The One Thing Obama Got Wrong
Ultimately, if Trump wins, black male voters won’t be to blame.
Hey, you! Yeah, I’m talking to you, you resident of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, or these cities’ environs!
We’re coming your way next week—come hang out with us! And in the meantime: Happy Friday.
What Obama Said
by Bill Kristol
Barack Obama was on the campaign trail in Pittsburgh yesterday for Kamala Harris. He gave a polished and effective speech before a boisterous crowd. But the most striking moment of his visit were informal comments he made when he stopped by a local campaign headquarters right before.
Obama thanked the volunteers for their efforts. But he decided to say something more. He remarked that he was concerned by a lack of energy on behalf of Harris, one that “seems to be more pronounced with the brothers.”
Obama noted that the apparent lack of enthusiasm among younger black men existed despite the fact that Harris’s opponent has “shown disregard” not just for the black community in general, “but for you as a person.”
What accounts for this? Obama was willing to speculate:
You’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses, I’ve got a problem with that. Because part of it makes me think—and I’m speaking to men directly—part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that. You’re thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you, because you think that’s a sign of strength, because that’s what being a man is? Putting women down? That’s not acceptable.
It was an unusual moment in contemporary American politics: Unscripted, candid, even bold. Obama’s remarks will surely be much commented on in the next few days. They’ll be quoted in longer journalistic and academic articles about race in America, gender in America, the intersection of race and gender in America, and the like. That’s good. We should discuss such sensitive matters openly and candidly.
In that spirit, let me make two points.
The first is that Harris is doing as well among younger black voters as Joe Biden was. Maybe sexism is holding her back from doing much better than Biden. Still, the fact remains that black Americans—including younger black men—are overwhelmingly going to vote for the Harris-Walz ticket, and against Donald Trump. There will be more defections among young black men than among older black voters or black women, but Harris still wins young black men by better than two-to-one.
The more important point is this: If you believe it’s important to defeat Trump, it’s not Obama’s “brothers” who are the problem. It’s my “brothers” who are the problem: white voters.
You want to know why Trump has a decent chance to win the presidency again? Because most white Americans support him. In the latest New York Times/Siena poll, Trump wins white voters by 52 percent to 44 percent.
And while Trump has an almost two-to-one margin among white non-college graduates, he doesn’t do that badly with white college graduates, taking close to two-in-five of that cohort. This is a much higher percentage of support for Trump than among any group of black Americans.
So all credit to Obama for trying to persuade members of his own community, who voted overwhelmingly for him, to turn out as strongly for Harris. It would be nice if others who’d gotten tens of millions of votes for president, such as George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, were also out there trying to persuade those Americans who voted for them—which includes a majority of white voters—to do the same.
But that’s apparently too much to ask.
What’s not too much to ask is that we recognize this fact: If Trump wins on November 5, it will be because of his support from a majority of white America. As a white American, and a white American man to boot, I’ve got to say, in the immortal words of Pogo: We have met the enemy and he is us.
8 Miles of Stupid
by Andrew Egger
You’ve probably seen the headline out of Donald Trump’s speech yesterday to the Detroit Economic Club: Trump decided to trash Detroit, in Detroit. “Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if [Kamala Harris] is your president. You’re going to have a mess on your hands.”
Naturally, this drew widespread attention and denunciations, from Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan to Harris herself.
And yet this wasn’t some gaffe or aberration on Trump’s part. The guy has trashed a number of American cities routinely, for years, as cautionary tales of Democratic policy run amok. There’s little reason to believe this sort of thing hurts him with voters.
The press is good at covering Trump when he plays the jerk or the villain. But I’ve wondered for a while whether so much focus on those elements of his persona actually play to Trump’s benefit. Some people see his badness as some kind of bankshot testament to his ruthless policy efficiency. He doesn’t get caught up in PC nonsense. He delivers hard truths and makes the trains run on time.
But of course that’s not true, which is the other main thing that comes through when you actually watch Trump for any length of time: He’s a blowhard doofus with soup for brains. Open up a video of his full remarks from Detroit, click on any spot at random, and you’ll see the real Trump on full display—tonelessly phoning in his teleprompted speech for a bit, then taking a quick vacation to ramble into the most insipid cul-de-sacs of ad-libbing you’ve ever seen:
For generations, this city and state were the world capital of automotive production, and American automakers rolled one iconic model off the line after the next—the Mustang, the Corvette, the Pontiac GTO—I had two of them actually. I had that GTO, oh, I thought I was the hottest guy around, it was crazy. We didn’t have all of the foreign competition then. We were so proud to have the Corvette—oh, if you had a Corvette—I never got a Corvette, I tell you, I feel—I was left behind. But I had my GTO, I was something, man. I put that top down. See in those days I didn’t mind when the hair waved. I’d go fast and that hair would be waving, that blonde hair, and I’d say, ‘Who the hell can take me?’ Nobody. Today I’m a little more careful. I want to cover up that little area up there. It’s a little bit soft up there. Cover it up. No, it was great. But you did, you had the greatest product. It was just fantastic.
Vote for Trump! You’re gonna feel cool, like you used to, back when you had all your hair!
