For anyone who wasn’t an ardent Kamala Harris fan, it was very funny to watch Rory Stewart’s humiliation after the US election. Beforehand, the posher half of The Rest is Politics had bet heavily, both in terms of his reputation as a pundit and, he said, with money, that Harris was going to “win comfortably”. “Biden’s admin has been solid,” we learned; polls suggesting the race would be tight were simply “herding, after past misses”, he assured us. As the results came in and the world steadily understood the extent of Trump’s victory, for those with an eye on the response of the centrists, the schadenfreude was like a warm bath.
What was revealing, though, was the way Stewart tried to explain why he’d been so wrong. He didn’t so much eat humble pie as claim that while, yes, he had made the wrong prediction, he could hardly be faulted for doing so, since he had made it for the right reasons. Dazed and shell-shocked in a now-infamous live broadcast of The Rest Is Politics election on election night, he explained: “I think I was wrong because I’m an optimist and I hate the idea of being right pessimistically… my vote on Kamala Harris was… a bet on hope.” Manfully embracing his reputational fallout the following day on Times Radio, he freely admitted that he was “guilty of massive wishful thinking”, but nevertheless maintained that he – a man who purports to tell millions each week how the world of politics works – would “rather be wrong optimistically… than be right pessimistically.”
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