Illinois, Colorado, and New Jersey could stay home and make no difference at all to the electoral outcome while creating a popular vote massacre.

Understand, even though every logical bone in my body doubts those polls, I try really hard to believe them and emotionally, I am totally prepared for a Biden blowout.

Is it possible that all this organic support for Trump, the car caravans and boat parades could represent a huge percentage of Trump voters, rather than the tip of the iceberg? Is it possible that untold gazillions of people who never make a political remark show up and vote Biden, crushing the louder opposition?

Oh, hell to the yeah.

But here’s the thing: that’s what everyone thought last time. That’s what keeps on running through my mind, all the parallels. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll see me do the “Four Year Check” every time some media pundit makes a triumphalist comment: Bill Kristol cackling in glee, Republicans cutting Trump loose, white women hate Trump, Amy Walters confidently predicting a Trump loss, shock that Trump is only 5-7 points up in Kansas, Biden/Clinton lead insurmountable, Megan McArdle mocking the poll unskewers, Dave Wasserman talking of Trump’s utter meltdown, and there’s thousands more. It all feels exactly the same.

But it’s different, they assure me.

 

OK.

 

Here’s what reassures me: win or lose, Trump goes out fighting. It’s widely reported that he didn’t expect to win in 2016. You never saw him say so. The media not only loathes Trump but actively works as campaign hacks for Biden, but there are no Trump equivalent stories to the Bush family reunion in the 2016 South Carolina primary or the desperation in the last weeks of the McCain campaign. Trump didn’t spend the last weeks of October sitting around the fire reading Hemingway short stories, and not only because he’d probably have trouble identifying one. The media may hate him, but they’re scared he might win, and you’ll never know otherwise from Trump. The man doesn’t do flop sweat.

Similarly, I have no fear that all the idiotic pollster prattle will dissuade GOP voters. I worry maybe the weather will do a terrible thing, but have no fears that Bud and Mary will say “Jeeze, Nate Silver says Donald Trump only has a 10% chance to win and Dave Wasserman says he’s almost seen enough, so let’s order pizza and do some premature mourning.” No, if Trump loses it’s because not enough people in the right states want him to be President, not because any supporter didn’t bother to show up.  His supporters will come out, from the homeliest hamlet to the many usually invisible Trump voters in blue states (they’ve been having some fun with their rallies this time round). And that’s comforting. The media might be trying to use certainty to depress the Trump vote. They’ll fail.

I have disliked the media and “experts” generally since 2008, but at this point I just hate them all. Boundless contempt, I have. What comforts me is that I’m not alone. The media can still cancel. The media still has influence with corporations, with employers, public and private. But they have no influence over public opinion.  The middlebrows who look to elites exist, but only on the Dem side, and it’s a vanishingly small group. The rest of us think the media are hacks or honest activists, with the only question being whose side they’re shilling for. If Trump doesn’t win, it won’t be because of a single thing the media wrote or didn’t write.

Which brings up another point I’ve been mulling for a while: GOP voters need new media. The National Review couldn’t even bring itself to endorse Trump, and published another vile diatribe by Kevin Williamson, who loathes America so much he’s moving to Switzerland, which he finds much more civilized.  If I want to read articles overflowing with disdain for the white working class, I’d read Twitter bluechecks.  The editors couldn’t bring themselves to endorse Trump and gave a voice to one formal yes, one formal no, and one formal who knows–but that’s in addition to Kevin Williamson, Richard Brookhiser, and Jay Nordlinger all saying they wouldn’t vote for him.

The Federalist has generally gone pro-Trump. Washington Examiner, with the single best reporter on the conservative beat, nonetheless has Tim Carney bragging he won’t vote and begging people not to hate people just because they voted for Trump.

