Boy, did I pick a bad time to take a break ...
And hello from the Lone Star State!
It’s been a long strange journey but we finally arrived in Texas a couple of weeks ago, setting up shop in a San Antonio suburb to be near my son, his partner and our first grandchild. I’ll write more about Texas later, especially its cultural and political climates, which are about as different from New England/New York as you could get and still be in the same country.
So much has happened since I filed my last meaningful dispatch on July 14, the day after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. The next day, Trump was nominated for the third consecutive time as the Republican presidential nominee, along with his running mate, the sharp-elbowed chameleon Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio. While we were on the road on July 21, somewhere in central Arkansas, President Joe Biden withdrew under intense pressure as the Democratic nominee and threw his support to Vice President Kamala Harris.
Harris has injected much-needed energy into the Democratic campaign but a surprisingly level of bitterness remains on the part of progressives who feel Biden was unduly hounded from his post by news media and the punditocracy. This facile assertion ignores the reality that the greatest pressure was exerted by Democratic Party elders such as Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer who, along with major donors, were convinced by internal polling that the 81-year-old Biden’s continued presence on the ticket would lead the party to certain ruin across-the-board.
From where I sit, Harris is not the strongest Democratic candidate to defeat Trump. The party has a number of sitting governors and senators who are much more capable politicians. You might recall that Harris ran a very poor campaign for president in 2020 and dropped out before any votes were cast in the primaries. Her campaign had run out of money early, had no real message and had high staff turnover and burnout. Or, as the New York Times reported (free link) at the time: “She has proved to be an uneven campaigner who changes her message and tactics to little effect and has a staff torn into factions.”
Has she learned from those mistakes and become a better candidate and politician? Time will tell. But the greater liability might lie in some of the policies she has endorsed in the past. During her 2020 presidential run, Harris put forth some very progressive policies that will not appeal to the swing voters she needs to win over. All you have to do is roll the tape.
“The archive is deep,” Brad Todd, a Republican strategist and ad maker told the New York Times (free link). “We will run out of time before we run out of video clips of Kamala Harris saying wacky California liberal things.”
Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Dish put it better than I could:
Harris favored decriminalizing illegal border crossings, free healthcare for all illegal immigrants, funded bail for BLM rioters, abolition of private health insurance, a ban on fracking, and replacing ICE — “starting from scratch.” She is committed to the woke concept of “equity”, which means ensuring that all identity groups in America “end up in the same place” by government intervention. She favors what we now know are irreversible medical experiments on gay, autistic and trans children. She supports reparations for slavery. She wants to inculcate the core ideas of critical race, gender and queer theory in public schools from kindergarten onward.
I’m not suggesting those are all bad ideas, but they will be a tough sell to folks in the Middle America swing states whose votes she needs in order to save us from four more years of Trump. These attacks on her earlier positions began in earnest last month before Biden even withdrew. How will she explain herself to moderate voters in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, Virginia?
Perhaps she could just play it straight and confess that when she was running in the 2020 primaries, she needed the votes of activists who dwell on the fringes, so she adopted those positions but would never pursue most of them if she actually won the presidency. Of course, that would make her look like a phony, but is she really any different from countless other presidential candidates over the last few decades who initially courted those on the margins where the energy is, but then moved to the center to win the general election?
Or she could simply use the old standby excuse for presidential candidates who disavow their prior out-of-the-mainstream positions:
A Sister Souljah moment wouldn’t hurt either.
It goes without saying that Trump’s past statements and policies should also be scrutinized, but it feels like we’ve been over this a thousand times. Despite her three and half years as veep, Harris seems like the new kid on the block and she will therefore receive more scrutiny, especially if she does not hold new conferences or sit for interviews with journalists. Speaking of sitting for interviews with journalists …
The excitement about Harris quickly eclipsed the Trump campaign’s profile, so Harris’ opponent decided he needed to inject himself into the news cycle by agreeing to be interviewed by the National Association of Black Journalists and attacking Harris by questioning her racial identity. It was a disgusting display, but Trump got himself back into the conversation and managed to insert the subject of race into the campaign, as he did with the “birther” nonsense about Barack Obama more than 10 years ago. Think about it: by questioning whether Harris was black or Indian, he suggested biracial persons need to identify as one or the other. They must choose.
In case you missed it, the uncomfortable exchange with ABC’s Rachel Scott concerning Harris’ racial identity begins early at 3:30:
By the way, I’ve been spending some time on Threads, the social media platform started by Facebook’s parent company, Meta. Based on what I see in my feed, it is essentially a progressive echo chamber. In the weeks after Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June, an enormous schism developed between liberals who wanted Biden to stay and those who thought he should step aside. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post came under intense criticism for coverage that was alleged to be anti-Biden. Dozens of people I encountered canceled their subscriptions.
Yesterday, we saw a timely reminder of how important those publications still are. The Post published some excellent investigative work exposing how the Trump Justice Department managed to stymie an investigation into the Egyptian government's attempt to inject $10 million into Trump’s 2016 campaign. This is precisely the kind of Egyptian bribery of which Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez was convicted last month.
Clicking “cancel” might make you feel better if you see some headlines or stories that don’t comport with your views, but these news organizations are among the few remaining that have the staff required to produce this kind of work:
$10M cash withdrawal drove secret probe into whether Trump took money from Egypt -Aaron C. Davis and Carol D. Leonnig, Washington Post (free link)
For those of you who don’t follow me on social media, here is some news you might not have heard. From San Antonio:
You saved the best for last. You hold the sun in your arms! Here's to the delightful times you have now together. best wishes.
Marvelous...both the words and the illustration!!!!