The

The Hello and welcome to behind the news. My name is Doug Henwood. Departures from Divine Mandate in these strange times?

I didn't have time to find a guest or two to discuss what happened on Tuesday. There will be plenty in the coming weeks.

But I do have some thoughts of my own, which I'll share. And then we'll hear from Dahlia Shainlan on a frightening topic, public opinion in Israel,

and from James Foley and Vladimir Unkovsky-Korice

on the role Ukraine plays in the politics of the West. First, the miserable election.

I often say that the political problem of the Democrats is that they're a party of capital

that has to pretend otherwise for electoral reasons. This time they hardly pretended. Kamala Harris preferred campaigning with the

inexplicably famous Mago Mark Cuban and the ghoulish Liz Cheney to campaigning with Sean Fane,

who led United Auto Workers to the greatest strike victory in decades. Those associations telegraphed

both her policy instincts and her demographic targeting, Silicon Valley, and upscale suburbs.

Like Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaigned, it failed only worse.

At least Hillary won the popular vote by almost 3 million.

Harris lost by 5 million.

She lost among suburban white women, a principal target of this twice-failed strategy. Like any major

historical event, this loss has many explanations. Proceeding her disastrous campaign, there

was the bizarre nature of her nomination. White House staff hid the severity of Biden's brain

rot for his entire presidency until his disastrous debate performance against Trump made it impossible

to sustain the

fiction of his mental competence any longer. There was no primary, and after a delusional

bout of enthusiasm, we were quickly reminded why Harris crashed as a candidate in 2020.

There was also the unwavering support for Israel's genocidal war, which probably wasn't decisive,

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