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 “whether Walz’s folksy, Midwestern brand can resonate beyond middle America.” Happy Friday.
Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing
—Andrew Egger
Yesterday, I whinged: Madam Vice President, couldn’t 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 wasn’t 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 it’s hard to fault her for moving in that direction only carefully—especially 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, he’s been steamed that he isn’t getting enough of it. Several times now he’s 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 Harris’s 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 Biden’s “border czar,” 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 week’s stock market dip didn’t deepen into an economy-upending crash: “We 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,” he said. “You saw it the other day with the stock market crashing—that was just the beginning. It’s gonna get worse. It’s gonna get a lot worse, in my opinion.”
He seemingly forgot the name of Tim Walz, whom he repeatedly referred to as “the gentleman from Minnesota” or “Kamala’s new friend” and described as “heavy into the transgender world, heavy into lots of different worlds having to do with safety.”
He inexplicably picked a crowd-size fight with Martin Luther King Jr., insisting that the civil rights leader’s March on Washington had been dwarfed by his own January 6th rally—the one that immediately preceded the storming of the Capitol. “Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Trump said. “If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech . . . same real estate, same everything . . . we had more.”
He waved off a question about whether his role in the end of Roe v. Wade would come back to bite him: “I 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.” (Trump declined to say how he intends to vote in Florida’s state-level abortion-rights referendum this year, although he said he planned to announce that later.)
And he said Harris wasn’t smart enough to hold a press conference, while waving off her bump in the polls: “Well, she’s a woman—she represents certain groups of people.”
It’s 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 that’s left is an old man, his acolytes, and his grievances.
That’s not to say Trump can’t win, and it’s certainly not to say he can’t 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
—Bill Kristol
Is there an evil eye emoji? Or more precisely, an emoji that guards against the evil eye? That warns against tempting fate?
I don’t disagree at all with Andrew’s analysis above. And I’ve 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, “Der mentsh trakht un Got lakht.” 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 I’m probably still scarred by the experience of the fall of 2016, when—even though I thought Hillary would win—I did spend some time telling anyone who’d listen that Trump could win. I didn’t think he would, but I’d lived through the1992 election and seen up close and personal how powerful anti-incumbent and “time for a change” sentiment could be. And so it was.
Again, in 2020, while I was pretty confident—the polls were very good—I 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 I’m 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 points—not 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 it’s 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 I’ll be bold, and will close by invoking another expression from the old country: “Fun zayn moyl, in Gots oyer.” From Andrew’s lips to God’s 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 Iran’s first direct attack. Is it ready for the next one? Washington Post
Trump’s 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 Harris’s play-it-safe approach so far and invites us all to check our priors a bit:
In tennis, a “pusher” 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 Kamala’s strategy: don’t 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 Biden’s 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 Harris’s 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 don’t really care about the answers to those questions, at least not in any serious way. On the Democratic side, there’s an energized, good feeling about Campaign Kamala—to a degree not felt, on a Presidential level, since Barack Obama’s last race—and 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 Harris’s 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 issues—even 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 “but her e-mails” 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 Clinton’s e-mail server and still understand that the media should do its job, and interrogate the Harris campaign, especially the parts that don’t 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.
It’s funny the little moments one remembers 50-some years earlier in their lives…
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 Women’s 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 Dean’s testimony. What I remember most about what they were saying was “This is NOT what the Republican Party stands for.” I didn’t follow them, I didn’t 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 Nixon’s resignation, it strikes me as in very stark contrast to how far the Republican Party has fallen in the intervening years. How many of today’s national Republicans can you count that have shown Integrity, have stood for the Rule of Law, our Constitution, and our very Democracy? I’d 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 today’s 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 won’t 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 upheld….