#Clinton Presidential Center

[streamingthruamerica]

Getting to Denver--Part 1

Much has happened since leaving Bonnaroo for Denver. There's been a long-distance get-together in Rogers, Arkansas with a nursery school buddy from Pittsburgh...

[deadpresidents]

"Everyone was calling everyone. I was honored to call one of the family members of the 9/11 victims; I called the House Homeland Security Committee and [Secretary of Homeland Security] Janet Napolitano. While I was in the Situation Room, I overheard one of the White House operations, saying [on the phone], 'Oh, I'm so sorry -- I didn't know you didn't work for President Clinton anymore. Do you know where I can reach him?' President Obama was calling his predecessors, George W. Bush and President Clinton. The operator is trying to find President Clinton. I looked at him and I said, 'Hold on one minute.' And I stepped back into the main room, [Secretary of State] Hillary [Clinton] was there, and I said, 'Madam Secretary, I'm really sorry to bother you, but do you have your husband's phone number?'

-- Mike Leiter, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, on the immediate aftermath of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011. President Obama was trying to get in touch with his immediate predecessors to notify them about the successful special forces operation and bin Laden's death, but there was some trouble finding contact information for former President Bill Clinton until Leiter realized he could simply ask Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the former President's phone number.

[dlyarchitecture]

[thenewdemocratus]

Movie Clips: Primary Colors (1998)

. Source:The Daily Press I saw the movie Primary Colors in the spring of 1998. Doesn’t seem that long ago, but that’s a different story with a long time friend of mine from high school who’ll go nameless. And we saw it for free because my friend worked at a movie theater, one of the few perks of being friends of him. And I looked forward to seeing this movie, because it reminded me of a real life…

[mariacallous]

The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer.

Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”.

Most voters, he says, “have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy.”

Lamenting the state of the media recently on X, Jeff Jarvis, another former editor and newspaper columnist, said: “What ‘press’? The broken and vindictive Times? The newly Murdochian Post? Hedge-fund newspaper husks? Rudderless CNN or NPR? Murdoch’s fascist media?”

These critics are responding to how the behemoths of the industry seem intent on bending the facts to fit their frameworks and agendas. In pursuit of clickbait content centered on conflicts and personalities, they follow each other into informational stampedes and confirmation bubbles.

They pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans, especially Donald Trump, whose gibberish gets translated into English and whose past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over. They neglect, again and again, important stories with real consequences. This is not entirely new – in a scathing analysis of 2016 election coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that “in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election” – but it’s gotten worse, and a lot of insiders have gotten sick of it.

In July, ordinary people on social media decided to share information about the rightwing Project 2025 and did a superb job of raising public awareness about it, while the press obsessed about Joe Biden’s age and health. NBC did report on this grassroots education effort, but did so using the “both sides are equally valid” framework often deployed by mainstream media, saying the agenda is “championed by some creators as a guide to less government oversight and slammed by others as a road map to an authoritarian takeover of America”. There is no valid case it brings less government oversight.

In an even more outrageous case, the New York Times ran a story comparing the Democratic and Republican plans to increase the housing supply – which treated Trump’s plans for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants as just another housing-supply strategy that might work or might not. (That it would create massive human rights violations and likely lead to huge civil disturbances was one overlooked factor, though the fact that some of these immigrants are key to the building trades was mentioned.)

Other stories of pressing concern are either picked up and dropped or just neglected overall, as with Trump’s threats to dismantle a huge portion of the climate legislation that is both the Biden administration’s signal achievement and crucial for the fate of the planet. The Washington Post editorial board did offer this risibly feeble critique on 17 August: “It would no doubt be better for the climate if the US president acknowledged the reality of global warming – rather than calling it a scam, as Mr Trump has.”

While the press blamed Biden for failing to communicate his achievements, which is part of his job, it’s their whole job to do so. The Climate Jobs National Resource Center reports that the Inflation Reduction Act has created “a combined potential of over $2tn in investment, 1,091,966 megawatts of clean power, and approximately 3,947,670 jobs”, but few Americans have any sense of what the bill has achieved or even that the economy is by many measures strong.

Last winter, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has a Nobel prize in economics, told Greg Sargent on the latter’s Daily Blast podcast that when he writes positive pieces about the Biden economy, his editor asks “don’t you want to qualify” it; “aren’t people upset by X, Y and Z and shouldn’t you be acknowledging that?”

Meanwhile in an accusatory piece about Kamala Harris headlined When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?, a Washington Post columnist declares in another case of bothsiderism: “Voters want to blame someone for high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate greed. Harris has chosen the latter.” The evidence that corporations have jacked up prices and are reaping huge profits is easy to find, but facts don’t matter much in this kind of opining.

It’s hard to gloat over the decline of these dinosaurs of American media, when a free press and a well-informed electorate are both crucial to democracy. The alternatives to the major news outlets simply don’t reach enough readers and listeners, though the non-profit investigative outfit ProPublica and progressive magazines such as the New Republic and Mother Jones, are doing a lot of the best reporting and commentary.

Earlier this year, when Alabama senator Katie Britt gave her loopy rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union address, it was an independent journalist, Jonathan Katz, who broke the story on TikTok that her claims about a victim of sex trafficking contained significant falsehoods. The big news outlets picked up the scoop from him, making me wonder what their staffs of hundreds were doing that night.

A host of brilliant journalists young and old, have started independent newsletters, covering tech, the state of the media, politics, climate, reproductive rights and virtually everything else, but their reach is too modest to make them a replacement for the big newspapers and networks. The great exception might be historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose newsletter and Facebook followers give her a readership not much smaller than that of the Washington Post. The tremendous success of her sober, historically grounded (and footnoted!) news summaries and reflections bespeaks a hunger for real news.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Conservatives are fringe outliers - and leftists could learn from them

The Republican Party, a coalition between Big Business farmers and turkeys who’ll vote for Christmas (Red Scare obsessed cowards, apocalyptic white nationalists, religious fanatics, etc) has fallen to its bizarre, violent, noisy radical wing, who are obsessed with policies that are completely irrelevant to the majority of Americans.

As Oliver Willis writes, the views of the radical right — which are also the policies of the GOP — are wildly out of step with the US political view:

https://www.oliverexplains.com/p/conservatives-arent-like-normal-americans

The press likes to frame American politics as “narrowly divided,” but the reality is that Republicans’ electoral victories are due to voter suppression and antimajoritarian institutions (the Senate and Electoral College, etc), not popularity. Democrats consistently outperform the GOP in national races. Dems won majorities in 1992/6, and beat the GOP in 2000, 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020. The only presidential race the GOP won on popular votes since 1988 was 2004, when GW Bush eked out a plurality (not a majority).

