The Same Old Tired Shtick
Remember when Donald Trump had the capacity to shock?
The Harris-Walz barnstorming tour heads for the Sun Belt today, with rallies scheduled in Arizona and Nevada. As Politico notes this morning, those events will provide an interesting test for āwhether Walzās folksy, Midwestern brand can resonate beyond middle America.ā Happy Friday.
Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing
āAndrew Egger
Yesterday, I whinged: Madam Vice President, couldnāt you spare a little time for us ink-stained wretches?
And yesterday, Kamala Harris obliged a bit, dropping by a scrum of her pool reporters at the Michigan to answer two minutes of rapid-fire questions. There wasnāt much to note from those exchanges, except that she left the door open to additional debates beyond the agreed-to ABC News showdown on September 10 and said she planned to have a full sit-down interview by the end of the month.
Still, it was good to see Harris at least cracking the door open with the press. And itās hard to fault her for moving in that direction only carefullyāespecially as her opponent spent his day giving a demonstration of the political perils of too much yakking at reporters.
Donald Trump is a machine that runs on attention; recently, heās been steamed that he isnāt getting enough of it. Several times now heās tried to wrench the spotlight back: showing up for a stage interview at a conference for black journalists, doing a bizarre interview with a smooth-brained Gen-Z video game streamer. Yesterday, he tried again, hosting an hour-plus press conference at Mar-a-Lago.
On paper, there could have been political merit to this: Trump, after all, wants to spotlight Harrisās media-shy strategy thus far. The trouble with this strategy, of course, is that Trump is Trump, a man who can no more run a disciplined press conference than he could free solo the Empire State Building.
Trump ran through his usual talking points: calling Harris Bidenās āborder czar,ā decrying inflation, promising to abolish taxes on Social Security income and tips. But he also lost himself in tangent after tangent and bizarre moment after bizarre moment.
He once again completely failed to conceal his disappointment that this weekās stock market dip didnāt deepen into an economy-upending crash: āWe have a lot of bad things coming up. You could end up in a depression of the 1929 variety, which would have been a devastating thing,ā he said. āYou saw it the other day with the stock market crashingāthat was just the beginning. Itās gonna get worse. Itās gonna get a lot worse, in my opinion.ā
He seemingly forgot the name of Tim Walz, whom he repeatedly referred to as āthe gentleman from Minnesotaā or āKamalaās new friendā and described as āheavy into the transgender world, heavy into lots of different worlds having to do with safety.ā
He inexplicably picked a crowd-size fight with Martin Luther King Jr., insisting that the civil rights leaderās March on Washington had been dwarfed by his own January 6th rallyāthe one that immediately preceded the storming of the Capitol. āNobodyās spoken to crowds bigger than me,ā Trump said. āIf you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech . . . same real estate, same everything . . . we had more.ā
He waved off a question about whether his role in the end of Roe v. Wade would come back to bite him: āI think the abortion issue has been very much tampered [sic] down. I answered, I think, very well in the debate, and it seems to be much less of an issue.ā (Trump declined to say how he intends to vote in Floridaās state-level abortion-rights referendum this year, although he said he planned to announce that later.)
And he said Harris wasnāt smart enough to hold a press conference, while waving off her bump in the polls: āWell, sheās a womanāshe represents certain groups of people.ā
Itās a funny thing. Trump can still scandalize the viewer with his cruelty, his pettiness, and his malice. More often these days, though, he merely confuses and bores. The did-he-really-just-say-that transgressiveness that made him so electric a decade ago is long since played out. All thatās left is an old man, his acolytes, and his grievances.
Thatās not to say Trump canāt win, and itās certainly not to say he canāt do a ton of damage if he does. Yet, watching him wallow around yesterday, it was hard to avoid feeling a growing suspicion: Hey, you never know. Maybe Harris can crush this guy.
Knock On Wood
āBill Kristol
Is there an evil eye emoji? Or more precisely, an emoji that guards against the evil eye? That warns against tempting fate?
I donāt disagree at all with Andrewās analysis above. And Iāve been impressed by how well the Harris-Walz ticket is doing.
Still: No need to tempt the gods is my general rule. As they said in the old country, āDer mentsh trakht un Got lakht.ā Man plans and God laughs.
Well, one trusts that God will find something else to laugh at in November than the disappointed hopes and dashed dreams of Never Trumpers. And Iām probably still scarred by the experience of the fall of 2016, whenāeven though I thought Hillary would wināI did spend some time telling anyone whoād listen that Trump could win. I didnāt think he would, but Iād lived through the1992 election and seen up close and personal how powerful anti-incumbent and ātime for a changeā sentiment could be. And so it was.
Again, in 2020, while I was pretty confidentāthe polls were very goodāI did remember that Trump had outperformed the polls in 2016. Again, I thought Biden would win, but I was worried. And in fact Trump made it close in the Electoral College.
So, for the record and to placate the evil eye, the fates, the gods, and anyone else who needs to hear this, let me say for the record: While Iām less alarmed than I was a month ago, I remain worried. (And so does Andrew, despite his outburst of youthful good cheer!)
Consider this: On August 9, 2016, Hillary Clinton was about five and a half points ahead of Trump in the national popular vote. She won by two percentage pointsānot enough to prevail in the Electoral College.
On August 9, 2020, Joe Biden was almost eight points ahead of Trump. Biden won the national popular vote by about four and a half points, enough to win in the Electoral College.
