As we approached JFK on our return, I wondered why a guy can’t take a little time off from the madness down there…

What, a guy can’t go spend two or three weeks traveling abroad without the whole country going stark, raving mad behind his back?

Apparently not.

I’ll write about the trip later. I’d rather write about that, because the topic is more pleasant, and it interests me more. But this is sorta kinda a political blog, or was. Frankly, I’m less and less interested in that stuff every day, because politics has gotten so insufferably stupid. But most of the craziness back in the States had to do with presidential politics, and that seems to be all that occupies the country’s collective hivemind in years bearing numbers that can be divided into whole numbers by four — no matter what’s going on in Ukraine, or Israel, or China. Or Venezuela, for that matter.

So let me try to get it all out of the way, and once we’re caught up, we’ll move on to other matters.

Oh, one other thing — the years numbered as I described are also known as “Olympiads.” And that was going on, too, during our travels. I was reminded vaguely of it when we turned on a TV in our waterfront room in Calais (I think that was the only time we touched a boob tube during the trip), and saw apparently unending coverage of some event having to do with the Olympics. The arrival of the torch in Paris or something. Huge crowds in the streets and uninteresting popular music performed on an outdoor stage. Which, we recalled, was why we had decided to avoid Paris on this trip. (I mean because of the crowds, not so much the blah pop music.)

“La grand soiree” goes on and on about “la flamme olympique.” Which was why we were avoiding Paris…

But onto the politics. Now mind you, we’re not talking “politics” as the word was used during the first 60 or so years of my life. You know, relatively sane candidates vying seriously for serious offices by offering their credentials and their character to a discerning electorate. It’s a far weirder thing now. But you know that already. Social media, and all that. So on with it…

Trump weirdness goes into overdrive

Let’s take it in chronological order. Nothing back home intruded upon my vacationing consciousness while we were in London. But then in Canterbury, just as I we were trying to drop off to sleep (it being five hours later than here), the news popped that someone had taken a shot at Donald Trump, clipping his right ear. Which, you know, was like all we needed. I turned off audible notifications on my phone and iPad, and being extremely tired — as tired as if we’d walked all the way there with Chaucer’s pilgrims — went to sleep.

That didn’t mean it would leave me alone over the next couple of days. I kept seeing this kind of stuff:

I found out that kid with the rifle, who couldn’t hit his target squarely despite being given minutes to aim in an ideal sniper’s position — but tragically managed to kill an innocent bystander, and seriously wound others — was also dead himself. I guess that’s the way it goes with deadly weapons fired from four to five hundred feet by someone who never received Marine training….

Oh, hang on — don’t get the impression I wanted him to kill Trump. No way. Total nightmare scenario, that. Worst thing that could have happened. Things went plenty crazy enough without that. Meanwhile, we were hearing how much the whole thing would help Trump get elected. Which I suppose we should expect, since “sympathy voting” is an old tradition. Voters in general are easily swayed by emotion, that goes especially for voters who might be susceptible to voting for this guy.

Where we were, the usual response tended to be “those crazy Americans and their guns,” from a column my wife read in Le Monde to the African Uber driver who took us across Amsterdam several days later. (We’d left England, and were not subjected to The Guardian, which adores that line of discussion.) We could ignore Le Monde (I could especially, since I don’t do Paris talk), but we felt we had to be polite to the driver — he was a very nice, intelligent guy — so we said things like, “Yes, you have a point, and it’s hard to explain, and no one knows what to do about it,” while thinking, Can we talk about windmills or something?…

That mass of crazy sort of blotted out our awareness of the GOP Convention over the next few days, although at one point I did stop to think, wasn’t he supposed to be sentenced by now? Wasn’t the sentencing date just before the convention? I even looked that up briefly, and saw an explanation having something to do with the recent Supreme Court decision, which made no sense, and I moved on. Fortunately, I had lots to distract me…

Wow, this post is taking some time, innit? That’s why I hadn’t written it yet. But to move on…

Joe drops out

Well, I had sort of expected this to happen before I got back. The pressure bearing down on my main man Joe, no matter what he did or said, was reaching a level that no one could withstand. Not even the kind of guy who would step up to save his country — and knew how — despite being at an age when he had served enough, and richly deserved to stay at home and enjoy his grandchildren.

But people weren’t interested in that anymore, if they ever had been. They were too busy twitching in response to things that mattered more to them than the unavoidable fact that a qualified alternative hadn’t emerged in 2024 any more than it did in 2020. And Kamala Harris, who would be the obvious replacement at this date, had been about halfway back in that pack of 2020 also-rans, in terms of qualification for our highest office.