But, as Willis says, Dems “act like it is 1984 and that they are outliers in a nation of Reagan voters,” echoing a stilted media narrative. The GOP’s platform just isn’t popular. Take the groomer panic: 71% of Americans approve of same-sex marriage. The people losing their shit about queer people are a strange, tiny minority.

Every one of the GOP’s tentpole issues is wildly unpopular: expanding access to assault rifles, banning immigration, lowering taxes on the rich, cutting social programs, forcing pregnant people to bear unwanted children, etc. This is true all the way up to the GOP’s coalescing support for Trump as their 2024 candidate. Trump has lost every popular vote he’s ever stood for, and owes his term in the Oval Office to the antimajoritarian Electoral College system, gerrymandering, and massive voter suppression.

Willis correctly points out that Dem leaders are basically “normal” center-right politicians, not radicals. And, unlike their GOP counterparts, politicians like Clinton, Obama and Biden don’t hide their disdain for the radical wing of their party. Even never-Trumper Republicans are afraid of their base. Romney declared himself “severely conservative” and McCain “put scare quotes around ‘health of the mother’ provisions for abortion rights.”

The GOP fringe imposes incredible discipline on their leaders. Take all the nonsense about “woke capitalism”: on the one hand, it’s absurd to call union-busting, tax-dodging, worker-screwing companies “woke” (even if they sell Pride flags for a couple of weeks every year).

But on the other hand? The GOP leadership have actually declared war on the biggest corporations in America, to the point that the WSJ says that “Republicans and Big Business broke up”:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/republicans-corporations-donations-pacs-9b5b202b

But America is a two-party system and there are plenty of people who’ll pull the lever for any Republican. This means that when the GOP comes under the control of its swivel-eyed loon wing, the swivel-eyed loons wield power far beyond the number of people who agree with them.

There’s an important lesson there for Dems, whose establishment is volubly proud of its independence from its voters. The Biden administration is a weirdly perfect illustration of this “independence.” The Biden admin is a kind of referee, doling out policies and appointments to its competing wings, without any coherence or consistency.

That’s how you get incredible appointments like Lina Khan at the FTC and Jonathan Kanter at the DoJ Antitrust Division and Rohit Chopra at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureat — the progressive wing of the party bargained for these key appointments and then played their cards very well, getting incredible, hard-charging, hyper-competent fighters in those roles.

Likewise, Jared Bernstein, finally confirmed as Council of Economic Advisers chair after an interminable wrangle:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-06-16-team-biden/

And Julie Su, acting labor secretary, who just delivered a six-year contract to west coast dockworkers with 8–10% raises in the first year, paid retroactively for the year they worked without a contract:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/06/14/statement-from-president-biden-on-labor-agreement-at-west-coast-ports/

But the Biden admin’s unwillingness to side with one wing of the party also produces catastrophic failures, like the martyrdom of Gigi Sohn, who was subjected to years of vicious personal attacks while awaiting confirmation to the FCC, undefended by the Biden admin, left to twist in the wind until she gave it up as a bad job:

https://doctorow.medium.com/culture-war-bullshit-stole-your-broadband-4ce1ffb16dc5

It’s how we get key roles filled by do-nothing seatwarmers like Pete Buttigieg, who has the same sweeping powers that Lina Khan is wielding so deftly at the FTC, but who lacks either the will or the skill to wield those same powers at the Department of Transport:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/11/dinah-wont-you-blow/#ecp

By refusing to stand for anything except a fair division of powers among different Democratic Party blocs, the Biden admin ends up undercutting itself. Take right to repair, a centerpiece of the administration’s agenda, subject of a historic executive order and FTC regulation:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

Right to Repair fights have been carried out at the state level for years, with the biggest victory coming in Massachusetts, where an automotive R2R ballot initiative won overwhelming support in 2020:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/13/said-no-one-ever/#r2r

But despite the massive support for automotive right to repair in the Bay State, Big Car has managed to delay the implementation of the new law for years, tying up the state in expensive, time-consuming litigation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/26/nixing-the-fix/#r2r

But eventually, even the most expensive delaying tactic fails. Car manufacturers were set to come under the state right to repair rule this month, but they got a last minute reprieve, from Biden’s own National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, who sent urgent letters to every major car manufacturer, telling them to ignore the Massachusetts repair law:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7bbkv/biden-administration-tells-car-companies-to-ignore-right-to-repair-law-people-overwhelmingly-voted-for

The NHTSA repeats the car lobby’s own scare stories about “cybersecurity” that they blitzed to Massachusetts voters in the runup to the ballot initiative:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

The idea that cybersecurity is best maintained by letting powerful corporations gouge you on service and parts is belied by independent experts, like SecuRepairs, who do important work countering the FUD thrown off by the industry (and parroted by Biden’s NHTSA):

https://securepairs.org/

Independent security experts are clear that letting owners of high-tech devices decide who fixes them, what software they run, etc, makes us safer:

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2022/01/letter-to-the-us-senate-judiciary-committee-on-app-stores.html

But here we are: the Biden admin is sabotaging the Biden admin, because the Biden admin isn’t an administration, it’s a system for ensuring proportional representation of different parts of the Democratic Party coalition.

This isn’t just bad for policy, it’s bad politics, too. It presumes that if some Democratic voters want pizza, and others want hamburgers, that you can please everyone by serving up pizzaburgers. No one wants a pizzaburger:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/23/narrative-warfare/#giridharadas

The failure to deliver a coherent, muscular vision for a climate-ready, anti-Gilded Age America has left the Democrats vulnerable. Because while the radical proposals of the GOP fringe may not enjoy much support, there are large majorities of Americans who have lost faith in the status quo and are totally uninterested in the Pizzaburger Party.

Nowhere is this better explained than in Naomi Klein’s superb long-form article on RFK Jr’s presidential bid in The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/14/ignoring-robert-f-kennedy-jr-not-an-option

Don’t get me wrong, RFK Jr is a Very Bad Politician, for all the reasons that Klein lays out. He’s an anti-vaxxer, a conspiracist, and his support for ending American military aggression, defending human rights, and addressing the climate emergency is laughably thin.

But as Klein points out, RFK Jr is not peddling pizzaburgers. He is tapping into a legitimate rage:

a great many voters are hurting and rightfully angry: about powerful corporations controlling their democracy and profiting off disease and poverty. About endless wars draining national coffers and maiming their kids. About stagnating wages and soaring costs. This is the world — inflamed on every level — that the two-party duopoly has knowingly created.

RFK Jr is campaigning against “the corrupt merger between state and corporate power,” against drug monopolies setting our national health agenda, and polluters capturing environmental regulators.

As Klein says, despite RFK Jr’s willing to say the unsayable, and tap into the yearning among the majority of American voters for something different, he’s not running a campaign rooted in finally telling the American public “the truth.” Rather, “public discourse filled with unsayable and unspeakable subjects is fertile territory for all manner of hucksters positioning themselves as uniquely courageous truth tellers.”

