MY wife and I were having a snack at Demico last Sunday morning on Main Street when this gentleman, without a sense of the situation, won’t go away. He wanted my take on my choice in the US presidential election. The last person to ask for my opinion was Chris Ram who spoke to me on the day of voting.

My answer to all them was I had no choice. I believe at a deep philosophical level, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are the same. In any two similar parties, there are shades of differences. But in their essence, those two parties are the same. I lived in Canada while studying there and it is only when you live in the developed West then you see that Third World politics and Western politics are completely different.
When you are left-wing in the Third World you tend to go with Labour over the Conservatives in the UK, with the Liberals over the Conservatives in Canada, with the Democrats over the Republicans in the USA and with socialist or liberal parties over the conservatives in Europe.
It is when you live in those counties, as a post-colonial human, then you see they are all the same and different from us in the Global South. The post-colonial governments in 2024 denounced Israel. Not one government in the West denounced Israel. The difference in culture and philosophy between us and them were graphic and stark.

Ms. Harris lost the election because of a huge misunderstanding of the politics of her own country. Ms. Harris lost the election in a fateful moment during an interview on a talk-show programme named “The View.” When asked what she would have done differently from President Biden she intoned: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.” Her history-making moment died right there and then.

This was the opposite with Barack Obama when he ran for the first time. Obama distanced himself from Hilary Clinton and denounced her support for the Iraq war. Did Ms. Harris pay attention to the polls on Biden presidency? The polls over the past two years showed that he had a very low rating and was not a popular president. The attitude of Biden was a crucial factor in Ms. Harris’s defeat even though Trump is pro-Israel. In situations like these, the role of conscience comes in.
Conscience is supposed to guide civilisation, and it does, and that is why the world still exists. Your conscience does not allow you to choose one person over the other even though there are areas of difference between them when the person you prefer has taken an unsavory position on a sacred value. You expect the politician you embrace to be different.

Ms. Harris was trounced in Michigan where there is a large Arab-American population that would never vote for Trump, but did not vote for Harris because of her stance on Gaza. The American establishment went for Israel during the past year but the American population did not.
The largest outbreak of student anger in the US after the Vietnam War was over Israeli cruelties and genocide in Gaza. If Ms. Harris was an astute politician, she would have known that she was playing with trouble over the youth vote. It is too early to assess demographic dimensions in the voting but it would appear that Ms. Harris did not get the young White voters.

What happened in the election was that Trump secured his base, Ms. Harris’ base had eroded. The analysts noted that the reason why Harris told the “The View” that she would not have done anything differently from Biden was because she did not want to appear ungrateful to Biden who made her the Vice-President.

It could be that she was not forceful on Gaza because she did not want to appear to be at difference with Biden and the same ungrateful factor might have been at play. But Biden presidency is at its end; she was facing a history-making moment of being the first woman president and a non-white person at that.

But there is another factor in the loss of Harris. Was she the right person? Two years ago, former UG lecturer, Dr. Mark Kirton, told me that Ms. Harris should not be the presidential nominee because she was just “not there”. I felt the same. Maybe she thought she could do a Barack Obama on the American people. But that era was long gone and Obama star has faded so badly that it has become invisible. To be continued

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