So in the two elections in which Trump has been on the ballot, the final result was about three and a half points more favorable to Trump than polls at this time in the campaign suggested. That was partly due to late surges by Trump, and partly due to the fact that the polls failed to capture all the Trump support that was out there.
But of course itās not inevitable that Trump again surges at the end or outperforms the polls. There are many reasons things could be different this time. And we of course have it in our power to make things different.
So enough humoring the fates and placating the gods.
Instead Iāll be bold, and will close by invoking another expression from the old country: ā āFun zayn moyl, in Gots oyer.ā From Andrewās lips to Godās ears: Maybe Harris can crush this guy.
Catching up . . .
How Biden will spend his last six months in office: Politico
The cable TV business is crumbling: Axios
Wall Street on edge after a week of wild swings: New York Times
Israel repelled Iranās first direct attack. Is it ready for the next one? Washington Post
Trumpās plans stir fears for Fed independence, inflation: Wall Street Journal
Progressives reckon with massive campaign spending deficit after Cori Bush defeat: ABC News
Quick Hits: The Pusher
Over at the New Yorker, Jay Caspian King ponders the advantages and drawbacks of Kamala Harrisās play-it-safe approach so far and invites us all to check our priors a bit:
In tennis, a āpusherā is a player who safely returns the ball over the net, again and again, waiting for an increasingly frustrated opponent to make a mistake. This appears to be Campaign Kamalaās strategy: donāt make any unforced errors, keep things vanilla, and eventually Trump or Vance will implode . . . She has not explained what, exactly, happened in Washington after President Joe Bidenās disastrous debate; or why she has changed her mind on fracking, which she once said should be banned, and has wobbled on Medicare for All, which she once supported; or what she plans to do with Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission, who is said to be unpopular among some of Harrisās wealthy donors; or much about how a Harris Administration would handle the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
I suspect that a majority of voters donāt really care about the answers to those questions, at least not in any serious way. On the Democratic side, thereās an energized, good feeling about Campaign Kamalaāto a degree not felt, on a Presidential level, since Barack Obamaās last raceāand nobody wants to mess that up with debates about policy. Harris is popular; Biden was not. Harris gives the Democrats a shot at beating Trump; Biden most likely did not. Most of the liberals I know seem to be enveloped in a pleasant if thin fog in which concerns and criticisms melt away. The believers do not need explanations as long as Harrisās poll numbers remain encouraging. Which is fine. Politicians have certainly run on less than being the figure, however generic and undefined, who can stop Trump . . .
But I do not think that it will help anyone if the media allows Harris to run her campaign with zero criticism, or any probing into where she stands on contentious issuesāeven if such questioning is met with pushback on social media, where the mildest criticism of the Democrats can unleash a flood of outraged claims that the press is repeating the ābut her e-mailsā travesty and dooming the country to four more years of Trump. One can believe, as I do, that some mistakes were made in the coverage of Clintonās e-mail server and still understand that the media should do its job, and interrogate the Harris campaign, especially the parts that donāt exist yet.
Cheap Shots
The Harris media approach thus far was validated by the questions she got in that mini media scrum, which were an absolute embarrassment - "did you see what Trump said?" "will you do the debates with Trump?" "did you hear what Trump said about Tim Walz?"
Journalists in high dudgeon about the fact that she doesn't have to "answer for her positions" or "provide a vision of governance" give up the game when they turn into gossipy tweens the moment they actually get to engage with her.
Itās funny the little moments one remembers 50-some years earlier in their livesā¦
I grew up in a family of life-long Democrats, with a father who was active leadership of his local Union. I spent my early adult years not just following, but participating in the first-ever Earth Day to protect our environment, along with both the Civil Rights and Womenās Rights movements. I was inspired by the passion of Martin Luther King Jr. and the idealism of Robert F. Kennedy.
After they were assassinated in April and June of 1968, I was emotionally wounded and withdrew for a time from following politics, from being involved in anything that strove to make our future better. But one night 5-6 years later, at the height of the Watergate Hearings, I was passing by the TV when I saw Senators Howard Baker from TN and Lowell Weicker from Connecticut in front of the microphones. I think, but am not certain, that it was just after some of John Deanās testimony. What I remember most about what they were saying was āThis is NOT what the Republican Party stands for.ā I didnāt follow them, I didnāt really know who they were, but I remember that all these years later because I was so impressed with the integrity they had shown.
Now, on the 50th Anniversary of Nixonās resignation, it strikes me as in very stark contrast to how far the Republican Party has fallen in the intervening years. How many of todayās national Republicans can you count that have shown Integrity, have stood for the Rule of Law, our Constitution, and our very Democracy? Iād say less than ten, and one could even argue less than 5. It turns out that all of those things have been nothing more than commodities that each of them has been willing to trade for relevance, ambition, and/or a lust for power by any means, at any cost.
While most people here blame trump for where we find ourselves at this moment in our history, I place most of the blame on todayās Republican Party and those involved at the national level. They have had the power all along to stop trump, have had many opportunities to do so, but have always made the choice to not hold him accountable, to not denounce his many failings and the danger he poses. To the contrary, they have embraced him.
While I think it is critical that we defeat trump in November, I wish more voters across the political spectrum, would hold the Republican Party to account for this as well. Vote them out at every level you have the opportunity to do so. They wonāt reform unless we do, and even then, they must be replaced by those to whom Integrity, the Rule of Law, our Constitution, and Democracy matter and will be upheldā¦.