Dear Weekend Jolter,
The rational voter would turn to RFK Jr. for three things, and three things only: instruction in falconry, expertise in roadkill-consumption laws by state, and a stinging assessment of why Kamala Harris's campaign is policy-light.
"Who needs a policy when you have Trump to hate?" he said a week ago, as he suspended his campaign and endorsed the Republican nominee.
It was perhaps the truest thing Kennedy said, even if that's not saying much. (Okay, he made a few valid points about censorship and ultra-processed foods, but how much do you want to praise a guy who sees a whale carcass and thinks: Glad I brought a chain saw?)
The Democratic nominee can eschew any commitment to a traditional campaign platform in part because negative partisanship will allow her to capture a near-majority of voters no matter what her policies end up being, when the choice is Harris or Donald Trump. But there's more to it. Her No. 2 position in an unpopular administration puts her in a policy straitjacket: She can't lean into that agenda too much, nor can she convincingly divorce herself from it. And so, as Audrey Fahlberg and Brittany Bernstein report, the message for now is joy, freedom — and TBD.
The campaign has no policy section on its website, has renounced several of the nominee's past positions, and is endorsing plans this cycle that, in key respects, allies and the media insist will not actually become law. Harris's anti-price-gouging plan is already being downplayed as not viable and a mere "messaging tactic," per Politico. In other words, "never mind."
In Thursday's CNN interview alongside Tim Walz, Harris nevertheless talked up that plank of her economic agenda (among others, including a $25,000 credit for first-time homebuyers, despite concerns it could raise the cost of starter homes). Addressing the inconsistencies between her last presidential campaign and this one, she insisted simply that her "values have not changed." The campaign is teasing additional detail. Harris spokeswoman Brooke Goren told NR that voters "can expect more to come from the campaign in terms of her talking about her specific plans." The New York Times reported that aides expect "a few targeted policy proposals, akin to the first planks of an economic agenda she rolled out" — but that the campaign "is unlikely to detail a broader agenda beyond what Mr. Biden has already articulated."
The reality is that the Harris platform remains a mostly black box — and may stay that way, in a stark departure from tradition considering the policy output by this point of the party's 2008 and 2016 nominees, as Audrey and Brittany detail. Jim Geraghty, after watching the CNN sit-down, can only conclude, “This is a campaign built on vibes, and it will remain a campaign built on vibes.” Does it matter? That's the underlying question in Audrey's latest magazine piece, which gets at the central problem for Harris — "figuring out how to present herself to voters as a fresh face and in no way responsible for the inflation, chaos overseas, and surge in illegal immigration that have occurred under the watch of the Biden-Harris administration."
Jim wonders if the candidate can simply get away with running for president without a policy vision. After all, the nominee whose theme is "freedom" would be granting her future administration plenty of it by withholding any agenda by which to be measured. Jim writes,
If Harris wins the election, she'll have an argument that she has a mandate to do whatever she pleases, as very few Americans demanded more specifics from her.
And if she wins, why should any presidential candidate spell out specific policy proposals ever again?
The nominee's convention speech included a few references to policy goals, including pursuing a national abortion bill and reviving the recently failed border bill. But Obama adviser/strategist David Axelrod told Audrey that, while elaborating on the issues is important, "what I don't sense in the public is this hungering for more white papers from her." Axelrod noted that her rival is "not exactly a policy maven." Trump, indeed, is all over the map — on abortion especially. But even Trump has a platform on his website, albeit one that contains as many specifics as it does lower-case letters.
Marc Thiessen, writing in the Washington Post, notes a historical detail that haunts Harris: A sitting VP has been elected president only once in the last 188 years. That was George H. W. Bush, who ran when his boss, Ronald Reagan, was about as above water in public-opinion polls as Harris's is below. "Bush succeeded where other modern vice presidents failed for one simple reason: Americans wanted a third Reagan term. Today, no one wants another Biden term," Thiessen writes.