Never mind The Dispatch and The Bulwark and the other Never Trump folks just slavering to throw out those plebe Trump supporters. I listen to lot of podcasts, most of them by conservative media folks, and they spend their time bitching about Trump, endlessly. Then occasionally they’ll bitch about Biden and the media and the left, but does that make them say Trump’s better? Oh, hell no. Back to bitching about Trump.

Guys, he won without your help once. If he wins without your help twice, who needs you? And if he doesn’t win, and you didn’t fight for him–again, who needs you?

But the sad truth is that we Trump voters still read National Review, still read Jonah Goldberg’s GFile, still talk about Ross Douthat, still call Bill Kristol a conservative and still support their various efforts to some degree because who else is there? They treat Trump voters like crap because they can.

OK, end bitching about media.

What if it’s not a Biden blowout? What if the polls are wrong, at least in part?

Well, then, we have a narrow Biden win or a narrow Trump win.

Narrow Biden win:

1. Trump keeps Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia. Biden takes the blue wall states.
2. Trump keeps Florida, Arizona, Pennsylvania, North Carolina. Biden takes the rest of the blue wall and….Georgia.

Narrow Trump win:

1. Trump keeps Georgia, Pennsylvania, Florida, and North Carolina. Biden takes the rest of the blue wall and…Arizona.
2. Trump loses Georgia but picks up Michigan in addition to the rest.

(as you can see, I have no truck with those single elector places. Assume they go to Biden.)

I naturally want Trump to win, but a narrow Biden victory will give serious pause to the plans to rework the GOP, particularly if Trump gets record numbers of blacks and Hispanics. Jim Geraghty hopes that a Trump loss will convince the GOP to be less “Trumpy”, but a GOP that loses white suburbs while gaining with blacks and Hispanics is a GOP in a lot better shape than the free trade, no entitlements anti-affirmative action party that Geraghty dreams about, when he isn’t having covid19 nightmares.

And as bad as a Biden presidency would be, a narrow win would set the media back on its heels, particularly if it was accompanied by an increased black and Hispanic vote.

If Trump wins, well, it’s a great day.

One last election thought, on the Senate: if the Dems tie  the Senate–or even if they don’t–Mitch McConnell should have a heart to heart with Joe Manchin and Jon Tester. Both of them will face endless attacks by their own party if they don’t go woke. And neither of them is woke. Both probably want to be re-elected, which will be increasingly difficult if the Democrats win the Senate. McConnell could probably promise them various committee chairs, right?

Everyone remembers that Jim Jeffords switched parties. But fewer people remember that Richard Shelby, senior senator from Alabama, did it back in 1994. He’s still around.

And maybe that will give ideas to moderate Dem representatives, too.

Worth a shot, anyway. Let’s start that realignment early!

If you haven’t made up your mind: vote Trump.

More than Gotcha: Kamala’s Busing Blunder

So I should confess to begin with that I really can’t stand Kamala Harris. As I say quite often on Twitter, her voice is as grating as Hillary Clinton’s, and it’s astonishing she doesn’t remind everyone of their least favorite ex-girlfriend or a really obnoxious seventh grade social studies teacher. What everyone else saw as passion in her debate, I saw as a windup doll whose string had been pulled.

But never mind that. As I write this, the consensus opinion among GOP analysts (Jonah Goldberg being the only demurrer I’ve seen) is that Harris poleaxed Biden when she said:

There was a little girl in California who was bussed to school. That little girl was me. #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/XKm2xP1MDH

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) June 28, 2019

Clearly, her team had planned this carefully, up to and including using an altered image that makes her look like a black child of poverty.

But more to the point, why wasn’t every GOP analyst and every conservative reporter up in her face about it?

Harris lied, for one thing. Or at least implied, that we all might infer.

Two decades after Brown v. Board, I was only the second class to integrate at Berkeley public schools. Without that decision, I likely would not have become a lawyer and eventually be elected a Senator from California.

That’s the power a Supreme Court Justice holds.

