Dear Weekend Jolter,
For all the foreseeable trouble Kamala Harris has had making a clean break from the administration in which she serves, Vice President Harris and President Biden are destined for splitsville — just give it a few days. "Garbage"-gate was but one portent.
If Harris wins on Tuesday, Axios reports, "she’s set to clean house and bring in her own people." This, after Biden World had "trash-talked" her right up until handing her the nomination. Picture Dustin Hoffman's triumphant Captain Hook fixing his gimlet eye on the crew as he barks "Who doubted me?" — before locking the infidels in the Boo Box filled with scorpions. The Biden-to-Harris transition would be a lot like that.
And if she loses, well — the recriminations to fly between the Biden and Harris camps will make Henry VIII's separation from Anne Boleyn look like an amicable divorce.
The tensions are evident. Whether or not Biden was caught griping to former President Obama that "she's not as strong as me" — as one "professional lip reader" attested to the New York Post, pertaining to a viral video of the two at Ethel Kennedy's memorial service — the sitting president clearly thinks his would-be successor has needed more of him in her campaign.
Biden reportedly wanted to stump for Harris, but the Harris campaign put him off. Per the NYT:
Officials on Ms. Harris's campaign think that holding joint events with Mr. Biden would "only hurt her" at the most crucial stage of the race, as one adviser put it. That leaves Mr. Biden, who has expressed an interest in helping stump for her in the coming days, left to arrange his own, campaign-approved events through trade groups and unions.
Ouch. As Jim Geraghty writes, it is easy to forget Biden is still the president, "because you see him so rarely, and apparently, that's just the way the Kamala Harris campaign wants it." The Harris camp's cold shoulder toward Biden in the closing days of the election is a clear sign of the frosting-over relationship between them.
In one sense, Kamala Harris owes the world to Joe Biden. He picked her for VP, letting bygones be that even after she publicly flayed him at a primary debate the year before. Then, in deciding to abort his run for a second term after considerable party pressure, he endorsed her and thus helped avert a messy and contested convention out of which she might not have emerged as the nominee. The Biden White House remembers, if Harris doesn't.
But Biden's legacy on inflation and the border and the Afghanistan withdrawal, his persistent unpopularity, and his actions in recent days are a collective burden on her campaign. His at-the-worst-possible-moment "garbage" gaffe, reminiscent of Hillary Clinton's "deplorables," was a gut punch to the Harris operation just when they were making hay of the sophomoric and actually deplorable set delivered by a Trump-rally comedian. Before that, Biden had to correct himself for saying of Donald Trump, "We've got to lock him up"; the slips and other remarks have only served to validate the Harris campaign's preference to keep the president at the White House, ideally in a SCIF. Surely, a Rahm Emanuel type has kept track, too, of all the incremental slights Harris has endured over the years — not just the anonymous criticism but the feeling that, as one ally put it, her portfolio was "trash."
Until the election, however, Harris cannot publicly separate herself from her 2020 running mate and administration partner. As Noah Rothman writes, "If she were to loosen her embrace of the former president, it would instantly become a Republican attack line" and might discourage Democrats. Yet "Harris's dissembling contributes to one of her biggest weaknesses: the perception that she is a creature with no fixed beliefs or values."
He concludes that "if Harris comes up short in November, that will be due in part to the fact that lugging Biden's legacy across the finish line with her was just too heavy a lift." If that happens, expect the grievances above to receive a full airing — and Biden to return serve. From where he sits — even though polls indicated he would have been in for an even tougher slog against Trump — a Harris loss would be seen as concrete confirmation that he should have listened to Jill.
Grab the popcorn.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Another reminder that all that rhetoric about voter suppression in Georgia was a flagrant lie: Democracy Is Alive and Well in Brian Kemp's Georgia
On the WaPo turmoil: Jeff Bezos Is Right
ARTICLES
Rich Lowry: The Strongest Trump We've Ever Seen
Noah Rothman: The Trolling Election
Jim Geraghty: The Democrats' Failure to Self-Scout
Jim Geraghty: That Trump-Rally Comedian Didn't Do the GOP Nominee Any Favors
Philip Klein: Why I'm Skeptical That the MSG Rally Comedian Will Hurt Trump
Abigail Anthony: Finding' Secret' Apostrophes'
Jay Nordlinger: Our Political World, Topsy-Turvy
Haley Strack: Female Autonomy Exists outside of Polling Booths
Andrew McCarthy: The Specters of Self-Pardon and Impeachment in the J6 Case
Brittany Bernstein: Know Who Else Rallied at Madison Square Garden? The Left Finally Stretches the 'Nazi' Charge to Its Breaking Point
James Lynch: As S.F. DA, Harris Raised the Bar for Murder Charges 'Unbelievably High.' So Cops Started Going around Her
Audrey Fahlberg: The $16 Million Effort to Overcome GOP Skepticism on Early Voting in Pennsylvania
Ryan Mills: Newspapers Overwhelmingly Endorse Dems, Slime GOP in Battleground Senate Races
Mark Antonio Wright: Jeff Bezos's Washington Post Op-Ed Is a Remarkable Document
Dan McLaughlin: The Campaign against Justice Gorsuch's New Book Is an Embarrassment
Christian Schneider: The Incredible Shrinking Presidency
Jimmy Quinn: Kathy Hochul's Team Denies Request for Records on Chinese Ties
Frederick Attenborough: Speech Tyranny in the U.K.?
