Democrats Forgo the Iceberg
More perils lie ahead, but Kamala Harris has a real shot.
Did you all enjoy your weekend? What weekend?
There ought to be a law against doing this sort of thing on a Sunday. Nota bene to all future presidents mulling stepping aside: Save it for the work week! Happy Monday.
Trump’s Too Old
—William Kristol
“Most Americans do not want a rematch between Biden and Trump. The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the one who wins this election.”
Thus prophesied Nikki Haley, six months ago in New Hampshire.
From her lips to God’s ears.
Donald Trump, for one, seems worried that Haley may have been right. Last night, in the midst of a bunch of mean-spirited Truth Social posts mocking Joe Biden, he complained:
So, we are forced to spend time and money on fighting Crooked Joe Biden, he polls badly after having a terrible debate, and quits the race. Now we have to start all over again. Shouldn’t the Republican Party be reimbursed for fraud in that everybody around Joe, including his doctors and the Fake News Media, knew he was not capable of running for, or being, President? Just askin’?
“Now we have to start all over again” is the tell.
Trump and his team were confident they’d defeat Biden. Now it’s a new game. And while Trump still has to be favored to win in November, he’s a less prohibitive favorite today, in a more unpredictable race.
And he knows it.
There was a second Trump post worth noting:
My debate with Crooked Joe Biden, the Worst President in the history of the United States, was slated to be broadcast on Fake News ABC, the home of George Slopadopolus, sometime in September. Now that Joe has, not surprisingly, has quit the race, I think the Debate, with whomever the Radical Left Democrats choose, should be held on FoxNews, rather than very biased ABC. Thank you! DJT
So Trump’s not so keen to debate the new Democratic nominee, and is beginning to create an excuse for wiggling out of such an encounter. Which is another sign that the old man of Mar-a-Lago is worried.
For one thing, the issue of age now cuts the other way. Trump is the oldest individual ever nominated by a major party for president. He’s older than President Ronald Reagan was when he finished his second term.
And isn’t Trump’s age actually accentuated by the fact that his running mate, JD Vance, is so young? Vance is exactly half Trump’s age. Do Americans really want this kind of bizarre May-September ticket? How about a couple of candidates between the ages of roughly 50 and 60? That seems pretty much what’s normal for this kind of job.
In this respect, Democrats, like Biden in 2020, have the chance once again to be the party of normalcy this November. But they’ll also be the party of change: Who wants to go backwards to an ex-president? It’s time to move forward!
If (when?) Kamala Harris becomes the nominee, she can quote in her acceptance speech John F. Kennedy: “The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans . . . proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”
Still, we shouldn’t kid ourselves: The Democrats face big challenges. They’ll need a level of competence this fall they haven’t always shown. They’ll have to resist all kinds of temptations, from emphasizing identity politics to forgetting that they need to make this race primarily about Trump. They’ll have to represent more than just their party. They must present to the country a broad coalition of democratic forces allied against Trump.
Harris will also have to overcome various limitations she’s shown in the past, and will have to—as I think she can—outperform expectations.
All of this will develop in the days and weeks to come. But for now, we should thank President Biden for stepping aside; for choosing to be the 80-year-old candidate who retired. We should welcome the opportunity for a new start that he’s provided.
And we should appreciate the fact that we’re much better off than we were 24 hours ago. USS Democracy now finds itself in choppy and uncharted waters. But that’s better than chugging ahead on autopilot straight into an iceberg.
The Burden of What May Be
—Andrew Egger
Eight years ago, just days after Donald Trump’s shock presidential victory over Hillary Clinton, then-President Barack Obama told the New Yorker who he considered the rising stars in tomorrow’s Democratic party. The first name he mentioned was Kamala Harris.
So it was interesting that Obama didn’t follow his old vice president’s lead on Sunday with an immediate Harris endorsement. “I have extraordinary confidence,” Obama wrote in a statement shortly after Biden’s announcement, “that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges.”
But Obama is seemingly shaping up to be only a very prominent exception.
By last night, Harris had racked up a king’s ransom of endorsements from every Democratic coalition that matters.
There were the Democratic elder statesmen. Bill and Hillary Clinton endorsed Harris instantly. So did 23 Democratic senators, including Elizabeth Warren, Chris Coons, and Tim Kaine.
There were progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who—far from seeing the open convention as an opportunity to drag the party farther left—endorsed Harris straightaway.
There were Harris’s potential rivals. Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, Andy Beshear, and Pete Buttigieg all got behind her.
There were the grassroots donors, who poured nearly $50 million into the Biden-Harris campaign accounts that Harris now occupies solo—one of the biggest days of online Democratic fundraising ever.
And then there were the delegates. Several states’ Democratic delegations have pledged themselves to support Harris, whose team is already working the phones to lock them up.
Republicans have known all along that Harris would be Biden’s likeliest replacement, so the president’s Sunday announcement didn’t catch them napping. Within minutes, the president’s MAGA Inc. super PAC was up with a new ad attacking the vice president (“Kamala was in on it. She covered up Joe’s obvious mental decline”). And RNC Research—the GOP’s rapid-response office—instantly started resurfacing old clips of positions Harris took during the halcyon days of the race-to-the-left 2020 primary.
Still, a campaign can’t change direction overnight. And as the Atlantic’s Tim Alberta has reported in recent weeks, Trump’s campaign suddenly finds itself running a strength-vs.-impotence campaign strategy without a sunsetting incumbent to run it against.
