“As a Californian, do you have any thoughts on Kamala Harris? It would seem she has a very realistic chance to end up as president.” This “Ask Greil” prompt sparked the following response from Greil Marcus…
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’m very patriotic to the Bay Area, so I’d like her even if I didn’t. I liked her Biden take down about “That little girl was me” because when she was being bused to Thousand Oaks Elementary in Berkeley I was living two blocks from there.
As a senator, she’s been the closest to Al Franken in questioning dubious people. As a speaker, she can seem programmed. As a DA, she defeated a very so-called progressive Democrat who was too progressive—that is, he didn’t prosecute a lot of people who belonged in jail. As AG, in California that’s traditionally been a stepping stone office, usually to governor. So she used that office as it’s been traditionally used—while making alliances with other AGs in group actions, which didn’t get her publicity but were effective.
Over the last few days, some polls show very dramatic tightening, with one poll showing Minnesota tied (which it probably has been all along—Hillary barely carried it) and CNN showing the national race effectively tied. Given what’s happened over the last two weeks, that either means Trump’s amplifying lunacy strategy—promising a third term, attacking immigrants as animals, endorsing QAnon—is working, that people are finding Biden the Man Who Isn’t There, or perhaps most likely are scared to death of a black woman. If that’s so, Kamala has her work cut out for her to present herself as someone people can imagine as president. And I’m not sure the Biden people, who will be running her campaign, will know how to do that.
At the moment I would say Trump has a 75% chance of winning. Before the sabotage of the Post Office, I figured the voter suppression would add 3 to 4 points to Trump’s legitimate position, but now I’d guess 7 to 10. And that’s a huge amount.
Here’s Marcus’s answer to a query about Kanye West’s “pledge to run for president (a prospect that Republicans seem to be actively encouraging).”
What he’s doing is neither illegal or insane. It was obvious from the first moment that this was a Trump ploy to strip black male votes away from Biden-Harris. West, like many others, loves proximity to power and in a personalized administration access can actually make things happen, including pardons for whoever the power might deem worthy. Who knows, there could be a cabinet post or ambassadorship coming. He’s the Jill Stein of this year—that nice progressive Russia-backed stooge who allowed white women to be righteous in their fear of or distaste for Hillary. Wisconsin, Michigan, PA, and Florida—10,000 Kanye votes in any of them could be the difference.
Marcus’s clarity about Kanye’s role synchs up with the following item from Marcus’s most recent Real Life Rock Column in The Los Angeles Review of Books:
9. Allstate, “Burger Joint” (Starcom). In this ubiquitous commercial, which is really a commercial within a commercial, its self-referentiality subsuming any other reality, Allstate “Safe-Drivers-Save-40-Percent” pitchman Dennis Haysbert walks into a restaurant. The host does a double take, then excitedly welcomes him by name: “Safe Drivers Save 40 Percent!” (Shouldn’t he have said “Mr.”?) The place goes quietly bananas: it’s that guy they’ve seen on TV, in their restaurant, breathing the same air they’re breathing, which means they get to breathe the same air he’s breathing. “Safe Drivers Save 40 Percent!” “Safe Drivers Save 40 Percent!” “Safe Drivers Save 40 Percent!” everyone says to each other. “That’s totally him,” says a man to a woman, as if he’s just won the lottery of life.
Dennis Haysbert is a big man, a first-class actor with a deep, ineradicable presence, a presence as powerfully moral as it is physical: as President David Palmer in 24, a great, complex role, as the gardener Raymond Deagan in Todd Haynes’s devastating Far from Heaven. Nobody in the burger joint — a very genteel, upscale burger joint — sees him as those people, The-Guy-Who-Was-Almost-Assassinated-But-Became-the-First-Black-President, The Guy-Who-Was-Run-Out-of-His-New-England-Hometown-Because-He-Was-Seen-in-Public-with-a-White-Woman, even if they actually did see him as David Palmer or Raymond Deagan — those people have been erased, which means Dennis Haysbert, even in the fictional roles he’s inhabited, is erased, appearing in a little commercial drama as if the rest of his life never happened. BLACK LIVES MATTER really means IN THIS COUNTRY BLACK LIVES DON’T MATTER — and the black lives that don’t matter, that in Allstate’s commercial never happened, are of a piece with what one Rob Bliss found when this July he stood by a street in Harrison, Arkansas, a Klan haven, holding a homemade BLACK LIVES MATTER sign, filming what people shouted at him as they passed by. “Explain to me why a coon’s life matters,” said one — an unspoken line in the episodes where David Palmer’s cabinet invokes the 25th Amendment and removes him from office, when white kids chase Raymond Deagan’s daughter after school and pelt her with rocks. Why does a coon’s life matter? Because in a burger joint a guy without a name walks in, and he’s been on TV.