Happy Warriors in Philly
Plus: Donald Trump gets his Aaron Sorkin on.
We hope you didn’t miss one of yesterday’s instant-classic Olympics moments: U.S. underdog Cole Hocker coming out of nowhere to upset the heavily favored and extremely cocky favorites, Josh Kerr of Great Britain and Jakob Ingebrigtsen of Norway, in the finals of the metric-mile 1,500-meter race.
If you did miss it, seriously, go watch it. Well, maybe read this newsletter first. Happy Wednesday.
Standing for America
—Bill Kristol
Campaigns are about math: polls, fundraising, turnout, votes, the Electoral College.
But they’re also about mood: images, spirit, enthusiasm, sensibility, momentum.
For now—and I stress for now to limit any temptation to irrational exuberance—the Harris-Walz campaign is doing well on both fronts.
The numbers are pretty straightforward: When Joe Biden stepped aside, he was trailing Donald Trump nationally by about 3 percentage points. Biden was running about 7 points behind his own 2020 showing, on a path to a decisive Electoral College defeat.
Now, seventeen days later, Kamala Harris leads Donald Trump nationally by about 3 points. This isn’t far from the final 2020 result, and we’re in a tossup election.
You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be encouraged by this. And so even a pretty heart-of-stone-ish person like me is encouraged.
The first appearance of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz together yesterday in Philadelphia, along with Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, reinforced my encouragement.
They were happy warriors.
Now I’ll admit that I’m kind of a sucker for happy warriors, having admired over the years politicians like Hubert Humphrey, Jack Kemp, Ronald Reagan, and John McCain. So I probably overweight the actual political upside of happy warriordom.
After all, as the above names suggest, happy warriors don’t always win. In fact, the term was introduced to modern American politics by Franklin Roosevelt, who lifted it from Wordsworth to describe Al Smith—but Smith prevailed neither in the fight for the nomination in 1924, when FDR bestowed the moniker on him in his nominating speech, nor in the general election in 1928.
Still: I want to believe that being happy warriors is superior, not just morally and aesthetically but also practically and politically, to being sullen and resentful ones. We’ll see if that’s the case in the year 2024.
I’ll add that Harris, Walz, and Shapiro weren’t just happy warriors. They were distinctly hopeful and future-oriented ones.
Again, I want to believe that’s what most Americans want. That we want leaders who live in the present and will work to make America better in the future, not figures who scowl at the present and fear the future. And certainly not candidates who justify extraordinary mean-spiritedness in the name of an embittered nostalgia for an imaginary past.
Here too, we’ll see.
Finally, I was struck that the mood in Philadelphia was, if I can put it this way, all-American. Watching Shapiro and Walz and Harris—an Easterner and a Midwesterner and a Californian, men and women of such different backgrounds and religions and races—I thought: You know, this is America.
It’s an unoriginal thought, to be sure. And as I thought it, an unoriginal—and for that matter an out of date and out of favor—phrase for some reason popped into my mind: the “melting pot.”
The image of the “melting pot” has never really described America. Many people have suggested better images—a mosaic, for instance—to capture American openness and pluralism and integration. Still, for some reason the phrase stuck in my mind.
Later in the evening, I googled The Melting Pot, the 1908 drama by Israel Zangwill.
I haven’t read the whole play, but its closing passages seemed apt for this Harris-Walz-Shapiro moment:
DAVID: There she lies, the great Melting Pot—listen! Can’t you hear the roaring and the bubbling? There gapes her mouth [He points east.]—the harbour where a thousand mammoth feeders come from the ends of the world to pour in their human freight. Ah, what a stirring and a seething! Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian,—black and yellow—
VERA: Jew and Gentile—
DAVID: Yes, East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross—how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God. Ah, Vera, what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labour and look forward!
Kind of hokey. But also kind of moving, I thought. Even kind of inspiring.
The Republican party has, sadly, turned its back on that vision of America. The Democratic party has a chance to embody it. Can the Democratic party rise to the occasion and, in 2024, stand not just for its particular policies and constituencies but for “the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labor and look forward”?
