Dumb Critique or Dumbest Critique?
Some Democrats are unhappy Harris is touting the endorsement of the Cheneys.
Atlantic staff writer Russell Berman highlights it in, “‘I’m Not Sure Progressives Want Democrats to Be That Big-Tent.’“
For more than two decades, the most popular nickname liberals had for Dick Cheney was “Darth Vader.” And even that was practically a term of endearment compared with the runner-up: “war criminal.” So when Kamala Harris touted Cheney’s endorsement of her campaign during Tuesday’s debate, not all progressives were nodding in approval.
“I cringed,” Joseph Geevarghese, the executive director of the left-wing group Our Revolution, told me. “At the end of the day, I’m not sure progressives want Democrats to be that big-tent.”
The 83-year-old former vice president and his daughter Liz Cheney, the former representative from Wyoming, are now the most prominent of more than 200 former GOP officials to back the Democratic nominee. (Another Bush-era bogeyman of Democrats, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, joined them on Thursday.) In his statement last week saying he would vote for Harris, Dick Cheney described her opponent in even graver terms than he once used against Democrats. Donald Trump, the elder Cheney said, “can never be trusted with power again.”
On one level, this clearly helps Harris. During the debate, she was able to use the Cheney endorsements as part of a broader effort to rebut Republican attacks that she’s too far left for moderate voters. (Her pledges to support fracking and boost small businesses came in the same vein.) But backing from the GOP could make another one of her campaign objectives harder to pull off.
Despite being the incumbent vice president, Harris has tried to establish herself as the change candidate, repeatedly urging voters during the debate to “turn the page” on the Trump era. Yet she has embraced many of the same establishment figures—including Democrats such as the Clintons, and Republicans such as the Cheneys—that Trump has long used as foils to make himself look like the agent of change.
For Harris, the trade-off was apparent in a New York Times/Siena poll taken after last month’s Democratic National Convention. In the survey, more than 60 percent of likely voters said they wanted a candidate that represented a major change; most said that Trump represented that change, but just 25 percent said the same of Harris. “He positions himself as not part of the establishment that has controlled politics for most of my life,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, a 28-year-old spokesperson for the Sunrise Movement, a progressive group focused on climate change. “The more that Harris associates herself with people in that political establishment, the easier Trump’s job is.”
Trump backers have tried to use the Cheney endorsement to appeal to disaffected Democrats. “Dick Cheney has just made the choice very clear: A vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for Dick Cheney, the architect of everything that has gone wrong in the Middle East for the last few decades,” Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic representative from Hawaii who is now supporting Trump, said last week during an event with Tucker Carlson. Another dark lord of Republican politics, Roger Stone, asked on X: “I guess Kamala is pursuing the warmonger vote?”
On the left, however, the Cheneys’ endorsement of Harris won the approval of no less an anti-war progressive than Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who applauded the father-daughter duo on Meet the Press for “their courage in defending democracy.” But for Geevarghese, whose organization grew out of Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, Harris’s name-dropping of the Cheneys represented a rare discordant note in an otherwise encouraging debate.
On Thursday morning, in an effort to sound an alarm among Democrats who were mostly jubilant about Harris’s performance, Our Revolution released the results of a survey it had conducted with more than 10,000 of its members after the debate. The survey found that although a large majority of respondents believed that Harris had won the night, sizable minorities said they did not fully trust her or believe she would sufficiently take on corporate power as president.
This is all beyond silly. While I’m likely somewhat more aligned than they are with Harris on policy matters, the Cheneys have endorsed Harris for the same reason I have: policy disputes are secondary when the alternative is a sociopath who doesn’t believe in democracy and the rule of law, much less longstanding norms of presidential behavior. They’re not saying, “Finally, the Democrats have nominated someone like us!” but rather “We’d rather help elect the most progressive Democrat ever nominated than side with the man who tried to overthrow the last election by violence.”