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) July 10, 2018

She was not the second class to be integrated at Berkeley public schools. The Berkeley school district, like most districts in California since Mendez vs Westminister, enrolled by neighborhood. Berkeley High School had always been integrated because it was the only high school in the district. After nearly a decade of black community pressure, junior high schools had been integrated in 1964. Berkeley High had tremendous racial tensions throughout the sixties, caused not by white segregationists but demands by emboldened black radicals. (I’m not saying that’s a bad thing).

After the school board survived a recall vote by opponents, they decided to work more slowly to integrate the elementary schools. This gave white opponents time to leave, and many of them did. (Prior to this white flight, Berkeley was a primarily conservative town; the liberals banded together with blacks to gain control. )  However, many other progressive whites moved to Berkeley to support the idea of voluntary integration, so the white population stayed the same. Notably, the black population didn’t increase: blacks in unintegrated Oakland stayed put rather than move to Berkeley.

Four years later, in 1968, the elementary schools were integrated via busing, with the black children in the Berkeley “flats” traveling to the mostly white schools of the hills, and vice versa. Kamala Harris was in the second class of integrated elementary school students. (all of this is easily sourced, but this book  goes into the most detail) While the elementary integration is generally considered successful, it hasn’t done anything to improve the achievement gap or de facto segregation.

All she had to do was insert one word in between “public” and “schools”.  There’s no question that Berkeley’s elementary school integration was notable for its two-directional busing and its smooth implementation. 1960s Berkeley was still discriminatory; it’s unlikely Harris’s academic mom could have lived outside the flats, thanks to redlinining practices. High school students were tracked ruthlessly, although most reports suggest accurately. Blacks weren’t doing well at Berkeley High, and Berkeley itself wasn’t the enlightened tolerant place it is today.

But to acknowledge that she wasn’t breaking color barriers would have ruined the narrative. How else could she hint at the horrors of racism if not to suggest that even liberal Berkeley was forcibly keeping black kids in black schools until she and her peers boldly broke the color lines?

Harris could rest assured that no mainstream media outlet would object to her lie. Factcheck.org supported her lie, even as it revealed the truth. This way, Harris could pretend that there but for the grace of liberal courts, her legal career would have been denied her.

The second part of Harris’s claim is ludicrous as well as dishonest. Her parents were academics, not working class or uneducated blacks. Her father was gone by that time, but Harris lived a very nice life even if her mother chose to live in the Berkeley flats while working at Cal. Given her parents’ background, how likely is it that the Harris sisters would have gone to a bad school?

Denied a professorship at Cal, Harris’s mother uprooted the family and took them to Canada for a new job, also in academia. Harris graduated from a Quebec high school.

So Harris is lying about the environment that gave her a bus ride, and pretending that going to a partially white elementary school when she was seven is all that prevented her from being a dropout or, god forbid, a teacher.

None of this is terrible. It’s just irritating in that no one picked up on the lie. Everyone accepted it, even though the misstatement is well-documented. Everyone allows her to pretend that busing is why she’s AG and a Senator.

But what I’m more puzzled and aggravated by is all the Republican pundits gleefully celebrating, or at least enjoying, the purported slam dunk of Biden. Ha, ha! Look, there’s Harris, a black woman, taking Biden apart for opposing busing when she was bused! It’s perfect! Wow, what timing! What elan! Harris wins!

It’s all about the gotcha and its entertainment value.

And I’m sitting here thinking what the hell? Busing? Busing was a disaster.  Much of the country hated busing. Joe Biden took the lead on busing because he’d have been a one-term Senator if he didn’t. Read about the anger and the white flight throughout the 70s that resulted when cities tried to forcibly desegregate neighborhood schools and end de facto segregation and Biden’s position becomes obvious.

No one else seemed to notice, though. Even conservatives like Mollie Hemingway, Comfortably Smug, and Hugh Hewitt were gleefully celebrating Harris’s body blow based, from what I can tell, purely on hahahaha she’s black, he’s old, she’s using his decades old vote to catch him out on changing times.