We’ve been here before. Remember Trump campaigning against a “rigged system” and promising to “make America great again?” Remember Clinton’s rejoinder that “America was already great?” It’s hard to imagine a worse response to legitimate outrage — over corporate capture, declining wages and living conditions; and spiraling health, education and shelter costs.

Sure, it was obvious that Trump was a beneficiary of the rigged system, and that he would rig it further, but at least he admitted it was rigged, not “already great.”

The Democratic Party is not in thrall to labor unions, or racial equality activists, or people who care about gender justice or the climate emergency. Unlike the GOP, the Dem establishment has figured out how to keep a grip on power within their own party — at the expense of exercising power in America, even when they hold office.

But unlike culture war nonsense, shared prosperity, fairness, care, and sound environmental policies are very popular in America. Some people have been poisoned against politics altogether and sunk into nihilism, while others have been duped into thinking that America can’t afford to look after its people.

In this regard, winning the American electorate is a macrocosm for the way labor activists win union majorities in the workplaces they organize. In her memoir A Collective Bargain, Jane McAlevey describes how union organizers contend with everything that progressive politicians must overcome. A union drive takes place in the teeth of unfair laws, on a tilted playing field that allows bosses to gerrymander some workers’ votes and suppress others’ altogether. These bosses have far more resources than the workers, and they spend millions on disinformation campaigns, forcing workers to attend long propaganda sessions on pain of dismissal.

https://doctorow.medium.com/a-collective-bargain-a48925f944fe

But despite all this, labor organizers win union elections and strike votes, and they do so with stupendous majorities — 95% or higher. This is how the most important labor victories of our day were won: the 2019 LA teachers’ strike won everything. Not just higher wages, but consellors in schools, mandatory greenspace for every school in LA, an end to ICE shakedowns of immigrant parents at the school-gate, and immigration law help for students and their families. What’s more, the teachers used their unity, their connection to the community, and their numbers to get out the vote in the next election, winning the marginal seats that delivered 2020’s Democratic Congressional majority.

As I wrote in my review of MacAlevey’s book:

For McAlevey, saving America is just a scaled up version of the union organizer’s day-job. First, we fix the corrupt union, firing its sellout leaders and replacing them with fighters. Then, we organize supermajorities, person-to-person, in a methodical, organized fashion. Then we win votes, using those supermajorities to overpower the dirty tricks that rig the elections against us. Then we stay activated, because winning the vote is just the start of the fight.

It’s a far cry from the Democratic Party consultant’s “data-driven” microtargeting strategy based on eking out tiny, fragile majorities with Facebook ads. That’s a strategy that fails in the face of even a small and disorganized voter-suppression campaign — it it’s doomed in today’s all-out assault on fair elections.

What’s more, the consultants’ microtargeting strategy treats people as if the only thing they have to contribute is casting a ballot every couple years. A sleeping electorate will never win the fights that matter — the fight to save our planet, and to abolish billionaires.

If only the Democratic Party was as scared of its base as the Republicans are of their own.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

[Image ID: The title page of Richard Hofstadter's 'Paranoid Style in American Politics' from the November, 1964 issue of Harper's Magazine. A John Birch Society pin reading 'This is REPUBLIC not a DEMOCRACY: let's keep it that way' sits atop the page, obscuring the introductory paragraph.]

[probablyasocialecologist]

Harris stretched her coalition into incoherence. Inhumanly—as well as fruitlessly—she attempted to score points from the right on immigration, accusing Trump of insufficient dedication to building the wall. Her cack-handed performances of sympathy with Palestinians accompanied an evident commitment to follow Benjamin Netanyahu into a regional war. The Harris campaign featured a grab bag of policies, some good, some bad, but sharing no clear thematic unity or vision. She almost always offered evasive answers to challenging questions. And she adopted a generally aristocratic rather than demotic manner, which placed the candidate and her elite friends and allies at the center rather than the people they sought to represent. In these ways, Harris repeated not only Hillary Clinton’s errors but many of the same ones that she herself had made in her ill-starred 2019 presidential campaign, which opportunistically tacked left rather than right, but with equal insincerity and incoherence. Who remembers that campaign’s biggest moment, when she attacked Biden for his opposition to busing and what it would have implied for a younger version of herself, only to reveal when questioned that she also opposed busing? Or when she endorsed Medicare for All, raising her hand in a debate for the idea of private insurance abolition, only to later claim she hadn’t understood the question? Voters, then as now, found her vacuous and unintelligible, a politician of pure artifice seemingly without ideological depths she could draw from and externalize. She often gave the sense of a student caught without having done her homework, trying to work out what she was supposed to say rather than expressing any underlying, decided position. Even abortion rights, her strongest issue, felt at times like a rhetorical prop, given her own and her party’s inaction in the years prior to Dobbs. How many times before had Democrats promised to institutionalize and expand the protections of Roe, only to drop the matter after November?

[...]

The Democrats, in other words, comprehensively failed to set the terms of ideological debate in any respect. Their defensiveness and hypocrisy served only to give encouragement to Trump while demobilizing their own voters, whom they will no doubt now blame—as though millions of disaggregated, disorganized individuals can constitute a culpable agent in the same way a political party’s leadership can. But the party’s leaders are to blame, not that many in the center have cared or even seemed willing to reflect on a decade of catastrophe. Has anyone who complained that the 2020 George Floyd rebellion would cost Democrats votes due to the extremism of its associated demands reckoned with the empirical finding that the opposite proved true? That the narrow victory of Biden in 2020 was likely attributable to noisy protests that liberals wished would be quieter and calmer? Has anyone acknowledged the unique popularity of Sanders with Latinx voters, a once-core constituency that the Democrats are now on the verge of losing outright? The pathologies of the Democrats, though, are in a sense not the result of errors. It is the structural role and composition of the party that produces its duplicitous and incoherent orientation. It is the mainstream party of globalized neoliberal capitalism, and at the same time, by tradition anyway, the party of the working class. As the organized power of the latter has been washed away, the commitment has become somewhat more aspirational: Harris notably cleaned up with the richest income bracket of voters. The only issues on which Harris hinted of a break with Biden concerned more favorable treatment of the billionaires who surrounded her, and her closest advisers included figures like David Plouffe, former senior vice president of Uber, and Harris’s brother-in-law Tony West, formerly the chief legal officer of Uber, who successfully urged her to drop Biden-era populism and cultivate relations with corporate allies.

8 November 2024

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

* * * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 10, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Sep 11, 2024

Former president Trump has always approached debates as professional wrestling events in which the key is not to explain policies or answer questions, but rather to demonstrate dominance over your opponent. In 2016 the Democratic nominee, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, had a hard time countering this strategy effectively because of the many expectations of what was appropriate behavior for a female presidential candidate. In 2020 and then again in the June 2024 “debate,” Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s stutter made it difficult to counter Trump’s scattershot attacks.