Whatever one thinks of Dick Cheney’s actions in support of the Global War on Terrorism—and, while I’m more sympathetic to them than Harris, much less Geevarghese, some of them were egregious —he’s an American patriot. Unlike the man who topped the ticket on which he was twice elected Vice President, Cheney felt he had to take a public stand to make it clear he finds Trump unworthy to serve as Commander-in-Chief.
Similarly, despite her heroic stance in the wake of January 6, Liz Cheney hasn’t suddenly become a Democrat—or even a moderate. She’s simply unable to defend what our erstwhile party has come to represent.
To be fair, Geevarghese’s view is a decided minority within the Democratic Party.
Among the progressives I spoke with, Geevarghese was an outlier in questioning her Cheney shoutout. Most were fine with Harris promoting the endorsement, even if they were taken aback by a Democrat linking arms with a man they’ve long reviled for his role in orchestrating the Iraq War and defending the use of torture against suspected terrorists. “I mean, it’s weird,” Markos Moulitsas, the Daily Kos founder, who was one of Cheney’s loudest critics in the early 2000s, told me. “I didn’t put on my bingo card of life that I would be on the same side as Dick Cheney.”
Svante Myrick, the president of the progressive group People for the American Way and a former mayor of Ithaca, New York, seemed okay with it too, even though he considers Cheney and former President George W. Bush “war criminals and war profiteers and genuinely the worst people to lead our country not named Donald Trump.” But for Myrick, Harris’s acceptance of Cheney’s endorsement would be a problem only if she had given up something in return. “Kamala Harris hasn’t changed any of her views to appeal to Dick Cheney,” Myrick told me. “The support seems to have come about honestly. They disagree on taxes and foreign affairs and the military-industrial complex and almost everything except the fact that we should have elections in this country and the winner should hold office.”
Which is an important point of agreement! Indeed, it’s a non-negotiable baseline for representative democracy to function.
It is precisely the lesson from this side of the Atlantic from the 1930s.
Left and Right both on this side of the Atlantic broadly across Continental europe making the error of while hand-wringing about the threat of the fascists, being rather more concened about impure alliances and intra-comparative-centre back-biting.
Every bloody vote in the Swing states is needed.
If the Cheneys bring a few to the table then bloody well take them – if one really seriously actually believes Trump is the threat to democracy that he is – and not mere hyped up partisan drama llama-ism…. (which sadly I believe is in fact the ingrained habit in certain quarters).
Perhaps making alliance with Ms Cheney is unpleasant, consider it the Lefty version of the alliance with Stalin against Hitler. If one truly takes the Trump threat seriously.
(now I have met Ms Cheney in another role long ago and while I had no sympathy for their Iraq demarche, I did rather like her intellectual honesty. She is a straight player.)
Dueling quotes:
About Grover Cleveland: “We love him best for the enemies he’s made.”
Attributed to Lincoln: “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”
I was today years old when I learned there was a left-wing group called Our Revolution with an executive director named Joseph Geevarghese. The Atlantic had to go digging deep to feed their need for Democrats in Disarray storylines.
@Lounsbury:
Everything you said.
Historically it’s often taken something like the Communist Party to get anyone on the Left to focus. (Not recommending Commies.) Without power, ‘being right’ is irrelevant.
@Scott F.: This rather appears less marginal then you present, as one reads in Wiki profile it is simply a Sanders PAC mechanism. Not some Trotskyite bizarre fringe as I would have expected (excepting to extent it is a modern conneixion to Bernies).
Of coruse I have always had a poor opinion of Sanders (his own naming of his book rather says things), but many of the Lefty Left fraction here rather liked him I seem to recall.
Such things do appear to be rather precious pretences, role playing.
@Michael Reynolds: I keep saying the USA feels like it is having a moment rather rhyming historically with the European 1930s moment… including the errors of Left and Right. Well Beni Adam Beni Adam.
So an article sited a bunch of people from obscure organizations who said they weren’t altogether thrilled about Dick Cheney’s endorsement and this means – what, exactly? That James disagrees with them?