And old habits die hard. As Bill notes, since Biden’s announcement, Trump has made nine posts attacking him on social media. He has yet to mention Harris.
What do you think of the Democrats’ quick coalescence behind Kamala Harris? Let us know in the comments:
And if you’re not yet a member of our humble crew, we hope you’ll join us:
Catching up . . .
Democrats start to rally around Harris after Biden’s exit: Washington Post
Secret Service director to testify agency ‘failed’ during Trump shooting: CNN
Netanyahu returns to D.C. for three-day visit, speech to Congress: Axios
Inside the Democratic reboot: Joy, hope, and fear: Politico
As Biden dug in on continuing his campaign, Pelosi kept the pressure on: NBC News
How Lord of the Rings shaped J.D. Vance’s politics: Politico
Quick Hits
1. Cop Kamala vs. the Felon
Here was Tim last night, over on our YouTube: “If you’re a Kamala fan, if you’re coconut-curious—and you want to get excited about what a contrast between Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee and Donald Trump as the indicted Republican nominee could look like, I’ve got to show you this ad.”
It’s a spot from Harris’s short-lived 2020 presidential campaign, and it brings the heat:
Up on the site today, Frederick Baron and Dennis Aftergut write that this may be Harris’s key campaign attribute: “She can prosecute the case against Donald Trump”:
As former prosecutors, we can affirm how a onetime state attorney general, district attorney, and trial lawyer such as Harris is schooled in sharp debate, political or otherwise. Prosecutors are trained to quickly grasp issues, listen to witnesses for dissembling or other flaws in testimony, and expose them to jurors.
Lest there be any doubt about Harris’s ability to do just that, check out her 2019 Senate Judiciary Committee cross-examination of William Barr, Trump’s then–attorney general. Harris established that Barr never reviewed the evidence in the Mueller Report that undercut Barr’s misleading “summary” of it. She left Barr stammering and flustered. She crisply shot down his efforts to interrupt her.
2. So you’re saying there’s a chance
Democrats’ relief at finally turning the page on the excruciating aftermath of last month’s debate is palpable. Over at the New York Times, Nate Cohn has some words of restraint. After all, Biden was losing even before his debate performance:
A year ago, many Democrats weren’t alarmed by the prospect of running an unpopular candidate like Mr. Biden (or presumably Ms. Harris) against Mr. Trump. Back then, many asserted that America had an anti-MAGA majority; in this view, it was all but impossible for Mr. Trump to win the presidency, despite Mr. Biden’s poor job approval ratings. As late as this spring, Mr. Biden’s team comforted itself with the assumption that the election would ultimately be about democracy and therefore he would prevail, despite his obvious liabilities.
In the end, Ms. Harris and the Democrats might win a coin-flip election by campaigning on abortion and democracy, just as Mr. Biden’s advocates hoped he would. But it’s far harder to be confident about that assumption today. After all, Mr. Biden had been trailing in the polls for essentially 10 straight months — long before the first presidential debate . . .
Ms. Harris is a new face; to some extent, she might help satisfy the electorate’s desire for change, simply by being someone other than Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden. But she is still part of the Biden administration; she will be hobbled by many of the same challenges faced by Mr. Biden, and it’s not clear whether she is better positioned to overcome them. To do so, she would probably need to offer an optimistic and hopeful vision for the future, backed by a plausible agenda — something that her 2020 campaign largely failed to accomplish.
Read the whole thing. The bottom line: This is still an uphill climb. Time to start climbing.
Cheap Shots
As a showman and candidate from the party of the WWE, Trump knows what just happened. The roles have changed. He was the strongman, the one who survived the bullet, the one who can overwhelm the weak old man with the failed polices of the past. Now, he is the old man. He represents a past that is filled with anger and conflict. He is now the villain who want to rule aspects of American’s private lives. He is the criminal; she is the law-and-order prosecutor.
The biggest change, something he will have difficulty overcoming, is that Harris can say she represents the future, and Trump is the past, and he wants to bring American back even further into the past, to the time of Jim Crow, and when women couldn’t vote or own property. To Trump, Harris is using her nails on a blackboard to irritate him, the nails of a strong, competent, outspoken women of color. His racism and misogyny will go out of control. The Dems are energized and mobilized. Let’s not F*ck this up.
We were led to believe -- or the GOP and media tried to do so, anyway -- that the previous weekend's assassination attempt had changed DJT and made him a more thoughtful, introspective person and potential leader. And that his calls for us to come together were sincere. It took mere minutes yesterday for that fantasy to be blown to shreds, as Trump attacked Joe Biden in his moment of sacrifice in the most crude, grotesque, self-serving way possible, lacking even a hint of appreciation for all of Biden's years of public service. That in fact is who DJT is and what he does, and it will not change.
The whole "changed man" persona was so obviously a farce. The reality is that DJT is scared. Very scared. Joe dropping out throws all the orbits out of whack, and he does not know what it means or how to handle it. So he lashes out instinctively, as wild animals tend to do. DJT always melts down when the heat is turned up, so the Ds should keep pushing his buttons and leading him toward these unforced errors of speech, as well as actions. In that regard Harris seems to be the ideal candidate to run against him. The Prosecutor versus The Felon. The optics are spectacular, and long overdue. Run with it, Dems. Turn up the temperature, push DJT out of his comfort zone, and enjoy the show as the narrative returns to being about his many failures more than someone else's age and health. It is time.