The question for Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris in tonight’s presidential debate was not how to answer policy questions, but how to counter Trump’s dominance displays while also appealing to the American people.  

She and her team figured it out, and today they played the former president brilliantly. He took the bait, and tonight he self-destructed. In a live debate, on national television. 

The Harris campaign began the day trolling Trump with a new campaign ad featuring the pieces of former president Barack Obama’s speech at the August Democratic National Convention that concerned Trump. “Here’s a 78-year-old billionaire”—the ad cuts to a photo of Trump in a golf cart—“who has not stopped whining about his problems.” Then a clip of Trump shows him complaining about Harris’s crowds, before Obama notes Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes,” complete with Obama’s hand motion suggesting Trump’s sizes were small. “It just goes on, and on, and on,” Obama says, before the ad shows empty seats and people yawning at Trump’s rallies.

“America’s ready for a new chapter,” Obama says to the overflow crowd cheering at Chicago’s United Center during the Democratic National Convention. “We are ready for a President Kamala Harris!” At the end, even Harris’s standard statement, “I’m Kamala Harris and I approved this message,” sounds like a challenge.

This morning, the Harris campaign began running the ad on the Fox News Channel. 

At the same time, they began running Philadelphia-themed ads across the city on billboards, in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and on food trucks and taxi cabs, sidewalk art, and digital projections making fun of Trump’s fascination with crowd sizes. They showed, for example, a full-sized Philadelphia pretzel labeled “Harris” alongside a piece of one that looked like an upside down U labeled “Trump.”

The taunting might have been behind Trump’s demand for loyalty from Republican lawmakers this afternoon, telling them to shut down the government if he doesn’t get his way on the inclusion of a voter suppression measure in the bill to fund the government. The right has often relied on threats of government shutdowns to try to get their way, but such shutdowns are never popular, and even moderate Republicans are leery of launching one just before an election.

Nonetheless, Trump tried to lock them into such a shutdown, reiterating in a post this afternoon the lie that undocumented immigrants are voting in presidential elections. “If Republicans in the House, and Senate, don’t get absolute assurances on Election Security, THEY SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD WITH A CONTINUING RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET. THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO ‘STUFF’ VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS. DON’T LET IT HAPPEN—CLOSE IT DOWN.” 

Throughout the day, the Harris campaign placed posts on social media showing Harris looking crisp and presidential and Trump looking old and unkempt. And then, for ten minutes in the hour before the debate, the Harris campaign held a drone show over the Philadelphia Museum of Art showing campaign slogans and then turning the words “MADAM VICE PRESIDENT” into “MADAM PRESIDENT.” 

Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported today that Trump’s advisors were concerned ahead of the debate about whether they would get “happy Trump” or “angry Trump,” worrying that a frustrated Trump would engage in the vicious personal attacks that turn voters off. They expressed relief that having the microphones muted when it was not a candidate’s turn to speak would prevent Harris from irritating him with fact checks and snark of her own. Conservative lawyer George Conway noted that it was “[i]nteresting how one campaign is extremely concerned about the emotional stability of its candidate, and how the other is not.”

Harris’s attacks on Trump, including her campaign’s subtle digs at his masculinity, appeared to have accomplished what they set out to. When the two came out on stage, he went straight to his podium, while she strode across the stage, moved into his space, held out her hand, introduced herself and wished him well: “Kamala Harris. Have a good debate.” He muttered in response, “Nice to see you.” Then she took her own spot at the podium. When the debate opened, it was clear that Harris was the dominant figure and that her opponent was “angry Trump.” He would not look at her during the debate.

In her first answer, Harris tried to set out both her own story as a child of the middle class and how she intended to build an opportunity economy for others, lowering food and housing costs and opening the way for more small businesses. It was a lot, quickly, and she looked a little nervous.

Then Trump spoke and it was clear he was going off the rails. His first comment was to suggest Harris was lying, and then to insist that his proposed tariffs will solve everything, although he has the way tariffs work entirely backward: they are paid by the consumer, not by foreign countries. As he followed with a long list of his rally lies, Harris started to smile.  

From then on, he continued to produce rally stories full of wild exaggerations and attack Harris with lies in what CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale called “a staggeringly dishonest debate performance from former president Trump.” "No major presidential candidate before Donald Trump has ever lied with this kind of frequency,” Dale said. “A remarkably large chunk of what he said tonight was just not true. This wasn't little exaggerations, political spin. A lot of his false claims were untethered to reality." As Harris spoke directly to the American people, growing stronger and stronger, Trump got wilder and angrier and told more and more crazy stories. 

And then, about ten minutes into the debate, Harris baited him. She invited the American people to go to one of his rallies, where “he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter, he will talk about ‘windmills cause cancer.’ And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.” 

Trump lost it. He defended his rallies, said Harris couldn’t get anyone to attend hers and has to bus in attendees (in reality, her rallies are packed and he is the one who reportedly hires attendees), and then, in his fury, repeated the lie about immigrants eating pets. When a moderator fact-checked that story, he fought back, saying he heard it on television.

And from then on, Harris kept baiting him while explaining her own policies directly to the camera, and he took the bait every single time. He ran down every rabbit hole and appeared unable to finish a thought. Notably, he refused to say he would not sign a national abortion ban and admitted that after nine years of promising one, he had no health care plan (he has, he said, “concepts of a plan,” and if they pan out, he’ll let us know in the “not too distant future”). 

He threatened World War III and repeated that the U.S. is “a failing nation.” He told a long story about threatening “Abdul,” the leader of the Taliban; in fact, the leader of the Taliban since 2016 is Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada. In response to Harris’s statement that foreign leaders thought he was a disgrace, Trump answered that Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who destroyed his country’s democracy and replaced it with a dictatorship, says he’s a good leader. New York Times columnist David French wrote: “It's like she's debating MAGA Twitter come to life.”

The debate moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis of ABC, asked solid questions and corrected the most egregious of Trump’s lies. But as he continued to interrupt and yell at Harris, they increasingly gave him leeway to do so. This meant he spoke more often and for more time than Harris; MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle reported that he spoke 39 times for a total of 41.9 minutes, to her 23 times for a total of 37.1 minutes. But the extra time did him no favors.

By the end of the evening, Harris had delivered a clear message about her hopes to move the country forward beyond years of using race to divide people who have far more in common than they have differences. She promised to develop an economy that will build small businesses and support a growing middle class, while protecting rights, including the right to make reproductive decisions without the intrusion of the state. And she showed the nation that Trump can be baited, that he lies freely and incoherently, and—perhaps crucially—that he is no longer the dominant politician in America.  