For what it’s worth, I think we can accept Cheney’s endorsement for what it is and not slobber all over him for making it. The government he was part of in a very senior capacity did some not-great things and remembering that isn’t “dumb”.
Let’s be clear, “war criminal” is not a nickname, it is a literal description. Between invading a country that was not a threat and the prisoner thing, do you disagree that he is an unindicted war criminal?
No. The proper interpretation, and the one Harris should push, is that they understand all this extreme leftist rhetoric is campaign BS and she will govern very much like Biden, Obama, Clinton, …
@Lounsbury:
I think it is called confirmation bias when the Lefty Left doesn’t behave the way you say they always do, so you go hunting for evidence while ignoring what is in front of you. A Sanders PAC mechanism is awfully deep in the weeds, is it not?
The Atlantic couldn’t get Markos Moulitsas (Daily Kos founder and a Lefty Left people might have actually heard of) to say he was unhappy with the endorsement. But, they made Joseph G., “an outlier,” the headline.
Maybe, just maybe, the American leftists (monolithic bloc of sheeple that they are) recognized the threat and they’ve coalesced behind Harris not by mistake, but with intent. Maybe, just maybe, they listened to you, recognized they were doing it all wrong, and they’ve changed.
BTW, I believe maintaining my disdain for Darth Cheney is perfectly suited for my rhetorical needling of Romney, Ryan, Bush Jr. etc. “If the 1% Percent Doctrine guy can choose country over party, why can’t you?”is a pretty good argument for pointing out the threat, if you ask me.
@Scott F.: confirmation bias? You’re the fellow who made the comment implying utter unknowness which provoked simple curiosity to highlight-Google thinking they’re some Trotskyite org (as the name can most familiarly to outre Atlantique call to Dear Leon’s book…)
And voila in fact Bernites core institutuonal with some extensive history in the political
media, which seems rather not utterly fringe
Hardly then supporting your sneer to the media about digging in any case, their extended media history at minimum showing a reasonable basis for journo phone call.
Nothing in my comment said anything about monolithic nor even pretended to have comment beyond simply the fact I had expected fringe
@gVOR10: How queer…. it is rather a nickname unless one has some reference beyond Left establishing Cheney in a legal fashion as a criminal…. (war criminal specifically).
“Unindicted war criminal” rather says that, its your Lefty accusation and unless legally confirmed very much a nick name however well merited or not. Lest there be doubt I have never had the slightest sympathy for Cheney père & his Iraq fiasco, we can commonly call a crime and worse a blunder, but really its rather extra precious to critique that word choice
Cheney’s endorsement highlights that Kamala Harris is the installed presidential candidate of the career government functionaries who value power over all else. Same as the, what was it 50+, former intel/NatSec functionaries who either lied or were incompetent when they rushed out to declare that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. Even though the FBI had had possession of the laptop and contents for 8 months and it has been since acknowledged as being Hunter Biden’s laptop free and clear.
You know, Lounsbury, you’re getting increasingly incoherent as you post more often. Maybe time to walk away from the computer and settle down for a few hours.
@JKB:
Still running from the question of sex changes in schools?
Why are you afraid to stand up for your führer?
@Not the IT Dept.: or rather the less Left friendly a comment is the more the Cliqueish Left fraction feel motivated to whinge on.
Partisan whinging is boring however. Example being whinging about reporter ringing round to bunch of “Progressive” organisations which a quick look shows to be a set well within the political reporters usual habits, nothing different than what the Republicans experienced with that weird Heritage org
Generally certainly lazy anecdote journalism driven by weak budgets and English/Journo major narration rather than driven data.
@gVOR10: Umm, James’ paraphrase of the Cheneys does not actually refer to Harris as the most progressive Democrat ever nominated.
It’s a hypothetical. It asserts that even if she were the most progressive Democrat ever nominated Cheney would still support her because she believes in elections and rule of law.
But no, that’s not the way to say it to the general public, because “most progressive” is all they are going to hear.
