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Democrats Blame Biden, Campaign Strategy, Others For Harris’ Defeat To Trump

Published

9 months ago

November 8, 2024

Democrats are facing a painful reckoning over Kamala Harris’s drubbing at the hands of Donald Trump in the US presidential election, as shock gives way to anger and recrimination in the aftermath of a devastating repudiation.

Lawmakers and strategists looking for someone to blame for Tuesday’s wipeout have so far been more likely to target President Joe Biden than Harris, who is regarded as having done a decent job with the short time she had to campaign.

The election night disaster — Trump’s triumph was accompanied by a Republican “red wave” in the Senate — has proved to be a Rorschach test, with rival factions each offering reasons for the defeat informed by their particular brand of Democratic politics.

The circular firing squad began with progressive senator Bernie Sanders arguing in a scathing statement that a party that had forsaken the working class should not be surprised to “find that the working class has abandoned them.”

That prompted an angry rebuke from Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison, who dismissed Sanders’s thesis as “straight up BS” and posted a long list of Biden’s achievements for low income families.

New York congressman Ritchie Torres hit out at what he sees as smug political correctness on the left, insisting that Trump had “no greater friend” than activists alienating voters with “absurdities like ‘Defund the Police’… or ‘Latinx.’”

– ‘Devastating loss’ –

Harris has escaped the harshest criticism, as she is regarded as having had insufficient time to campaign thanks to Biden’s initial insistence on running again at 81, despite having promised to be a bridge to the next generation.

The aging president’s sluggishness in bowing out after a disastrous debate performance against Trump deepened the challenge, as Harris had to start her campaign in July as a relative unknown, despite being the vice president.

Billionaire former Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg, who feels that Biden’s campaign should never have got as far as the June 27 debate, attacked the president’s team in a commentary for Bloomberg for covering up his shortcomings “until they became undeniable on live TV.”

Other Democrats blamed the ongoing economic reverberations of the coronavirus pandemic, which caused governments to fall across the globe amid anger over soaring inflation.

Biden himself heaped praise on his vice president in a televised White House address Thursday.

“She gave her whole heart and effort, and she and her entire team should be proud of the campaign they ran,” he told the nation.

While there is little she could have done about post-pandemic price hikes, many congressional Democrats told reporters behind the scenes that Harris’s team overestimated abortion access as an election winner and dropped the ball on the economy.

Another criticism is that Harris failed to distance herself from Biden once she was handed the torch, despite his approval ratings being underwater at 40 per cent.

This was exemplified in her answer that “not a thing comes to mind” when she was asked on a daytime talk show how she might have governed differently from her boss.

– ‘Bigger tent’ –

Other critics say she picked the wrong running mate in Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

But evidence that Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania would have been any more effective in helping Harris win the predominantly white, working-class Rust Belt is threadbare.

Harris has also been criticized for not being clearer in disavowing unpopular leftist views she held in 2019 and explaining transparently why she tacked so dramatically to the centre.

Under this theory, Harris’s outreach to Republicans, and the assurance that “my values have not changed,” were not enough to reassure voters that they were really seeing the real woman and understood what made her tick.

Yet for all the talk of the need to learn lessons, some Democrats were keen for the bloodletting to be over so that the focus could return to opposing Trump.

“Listen, I’m all in for the messaging/strategy biopsy. Need to build a bigger tent; use economic populism as the tentpole; be less judgmental and exclusionary,” Chris Murphy, a US senator from Connecticut, posted on X.

“But folks, (Trump) might not be lying about the roundups and political prosecutions. Job one is to get ready for that.”

AFP

Headline

Wildfire Engulfs Mountain Near Western Canada City

Published

9 hours ago

August 13, 2025

Editor

Nearly 20,000 residents of a community in western Canada were on standby on Wednesday as a wildfire engulfed a mountain overlooking the city of Port Alberni, the latest area threatened in the country’s second-worst fire season on record.

“I’ve lived in Port Alberni since 1956, and this is one of the biggest fires we’ve ever seen,” Russ Wetas, 69, told AFP as smoke from Mount Underwood filled the sky behind him.

The wildfire service in the west coast province of British Columbia has listed the Mount Underwood fire as “out of control,” meaning it is expected to spread further.

But it remained unclear if Port Alberni, roughly 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) north, will be evacuated.

On the opposite end of the vast country, in the easternmost province of Newfoundland and Labrador, parts of the capital, St. John’s, received evacuation orders on Tuesday, following several days of intensifying fire.

A wildfire was also burning on Wednesday on the outskirts of Halifax, a major city in the eastern province of Nova Scotia, with a population of nearly half a million.