Immediately after the debate, the Harris campaign continued their demonstration of dominance. Harris-Walz campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon released a statement recapping Harris’s strength and Trump’s angry incoherence. She concluded: “Vice President Harris is ready for a second debate. Is Donald Trump?”

Then things got even worse for Trump. 

Music phenomenon Taylor Swift endorsed Harris, telling her 283 million Instagram followers that she felt she had to because of Trump’s earlier reposting of an AI image of her seeming to endorse him. That, she said, “brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth. I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election.”

After explaining why she was supporting Harris and Walz and urging her fans to do their own research, Swift signed off: “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[seinfelt]

The Gamesman

Due to a miscommunication, Jerry gets booked to play a couple nights at a goth jazz club. After his first set completely bombs—so disastrously that not a single person laughs even once and many even boo him and shout "this isn't music!"—he finds himself so distraught and depressed that all he can talk about is how "the Woe Clef killed comedy!"

Kramer finds an old Nintendo Entertainment System in a trash can on his way home from riding the escalators at Macy's. Jammed inside of it is a Tetris game cartridge, which he is unable to dislodge despite his best efforts with a butter knife he'd been carrying around in his back pocket. Back at his apartment he hooks it up and turns it on and discovers he can't stop playing. Ignoring the occasional ringing phone and knock at the door, he stays glued to the screen, amassing a higher and higher score.

George keeps misusing the phrase "it takes two to tango", to the increasing agitation of everyone around him. Jerry rants to him about his humiliating experience at the Woe Clef, and how they canceled his second performance. "The Woe Clef doesn't even know what comedy is!" he wails. George nods sagely and tells him, "you know, it takes two to tango."

Desperate for someone other than George to talk to about his grievance, Jerry finally forces his way into Kramer's apartment and discovers him leaning so precariously forward at the edge of his recliner that it's tipping off its back legs. He tries calling out to him, "I've been canceled by the Woe Clef," but Kramer's focus never once leaves the TV. "That's great, Jerry," he mutters dreamily. Exasperated, Jerry storms out, slamming the door so hard it startles Kramer into a reflexive flinch. The movement is just enough to tilt his center of balance far enough forward that he flips his chair on top of himself and ends up pinned beneath, landing with his face pressed down on the Nintendo's controller. Panicking, he begins to struggle, but realizes that making certain facial expressions allows him to control the game just fine. Stuck like some sort of upholstered turtle, he continues his marathon gaming session for hours until his score grows high enough to crash the game. Finally snapped out of his captivation, he struggles to free himself, wiggling back and forth until the chair falls sideways between him and his coffee table. The resulting tremor knocks his television off its stand and onto the floor, and the linear alignment of objects causes Kramer and his toppled belongings to blink several times and disappear.

While flipping through the channels, George catches a scene from an old movie where a woman dances the tango with two men. His jaw drops and he falls off the couch, then scampers into the secret second bedroom he keeps hidden behind a bookshelf. He pulls a tarp off a whiteboard revealing an elaborate equation and assesses it for a while before adding a ">" next to the "=" to the left of the number 2 on line 18. On a nearby table, a jar filled with strange black slime suddenly begins to shimmy rhythmically. "Finally!" bellows George with a maniacal cackle, "the dance dance revolution can begin!"

Elaine is confused but flattered when Bill Clinton drops out of the Presidential race and pledges his full support for her candidacy.

[simply-ivanka]

Why Do the Young Vote Left?

Socialist teachers lead them to think of government as a free-money tree.

It’s the gifts. The progressive vibe is that big government will take care of you. It knows what’s best for you. It will redistribute money how it pleases. You need to put a smile on your face while it takes away your laurels, guns and money. “We believe in the collective,” Ms. Harris declared, much like Hillary Clinton’s “it takes a village.” Equity in Schenectady. Handouts for all.

You want proof? Ms. Harris’s Senate voting record is leftward of socialist Bernie Sanders. Vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz fawns over China, saying “everyone is the same and everyone shares.” Viva la revolución and Che Guevara T-shirts for all.

This is antifreedom. Too many of today’s youth fall in line with progressives because they’re undereducated and overindoctrinated with someone else’s agenda. I watched in horror as local high-school biology classes spent weeks on the science of recycling centers and only a short afternoon on mitochondria and mitosis. Profit is a bad word. It’s gimme, gimme, whether it’s student loan forgiveness, free healthcare or tax credits.

Who’s to blame? Misguided capitalism-hating social-studies teachers to start, with Tim Walzian thinking: “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.” Who is he, Mr. Rogers? Add like-minded college professors. Work ethic and ambition are evaporating.

Worse, Pew Research notes almost a third of currently childless 18- to 34-year-olds aren’t sure if they ever want children. Why? The Harris campaign’s “climate engagement director,” Camila Thorndike, is among the hesitant, telling the Washington Post, “I want to protect them from suffering.” Perpetually pessimistic progressive prognostications induce fear. No wonder U.S. fertility rates are at historic lows.

OK, I know I’m asking for trouble. Every time I write about youth, I get a chorus of comments and tweets telling me I’m an old man screaming, “Hey you kids, get off my lawn.” Yeah, yeah. Very clever. I’m not that old. But in the Kamala collective—as California attempted—private “ornamental” lawns are out, and drought-resistant vegetation is in. Progressives literally want you off your own lawn.

My conversations with young folks who do exhibit some actual drive show their confusion: “I want to do a startup.” Great! To do what? “A sustainable something or other. To save the planet.” OK, is it productive? “What’s that?” Does it scale? “Huh?” Will it do more with less? “Not really, it needs lots of money to keep going and save more of the world.” Sounds like a nonprofit. (That usually invokes a smile.) Actually, wealth comes from delivering ever-cheaper stuff to millions of people, not handouts. “I don’t care about money.”

OK, I say, but progress and societal wealth happen when you delight customers and postpone consumption to reinvest profits into better products. The looks on their faces are as if I’m describing Chinese arithmetic.

Our youth aren’t lazy but lost. Progressives have strong opinions about society but no viable solution beyond handing out other people’s money—taken from the few who actually are productive, drive progress and generate wealth by fulfilling customer needs. It’s a downward spiral: When progressives tax—screaming “fair share!”—they cripple the productive few who actually create the real non-burger-flipping, get-out-of-your-parent’s-basement jobs.

To aggressive progressives, government is simply a magic money tree. Vote left and dollars appear. The gross incompetence of government—think billions for eight electric vehicle chargers—destroyed healthcare (thank you, ObamaCare) and education (assisted by Randi Weingarten’s teachers union) and is close to destroying energy (net zero), even while the Biden-Harris administration works hard to destroy Big Tech—one of the few productive industries. And I’ll never forgive progressive Hollywood for turning “Star Wars” into unwatchable wokey Wookiee drivel.

