If only she had messaged:

Let me take the fight to the next step: bringing the full force of the federal government down on the “pandemic profiteers”. We have ample proof of corporate and billionaire greed and exploitation. Now it’s time to send in a prosecutor to bring justice to the American people.

What I want to tell the profiteers: ‘Brace yourself, we know who you are, here I come, and I aint gonna be playing defense.’

My key premise is the Billionaire Trump did a very good job inciting anger at what is (unfortunately) the #1 concern of (short-sighted and ill-informed) voters while deflecting the blame from the actual culprits (the greedy class) and therefore the Dems had a chance to do the same thing with a simple posture:

“Billionaire Trump sold you out to mega-corporations and billionaires - that’s just what billionaires do if you elect them. Joe Biden got us half-way towards fixing it. Let’s finish the cleanup.”

Where she really screwed up is “waffle” when asked what she would do differently compared to Biden. I get she didn’t want to throw Biden+Harris under the bus, but she did not have to…

She coulda/shoulda positioned the last 4 years as the “first aid” stage for a gravely wounded economy, but now it’s time to counterattack and take back the ground lost under Trump and his cronies. (Cite examples like political appointees with astonishing conflicts of interest profting as they gutted public institutions.)

The Script

  • Billionaire Trump left behind a trainwreck of an economy, gutted by cronies and other billionaires (cite stats)
  • Even with a disfunctional Congress Biden managed to unwind the worst of it and get the economy off life support in one term (cite accomplishments)
  • But in the process, mega-corporations and billionaires exploited the economic upheaval for their own benefit at the expense of everyone else. Cite:
    • Record inflation + record corporate profits means the inflations is direct result of corporate profiteering
    • Billionaires - including Billionaire Trump - enjoyed unprecedented gains
    • Working class Americans have a harder and harder time affording groceries or a home
  • The solution is simple, but not easy: “give me a 4 year mandate in the house, senate, and white house and let’s finish what we started and make the pandemic profiteers fully accountable to the American people” … for example:
    • repatriate unearned profiteering gains to the direct benefit of everyday Americans… send all Americans a periodic “refund” check, like they do for class-action lawsuits
    • bust monopolies found guity of profiteering

There’s a lot of ways to handle the actual positioning. One being: “War” on the greedy class. A better alternative is probably:

  • Biden was the “emergency medic” we needed to stop the bleeding, and he did it.
  • Now, Harris is the “surgeon to excise the cancer of unchecked greed that Billionaire Trump instigated”.

A missed opportunity

I suspect the social media tycoons, being the social parasites they are, would have fallen into line behind her, faced with the alternative of being in her crosshairs. (E.g., precisely the same intimidation strategy Billionaire Trump uses.)

But, as Bernie has noted, the Democratic party refused to raise the banner of the exploited working class. Attacking profiteers does not make one a socialist.

And as we plainly saw, in 2024 identifying the real enemy - profiteering mega-corporations and billionaires with record profits at your expense - would have been a more effective strategy than assuming Americans to have the sense to consider character.

Harris’ team could have, in my opinion, handled a lot of things better, but the economy was #1 so they needed to aggressively attack the profiteers, not try to gaslight people into equating a good stock market with a good economy for non-billionaires.

Final thought: Harris shoulda never mentioned Trump’s name without “Billionaire” in front of it.

As evidenced in 2016, rebranding the opposition via name-calling repetition works, unfortunately. When talking to people who work for a living using “billionaire” as a pejorative would be effective on many levels in the us-vs-them battle for votes. Or in this case “U.S. vs Them”?