A Note: Last night, I watched Barack Obama and Kamala Harris give two of the most meaningful speeches I’ve ever seen.
Obama declared a national emergency over our endangered democracy that was stunning for its authority and dignity. I am not a black woman, but I could almost feel and touch the joy and energy surging through all women, white, black, or brown over Harris being on a presidential ticket.
I loved the genuine joy in Kamala Harris’s speech, it was full of hope and emotion.
Joe Biden can’t match either of those speeches for energy or power, but if he manages to show a big heart and decency, the convention will be a major triumph for the Democrats. I sure wouldn’t want to follow those two.
I’m sure I’ll write more about it tonight, I just wanted to get these immediate thoughts down. These two speeches were a great big deal, Donald Trump proved once more – with a stream of angry tweets in caps – that he is incapable of coherently rising to any occasion, he can only fall. He is just too small for the job.
The original piece:
I love writing this piece. The election isn’t about left and right or Republican vs. Democrats or blue and red. It’s rising above that. It’s about what happens when a decent man meets an Army of ascending women.
It’s about the battle for a compassionate and empathetic nation, not just a rich and powerful one. You can take your soaring stock market and put it right where the sun don’t shine.
I’m not writing my usual bloviated and lengthy column tonight, mostly because everyone who cares about politics will be watching Kamala Harris, Hilary Clinton, and Barack Obama tonight, not reading my obscure little column.
I’ve gotten used to all that feedback and viral columns, perhaps spoiled by it. And humbled, too.
I did want to say something about this election, something important yet still somehow overlooked.
When Kamala Harris talked the other night about a Coalition of Compassion, I think she put her finger right on what this election is turning out to be about, to the amazement of almost everyone.
Yes, it is about Trump, and yes, there are profoundly important issues like health care and racism.
But the pandemic and the concurrent rise of the next and perhaps biggest chapter of the Women’s Revolution (more than a movement in my mind) has brought into sharper focus what the real issue for America is:
It’s about compassion and empathy.
I understand why Joe Biden, who is far from the flashiest or even most loved candidate, is faring so well in the polls, and thumping Donald Trump without even leaving his house much.
Joe Biden, meet the new women’s movement, the core of your support: women rising all over America to make the country gentle again and to practice compassion and empathy again.
This is not because of the love of policy or proposals. Biden is no genius when it comes to bold ideas.
It is because he is a good man, an honest, decent, and compassionate man. And an empathic man, a rare thing in the American political sphere that white men have dominated for so long.
And because Trump, whatever his virtues might be, is not a good man, or a decent and compassionate one. Partisan politics aside, Trump has shown to be an awful human being carried along by arrogance and some bold ideas, and nothing much else.
He is the one who made us see why empathy and compassion are so important, the other politicians failed to do it.
That, curiously, seems to be why so many of his supporters love him. But then, he is the King of the Angry Old White Men; the most tribal of all the chiefs: he is their General Custer leading them to their last stand.
He is not supposed to be loved.
This is what the women have brought to the vicious, cold, Darwinian political culture that the old white men have built for us over many years, and which is now threatening our country as well as the world. It is time.
We need to get out of their way so they can save us from us.
This is the issue that so many women share, even as they differ on so many questions: they value compassion and empathy. This is also what Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez brings to her own exciting movement: empathy for the poor and the vulnerable. She has walked in their shoes, which is the definition of empathy.
To Trump, this is a threat to the country. He only walks in $1,000 imported Italian shoes.
(Donald Trump wears only custom made Italian shoes. Since he is very insecure about his height and his foot size, his dainty size 8 feet are cocooned inside size 12 black leather shoes with a 1-inch lift. This ensures that he will usually be the tallest man in the room and that his shoes will look proportional to his size.)
To the women who are organizing all over America to defeat Trump, empathy is the salvation of the country – for blacks, for immigrants, for women, for white men who wish to come along.
I always wondered what ethos women would bring to politics if and when they came to power, and we are seeing it now. They are tough and strong, they are also willing to be compassionate and empathetic, even vulnerable.
They are not afraid to be human.
Women are different from men, it is the farthest thing from sexism to say so, that is why they will help elect Joe Biden as President. Biden is not the brightest bulb in the shed, no one has ever called him brilliant or inspiring, he has no overarching vision for America to offer, except this:
He is decent, compassionate, and empathetic. It isn’t just more political talk. People are beginning to realize that he is really nice. The very angry white men and women on Fox News are obsessed with his health and his cognitive skills.
But they miss the point. Nobody loves him for his cognitive skills. They love him because he is a good man.
He sees people, they are not just numbers to him. That has always been his gift, and in the year of the pandemic, when so many people are suffering, and so many women are up on the stage, it matters.
It will carry Biden to victory, a triumph of the Coalition of Compassion Kamala Harris talked about when she was introduced as the vice presidential nominee.
Biden was nominated by a working woman, a security/guard elevator operator from the New York Times who became his friend, something it is simply not imaginable for Donald Trump to have done.
Jacquelyn Brittany, who runs the elevator Biden took to meet with New York Times editors, said “Biden saw me. He knows me. And I love him.”