What industries will be left standing? Who cares, because the dreamy types think generative artificial intelligence will kill all jobs and government will provide universal basic income so they can Zyn, TikTok and play College Football 25 videogames all day. A naive youthful triumphalism.

This is a false endgame. There is so much more to be invented: drugs, immunotherapy, fusion, self-folding clothes, humanoid robotics, flying cars. Hard brain work plus quality recharging leisure time is the goal, not a nation of welfare queens.

I feel sorry for the youth that do care, do work hard, are productive and help push the boulder of progress up that steep slope, while essentially carrying all the others on their backs. It’s you against the collective, the village, which is always about being supported, pampered, living off someone else’s hard work and then complaining that the handouts aren’t big enough. So, yeah, get off my lawn, while lawns are still allowed.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Nikki McCann Ramírez at Rolling Stone:

The Democratic National Convention kicked off with a heavy dose of star power on Monday, with everyone from Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr to former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaking in support of Vice President Kamala Harris. But no one worked the crowd into more of a frenzy than Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). 

“I’m here tonight because America has before us a rare and precious opportunity,” she said. “In Kamala Harris, we have a chance to elect a president who is for the middle class because she is from the middle class.”  Much like the early messaging of the Harris/Walz campaign, Ocasio-Cortez’s speech centered on the issues plaguing working-class Americans.  “Donald Trump would sell this country for $1 if it meant lining his own pockets and greasing the palms of his Wall Street friends,” she added. “I for one am tired of hearing about up how a two-bit union buster thinks of himself as more of a patriot woman who fights to lift working people up every single day.”  Ocasio-Cortez noted that Republicans often attack her past work as a bartender. They have “attacked me by saying that I should go back to bartending. But let me tell you I’m happy to any day of the week because there is nothing wrong with working for a living,” she declared. “Imagine having leaders in the White House who understand that.” 

Ocasio-Cortez also threw an indirect nod to protesters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and an arms embargo against Israel. Thousands descended upon Chicago to affirm their calls for Vice President Kamala Harris to break with President Joe Biden and endorse a harder stance against the Israeli government and their ongoing siege on Gaza.  Harris has been “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home,” Ocasio-Cortez said in her speech. 

Last night at the DNC, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) torched Donald Trump in her speech good.

AOC delivered this money quote: “Donald Trump would sell this country for $1 if it meant lining his own pockets and greasing the palms of his Wall Street friends. I for one am tired of hearing about up how a two-bit union buster thinks of himself as more of a patriot woman who fights to lift working people up every single day.” #DNC2024 #DemConvention

See Also:

Daily Kos: AOC fires up DNC crowd with scorching swipe at 'two-bit union buster' Trump

[fluidstatick]

Dear Left-of-Center American,

So you're not in a swing state, you hate the electoral system we've got, and you want to cast a protest vote, or abstain entirely.

Consider this:

If you vote blue, you suck the joy out of the other guy voting red.

Walk with me --

Biden's terrible, you said, repeatedly, last week. He's always been terrible. And I don't disagree with you. He's done a lot of bad things. There's blood on his hands. That's true of every president America has ever had. (Yes, Carter too. Don't get distracted. Stay with me, here.)

Now that Biden's dropped out, you still don't want to vote. Harris has done a lot of shady things. You point to Haiti, California's prisons, her voting record on various and sundry policies that you like or don't like. But I'm looking you in the eyes. I'm holding out my hands. I'm asking you, gently, to step away from the receipts and look at the basic arithmetic of the two party system.

Yknow that person? The one that looks at you funny, like you're either pitiable or disgusting -- Yeah, that one. Maybe you can think of a few. The terven evangelical lady who won't stop sending you anons about gender essentialism and hellfire. The old man you keep running into on the city bus, who loudly scoffs to the guy two seats over "these damn liberals have no shame anymore." The college jock with the massive lifted pickup truck covered in maga stickers. The grey suited board member on c-span who stares dead-eyed at nothing while one of your comrades tries to explain to him why he should care about other people. You know the ones.

Those people vote. They love voting. If they go to church, their clergy encourages them to make godly decisions at the polls. It's a sacred privilege, but it's also fun for them. They love their superhero candidate. They're voting for International Prom King. They're simping over their man so hard it's their entire personality from May to the following January and beyond.

Those people that don't like you started planning for the 2024 election the moment they understood they couldn't scream and curse Joe out of the white house. This is every competitive sport on earth combined for them. They vote because they love the idea of helping their guy score the ultimate super mega touchdown of all time. These people gameify their elections. They're giddy about watching results pour in.

When I was very small, I listened to my lifelong democrat parents criticize Bush Sr. They didn't think I understood what they were talking about, but I knew the man was powerful and was making decisions that made things more difficult for people. I watched Bill Clinton make life easier for my parents, and Americans like them, for eight solid years. (Yes, I learned about bombs and lobbyists and oil subsidies, too. Don't get distracted.) I watched Gore lose the 2000 election, slowly and painfully over the course of weeks. I learned about gerrymandering and voter suppression and swing states and delegates.

And then. When I was in my late teens, too naive to know better, I dated a staunch conservative. The first presidential election I was old enough to participate in was 2004. I was living with the aforementioned conservative. When our voter's pamphlets arrived in the mail in mid October he handed mine to me and said, grimly, "You're gonna vote for Kerry, aren't you?"

I said "of course I am."

He tossed his voter's pamphlet in the trash and said "See, you liberals annoy me. What's the point of me doing my civic duty as an American id you're just going to cancel it out by voting for a socialist?"

(Kerry was not a socialist.)

Bush won a second term in 2004. It wasn't nearly as close as Bush/Gore, because Americans were still deeply paranoid about terrorism, preoccupied with Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. Kerry ran on economics. Bush ran on Islamophobia. But I pissed off my conservative boyfriend, his parents, and half of his friends. We broke up not long after that.

And my point is: If you can't convince yourself to show up at the polls in support of the Democratic nominee, and you can't imagine your deeply red state flupping blue, or your historically blue state drifting purple: Imagine looking your most obnoxious bigoted neighbor in the eye and telling them "I voted for the one you don't like. If you think about it, it's like you didn't vote at all."

Is that how voting works? Of course not. Will it piss em off? Yeah, probably.

Vote to spite an asshole with a punchable face, if you want. Just fuckin' vote.

[deadpresidents]

Is it true that Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have an uneasy relationship?

I'm sure everything has mellowed over the years since Clinton left office, but they absolutely had a frosty relationship. They had issues dating back to when Clinton was Governor of Arkansas and Carter was still the incumbent President and they seemed to pick up where they left off once Clinton was in the White House.

