These are not our dads or aunts. We are electing a head of state who will wield immense power and control a massive nuclear arsenal. “Policy” is not peripheral or dispensable, it’s the only thing that really matters.
  •  t3rmit3   ( @t3rmit3@beehaw.org ) 
    6•23 days ago

    Americans just don’t care about a president’s policies, i.e., what they do with their power, but are more interested in who they are.

    To me this is silly. We’ve been hearing about GOP and DNC policy arguments nonstop this entire campaign. What do they think the back and forth about Project 2025 is, if not policy discussion?

    Harris is not resetting the entire DNC agenda or something, you can largely apply Biden’s policies to her. The big difference is that she just became the front-runner very late in the game, and now people are scrambling to figure out her and Walz as people.

    Nichols says that it’s a myth that Americans care about policy. But perhaps the opposite is true. I think the very reason that so many Americans are disillusioned with politics is that they don’t see how it affects them.

    I think they’re both wrong; Americans do care about policy, but we’ve learned that anyone can say anything and there’s nothing holding them to their words except the next election.

    Biden wasn’t unpopular because of his age, he was unpopular because of his bad policies on Gaza, his lack of force confronting Project 2025, his lack of force confronting a corrupt SCOTUS, his lack of force confronting anti-LGBT laws, his lack of force confronting anti-reproductive healthcare laws, etc.

    He didn’t lose on his policy points- on paper he claims to want a ceasefire and all the rest- he lost his candidacy on his lack of trust from voters that he could or would carry out those policies. Kamala is trying to convince voters that she’s a person who will, which is a question of personality.

    The NYTimes article they cite says

    There is no area in which she is seeking a significant break from [Biden’s] agenda — perhaps not surprising given that she had a role in crafting much of it.

    The CA author uses the example of Nixon’s appealing to black voters as an example of policy campaigning, but then immediately notes that he lost the black vote because voters saw through the bullshit (policy claims) and rejected him as a person because they knew that he could not be trusted.

    “Policy” is not peripheral. In fact, it’s everything… The only reason elections matter is that they have consequences for people in the real world, consequences like whether poor children are going to eat or starve.

    Nixon wasn’t going to help black people. Neither is Trump, no matter how much “saving black jobs” is one of his policy positions.

    Policy is not everything, because policy is implemented entirely by people. It is only half of the equation.

    And presidents don’t write laws, they set agendas. What they as people decide to spend their energy actually pushing for is much more important than individual line-item stances. If they are vetoing legislation from their own party because they disagree with line items, that’s a problem, because legislators are the ones who directly (ostensibly) represent a set of constituents.

    We don’t need to be enshrining a mindset of even more power being invested in the Executive, by now asking them to declare what will and won’t pass their desk: we need to be punishing presidents who override their own party’s positions too much with their own personal policy preferences.

    Gaza was my breaking point with Biden, and him choosing to go above and beyond our current legal aid requirements to Israel, and him quashing the State Department reporting that Israel was in violation of the Leahy Act, and him preemptively sending warships to the region to intimidated other countries, are all actions that were not listed in his policy documents on his campaign website. Those policy claims are curated, and don’t reveal the whole story of who a candidate really is. Biden could have written a million pages of policy briefs, and he would never have put his intentions around Gaza into writing in those pages.

    It’s clearly important to know who politicians are as people, too.

    end rant/