Biden took a selfie with Brittany and the two became friends. They talked on the phone often, says Biden’s wife Jill.
This is one of those political stories that steps outside of itself and touches even the hardest heart.
I also saw a story about how Biden became close and personal friends with Gregg Weaver, the conductor who worked on the train Biden took to and from Washington every day so he could be with his sons after their mother was killed in a car crash.
Biden called Weaver up when he was vice-president when he learned Weaver had suffered a heart attack. They became friends, Weaver came to Biden’s inauguration as vice-president.
This is Biden’s great and perhaps only genius – he relates to ordinary people and who would have guessed that this would be central in the time of Trump?
It is typical for politicians to present themselves in schmaltz ways like this, often dishonestly, but the people who have worked with Biden for years say this is genuine, this is who he is.
People did not turn off the convention and talk about Biden’s stunning plans for health care or NATO or even raging social issues like race.
They woke up the next morning talking about how nice he is, and how decent a man he is, and how refreshing that would be, and how necessary it is right now.
And this is so powerful a thing this year because President Trump has made it clear that he is none of those things. He is proud of being an asshole, he equates being offensive with being strong.
In a pandemic year with so much suffering, and a political year with so much ugliness and controversy, black lives are not the only things that matter: empathy matters.
These elements have fused and come together in a way that elevates Biden far beyond his own skills and ideas.
The country is bleeding, literally, economically, racially, and figuratively. Trump cannot show empathy for the unemployed and the soon-to-be evicted. He can’t show empathy for the 170,000 dead Americans and their families. He can’t show empathy, only bullying for the thousands of mostly black men being shot and killed all over the country. He can’t show empathy for the millions of people out of work and afraid for their jobs. He can’t show empathy for the millions of frightened Americans who are afraid to risk their lives to vote, or who have lost their jobless benefits. He can’t show empathy for the 20 million Americans who face eviction due to the coronavirus. He can’t show empathy for the 670,000 postal workers who were never meant to make a profit, just to provide a desperately needed service, and who did it well and efficiently for 250 years. He can’t show empathy for embattled and frightened school teachers and administrators caught between his brazenly self-serving political interests and their own safety and that of the children.
Good Lord, if you can’t show empathy for any of those people, do you have a beating heart at all, or is Mary Trump right about her uncle: is he really just Frankenstein without a conscious?
And as a lover of “Frankenstein” the book, I can say that the monster had a lot more empathy than the President does.
In this election year, empathy just happens to be the thing we all think about every day. Has that ever happened before?
When people hurt, they need more than anything to know what someone knows them, just like the New York Times elevator operator and the train conductor said they were known, not just seen.
I have never been a particular fan of Joe Biden, but I get him now, and I believe a simple, decent, and caring man is just what we need. His moment has finally come around to him, and just in the nick of time.
Could it have been a decent caring woman accepting the nomination for President tomorrow? Sure, but America is still a mess that needs to be cleaned up. Maybe it took a nice white man to get it going.
I think almost everyone I know when it comes down to it, is yearning for a gentler, kinder and more empathetic America. Yes, even many of those Trump supporters. Because we all need it, and so do our children. More than we need policy proposals and speeches.
The miracle is that Joe Biden, a poster boy for angry old white men, is not one of them somehow.
He is a gentle old white man who has teamed up with a vast army of tough, compassionate, and empathetic women.
Politics has never been about being nice, at least not until this year.
The Coalition of Compassion might disagree with Biden on many issues, but they love him because he is a good man. How often do you hear those words spoken?
It’s the most powerful combination I’ve ever seen in politics, and I honestly can’t see how it will fail, no matter what Donald Trump does.
Political movements often rise up without warning and change history. Trumpism was one of them.
Trump had it all for a couple of years. But hubris ate him up, just like the Greeks predicted: he overdid it, he overreached, he was too hard, too harsh, too cruel and unfeeling. He was too much of a jerk.
He thought it was all about money and power, but he missed what was happening now, he was so caught in the past.
Movements spring up like wildfires and storms and sometimes they just fly on by, and sometimes they change our world.
This women’s revolution is real and is growing and catching fire. They are confident and determined.
They aren’t going to take these womens mail or votes away, you can take that to the bank.
Trump has always dismissed and underestimated women. He is finally about to get the reckoning he has long deserved and always managed to escape, and from a place, he never believed could harm him.
Biden feels like a winner to me now, so does Kamala Harris and the women of Black Lives Matter, Me Too, the Black Mayors, the moms, and the suburban women mothers, workers and wives who have grown rapidly beyond the cheap stereotypes of women as housewives that our President can’t resist repeating.
He is out of touch with all of these women.
The women in his consciousness are all timid, cowering housewives living in dread fear of immigrants and African-Americans.
By being so simple and decent, Biden seems to have risen about all of that and become a North Star to beleaguered Americans with a vast Army behind him calling us to hope and healing.
It won’t be easy, for sure, or pretty, or simple in any way. But you can see it if you look closely, and I wanted to be sure to write that tonight, while everyone was watching their screens.