In fact, there was tension between Carter and his four immediate successors (Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43). While most former Presidents of the post-World War II era have largely avoided criticizing the incumbent Presidents, Carter was often very candid about certain policy or political issues after leaving office. Carter's work around the globe with the Carter Center was also sometimes seen as influencing or interfering with White House initiatives or events for several different Administrations.

As Jonathan Alter wrote in his excellent 2020 biography of Carter, His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO):

Carter traveled to more than 140 countries after leaving office -- returning to several of them more than a dozen times -- and he said he always kept the State Department apprised of his trips. But the notifications were often pro forma, as if he merely had to check a box before going off on his own. It was no secret that Carter was not a member in good standing of the ex-Presidents' club, in part because he never accepted their code. The unwritten rules aren't complicated: former Presidents are expected to build their libraries and at least try to hold their tongues about the incumbent, not complain -- as Carter often did -- that the policy is wrong or they are underused by the President. No one sitting in the Oval Office likes the idea of a freelance Secretary of State. At the same time, five of the six Presidents who succeeded Carter (all except Reagan) recognized the usefulness of his vast knowledge and high-level contacts. The challenge for them was managing their high-maintenance predecessor. When Carter was President, he took care to cultivate relationships with his living predecessors -- Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford -- and he welcomed their support on China, the Panama Canal, and other issues. After leaving office, he got along exceptionally well with Ford, who joined him on several post-Presidential projects. Ford and Carter promised that each would deliver the eulogy if the other died first. Ford did, and Carter remembered him warmly at his funeral in 2006. George H.W. Bush believed the Ford-Carter bond "set a wonderful example of cooperation and friendship" between old rivals. Carter's successors were a different matter. He said he had "okay relations" with the Bushes -- especially George H.W. Bush -- and Donald Trump in his first two years. It was the Democratic Presidents, Clinton and Obama, whom he found "cooler and more aloof." No one who watched their interactions over the years would be left to wonder why.

Regarding that relationship between Carter and Clinton, Alter also wrote:

During the 1992 Presidential campaign, the tensions between Carter and Bill Clinton of a dozen years earlier resurfaced. "People are looking for somebody who is honest and tells the truth," Carter said in a remark that took on added meaning because it came amid the first national stories of Governor Clinton lying about sex. Clinton, for his part, worried that Carter's failures as President would rub off on another southern governor and hurt his chances. After the election, Clinton wouldn't take Carter's calls. He finally handed him off to Warren Christopher, his transition director and choice for Secretary of State. "Chris" quickly grew tired of Carter, too, and fobbed him off on his undersecretary, Peter Tarnoff. Carter felt snubbed. Clinton's basic problem with Carter was that he too often crossed the line from expressing his views on a subject to saying the President "should" do something. Carter admitted later that while he didn't intend to be personally critical, "I may not always have succeeded.".... ....As Carter moved around the world, the Clinton White House had no confidence that he would limit himself to his assigned mission without making concessions that the President never approved. The White House knew that Carter understood that recalling a former chief executive like some errant ambassador was difficult if not impossible, which meant that he could hog glory and operate outside the President's control. This happened twice in 1994 [in North Korea and Haiti], a year that was simultaneously the peak of Carter's success as a peacemaker and the nadir of his forty-year relationship with Clinton.

[a-very-tired-jew]

Suffice to say this feels like 2016 again for me.

Many of us had said Hilary wouldn’t win against Trump then, and we said the same thing about Kamala.

Hilary was burdened by the fact that by 2015 the Clinton name was suffused in conspiracy. You couldn’t exist anywhere without some form of Clinton Conspiracy being present. Left, Right, Center, extremes… everyone had them. It didn’t matter how good Bill’s presidency was, the conspiracies were so prevalent and damaging that the writing was on the walls even before she was the official nominee. It was the “if she gets it, we’re fucked because of this”.

But the DNC chose Hilary because she was a safe candidate that they tried to sell as a good candidate. And arguably she was, if it wasn’t for all the baggage.

Kamala is Hilary 2.0. She doesn’t have the burden of Clinton dynasty level conspiracies, but she does come with the baggage of being the VP of the Biden administration. The current admin isn’t exactly the most liked and voter apathy and dislike can easily be exploited with a “weren’t things better under me?” by Trump (and they were because Presidential policies have an effect down the line, not immediately).

They tried to run what they thought was a safe candidate, and in the early days of her candidacy there was some talk that this was a bad idea. That just because she was younger didn’t mean she’d win. She didn’t have the benefit of being meme’d into the public consciousness like Biden did during the Obama years.

She didn’t have the benefit of being “not Trump” because she’s part of the current administration and Trump was a future possibility, not the now that voters dwell in. The now dictates that she and her policies were the issue if they were a continuance of the current administration.

She didn’t have the benefit of being “not Biden” because she’s just a safe continuation of Biden Presidency policies. None of these policies really made big splashes and many people are not aware of the benefits they have received from Biden’s term in office.

The gamble of a safe candidate of an honestly milquetoast presidency and a continuation of its policies did not pay off, and it’s exactly what many people were worried about.

To further elucidate this point, also think back to the 2016 election and the social aspects of the presidential campaigns and their candidates. As I said above, Hilary was burdened with the conspiracies about her and her family. Memes, jokes, and articles about her existed in a primarily negative stance, she had negative social capital. Conversely, Bernie had very positive social capital, very few negative memes and articles about him, and so many people wanted to vote for him across the political spectrum.

But he was not the “safe” candidate.

He was considered “risky” even though he polled better than Hilary routinely. Part of this is due to the differences in social capital.

Kamala’s campaign didn’t even have social capital until the debates.

Yes, there was some from previous years and we sort of knew what she did prior to being VP, but she wasn’t cemented in the public psyche. If there had been some effort to generate social capital over the course of the Biden administration then maybe there would have been a better chance. Biden’s campaign in 2020 benefited from his establishment in the public psyche through the memes about him during the Obama years. But we haven’t seen anything like that regarding Kamala at all. The only real meme to come out of the Biden admin is “Dark Brandon” and that’s it. As such, Kamala came into this race with negative social capital from her attachment to the current admin and its policies and no beneficial memes until it was too late.

Meanwhile, Trump has existed in the public psyche for over a decade and has a strong social media and meme presence. For as much negative social capital he has on one side, he has an abundance of positive on the other.

You can’t run a “safe” candidate against someone with Trump’s presence and social capital. You have to run someone on equal footing. If they had reran Biden and leaned into “Dark Brandon” there might have been a chance. If they had run Bernie there might have been a chance (yes, even with him being a Jew).

But Kamala? She was just a safe choice like Hilary was. All the warning signs were there and people pointed them out. But as it goes here in the States “If the Dems are so good, why do they lose so fucking much?” and it’s because they don’t listen. They only win when people are reminded how bad things are under right wing policies. They never listen to maintain their control or power because then they revert to outdated “safe” strategies that don’t work.

