Who Wants to Win the 2024 Sideshow ‘Selection?’
By Joe Maniscalco
Roughly the same number of American voters who helped Joe Biden best Donald Trump in 2020 decided not to vote at all in that same election. That’s a lot of people—about 81 million, in fact—some of whom could, nevertheless, now be moved to help prevent King Donald I from returning to the throne in November. But that’s only if the Democratic National Committee actually gave them reason enough to get out and vote this time.
With Joe Biden finally out of the picture, the DNC is now cleared to do just that. And they won’t even have to resort to anything crazy like selecting a running mate for Kamala Harris who actually represents the interests of working class people the way Bernie Sanders did once upon a time in a galaxy far, far way.
That would be great, of course, but it’s not gonna happen and isn’t what we’re talking about here.
As many of those roughly 81 million non-voting citizens from 2020 know, the current American electoral system is a total sham and affront to any working concept of democracy one might possibly conceive. The DNC is a private organization that has long ago sold out working class voters and aligned itself with Wall Street money and the international corporate class. This is not the “democracy” our grandparents thought they were fighting and dying for.
So, yeah—this corporatized cat ain’t changing its spots now—even if it that means Trump gets a return trip ticket to the Oval Office this fall and our system of inverted totalitarianism gives way to full-blown fascism. The DNC will just spend the next four years successfully fundraising off our dystopian decline.
We, as a nation of working class people averse to corporate control and dedicated to democratizing our lives, workplaces, and institutions, are gonna be up against it in 2025 no matter what ally of Wall Street is ultimately selected to take the oath of office in January. That’s the real battle working class people must fight together and win. All the rest of this is just noisy freak show nonsense.
Indeed, we are living inside an epic circus sideshow attraction—and not the cool and subversive kind that you can still catch every year in Coney Island once the weather gets warmer. We’d like to invoke some of that old-timey subversive hucksterism for which the “Poor Man’s Paradise" is known and offer some strategic advice for the DNC: Stop what you’re doing right now and dump that short list of running mates you’ve put together for Kamala Harris.
Who’s on it right now, anyway? Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly? North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper? Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro? Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker? Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz? Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer?
Come on! You’ve only got one woman on that list? This is American politics, folks. It’s all about optics. It’s all about the narrative. You know this. You create this. Non-stop. And this is what you’re doing?
As previously stated, a good number, if not most American voters, already know our hijacked corporate elections are total B.S. Quit trying to hang onto a patina of legitimacy with these very sober and considered picks and get to it. Bypass the head and go straight to the heart. Hit ‘em in the guts. It’s the only thing you have left.
Go ahead and load up that 2024 DNC Presidential ticket with not one, but two women capable of matching up against the RNC’s “Donny and DJ bros.” The women against the meatheads!
No, it doesn’t make any intellectual sense. It’s really stupid. Just a dumb political ploy aimed squarely at the basest of emotions. We all know, or should know by now, that on its own, having two women at the top of the Presidential ticket would be meaningless to the lives of working class people struggling under corporate dominance if those two women merely operated as dutiful cogs in the great corporate machine.
The New York City Council is entirely women-led—but municipal retirees who’ve spent their entire working lives helping to guide NYC through every calamity and disaster from 9/11 to Covid are still searching for a City Council champion who’ll stand up and protect their original non-privatized Medicare benefits.
That same women-led City Council also can’t seem to bring itself to take a stand against the system of “modern day slavery” that continues to force older women of color in New York City’s home care industry to work 24-hour shifts at roughly half the pay.
That doesn’t matter, though, if all you want to do is win this political freak show. In that case, all that matters is having a fight good enough to hype—because on some emotional level, at least some of those 81 million voters who sat out the 2020 Presidential Election will no doubt be moved to vote this time out for an all-woman ticket—even if they know it to be, at best, symbolic.
The DNC—if it is sincere about keeping Trump out of the White House—has got to do something to stir the soul and raise the blood. Put the word out. Search high and low within your ranks for anyone who can speak authoritatively and go toe-to-toe with the RNC bros.
Having two women at the top of the ticket will at least be “historic” and we can kid ourselves about how we’ve been a very democratic nation all along.
Granted, this search might lead you to candidates who make Wall Street a little nervous, but that’s okay. It’s not like you’re actually gonna be drafting Henry Wallace’s heir apparent or anyone even remotely like that.
Just try to steer clear of the word salad people. And as fanciful as it might be for all the Hillary supporters out there studying the Twenty-Second Amendment and triangulating all the angles—you probably shouldn’t put up a vice-presidential candidate who generates as much loathing in as many corners as Trump himself.
Although something like that would be wild, wouldn’t it? It’s all a carnival—might as well go ahead and make it completely nuts.
At this stage, the old axiom insisting things have to get really bad before they can begin to get better, seems inescapable. Only working class people banding together to beat back the corporate coup that’s taken place across this land have the collective strength to break out of the corporate duopoly and deliver us from this existential crisis. Let’s get this clown show over with and press that fight.