Last night the only moment of natural jocularity in the PBS panel of David Brooks, Mark Shields, Michael Nutter, and Chris Buskirk, came when Buskirk said something like “the music seemed to come from 1968”...Judy, David, even Mark all of a sudden looked like they were in a nice after dinner boomer cocktail chat. It seemed as if there was a comfortable nostalgia that was bittersweet surrounding the riffs to “Battle lines being drawn...nobody’s right when everybody’s wrong...”
Finally...I had been disturbed that my comfortable cohort of Old Cis-gender White Men were not being adequately represented! But no worries...it was as if all the memes of the young, diverse, impassioned idealism of a new generation of hopeful youth were being shaped into a main outline narrative by the fading, but present power of the old white men who were visibly absent from the convention screens, but now, pressed into action by Trump’s call to the 60’s battlefield issues, behind the scenes, were shaping a redo of the culture wars of the 60’s, but with the “wisdom” of what if we knew then what we know now...and at the top of the ticket...a white man so old he isn’t even technically a boomer. Trot out the youngsters, and let them deal with the technical part, and the optics, but we will run the show.
I am seeing Joe Biden as Hubert Humphrey, and Bernie Sanders as a Eugene McCarthy who is not going to fracture the party this time.
But Joe is not up against a Nixon, but an ignorant, unqualified, venal, crypto-fascist demagogue, and if in ‘68 those of us who were in Chicago made sure Humphrey was yesterday’s news, and bound to lose, the old white men were going to make sure this didn’t happen this time.
Tonight laid out the case for the importance of taking this election as seriously as it needs to be taken, and targeted were suburban moms in Wisconsin.
Probably as it should be done.
Except that Elizabeth Warren, or Bernie, or the Eugene McCarthys that I would vote for aren’t the candidate.
But Biden/Humphrey is probably not going to lose to Trump/Nixon, if everyone who understands what is at stake votes.
I can’t take another four years.
While I am not a Democrat, I went from Bernie, to Pete, to Warren, and will vote for Biden with about as much enthusiasm as I would have voted for Humphrey, that disappointment is mitigated by Obama not wanting to finish the speeches tonight, but to let Kamala do it...he was passing the torch.
Time for the old white guys to go away...but I hope we can pull this election off.
