Yeah, this title IS a weak parody of a famous Dylan song. It’s also a callback to one of those commonly-known, exoticized adages:

May you live in interesting times.

NOT an ancient Chinese curse (Quote Investigator, Grammar Party)

I still haven’t decided how much reportage I’ll be doing on JALC about the 2024 election hellscape-slash-battle for the soul of the nation. The older I get, the more aware I am of how minimal my “insights” are about these sort of political things: and so there seems minimal value to me going all pundit-like on here.

However, with the sort of momentous week like we’ve just had, I simply can’t restrain myself.

Obviously, I don’t pretend to have any insider knowledge or reportage of the shake-ups in the landscape around the Democratic Party’s Presidential candidate. I’m sure you can find your own news about that, but here’s some of what I’ve been reading:

• NYTimes: Inside the Weekend when Biden Decided to Withdraw
• Daily Beast: Rachel Maddow Calls Biden’s Decision His Greatest Act of Public Service
• Maddow’s own essay on MSNBC: “Then in an instant, everything changed.”
• WaPo: The remarkable contrast between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump
• WaPo: Biden flips the script–and Republicans forget their lines

Speaking just from my own little brain and heart, here’s a medley of what I’ve been thinking and feeling.

Ever since the debate–which, admittedly, I did not watch*–I have not been able to shake the unhappy feeling that much of the crisis around Biden’s campaign was manufactured and propelled by media pundits and big donors. As a white female-identifying progressive feminist who tries VERY hard not to be that kind of White Feminist, I try periodically to check my own assumptions and perspectives against the voices of BIPOC individuals and organizations. So throughout the 3 weeks of brouhaha that followed the 6/29 debate, I kept my eye on the Congressional Black Caucus, which stayed in Biden’s corner. I am reassured that the Caucus has given full-throated support to Harris’ candidacy, but doesn’t this feel like one more time where the DNC leadership wreaks chaos and expects Black Americans to save our collective asses?

Having said all that, I can’t deny that in an election where the focus really needs to be on P-murt’s profound unfitness for office, Biden became the focus of the story during July in an incredibly unhelpful way. And yes, him being the focus of the story was itself a product of the whole media-created nature of the crisis. Nevertheless, I have hope that P-murt’s criminality and awfulness will once again be in the media spotlight for the remainder of this election cycle.

From my own circle of friends, colleagues and acquaintances, I see a boost of energy created by the switch from Candidate Biden to Candidate Harris. So: yay for that. But there’s so much I can’t yet sort or predict about this change. Will Kamala’s campaign:

• inspire increased turnout and votes for her from younger voters and/or those from historically minoritized groups?
• inspire increased turnout against her? (because the power of racism and misogyny CANNOT be discounted in the great USofA)
• be better able to galvanize voter energy from those of us who remain actively pissed off about the Dobbs decision?
• be hampered by her relative invisibility within the campaign thus far? (building a public political brand in 3 months isn’t impossible, but it sure ain’t easy…)

Fuck if I know.

What I do know is I’ll be watching the Convention carefully, making my donations to the campaign and doing the get-out-the-vote activities I did back in ’20.

And for the duration, I’ve bought this sticker to put on my laptop.

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* All those end-of-quarter assignments for doc-school.

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Image credits:

• Changes ahead: Nick Youngson on Pix4Free. CC BY-SA 3.0 license.
• Strange women: TeePublic creator BackSkull.