Harris is understandably reluctant to commit herself to anything resembling such a thing, her economic plan notwithstanding. So, no, don't expect the nominee to suddenly "have a plan for that," à la Elizabeth Warren. That's not this campaign — not this year.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
The Biden team's social-media bullying . . . was not normal: Biden's Social-Media Censorship Regime
"Female inmates should be guaranteed a facility free from men in which to pay their debt to society." Common sense, and yet it's not being followed: The Transgender Prisoner Madness
On the GOP ticket's abortion retreat: Republicans Need to Take a Stand on Abortion
ARTICLES
Dan McLaughlin: Seven Theories of Press Complicity with the Harris Campaign
Philip Klein: How Kamala Harris's First Presidential Campaign Unraveled Thanks to Health-Care Policy
Charles C. W. Cooke: We Have Two Republican Parties
James Lynch: Zuckerberg Admits Facebook Wrong to Suppress Hunter Laptop Story, Scolds White House for Covid Censorship
Andrew C. McCarthy: Israel's Necessary Preemptive Strike against Iran and Hezbollah
Andrew C. McCarthy: Smith's Superseding Indictment Returns Trump Case to Square One
Noah Rothman: Trump's Ridiculers Haven't Learned Their Lesson
Caroline Downey: Male Child Molester Housed in Women's Prison under Investigation for Sexually Harassing Female Cellmate
Ramesh Ponnuru: Trump Stabs Florida Pro-Lifers in the Front
Jimmy Quinn: U.S. Cities Are Awash in Chinese Propaganda. Why Do We Put Up with It?
Steven Camarota: Trump Is Likely Right about Illegal Immigrants Accounting for Job Growth
Abigail Anthony: EU-Funded Scholars Fail to Define 'Sex' or 'Gender' after Five-Year Research Project
Zach Kessel: California School District Ethnic-Studies Committee Awash in Antisemitism, Lawsuit Alleges
David Zimmermann: New England Fishermen Sound the Alarm after Wind Turbine Litters Local Waters with Fiberglass
Wesley J. Smith: The 'Gender-Industrial Complex' Makes Billions Annually
CAPITAL MATTERS
Jon Hartley poses the question: Are those below the median income better off than when Biden took office? The Failure of Bidenomics
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White, on the populism of the new Wahlberg-Berry thriller: The Union Pretends a Deep-State Rescue Mission
Brian Allen takes us on a tour through a famous American writer's "cottage" (to use an elastic definition of the term): A Visit to the Mount, Edith Wharton's Berkshires Estate
EXCERPTS: BELABORING THE POINT, IN HONOR OF LABOR DAY
Philip Klein breaks down why the Harris campaign is so reluctant to expose their candidate to media, looking back to the experience of her 2019 collapse:
While there were other factors leading to her collapse in the polls, the health-care issue dominated conversation during her brief time as a top-tier candidate. In her current campaign, aides claim (without any public explanation from Harris) that she no longer supports Medicare for All, a socialized health-insurance system, despite once claiming she was a strong supporter. Given Harris's reluctant approach to interviews in the current campaign (agreeing to do her first one after more than a month of being a candidate, but only with running mate Tim Walz at her side), it's clear avoiding the 2019 fiasco is no doubt at the front of their minds.
Understanding Harris's problems on health-care policy requires going back to 2017, when as a first-year senator with presidential ambitions, she decided to join other Democrats in co-sponsoring Bernie Sanders's Medicare for All legislation that would have cost $34 trillion and eliminated private insurance for around 180 million people. After Sanders's strong showing in the 2016 primary, the conventional wisdom was that the 2020 Democratic nominee was going to be somebody who would be able to tap into the energy from his movement while being a bit more palatable to the mainstream of the party. At the time, it was not clear that Sanders would try to run again, so there was a chance his supporters would be up for grabs.
In the run-up to her presidential campaign, eager to reassure progressives, Harris stood firmly behind the Sanders plan. She ran an ad on Facebook in the summer of 2018 declaring, "I was proud to be the first Senate Democrat to come out in support of Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All bill." In a January 2019 CNN town hall, she said of private insurance, "Let's eliminate all of that. Let's move on." In February, she told NBC, "I strongly believe that we need to have Medicare for All."
