Rating: WORTHY!
From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
Erratum:
"Kamala's 2020 presidential campagin." - campaign
This book ought to be required reading for anyone involved in getting the Democrat party up to speed for the November election. Zerlina Maxwell is MSNBC's political analyst and also a SiriusXM radio host and she tackles the big issues head-on in this sweeping book that efficiently and competently covers a lot of ground.
The Trump racist presidency has never been exposed more starkly than it has in the last couple of weeks since George Floyd's appalling death at the hands of clearly uncaring white police officer who already had multiple complaints against him, but there is more to that disgrace to the White House than this. Trump's election was, as the author argues, a backlash (or a white-lash if you prefer - and let's face it - when in US history has the black population not felt the white lash?) to eight years of having a black guy in the White House. Well that backlash to eight years brought us eight minutes of cruelty which in turn has spawned weeks of demonstrations which have spread like wildfire around the world.
Far too many insecure white men and women didn't like having a black man in the nation's highest office, and the Democrats mistakenly thought politics à la mode would suffice. They neglected the black vote, specifically the voting power of black women, and the whole country has paid the price for four years now, by electing the least competent president ever elected by majority - or in his case, a minority - vote: a man who is openly abusive of everyone who doesn't kowtow to him, who is misogynistic, racist, homophobic, blinkered, anti-science, bigoted, hypocritical, and unremittingly devoted to the narrowest of self-interest.
Rather than drain the swamp, he expanded it and once again put the Trump name on it. He has shamed the office and the nation causing rifts across the world between the US and every nation that isn't a dictatorship. He's caused untold misery and hobbled the USA in its place on the world stage.
As we saw the most diverse field ever of potential Democrat candidates quickly winnowed down to the business-as-usual old white guy, Maxwell's hammer rings loudly on the anvil of necessary change. This book handily tackles the self-destructive 'Bernie Bros', the problems with Biden, discriminatory public policies - and lack of anti-discriminatory ones - the marginalization of important and downtrodden communities, and the inescapable but ignored fact that, just seven elections from now, the majority of the US voting population will be non-white.
Biden recently embarrassed himself yet again with another thoughtless gaff (words to the effect of: "If you ain't voting for me, you ain't black") that was so mind-numbingly godawful on so many levels. He can't win by being stupid. Stupid is already in the White House and the nation is sick of it. Smart is what's needed. What he ought to have been thinking was that "If I don't steal a few carefully-selected pages from Donald Trump's playbook, I ain't elected." He needs to tackle the man head on and not in the divisive way that Trump does it.
Although very recently, he's stepped-up a bit more, Biden's been largely invisible while Trump has lumbered imposingly around the world stage laying down his law, and despite the overpowering presence of Coronavirus hampering campaigning, it did not have to be that way. Biden already knows (supposedly) Obama's playbook and he isn't even using that one. When will he wake up? Not until after he reads this book. This book is his new playbook and if he doesn't learn from it, and he doesn't change tack, he's going to lose come November because as this author makes clear, he cannot win without winning the black female vote - the one voting block that has been marginalized and undervalued for far too long, and in my opinion he should pick Keisha Bottoms as his running mate - assuming she's even willing. I commend this as not just a worthy read, but as an essential one.
