Hope and Heart vs. "An American Hitler"

It's Not a Choice, It's a Reckoning for America

Contrary to what you may be reading in your big grey morning newspapers, campaign 2024 has never been between two traditional candidates or political parties. It has never been about “policy differences” and “left vs. right.” In fact, those papers would probably be better off had they had given their political reporters a year off and let the science journalists who cover the space program handle their reporting on this year’s presidential race.

That is because these two candidates, parties and the campaigns they are conducting are taking place not at different ends of the political spectrum but rather on different planets on different sides of our solar system. (And candidly, I’m not sure our solar system is quite big enough to convey their true differences properly. After all, it is only a little over 18 trillion miles across.)

The full distance between the campaigns was never clearer than as this week drew to a close.

On Thursday night of this week, Kamala Harris conducted a town hall style streaming meeting hosted by Oprah Winfrey. There were plenty of movie stars and celebrities in attendance. But what made the meeting different from almost any other political event of the year—or any other event of its kind that I have ever seen—was its focus on the challenges faced by real people as a result of Trump-MAGA policies like the repeal of Roe v. Wade, the promotion of an armed free-for-all in our streets and schools, and economic programs that favor the richest Americans while leaving everyone else to fend for themselves.

Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts notwithstanding, the real stars of the evening were ordinary people who had endured great hardship and who bared the souls and a presidential candidate who display more compassion and heart and raw emotion than I have ever seen from a U.S. political leader on a comparable stage. This was an event about people and about heart and the program that Harris headlined in Atlanta the next day focusing on the victims of Trump’s anti-choice, anti-woman’s health laws was every bit as affecting and stirring and once again the Vice President reminded Americans that she is the leading advocate in America for women and their reproductive rights.

Meanwhile, on the dark side of one of the moons of Uranus, the Trump campaign was an accelerating vortex sleaze and hate. There was no room in it for concerns about normal people or their feelings, their problems or their aspirations. Rather, Trump and his depraved acolytes were hard at work trying to spin shit into the bonds by which they could bind a nation. They seemed to be testing not only the bounds of decency but flaunting their depravity and vileness in ways that made it clear their contempt for virtue rivaled their disdain for the most fundamental laws that have governed human society.