So idk if we’ll go full authoritarian government with no democratic future as Trump has wanted, but I do know we’ll repeat this in 8 years.

I’m tired as fuck as this pattern repeats so much that for once I’d like to not have a “I told you so” moment that didn’t come with a side of “we’re fucked”. But that’s the American experience for you.

[thenewdemocratus]

Liberal Values: Ron Chusid: 'Al Gore As The Liberal Alternative To Hillary Clinton?'

Source:Liberal Values I’ve blogged several times even within the last year that the Democratic Party needs to challenge Hillary Clinton with a center-left liberal challenger. And if Hillary does end up as the Democratic nominee for president, she’ll need that challenge as well for her to the strongest presidential candidate in the fall of 2016. That gets here out of this run for the middle…

[mariacallous]

Presidential debates have impact when they address questions and concerns about the candidates that are top of mind for voters. As the crucial presidential debate began, in a race that was statistically dead even, both candidates had work to do.

Kamala Harris faced three key challenges. First, 37% to 42% of voters in some swing states knew virtually nothing about her except that she serves as Joe Biden’s vice president. Filling in this gap, or at least beginning to, was job one. From the very first minutes of the debate, it was clear that she knew she had to define herself and that she did—as a child of the middle class who, in contrast to Trump, was not given $400 million to start a business. In addition, she repeatedly came back to her experience as a prosecutor.

Second, Harris has shifted her position on many important issues—health care (Medicare for All), climate change (fracking), and immigration (decriminalizing border crossings), among others—since she ran for the nomination in 2020. This left people wondering, what kind of Democrat is she—a classic California progressive or the next generation of the Clinton, Obama, and Biden-style center-left? She had to persuade voters that the new version of Kamala Harris is the one they will get if she is elected.

Here her performance was more mixed. She explained her shift on fracking but didn’t give as clean and crisp an answer as she could have on other issues where Trump has accused her of flip-flopping. However, she defended the Biden administration and her participation in the bipartisan immigration legislation that Trump killed, she let the audience know that both she and Tim Walz are gun owners who have no intention of taking away people’s guns, and she pushed back against the charge that she was weak on crime by emphasizing her experience and record as a prosecutor who put criminals behind bars.    

Third, as is the case with every candidate who hasn’t previously occupied the presidency, Harris had to convince swing voters that she has what it takes to serve effectively as the nation’s chief executive and commander-in-chief. Simply put, they needed to be able to see her as big enough to be president, a barrier that some previous candidates, such as Michael Dukakis in 1988, failed to cross.

Harris passed this test easily. She never got flustered, she made her points concisely and quickly, and she spoke with confidence about traditionally “male” issues like war, defense, crime, and foreign policy.

What did Trump have to do in this debate? Two things.

First of all, he had to come across as someone who is not mean and angry, obsessed with the past and prone to conspiracy theorizing. His campaign aides have urged him to fight Kamala on the issues. Yet, on the stump, Trump can’t seem to stick to the script. He reads the policy portions of his speeches with an obvious lack of enthusiasm and returns often to complaining about alleged ballot fraud in 2020, insulting Harris, and unearthing conspiracy theories that make little sense.

Trump began the debate with the advice from his advisors ringing in his head. His first answer on the economy took aim at the Biden record, one of the issues on which he has held a consistent lead throughout the campaign. But as time went on, his debate performance took the same course as the Trump rallies. He turned nearly every question into an answer about the threats from illegal immigration. Like the economy, this has been a good issue for him, but he did begin to sound like a Johnny One Note on the topic, and it is not clear that this issue is as powerful in swing states like Pennsylvania as it is in border or more Republican states.

Also, as the debate wore on, Trump simply could not stay away from weird stuff. He insisted that Democrats favored killing babies after they were born and allowing abortion in the ninth month. And he repeated a story about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio killing and eating people’s cats and dogs. One of the moderators, David Muir, had to step in to point out that reporters had called Springfield city officials who had investigated the story and found it simply wasn’t true.

The second thing Trump needed to do was differentiate himself from the most extreme stances of his party—many of which are described by his former aides in Project 2025. As he has done in the past, he distanced himself from this document during the debate, claiming “I have nothing to do with Project 2025. I haven’t even read it.” 

Although there are many questionable policies being considered by Trump and the right wing of the Republican Party, such as slapping huge tariffs on U.S. imports and deporting millions of immigrants—by far the most dangerous one for him politically is abortion. On that issue, his answer was, as it has always been, that everything is okay because now the states are deciding it. Not surprisingly, Harris’ attack on abortion was exceptionally strong. She pointed out the many states that have passed highly restrictive abortion policies and, in some cases, have criminalized the behavior of doctors who are providing reproductive services. Abortion rights is the single most helpful issue for the Democrats in 2024.

Republican strategists keep hoping the abortion issue can be buried, but recent steps by Trump allies in Florida and Texas have kept it alive. In the debate, Trump tried to distance himself from the extremes, arguing that he would approve of abortions for rape and incest and even going so far as to say the Florida six-week ban is too short. Nonetheless, the coalition he leads isn’t happy with his nods to moderation, and it is likely many Americans will continue to believe that he would sign a national abortion ban if a Republican Congress sent it to his desk.

In conclusion, there are three kinds of presidential debates. The first is when one candidate lands a knockout blow against the other, as Ronald Reagan did with Jimmy Carter in 1980. The second is when the debate does little if anything to change the flow of the race; the Clinton/Dole debates in 1996 are a good example. The third, intermediate outcome occurs when a debate yields an advantage to one candidate without ending the other’s chance to win, as happened when Mitt Romney bested President Obama in their first debate in 2012.

The first (and perhaps only) debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris falls into this last category. After a month-long Harris surge that erased the advantage Trump had developed over President Biden, the race had stabilized during the past two weeks. This debate seems likely to put new wind in Harris’ sails. Whether it will be enough to propel her to victory in the Electoral College remains to be seen. But her campaign and supporters leave the debate with renewed energy and hope. By contrast, the Trump campaign must reckon with the likelihood that their candidate’s performance pleased his base without rallying many new supporters to his side.

Throughout the race, Trump has enjoyed a solid lead on the question of strong leadership. While he may still hold an advantage, most Americans who watched the debate probably saw in Kamala Harris an adversary who held her ground, went on the attack whenever possible, and refused to be intimidated. This matters.

On the face of it, the Trump campaign has an incentive to seek a rematch. If it does, the Harris campaign will probably insist on rules more to its liking. If not, this debate will stand as the last high-profile event before the November 5 election and as the race devolves into trench warfare—a battle of communications and organization in the states that will decide the outcome.

Finally—in the minutes after the debate closed—the galactically famous singer Taylor Swift announced she would be voting for Kamala Harris. In today’s world, this may be worth as much or even more than Harris’ solid debate performance.