Y’all know very well what my position was: The country, and the world, needed him to stay in office. Not that it would have been good for him — it was the worst possible thing for him personally, and I’ve felt guilty for years for my willingness to exploit his willingness to put himself through it. But Americans, and the rest of the world, needed him to keep his hand on the tiller. Because there was no one else.

It might help you to understand my long-held position if you reflect that my mind doesn’t center around such questions as “Who can win the election?” For me, the question was “Who should win the election?” Of course, you need someone who both should, and can. That’s the trick, and Joe knows it as well as anyone. Which was why he dropped out.

Which means we now ask ourselves other questions… but I’m going to have to take a break and do some paying work, or none will get done today. I’ll try to get back and finish this before the day is over, because I really want to put this stuff in my rear-view mirror…

…OK, I’m back, and now I want to correct what I just said. We don’t need to ask ourselves any questions at all, old or new. The world may be nuts now, but it’s a lot simpler.

Now, the choice is between Donald Trump and… somebody else. Kamala Harris, with close to zero experience that applies to the job of president, is a bit of an unknown quantity. But that’s OK, because it clearly brings us to a simple point. I’ve often said that anyone would be better than Donald Trump. Kamala Harris doesn’t quite qualify as “someone chosen at random off the street,” but she shares a characteristic with that person — I don’t know anything bad about her. She’s basically a neutral character in this situation.

Well, I do know one bad thing — the way she stabbed Joe in the back in that first debate in 2020. Major cheap shot. But Joe forgave her, so I feel obliged to do the same.

So, no bad things (maybe you know some bad things about her, but I don’t). And she’s running against a guy with more bad qualities than anyone who has ever reached this point in American politics.

So there’s nothing to think about. You vote for Kamala, and you hope she keeps Joe’s team in place — people like Anthony Blinken and Merrill Garland. People who know the job. That way, there’s a chance for things to be OK.

Whereas, with the other guy, nothing — at home or abroad, on any level — will be OK.

So there’s not a lot to discuss. Vote for Kamala.

To be more encouraging…

That’s not sounding like a really enthusiastic endorsement, I realize. Let me try to offer something better.

Back before we headed to London, some smart, thoughtful people — not just the freakout crowd, or the people who never liked Joe anyway, like the Bernie Bros and the editorial board of the NYT — were starting to suggest that maybe someone else could take Joe’s place, and it wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

One of those thoughtful people was Ezra Klein. If you can gain access to his podcasts, I do recommend checking them out. No, that wasn’t a link to his podcasts. This is, though.

Sometime way back on July 5 — a few days before we left the country — he did a podcast titled, “Is Kamala Harris Underrated?” This being based on the assumption among smart, thoughtful observers that she hadn’t shown us much yet. But he suggested that now that we’re in this fix of the abundantly qualified and accomplished incumbent’s numbers plummeting, maybe she possessed qualities that made her better than we thought. Among other things, he said:

There are ways in which Harris seems perfectly suited for this moment. She’s a former prosecutor who would be running against a convicted criminal. She’s the administration’s best messenger on abortion by far, running in the aftermath of Dobbs. She’s a Black woman with a tough on crime background, running at a moment when crime and disorder have been big issues in American politics.

And unlike Joe Biden, who I think has very little room to improve from here, the American people don’t really know Harris. The opportunity for her to make a different impression if she was speaking for herself, rather than for the administration, is real. Now, that doesn’t mean she’d be able to pull that off. That’s a hard political job. But she’s a lot sharper in interviews and debates than I think people are now prepared for.

She has a résumé and some skills quite well-suited to this moment. It definitely doesn’t seem impossible that she could rise to the task. There is a reason she was considered so strong in 2019 and in 2020. Wouldn’t you want to see her debate Donald Trump?…

OK, that’s not a really ringing endorsement, either. But he said enough good things — or at least potentially good things — about her that I felt a little better about the situation as we prepared to take off. I felt like Joe might not be running when I got back, and I was glad I was going to miss those last days before that happened. And Klein made me feel like maybe things would be OK. At least, after January, Joe will finally get the time off that he has so richly earned. (About time he had a little Joe time.)

And so far, they have been pretty OK. She seems to have done OK with her first big test — picking a running mate. I’ll probably write more on that subject in coming days.

But I don’t think I’ll be writing as much about the presidential election as I might have otherwise. Maybe because it’s all so simple now. We’ll see. In any case, I look forward to writing about other things. And now that I’ve dealt with this stuff, I can go on and do that.

I don’t think it will be another month before you hear from me…

I’ll come back soon to tell you about our trip. Until then, enjoy the flowers…