Please Vote for Kamala Harris for President

An official endorsement.

It is a longstanding tradition — one, that goodness, has now gone on for more than eight years — that, in an even-numbered election year, I write an electoral endorsement post. Here’s 2016, and here’s 2018, and here’s 2020, and here’s 2022. This year, during a time when there is nothing most people want to talk about less right now than politics, I have decided to write two.

Last week’s, Part One, attempt to grapple, hopefully one last time, with the Trump era. You can read it right here. Today’s: An endorsement of his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

“Ninety percent of life is showing up,” some man whose name I can’t remember once said. Source of this quote aside, I’ve long found this an invaluable life lesson — perhaps the most important lesson of all. The key to the lesson’s wisdom is two-fold.

1. You have very little control over what happens in your life. Good things will happen, bad things will happen, and in many ways, you just have to hope, when good things do, you are standing in the right place, and when bad things do, you have to hope you’re standing somewhere else. But key to this is that you do have to be standing somewhere. If you don’t put yourself in position to be in the right place for good things to find you, they won’t.
2. When the stars align, when you’re blessed with the kismet of positive fortune, when everything comes together at the precise moment and opportunity, history, finds you, you have to be ready. You have to meet the moment. Showing up is the 90 percent part. What you do next is the 10 percent … the only 10 percent that matters.

I do not know how this election is going to turn out. But I do know a history-finds-someone moment.

This election has been going on for years now, so long I’m not sure the last one ever stopped, but for all intents and purposes, this election began on June 28, when Joe Biden confirmed many people’s worst fears — and confirmed what his detractors and opponents had been saying about him for months — with a debate performance so disastrous that it became immediately obvious that there was no way this man could serve as President for the next four years. (It is remarkable how impossible it has been to…