Every conservative I follow was rightly stunned at the entire slate’s support for open borders. As Ari Fleischer put it:

The Democratic plan for the future:

1) Decriminalize illegal border crossings
2) Provide illegals with drivers licences
3) Provide illegals with free health care
4) Watch illegal immigration soar
5) Create a path to citizenship
6) Win elections.

That’s what this is about.

— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) June 28, 2019

But most people were so wowed by this comment that they don’t seem to think about what it meant:

And there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bussed [sic] to school every day. And that little girl was me. So I will tell you that on this subject, it cannot be an intellectual debate among Democrats. We have to take it seriously. We have to act swiftly.

…..It’s a failure of states to integrate public schools in America. I was a part of the second class to integrate Berkeley, California, public schools almost two decades after Brown v. Board of Education.
…
That’s where the federal government must step in.

Look, Americans who aren’t dealing with immigrants every day often don’t completely grasp what it’s like, and go squishy on things like border control or amnesty.

In contrast, they are entirely clear on the intrusive, invasive ways the federal government can “step in” to order schools.  And they don’t like it one bit.

Go ahead, Kamala, you brave truth teller, you survivor of segregated Berkeley discrimination. Tell all those Dem voters how busing is what America’s schools need to achieve the necessary diversity. Tell them how you’ll appoint judges who’ll overrule Milliken, allow states to mandate integration across districts.

Tell  white working class voters the Dems still need in order to win, all those rich white progressives who purport to love people of color so long as some other school is being integrated, not theirs. Tell low income African Americans to forget about those charter schools they like so much, because your great integration plan means they’ll be unnecessary.  Trumpet your plans to mandate school systems like San Francisco, where racial quotas determine where and how far each child will be sent away from home. While you’re at it, explain how this system resulted in far more segregation. 

Go ahead and tell people that your plan will end segregation as the government sorts populations based on race, just like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 planned all along.

But best of all, go tell Asians all about your great plans. Tell all those parents at  those 80, 90% Asian public schools you plan to yank half of the kids out and send them into the inner cities with all sorts of poor black and Hispanic kids. Go ahead and tell Asian immigrants that they can’t cluster and dominate in certain schools, tested or otherwise.

This is a community that sent out a 12 year old girl  to say, in public: “If I work hard, shouldn’t I have an advantage over those who don’t even try?…It’s just not right for me to work hard and do my best while others are being lazy.”

And even after that, the New York legislature backed down on deBlasio’s plan to open up the schools to the kids that girl called lazy.

These are people who brought enormous, angry pressure on a Palo Alto school district when the board wanted to name a school after  a Japanese American who fought for his country.  As immigrants who think of themselves only as Chinese, the opponents looked at an American and saw only a hated enemy from Japan. They won, too.

Raise your hand, everyone who thinks Asian immigrants are going to give the smallest iota of a rat’s dropping about Kamala Harris’s guilt trips? Go grab some popcorn, I say.

I hope Andrew Ujifusa or one of the other Edweek reporters will run with this opportunity hound Harris relentlessly with:

“Senator Harris, you’ve opposed charters throughout your career. In the debate, you strongly supported busing. Are you planning on ending charter schools so you can more easily enforce busing mandates? Will you appoint judges who will overrule the ban on inter-district busing?”

She would have to choose. She could walk back her insistence that the federal government must intervene to enforce school integration. Or she could explain how she’s going to implement country wide integration by taking away all choice from America’s parents.

I don’t understand politics, I know, but for the life of me I don’t understand why every politician from Trump on down to dogcatcher isn’t tweeting about Harris’s plan. Then hound every other Dem candidate and force them to fight that battle for her. Harris will be oh so very popular.

“If you like your school, too bad. Democrats won’t let you keep it.”

Note: I teach in a school that may as well have been formed by Harris’s mandate, so integrated and diverse it is. I like it fine. I just live in a reality-based world most of the time.