By May, however, as Biden had become front-runner, it was clear there was a bit more appetite for a traditional Democrat, as opposed to a Sanders clone, than originally expected, so Harris tried to pull back a bit. In an interview with Jake Tapper, she claimed when she said "let's eliminate all of that" she actually meant "let's get rid of all the bureaucracy." . . .
This is why it stood out in the June 27 debate, when candidates were asked, "Who here would abolish their private health insurance in favor of a government-run plan?" that she raised her hand alongside Sanders.
Yet as she did a victory lap in interviews after crushing Biden in the debate, Harris walked back the walk-back of her walk-back, claiming that she misunderstood the question to be about whether she would be willing to give up her own personal health insurance for a government-run plan.
Charles C. W. Cooke explains how the Republican Party has bifurcated:
It is true that Trump is a capricious, chaotic bore, and that, in their cowardice, many within the national GOP have allowed him to play with their convictions as if they were plasticine. It is not true, however, that this failing has infected the institution in toto. Indeed, if you can bear to glance past the psychodrama that is this year's presidential election — and to search instead at the state and local levels at which American governance takes place — you will find a Republican Party that, far from being impotent, arbitrary, unmoored, or devoid of ideas, is sensible, focused, and busy contriving and implementing its plans.
I am, I accept, somewhat spoiled in Florida, where, in addition to a remarkable 30-year run of terrific public policy, the state now has a balanced budget and has started paying down the debt. But look elsewhere and you will witness enormous progress, too. In Georgia, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, Iowa, Tennessee, Arizona, and more, Republicans have taken their charge seriously and used the power that they have gained to advance the political ball. In those places, and more, they have cut taxes, reduced regulation, moved toward school choice, protected the right to work, resisted illegal immigration, passed restrictions on abortion, reformed public-school curricula, ushered in permitless carry, and more. Not every state has ticked off every item on that list, and the degree to which each has been able to reach its ideal has been tempered by the usual combination of electoral success and local differences in mood. These failures, however, are not for lack of care or lack of resolve. In Texas last year, Republicans were thwarted in their push for school choice. In response, they primaried the holdouts, and, per Governor Abbott, they now have the votes. That, right there, is how it ought to be done.
In effect, there now exist two sets of Republican Parties in the United States — and, thanks to the repeated mistakes made by primary voters, they seem destined to never meet.
Caroline Downey continues her disturbing but important reporting on the harmful effects of transgender policies in America's prisons:
A male child molester currently being housed in the Washington Corrections Center for Women (WCCW) has repeatedly sexually harassed a female inmate who is herself a victim of child rape, the victim, Mozzy Clark-Sanchez, told National Review.
Prison officials recently notified Clark-Sanchez that her 2022 Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) case against transgender-identifying inmate Christopher Williams has been referred to the state police.
PREA cases are referred to police when the allegations appear to be criminal in nature, according to Department of Corrections (DOC) policy. Asked for comment, the Washington State Patrol confirmed they are currently investigating the case, but no charges have yet been filed.
During the pandemic, Williams, who identified as a woman but has no known female name, asked to be housed with Clark-Sanchez, claiming his roommate was bullying him. But once they were placed together, Williams started making lewd comments toward her.
"I'd be sitting on my bunk and he'd lean over me and he'd be like, 'I hate it when it fills up with blood,'" talking about having an erection, Clark-Sanchez said.
On at least three occasions, Clark-Sanchez woke up to Williams sitting next to her bed. On another occasion, Clark-Sanchez woke up to find Williams's hand under her blanket touching her, she said. A prison guard busted him in the act and scolded him to get back in his bunk.
Honorable Mention
A word from our friends and partners over at National Review Institute. They're hiring! The details:
NRI's Burke to Buckley Fellowship Program is hiring a Future of Freedom Fellow to support the program. This is an early-career role for a self-starter who wants to help grow the program through recruiting and alumni involvement. Ideally, the candidate would reside in NYC, D.C., or Dallas. If you are interested or know someone who might be interested, you can find additional information here on TalentMarket.
CODA
Let's wrap with one last summery song, and then bury those memories good and deep until it's time to emerge from the stupor of prolonged home hibernation sometime next May.
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