A bit later, Trump had another important score to settle: with the New York Times’s Peter Baker, who has written about Trump’s claims to have once been honored in Michigan as somebody’s “man of the year.” Trump actually brought a physical prop for this one, pulling a printout of a news article out of his jacket pocket:
The fake news, we have such fake news. I mean, I’ve had a recent thing where, as an example, an Obama disciple named Peter Baker—he writes for the failing New York Times—he wrote a piece about me, and just one of the many things he said that was wrong, he said that I would go around saying that I was honored here years ago as the Man of the Year or whatever. And I talked about how your car industry—this was long before, many years before I ran for president, maybe 18 or 20 years ago. And he made the statement that that never took place. That honor never took place. I was never honored here. Which was quite insulting, actually. I didn’t remember the specifics of it, it was 18 or 20 years ago. But he said it never took place. Much like Kamala said she worked at McDonalds and she didn’t. I didn’t want to get into that. So what I did is, I asked my people, you’ve got to find it. When, it was like 19 years—it was a long time. But I was honored. And guess what? They found it. I was.
In fact, the local paper whose printout Trump was brandishing said afterward that their article had been mistaken: Trump never had actually been declared “man of the year” after all. But more to the point: Who could possibly care about any of this? How is this possibly part of Trump’s closing pitch, with weeks to go before the election?
The answer, of course, is that it’s important to Trump for the same reason everything is important to Trump. Anything that inflates his ego is worth fighting for. In that way, of course, Trump’s stupidity and his evil overlap: He needs to have been man of the year in Michigan decades ago for the same reason he needed to try to steal the 2020 election.
Still, maybe we should all be making an effort to focus on the stupid a bit more.
Quick Hits
THE SILVER TONGUE: One other highlight worth noting from Obama’s Pittsburgh rally yesterday: the way he tackled a segment on January 6th.
“Donald Trump was told that Mike Pence was in the Capitol, about 40 feet from an angry mob chanting ‘Hang Mike Pence.’ And his response was, ‘So what?’” Obama said. “If Donald Trump does not care that a mob might attack his own vice president, do you think he cares about you?”
As JVL pointed out on YouTube last night, we live in a clown world where a whole lot of voters aren’t sparing much of a thought to what one of the candidates tried to do after he lost the last election. But voters are plainly responding to Harris’s ‘Trump’s not in this for you’ messaging; after all, she’s increasingly leaned into it as her main theme. Obama smartly weaved that messaging into a point he was making about January 6th.
We’d prefer to live in a world where one didn’t have to practice rhetorical jujitsu just to make people remember an attempt to steal a presidential election four years ago! But that’s the world we do live in, and it was artfully done.
WITH ELITES LIKE THESE: The New York Times reports this morning that Elon Musk is throwing himself personally into the election “in a manner unprecedented in modern history.”
The Times notes that Musk “is now talking to the Republican candidate multiple times a week” and “has effectively moved his base of operations to Pennsylvania, the place that he has recently told confidants he believes is the linchpin to Mr. Trump’s reelection.”
He has also funded his super PAC with tens of millions of dollars and “proposed taking a campaign bus tour across Pennsylvania and knocking on doors himself, in part to see how his money is being used.”
It’s a remarkable and scary thing to watch: the world’s richest man basically trying to buy an election, with promises from his candidate that he will then get to oversee a massive government portfolio. Read the whole thing.
TUCKED INSIDE THAT PIECE . . . was news that after hacked materials from the Trump campaign were reported, campaign aides connected with officials at Musk’s platform, X, “to prevent the circulation of links to the material.” And, well, would you look at that: “X eventually blocked links to the material and suspended the reporter’s account.”
We’re old enough to remember when Trump world and Musk thought that allegations the 2020 Biden campaign backchanneled to Twitter was a massive scandal. Hell, we even read the credulous coverage of the “Twitter Files.”
CAUGHT IN THE ACT!: Another day, another “they’re sneaking Kamala the right answers” conspiracy theory—this time involving her Univision town hall event last night, after an early shot panning over Harris’s shoulder briefly showed some text on a teleprompter before fading to black.
“BREAKING: Univision accidentally broadcast proof that Kamala used a teleprompter at her town hall,” professional yeller and sometime Russian asset Benny Johnson exclaimed. “Watch them panic when they realized they were showing the prompter live on-air.”
The Univision interview host, Enrique Acevedo, spoke up quickly to debunk Johnson: “The prompter displayed my introduction (in Spanish) and then it switched to a timer. Any claim to the contrary is simply untrue.” (Johnson’s post had racked up about 5 million views; naturally, the correction got about a tenth of that.)
The claim is ridiculous on its face: Harris is supposedly so incapable of speaking off the cuff that she needs to be fed her lines at all times, but she somehow doesn’t miss a beat when the prompter goes offline? But Benny doesn’t hear your dunks and corrections—he’s already off to the next ridiculous thing.
Cheap Shots
Okay, we can’t help it—here’s one more moment from Detroit:
Andrew: blow hard doofus with soup for brains. Amen!
Bill: white men (like me, too) are the problem. Amen!
10/10 today. No notes.
Kamala Harris had a great convention. She wiped the floor with Donald Trump at the debate. She has had a near perfect campaign. He has had a campaign that would sink anybody, anybody! (after everything he has said and done) So why does Harris have the same small national lead (2.5%) now as she had after the convention? Why is it simply a toss up? As a never ever Trumper from the jump, the only conclusion I come up with is that nothing Harris says or does help her. Conversely, nothing Trump says or does hurt him. The Walt Kelley line from Pogo is accurate. And so is Tom Nichol's; "We are not a serious nation". Hopefully, Kamala's ground game is the difference. Hopefully.