Correction: Mark Kelly, What the Fuck Are You Doing!

I want to make it clear that I still stand behind the logic of yesterday’s column trying to recreate my Joever magic in kinda sorta calling the vice-presidential race for Senator Mark Kelly. I am no fan of anyone who has to be offered one of the highest offices in the land to reach the floor it takes to call yourself kind of pro-labor, but as I stated in my coconut-based future column, when you are trying to regain control of a car careening off a mountain, ideology takes a backseat to getting all four wheels back on the road, and it is difficult to dispute the broad appeal of an astronaut.

But now that we’re stabilized and have a sentient human who hopefully has moved past whatever issues she had with voters that caused her to drop out of the Democratic primary before anyone could vote for her (fingers crossed!), we can focus on how to best contrast our new Democratic standard-bearer. Lefties, I’m sorry, but it’s pretty clear that we have to reduce our expectations for the Veep. The coconut is our prize.

Kamala Harris has always had a semi-interest in moving left, and her climate record is good. She hasn’t moved left far enough or with any consistency to convince anyone she’s a true believer (but her dad is a Marxist economist…), but she has made enough attempts to tack left that she has at least demonstrated an understanding of what Biden did with his Bernie/Warren/Biden policy councils: the lefty plurality is a lot if you can get it all, and electoral politics is a game of numbers.

As Biden knew in 2020, table stakes in the lefty electoral sphere is lefty policy, and we make our priorities clear. We have drawn a line in the sand in Gaza, and speaking as someone who firmly believes domestic Joe Biden to be by far the greatest president since Lyndon Johnson, he still is a huge net negative president in my book by backing a genocide. How is this still even a debate?

But it is, because we have a bunch of clapping seals in the State Department and Congress willing to back a genocide in the name of American and Israeli imperialism, which brings me to the clapping seal I thought had the vice-presidential nomination locked up yesterday, Senator Mark Kelly. ABC News reported that it was down to him and Josh Shapiro, the first-term governor of Pennsylvania. I figured since replacing Kelly with a Democrat was easier than replacing Shapiro with one, and because Shapiro has antagonized the pro-Palestine movement, that Kelly had a layup.

He was an astronaut! He was a Navy captain! Turn your brain off, man. This is America. He is so obviously a good campaign choice for a position whose very nature is superficial. Put a space troop next to a cop, how could this country not love it?

But as I wrote in the ending, you must align with Democratic values first before you get to exploit your optics advantage to low propensity voters, because the rank and file of this party do give a shit about making things happen, and Kelly’s biggest obstacle was him being basically the most anti-labor Democratic Senator. That doesn’t fly in the post-2020 Democratic Party, and Kelly called up the good folks at Ariana’s former Huffington Post yesterday to bend the knee and say yes I will support the signature legislation every union and Democrat in America wants passed that I helped kill, now please make me VP.

That should’ve been it! Game over. Labor moved him, he’s malleable now. VP is a schlub office anyway and he’s been put in his place. Shapiro is still in the womb (and reminding everyone how his office settled sexual harassment allegations against a top aide), Gretchen Whitmer proved she’s smarter than everyone by receding into the background and taking power, Roy Cooper and Andy Beshear are fever dreams of a Clintonian past that’s actually competitive in the south, and Mayor Pete is still just the former mayor of Indiana’s fifth largest town with a side gig as a cable news pundit.

Who the hell else is left to be Veep? (yesterday’s blog was published before news broke that Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker is now in the race, so, him)

So in this pre-Pritzker world, it’s gotta be Mark Kelly, right? Tim Walz is great. I’d love Tim Walz, he gives free meals to kids and has come up with the most effective message in the Democratic Party in sixteen years: those guys are fucking weird!

But have you ever heard of Tim Walz? No, of course not. No one has. Most people spend most of their time forgetting that Minnesota even exists.

Once I clicked publish and retreated to Elon’s hellscape to promote it, I saw this cretinous quote from Mark Kelly reported at basically the same moment I went dark to write my “Mark Kelly just won” blog.

“For all we know Iran is funding the anti-Israel protests” outside Congress today.

Mark Kelly claps for Netanyahu saying protesters may be “Iran’s useful idiots.”

— Akbar Shahid Ahmed (@AkbarSAhmed) July 24, 2024

Mark! You idiot! This was Shapiro’s baggage! He’s the one who likened the protesters to KKK members! You just had to keep your mouth shut and not shove your nose up a genocidal maniac’s ass and you would have been America’s astronaut for life! You know Kamala Harris wasn’t there for Netanyahu’s speech, right? You fucked up!

So I would like to issue a correction on yesterday’s blog and note that Kelly does not have this seemingly locked up. While all Beltway conventional wisdom still points to the easily replaceable Senator Astronaut Navy Captain as the favorite, the vibes in the Democratic Party are too coconut-y to ruin, and the big boy from Illinois has not sullied himself with this sycophantic genocidal nonsense. As Jezebel correctly noted, this is a race between broadly non-controversial white guys to normie America, we are choosing between different shades of eggshell, and you should just pick the one that gets you out of the store the fastest without causing another big exhausting fight that makes another scene in public.

The Democrats can sell any one of these relatively new faces as anything to the low propensity voters who turned on Joe Biden and made him a one-term president and are threatening to make Donald Trump a two-term one. What they can’t do is sell a clearly discordant Democratic Party as unified, and any indication of the party’s continued support for the genocide in Gaza in a Harris administration is sure to derail the momentum in a party wholeheartedly horrified by the genocide in Gaza.

There is no reason to pick fights with key constituencies like labor or the left when you could just choose that nice white guy from Indiana that’s on TV all the time and know that most Democrats would say “yeah OK fine.” If Mark Kelly is Kamala’s guy, and he still easily could be because this is America, then he’s going to have to do a lot of work to prove to both labor and the anti-war left why he is not their enemy.