So, at what point did it dawn on you that Kamala Harris not only was probably going to lose but deserved to lose? For me it was probably that moment on her last rally when she held hands aloft with Oprah Winfrey to the cheers of the multitude. “Yes She Can”, said Oprah’s T-shirt. Well, No She Couldn’t, actually.
The celebrities who are sad today – it’s a bad day for Taylor Swift, J-Lo, Beyonce, the lot – can reflect that their girl’s performance has proved one thing: celebrities do not swing elections. They can, however, annoy ordinary voters with their asinine pronouncements. There was, however, a more obvious reason for the result. Two clips from the BBC (a bad day for them too) two days ago summed up the campaigns, one from Kamala, one from Trump. Kamala declared: “Being president isn’t about who you can bring down; it’s about who you can lift up” (cheers). Trump’s was shorter: “Are you better-off now than four years ago?” (“No!”). There you had it. One candidate wanted you to feel the glow; the other wanted you to be better off. And look who the voters went for.
The meltdown among celebs and the pundits at the result is not, however, confined to America. There was quite the little temper tantrum on the part of Emily Maitlis when she presided over the Channel 4 election coverage last night and used a bad word to describe Trump’s rhetoric on immigrants and was correctly taken to task by Krishna Guru Murthy, her co-presenter. She also had a go at the former PM, Boris Johnson, for the “Trump-like behaviour” that he “imported here” and got quite snappy when he suggested that it might be better to focus, you know, on the US result rather than on him. Time was, presenters used to put up a reasonable show of impartiality; Emily is now so grand after dismantling Prince Andrew, in my opinion, she doesn’t even seem to try.
The UK political classes don’t come terribly well out of the election. The atmosphere today is weirdly reminiscent of the day after the Brexit vote, when the people who know best woke up to find that the plebs had got it wrong. Sadiq Khan, the Mayor, felt that this was the moment to sound off about the US rather than his actual area of responsibility: London. “Asserting our progressive values is more important than ever – re-committing to building a world where racism and hatred is rejected, the fundamental rights of women and girls are upheld, and where we continue to tackle the crisis of climate change head on.”
Dear Sadiq; how to say this? Your job is to keep the Tubes running and crime down. Inanities about progressive values is what lost the Democrats the election. Same goes for the exciting duo Alistair Campbell (“Trump is losing and he knows it”) and Rory Stewart (“It is heartbreaking that Trump is now president”) whose reputation for prescience will take time to recover. The genius that is Carol Vorderman also failed to see where things were going for the simple and sufficient reason that it wasn’t where she wanted them to go: “Harris Will Win”, she told us. Really?
Look, few people think that US electors were spoilt for choice in this election. Donald Trump’s flaws are evident even to his supporters but about the only British pundit or politician who could identify his strengths was Nigel Farage and possibly Boris Johnson. The rest went for Kamala.
But the actual question is, how did the Democrats think they could get away with Kamala? By one of those odd coincidences there arrived on my desk today a cheerful little book for children called: Amazing Facts: Kamala Harris. And among the Amazing Facts are the following: “Kamala is Brat. Lots of music stars endorsed Kamala for President, including Charli xcx” and “Kamala is a Role Model for Women. Kamala uses her position to inspire women. Her advice to young women and girls is ‘You are powerful and your voice matters’.”
Now this stuff is bad enough for children but it was pretty well the tone of much of the coverage of the election here. The pundits were prepared to overlook the policy vacuum (has there ever been anyone less able than Kamala to answer a straight question?), the flawed record on border control, for which she was actually responsible, the incoherence (Kamala’s word salads), the lot. She got off with an awful lot on the basis that she was supportive of “women’s healthcare”, euphemisms invariably adopted by the BBC. The cheerleaders have got their work cut out explaining the number of women who actually voted Trump, about 43 per cent of them, as well as the third of people of colour who did the same, including a great many Latinos.
It’s time for a little soul searching on the part of the progressive tendency in the US and their equivalents here. You know who you can blame for Kamala? That’s right, Joe Biden. The president clung on to the hope of standing for another term for at least a year after he should have been visited by what the Tories used to call the men in suits to tell him that he was too senile for office. But no one quite knew how incoherent he was until his limitations were cruelly exposed during his televised debate with Donald Trump.
It took George Clooney to tell it like it was. But why did it take that long? Because US journalists didn’t go out of their way to reveal the limitations of a Democrat president; the electorate wasn’t well served by its free press. So he was only forced to step down too late for his replacement to be properly scrutinised. Kamala was simply the easiest, most available option, and she got an easy ride on both sides of the Atlantic because she was all about women, minorities, LGBT plus, people of colour etc, but not, alas, about the issues that mattered to most voters, including voters from all these groups.
The results aren’t playing well with the celebs. Cardi B, the rapper, was brutally honest about it: “I hate y’all bad” she said on Instagram. I expect Harry and Meghan feel the same; Portugal beckons for them. But it’s the gulf between the political classes and the US electorate that should give us pause. In their little bubble of righteousness, they got it all wrong.
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard writer
