It’s 8:03 PM on a day I had no plans and I’m just starting to blog. That’s not good. Now I have to squeeze it in before the Met game. Yesterday’s adventure was my first walk to Aldi in ages. I used to do this weekly. It’s 2.94 miles away. That’s not too impressive but my elevation gain of 1500 feet is. That’s so impressive that I don’t believe it. I’ll check that next time I walk there. I didn’t walk home because I bought ice cream. 51 minutes 17 seconds is a lot to ask of unrefrigerated ice cream even in an insulated bag. The most important thing I bought was cheese curds. There’s an idiot story behind that. The day before I made poutine. The problem is that after making the fries and opening the can of beef gravy I discovered that I was out of curds. I had to use shredded Puerto Rican cheese. I love shredded Puerto Rican cheese but it’s not the cheese for this job. The trip was almost a waste, I bought the last bag of curds in the store.
When I got home from Aldi, I got a phone call from Dan. I would usually cast some aspersions on Dan, but I owe him one. After talking for not that long I remembered that I had a training with the Harris for President website. I signed up to work on the social media campaign. I was looking to find out how to best engage with people on Facebook and here in Wise Madness. Instead that were teaching us how to engage with people in our social communities, whether they be groups on Facebook or other platforms. I had no interest in doing that. I don’t want other people introducing politics to my music or baseball groups. That can disrupt the group’s unity of purpose. I’m very happy to post on my own Facebook page or here, but not in my baseball groups. I did decide to bring up politics more here. This is where I’ll try and talk you into working on the Harris/Walz campaign.
I wasn’t going to watch the convention, the Met game started at 9:40 last night and unlike the convention I don’t go into it knowing who is going to win. I rarely watch political speeches no matter how much I love the speaker. The highlight on Wednesday was the poet, Amanda Gorman. But I had nothing particular to do come 8:50 other than write my blog, and I was looking to put that off, so I started to watch till the Met game started. I then surprised myself by asking my sister to text me when Harris came on. The Mets were winning 1-0 at the time and I turned it off! I don’t think I made the right choice. I went from enthusiastically supporting Harris to still enthusiastically supporting Harris. In the meantime, the Mets went from winning 1-0 to winning 3-1. It took a great play by Jose Iglesias to turn a double play to hold the Padres to one run. I missed it. I’ve seen it in replay but that’s not the same thing.
Today I listened to podcasts recorded immediately after Harris’s Speech as well as accounts in the newspaper and you’d think they were listening to different speeches. The outlier tale was that Harris didn’t sound comfortable when telling the story of her parents and her upbringing. Others thought it a highlight. I certainly didn’t think she sounded uncomfortable. That’s me writing as a recorder of what happened, not me being a partisan for Kamala. I just decided to refer to her as Kamala as I referred to Hillary Clinton as Hillary. After all these years I still have to see how man L’s are in her name. I know it’s the same as Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Mt. Everest but I have to check the spelling of his name every time I write it too.
There is a lot of talk that ,La (not a typo, think about it) needs to focus more on policy and less on vibes. That’s ignoring the history of two of the most effective presidents, one of which I love, and the other I hate, FDR and Reagan. FDR was hugely popular when he won his first election, but it was not based on his economic policies. Hell, he talked of balancing the budget. His only populist stand was repealing prohibition. He promised a New Deal, but the policies he proposed were not the policies that became associated with it. His initial major policy was enacted as the National Industrial Recovery Act, which proved a failure and much of it was declared unconstitutional by the reactionary Supreme Court. It wasn’t policy that led to FDR’s popularity, it was his optimism and making people feel that he would do whatever it took to turn the country around. Eventually there came the successful policies but those were possible because of his popularity, because he raised the spirit of the country.
Reagan never had the policies that helped the country, they actually hurt it, but he had the optimism. The 70s were a miserable decade. The War in Vietnam ended not with a bang but with a whimper and it was the Americans that were whimpering. WE had a unique period of high inflation and high unemployment, stagflation. That was conquered not by Reagan but the chairman of the Fed, Paul Volker but that’s a story for another day. Today the spotlight is on vibes. Reagan like FDR made people feel good about the future, that that’s a self-fulfilling prophesy. I never felt his charisma at all, just as I’m sure Republicans aren’t feeling Harris’s joy, but enough people felt it to make it shape reality. Shaping how people feel is perhaps THE most effective lever of power for a leader. Do not minimize it and say “it’s just vibes.” Right now, the Democrats are feeling it. That alone shows that switching from Biden to Harris was the right move. There’s evidence that it’s affecting the persuadable voters too. Trump is promoting fear and promising he is the only one that can keep the evil people away. Kamala is promising Freedom. Harkening back to FDR we should remember his four freedoms.
Freedom of speech and expression
Freedom of worship
Freedom from want
Freedom from fear
Isn’t that Kamala’s program? We just need to throw in
Freedom of bodily autonomy
Freedom of love
But let’s go back to FDR’s four, the last is freedom from fear, the antithesis of Trump. Some people are unhappy that first Walz and now Kamala are portraying Trump as weird, not a singular evil. The freedom that so many of the disaffected long for is freedom from the feeling of impending doom that pervades political discourse. Kamala laid out the case against Trump but most of Thursday night was celebrating the future that could be. This is not being a Pollyanna. I’m not saying to make believe there is no danger, but focus on the bright future that is still possible. A therapist would tell the American public to not catastrophize. Those of you that suffer anxiety and depression know exactly what I’m talking about. Here’s what I’m asking you to do. To work on the things that make a better future possible. When you have the catastrophic thoughts don’t spread them to others. I’m not telling you to lie. Like Faramir I wouldn’t even deceive an orc with a falsehood. I’m just asking you to put that energy into preventing them from happening. Look how quickly this campaign turned around. Change is possible.
I have been to free to criticize people that want the same things I do but follow their feelings not their reason. When I lay into them too heavily, I’m following my feelings, not my reason. You don’t get other people to change by calling them stupid, or hateful, or evil. What do we want? Change! When do we want it? Now! How do we get it? Using our heads not our glands.
I’m going to use this blog politically now and then. Serious subjects need research on my part. That means cribbing off people that know more than I do. I want to write a blog on the state of the economy, but I am far from putting all those ducks in a row.
ACK! The Met Game Started! That’s what happens when the short entry you plan stretches out to 1425 words.
Here’s where to volunteer, Volunteer for Harris
Wise Madness 