SCRANTON, Pa. – Joel was down from Boston with a few of his heavily accented friends and fellow members of the National Association of Government Employees sent by the Kamala Harris campaign to shore up support in Pennsylvania.
Even they know, things are not going well for her.
‘I don’t know why she can’t answer questions,’ Joel told me, in what was about the most blunt assessment against one’s own interest I’d heard in months.
I think a lot of people on all sides are confused by this.
As a guy born and raised in Philly who lived for two decades in New York, I felt it my duty to explain, in a good-natured way, to the fellas why I hate Boston. After all, it’s a treasured ritual of the Northeast. With that out of the way, Stanley, who appeared to be the group’s leader, had another explanation for Kamala’s woes.
‘She’s only been in the race three months, she’s barely out of the gate. That’s a lot to ask.’
Billionaire mogul Mark Cuban echoed that in an X post, ‘Think of it this way,’ he mused, ‘a candidate that started only 13 weeks ago, is now, worst case scenario, in a dead heat with a former president.’
Aside from being bad at imagining the worst-case scenario, what we see from Mr. Cuban is the beginning of the excuses for a Harris loss. But as the playwright David Mamet once wrote, ‘your excuses are your own.’
I was thinking about all of this Friday as I wandered around Scranton under beautiful skies and amid old stone monuments to America’s greatness. At one point, and my hand to God, I’m not making this up, I found myself literally on Biden Street.
Biden street. That Biden.
I bring this up because there were sirens blaring and flashing lights as cops shut down traffic. ‘The drivers are annoyed,’ I heard one cop say, ‘maybe they’ll remember it was a Democrat who did this on Election day.’
A guy comes up to me and says, ‘why’d they shut down traffic?’
‘Tim Walz is in town,’ I explained.
‘Time Walsh?’ he asked.
‘No, Tim Walz.’
‘Who?’
With a gentle sigh, I said, ‘It doesn’t matter.’
And it struck me, the Democrats passed on a guy who literally has a street named after him in Scranton for Kamala Harris and a goofy sitcom dad nobody knows.
Joel and Stanley are good dudes, stand-up guys who love the country and just disagree with me about who is best to serve it. Even if they are Patriots fans. There is nothing wrong with them organizing as employees to fight for the future they want. That’s America.
But I didn’t leave convinced Harris is who they really want.
‘I didn’t like how it went down,’ Joel told me, regarding the ousting of Joe Biden from the race. And he meant it. I often say that polls don’t have faces, people do, and I could see it in his eyes.
When I asked Stanley why he supports Harris, not why he doesn’t support Trump, but why Harris, he said, ‘Why can’t I say why I don’t want Trump?’
And he can, and he did, but I think even he knew it was an evasion.
The biggest misconception about American politics is that it’s all an algebra equation, even when the polls are wrong over and over. It’s not math, it’s a story, and Kamala Harris isn’t telling one beyond her middle-class upbringing.
‘I don’t know why she can’t answer questions,’ Joel said, and yeah, he had a point.
Harris still has a chance to become the president of the United States, but before that can happen she has to answer one simple question: ‘Why you?’