ALTHOUGH KAMALA Harris has ran a dangerously conservative election campaign, inviting Republican challenger Donald Trump to portray the Democratic Party as the flagbearer for a corrupt status quo, it will not cost her the presidency.
Nor will her failure to condemn Israel's genocidal war in Gaza and its savage military assault on Lebanon. Her repeated comments that she supports a ceasefire in Gaza are derisory, since she has no intention of stopping the shipment of arms to Israel. Such doublespeak will lose Harris votes among progressives, Arab Americans and Muslims but not enough to lose the presidency. No doubt her people have crunched the numbers.
A victory for Kamala Harris though does not prove that centrism has saved the day, especially since it was centrism that got us into this mess in the first place when the Democratic Party establishment chose Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Rather Donald Trump has handed the Democratic Party another four years in the White House by running a dark and divisive campaign, unpalatable to much of America and out of step with the mood of the country. Such madness as claiming that immigrants have been eating people's pet cats and dogs and suggesting that Liz Cheney should made to face a firing squad do not inspire belief that Trump is the man to lead America, never mind make it great again. It only encourages belief that Trump is not right in the head and needs a cup of tea and a lie down.
Trump's parade of obscenities, grievances and racist sneers might well appeal to Trump's base but massaging its prejudices and bigotry won't win Trump the election. He doesn't have the numbers because Trump is simply incapable of uniting the electoral forces needed to win. He's got nothing left in his toolbox and even Elon Musk's money won't save him now.
I'm confident that Trump will lose this election and I suspect that the margin of the Harris victory will be far more comfortable than the polls are suggesting. This is especially true since it has now emerged that a slew of Republican-sponsored polls have been intentionally slanted to favour Trump.
As documentary maker Michael Moore has commented:
'The vast majority of the country, the normal people, have seen enough and want the clown car to disappear into the MAGA vortex somewhere between reality and Orlando.'
But the defeat of Trump should not be celebrated as a victory for the left either. While Trump, hopefully, will be thrown into the dustbin of history, any sense of relief should be tempered by the fact that the Democratic Party under Kamala Harris remains a party of neoliberalism and of enforcing American interests abroad.
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