@Not the IT Dept.:
It means clickbaiters gonna clickbait. It’s all rather sily, indeed. But the author(s) know that, since “Geevarghese was an outlier in questioning her Cheney shoutout.” Oh.
So…does dumb and dumbest refer to Geevarwho or to journos who waste copy on hundreds-wordslong clickbait pieces culled from outliers? Then again, they can only compose variations on a theme of ‘Trump’s a degenerate thug and an unqualified, unfit, lying racist crybaby’ so many times.
@Michael Reynolds:
Michael,
The school nurse may be sending male students to this place.
@Scott F.: And even he’s not saying that he won’t vote for Kamala because of the endorsement, just that he’s disappointed that she feels she needs to do boosterism for it. I see his point; the center is where progress goes to die.
@Lounsbury: Partisan whinging is boring however.
Then stop doing it.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Come on, don’t let past behaviors bias your assessment of the now, too.
The Biden administration has managed some significant progressive legislation, and has been the most pro-labor president in my lifetime, through centrism. Big Tent coalitions can work, if the tent is big enough.
@Not the IT Dept.:
What partisan whinging? There are two parties now, just two: Trump and Not Trump. @Lounsbury is clearly, unmistakably on the right side. One of the more frustrating aspects of the Left is their inability to accept any criticism. This refusal to contemplate the possibility that they may be in error supports Lounsbury’s general position.
The far Left has fucked up a lot. And never admit it. We’re still eating shit for Defund. Even the far Left will now tacitly admit that was not a helpful stance, but of course at the time anyone who expressed alarm at that particular bit of idiocy was furiously denounced.
At this point it is far more important to win rather than be right. But that doesn’t mean we should not also try to be right, try to analyze and understand. This requires us to keep an open mind when faced with reasonable criticism.
@JKB: “Cheney’s endorsement highlights that Kamala Harris is the installed presidential candidate of the career government functionaries who value power over all else. ”
I guess the 350 electoral college votes she’s going to get are really going to highlight how the deep state is taking over America.
You keep telling yourself that.
@Lounsbury: ” or rather the less Left friendly a comment is the more the Cliqueish Left fraction feel motivated to whinge on.”
Could you translate this into English?
@Michael Reynolds:
Lounsbury is not clearly anything. Clarity is not their thing.
@Michael Reynolds:
Sanctimonious hippy bashing is also boring. And both you and Lounsbury have both acknowledged, at least implicitly, that it isn’t really necessary at this moment in political history, as the hippies is learning and for the most part they don’t hold sway in the Democratic Party of Biden/Harris. The critical mass of the Democrats have coalesced behind the Harris/Walz ticket at a time when the circular firing squads are profoundly unhelpful. And with Trump and Not Trump being the order of the day, this is an unalloyed good thing.
What started this whole exchange was my simple statement that Russell Berman, or at least the headline writers at the Atlantic, had to reach to make the Cheney endorsements a problem for the Democrats when apparently they aren’t – unless you go looking for Bernie Bros. If you think today’s Democrats in Array is a mirage, then say so. But, I have seen enough evidence to believe it is authentic and intentional. And I believe the mainstream press, such as The Atlantic, hasn’t caught up with the new reality. So I am, as Harris is wont to say, “unburdened by what has been” and willing to lean into the Democratic coherence of the day.
Also too, please don’t mistake bristling at arrogant condescension for an inability to accept reasonable criticism. I’ve been coming to OTB for more than a decade for analysis and understanding drawn from both the front pagers and the commentariat, who to my mind represent a decent cross section of perspectives. Open mindedness doesn’t require us to be disrespected or disrespectful (JKB excepted).
@Lounsbury:
The irony…
@JKB:
FTFY
James, this was not as clear as perhaps you intended. Are you saying that the Cheneys would have supported FDR, or Hubert Humphrey, or George McGovern, or Michael Dukakis, over Trump? Or are you (laughably) claiming that Kamala Harris is “the most progressive Democrat ever nominated”? The former is questionable; the latter is nonsense.