Consider, if you must, and you absolutely must, my favorite political story of this misbegotten and ragged political year. From Tulsa Public Radio:
Lessie Benningfield Randle, 109, issued a statement late Friday saying that she was grateful for the right to vote. Randle was born in 1914, and women didn’t gain the right to vote in Oklahoma until 1918. In 1921, Randle witnessed the destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood at the hands of a white mob. The area was known for its relatively affluent Black residents. Researchers say as many as 300 people died. In her statement, Randle alluded to Harris’s Republican opponent, former president Donald Trump, but didn’t use his name.
Ms. Randle had a little more to say.
“I don’t know how much longer I have left. But if this is my last ballot, then I’m grateful that it’s for Kamala Harris. I have five children and more than 20 grandbabies. VP Harris has the better chance of building the nation I want them to inherit."
It’s worth reading her statement in full. A 109-year-old survivor of a horrendous racial pogrom that this society can barely bother itself to atone for puts her name to a statement that sums up the stakes of this election better than one from a herd of highly paid pundits, then she bestirs her 109-year-old self to vote anyway. For the past several weeks, I have hijacked a slogan from Shaka Smart, the basketball coach at my alma mater by the shining banks of the Menomonee in Milwaukee. To me, it seemed a helpful reminder that the work of expunging Trumpism will not end if and when its founder loses another election—which, God willing, will be his last. Then Ms. Randle’s story came along, and I realized that she was the living embodiment of the following slogan:
No finish line.
In the less noble precincts of the election, it was quite a weekend for whining, especially from the Republican side. The vice president made a well-received appearance on Saturday Night Live. (An aside—a win for the VP would mean more Maya Rudolph on TV, which is reason enough to tip any undecided voters.) The Republican side wasn’t going to take this lying down, not with an opportunity to play the victim card...again. And the GOP is now playing with a deck of fifty-two victim cards, much like the deck made up entirely of queens of diamonds brandished by Frank Sinatra in The Manchurian Candidate. Cue one Brendan Carr of the Federal Election Commission. From The Hill:
“This is a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule,” Commissioner Brendan Carr posted on the social platform X. “The purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct—a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election. Unless the broadcaster offered Equal Time to other qualifying campaigns,” Carr, a Trump appointee, continued. The FCC’s “equal time” rules let rival candidates ask for equal air time. Carr, the senior Republican on the commission, was appointed by former President Trump.
Jeebus, get over yourself.
There’s more to Carr than merely having been appointed by a vulgar talking yam. He’s also one of the authors of Project 2025, the bureaucratic Mein Kampf produced by a clutch of the former president*’s apparatchiks about which the former president*, of course, knows nothing.
“Given the close ties between Project 2025, Trump, and his re-election campaign, it is deeply troubling that Commissioner Carr would use his official title and position to author part of the political playbook for a Republican presidential candidate,” the lawmakers wrote. “This potential misuse of title raises serious questions about Commissioner Carr’s commitment to keeping his private political activities separate from his official duties.”
Meanwhile, out and about, the former president* tried his best to ignore the “check engine” light blinking away in the corner of his eyes. He was constantly on the move, and by the end of the day, he looked like the representation of Death from some medieval tapestry. He sounded like an old 78 rpm that had been left in somebody’s garage for seventy years. And his familiar recitation of his calendar of grievances was lifeless, when it wasn’t graceless, when it wasn’t utterly incoherent.
“And then they accuse you of being a conspiracy theorist and they want to lock you up and put you in jail. The ones that should be locked up are the ones that cheat on these horrible elections we go through in our country.”
“A whistleblower released the information on the 18 on the 800,000 cobs, plus...there were not 800,000 and 18,000 you add them up that’s and then you add 100 and think of it 112,000 jobs.”
“That beautiful white skin that I have would be nice and tan. I have the whitest skin because I never have time to go out in the sun. I have that beautiful white. It could’ve been beautiful tan.”
I picked those cherries in between football games just yesterday.
And they were back at it on Monday—a dizzying homestretch of speeches and rallies and interminable television commercials. (There’s nothing quite like watching a happy Christmas-is-coming ad from Target with one of those doom-scrolling commercials from the former president*’s ad men. Please stop killing my dead buzz.) But I’m hanging in there with Ms. Lessie Benningfield Randle, who learned a hard lesson one dark day in 1921.
No finish line.