Old Man Yells at Phone
—Andrew Egger
Yesterday wasn’t super fun for Donald Trump.
Monday had been his most pleasant day since the last day he was running against Joe Biden. The stock-market dip had him nearly capering with glee over the possibility of a longer-term recession that might blunt the rise of his opponent Kamala Harris. “Next move, THE GREAT DEPRESSION OF 2024,” he exulted.
But alas: Markets stabilized Tuesday, ending a few hundred points up in the Dow Jones average. You can’t get everything you want in life.
Meanwhile, the Kamalamentum kept rolling. Harris’s announcement of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate gave the conga-dancing Democratic base yet another jolt of good vibes, with the campaign sucking in yet another small-dollar haul of more than $10 million yesterday. And new polls from SurveyUSA, Morning Consult, and Marist College all showed Trump trailing Harris by 3 or 4 points nationally.
It’s all enough to make a guy like Trump nostalgic for the good-ol’ days of a few weeks ago, back when he was bludgeoning Biden in the polls. So Trump spent Tuesday working through those feelings the only way he knows how: posting on main.
“I HEAR THERE IS A BIG MOVEMENT TO ‘BRING BACK CROOKED JOE,’” Trump posted Tuesday afternoon. A little later, he followed up:
What are the chances that Crooked Joe Biden, the WORST President in the history of the U.S., whose Presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN from him by Kamabla, Barrack HUSSEIN Obama, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Shifty Adam Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, and others on the Lunatic Left, CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination, beginning with challenging me to another DEBATE. He feels that he made a historically tragic mistake by handing over the U.S. Presidency, a COUP, to the people in the World he most hates, and he wants it back, NOW!!!
This is amazing stuff. (And all sic, for the record.) Usually, it’s the center left that gets dinged for occasionally looking at politics through the lens of dewy-eyed fan-fiction—but not even Aaron Sorkin ever wishcasted quite like this. Ugh, that debate against Biden was so great. Can’t he come back for one more with me? As a treat? Come on, Joe, I need this.
On full display, too, are the late-stage brainworms. More and more these days, Trump seems to struggle to get from point A to point B in a thought without getting bogged down in a thicket of references, personal grievances, and in-jokes.
And even the in-jokes are losing a lot of steam: “Kamabla,” Trump’s fourth-try derogatory nickname for Harris, has to be some of his lamest work yet. No wordplay, no point, just mean-spirited mockery. Behold the GOP’s gibbering id:
JVL’s still out, but Tim and Sarah had a good time breaking down the Philly rally on The Next Level last night:
Hungry for even more Tim Walz takes? Andrew, Sarah, and Sam Stein taped an instant-react video to the news of his pick yesterday morning:
Quick Hits: Heat Check
Three data points from primary elections around the country yesterday:
THE GOOD: Democratic Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri, a member of the progressive “squad” first elected in 2020, lost her primary election last night to county prosecutor Wesley Bell. Bell was buoyed with huge sums of outside support from pro-Israel groups angered by Bush’s way-out-there stances on Israel’s conflict with Hamas. (In an interview with the New York Times this week, Bush demurred when asked if Hamas was a terrorist organization. “Would they qualify to me as a terrorist organization? Yes. But do I know that? Absolutely not.”)
But the case Bell prosecuted against Bush had little to do with Israel: Instead, he attacked her for chasing progressive notoriety over legislative results, repeatedly spotlighting her vote against President Joe Biden’s infrastructure package last year: “She had her own protest vote as opposed to what’s in the best interest of her district.”
THE BAD: Washington’s 3rd District is headed to a 2022 rematch: incumbent Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez on the Democratic side, MAGA loon and kinda sorta white nationalist Joe Kent representing the GOP.