This is already Canada’s second-worst wildfire season in terms of landmass burned, based on figures dating back to 1983.

So far, 7.4 million hectares (18.3 million acres) have been scorched, an area nearly as large as Panama, putting 2025 past the 7.1 million hectare mark from 1995.

But this year is not expected to pass 2023, when 17.3 million hectares burned, an extraordinary toll that focused global attention on the growing threat of wildfires boosted by human-induced climate change.

Smoke from this year’s wildfires has put tens of millions of people under air quality alerts in both Canada and the United States. The haze has even crossed the Atlantic, affecting people in western Europe.

More than 700 wildfires were burning across Canada on Wednesday, including 161 considered out of control, with nearly every province and territory impacted.

Mount Underwood is on Vancouver Island, making the blaze there part of a worrying trend of increased wildfire activity near the coast.

Experts have said that historically, coastal areas did not burn, but more serious wildfires near the ocean are being recorded, even if they remain less intense than blazes further inland.

“This is a fire that hasn’t been seen on Vancouver Island,” John Jack, a First Nations chief and regional official, told the public broadcaster CBC.

Ted Hagard, who works at Port Alberni’s paper mill, told AFP he had been watching the fire’s progression on social media but needed to see it for himself.

It’s “insane how huge it is,” the 46-year-old said, standing on the shores of a lake adjacent to Mount Underwood.

Canada is experiencing a rise in conditions that are conducive to fires, experts say, linking the trend to climate change, which has caused elevated temperatures, reduced snow, shorter and milder winters, and earlier summer weather.

Headline

Zelensky Rules Out Swapping Territory, Calls For ‘Fair Peace’

Published

15 hours ago

August 13, 2025

Editor

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Wednesday that Ukraine and its allies must work together to pressure Russia into ending its invasion, ahead of talks in Berlin with European leaders and US President Donald Trump.

“Pressure must be exerted on Russia for the sake of a fair peace. We must learn from the experience of Ukraine and our partners to prevent deception on the part of Russia,” Zelensky wrote on social media.

“There are currently no signs that the Russians are preparing to end the war,” he added.

Zelensky is due in Berlin on Wednesday for talks with European leaders and Trump ahead of the US president’s summit with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.

The Ukrainian leader said he and his team had held more than 30 conversations with world leaders and high-ranking officials ahead of the talks.

The flurry of diplomatic engagements have been overshadowed by rapid, but so far limited Russian push in the eastern Donetsk region, which the Kremlin claims is part of Russia.

A member of the Ukrainian delegation travelling with Zelensky to Berlin told AFP that the Russian gains around the mining hub of Dobropillia “did not influence” preparation for Wednesday’s talks.

Zelensky conceded one day earlier that Russian forces had advanced by up to 10 kilometres (six miles), but ruled out swapping territory with Moscow as part of any deal with Russia.

AFP

Headline

S’Africa Offers US New Trade Deal To Avoid 30% Tariff

Published

2 days ago

August 12, 2025

Editor

South Africa will offer a “generous” new trade deal to the United States to avoid 30 percent tariffs, ministers said Tuesday.

Washington on Friday slapped the huge tariff on some South African exports, the highest in sub-Saharan Africa, despite efforts by Pretoria to negotiate a better arrangement to avoid massive job losses.

The ministers did not release details of the new offer but said previously discussed measures to increase imports of US poultry, blueberries, and pork had been finalised.

“When the document is eventually made public, I think you would see it as a very broad, generous and ambitious offer to the United States on trade,” Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen said at a press briefing.

Officials have said the 30 per cent tariff could cost the economy around 30,000 jobs.

“Our goal is to demonstrate that South African exports do not pose a threat to US industries and that our trade relationship is, in fact, complementary,” Trade Minister Parks Tau said.

The United States is South Africa’s third-largest trading partner after the European Union and China.

However, South African exports account for only 0.25 per cent of total US imports and are “therefore not a threat to US production”, Tau said.

Steenhuisen said US diplomats raised issues related to South African domestic policies, which was a “surprise given the fact we thought we were in a trade negotiation”.

The two nations are at odds over a range of policies.

US President Donald Trump has criticised land and employment laws meant to redress racial inequalities that linger 30 years after the end of apartheid.

“Things like expropriation without compensation, things like some of the race laws in the country, are issues that they regard as barriers now to doing trade with South Africa,” he told AFP on the sidelines of the briefing.

“I think we’re seeing some form of a new era now where trade and tariffs are being used to deal with other issues, outside of what would generally be trade concerns,” Steenhuisen said.