Kent has been on our radar for a while. “Every once in a while,” Tim wrote back in 2022, “there appears a candidate who manages to abase himself in such a spectacularly extravagant manner that it merits special recognition.” Kent had managed to distinguish himself that cycle first by cozying up to out-and-out white nationalist Nick Fuentes, then by trying to put some daylight between them following a backlash, then by going back to Fuentes’s followers hat in hand to mend fences: “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with there being a white-people special interest group,” he said in a po-faced appearance on a podcast hosted by a Fuentes-fan teen. “They have to be very careful about the way they couch that and the way they frame that, obviously, in terms of messaging and in terms of getting credibility.”
Last cycle, Kent managed to successfully primary then-GOP Rep. Jaime Herrera-Beutler before face-planting against Glusenkamp Perez. This year, Republicans in the district had the chance to turn the page on that sordid chapter: Prosecutor Leslie Lewallen campaigned as a less loony GOP choice who could put the reddish district safely back in Republican hands. To which voters replied: Zero chance! Kent collected 38 percent of the jungle-primary vote, compared to 12 percent for Lewallen.
THE UGLY: You might remember Valentina Gomez, the Missouri secretary of state candidate who regularly courted viral infamy this year with a series of bizarre videos in which—for instance—she jogged down the street wearing a bulletproof vest while denouncing Democrats as “weak and gay” or called Juneteenth “the most ratchet holiday in America.”
The stunts earned her hundreds of thousands of social-media followers and millions upon millions of views. They also earned her about 48,000 votes in last night’s primary—good for sixth place.
This would feel like karmic justice, if there were any indication Gomez ever cared about being Missouri’s secretary of state in the first place. But the whole campaign nevertheless accomplished the purpose that Gomez transparently intended for it: Setting her up for a lucrative future as a lunatic right-wing social media personality.
Cheap Shots
I must admit that watching the Philadelphia Harris/Walz event live on TV changed my thinking on the Walz choice. I had been a Shapiro for VP person, for all the pragmatic reasons that have been discussed here and elsewhere. And then Shapiro spoke, firing up the crowd as the opening act. I mean this as a compliment. He did a great job of it. He set an excellent tone. He said the right things. He obviously has a future. But that is then and this is now. I came away with the feeling that Shapiro sees himself as a Number 1 type of guy—and not without reasons. But the open position is for Number 2, and it felt to me like he was auditioning to be 1B to Kamala's 1A, not her Number 2. Here and now, under these circumstances, it isn’t the right job for someone who might undermine Harris, even if unintentionally, and give off the vibe that the Democrats might have chosen the wrong person for Number 1. Harris has what it takes here and now, and should have the space to define herself, on her terms. Shapiro can wait. He appears not to be someone who will be past his sell-by date in 2028 or even 2032. In contrast Walz seems quite comfortable in his own skin in serving as a Number 2. And he seems adequately prepared for the job, with the bonus of being a much more empathetic figure than J.D., who is abrasive and inherently the grey cloud in the sky with all of his negativity and lack of any perceptible human warmth and emotion.
I also like the fact that Walz, and his wife, both have a teaching background, and that Harris played that up substantially in her presentation. Being a teacher myself, of course I feel this way. Just the same I think that it is time to get back to emphasizing, and praising, that bedrock contribution to society and how it matters to the greater good. Shapiro with his oratory gifts, and Kelly with his fighter pilot and astronaut background, have more of a wow factor attached to them. But Walz has a background that far more everyday people can relate to and understand at heart. If you believe that slow and steady wins the race, the selection of Walz looks better the more one stops to think about it and how it should resonate over time. I’m glad to admit that I’ve been schooled in this instance.
Five minutes into the Biden/Trump debate I, an unapologetic, self-described news junkie (all day and all night to the point of concern for my loved ones) turned off the TV, deleted NPR from my car radio buttons, switched off Twitter and Reddit, unbookmarked The Bulwark, etc. and didn’t, until late last week begin to peek at the news. I truly believe that hopelessness is the enemy of justice and I have never entirely lost hope during the past 8 years until that debate. I really did. I hit fuck it and resigned myself to the inevitability of a fascist state. It was finally just too much to bear.
Baby I am back! I know it is still an uphill climb and there is no resting on laurels, but god damn I am here for the fight and it is about effing time! Cheers to hope and justice!