CAPITAL MATTERS
Robert H. Bork Jr. looks at the known unknowns in how the election outcome could affect antitrust-policy enforcement: What Will the Election Mean for Antitrust?
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
A small museum has been gifted 331 works of art and $45 million from an estate. That's a big frickin' deal. From Brian Allen: YUGE Gift to the Clark Art Institute: Philanthropy at Its Best
Armond White has a winner: La Cocina: Best Film of the Year
THE VERY LAST TIME WE'LL EVER HAVE TO WRITE ABOUT THIS ELECTION (right? right??)
In the end, this election was about trolling and "trash" talk. Noah Rothman, who should be credited with that joke, surveys the dumpster fire:
In the waning days of this campaign, America's two major political parties have condemned Americans to litigate which party's voters are, in aggregate, a bigger pile of festering "garbage." In an effort to put that debate to rest, Donald Trump's creative campaign put the candidate in a class 2 high-visibility safety vest and sent him off to a photo-op driving garbage truck.
Calling it his "big, beautiful Make America Great Again garbage truck," Trump twisted the knife Joe Biden absentmindedly plunged into his former running mate's back. "This truck is in honor of Kamala and Joe Biden," he said.
This sideshow, if it is to be remembered at all, will be evaluated in retrospect after Election Day. If Trump emerges victorious, political observers are likely to regard this as a deft exploitation of Biden's gaffe and an overture toward the working-class voters who are likely to make an outsized contribution to his triumph. If he loses, it will be seen as a display of reckless hubris. It's hard to think of something that would tempt the fates more than riding around in your own personally branded waste-disposal unit. A vengeful deity would be hard-pressed to ignore a metaphor for failure like that.
For the time being, however, the event represents a superlative example of the tactic both campaigns have deployed with abandon in this election cycle: trolling.
Kamala Harris and her campaign are not above being gratuitously provocative themselves. The Democratic presidential nominee has sought to drive Trump to distraction by calling the former president's rallies boring, questioning size of his audiences relative to her own rallies, and alleging that Trump's rally-goers can increasingly be seen leaving the proceedings early out of sheer boredom.
We're not just talking about rhetoric. The vice president's campaign has invested resources in the effort to irritate Trump. In September, the campaign released a spot it called "The Best People," which featured clips of former Trump officials reflecting on the risks associated with his reelection, and previewed their intention to air it in places like New York City and West Palm Beach — two locales with limited electoral upside for the Democratic Party, but which maximize the potential for Donald Trump himself to see the ad.
It wasn't the first time the Harris campaign committed capital to its effort to get inside Trump's head. "We thought it was important for Donald to see how much voters hate his Project 2025 plans to control their lives, seek revenge on his enemies, and rule as a dictator on day one," said one Harris campaign spokesperson following the placement of a similar ad in Trump's backyard.
No matter who wins on Tuesday, Democrats should take to heart Jim Geraghty's diagnosis of what is holding them back:
Democrats refused to do any serious "self-scouting" — a hard, unsparing assessment of their own strengths and weaknesses — and now they're left hoping that the early vote lead for Republicans is a mirage and that their own get-out-the-vote operations will be just enough to keep the blue wall in place. . . .
Disgraced former North Carolina senator John Edwards was wrong about a lot of things, but for now let's focus on the fact that there are really three types of Americans: Republicans, Democrats, and independents. And independents perceive the world considerably closer to the Republican view than the Democratic one.
In July, before Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, Gallup found just 4 percent of Republicans approved of the job Biden was doing, and just 31 percent of independents approved of the job he was doing.
But 81 percent of Democrats approved of the job Biden was doing. And that had been the story of Biden's approval rating throughout his presidency. Republicans never liked him; he started with an 11 percent approval rating among self-identified Republicans. Independents gave him a shot — he started with 61 percent of independents approving of the job he was doing in the opening days of his term — until his approval rating among this demographic took a tumble in the summer of 2021 (hello, Afghanistan withdrawal) and never recovered, lingering in the 31 percent to 41 percent range.
But Democrats always cut Biden an enormous amount of slack. Biden started with 98 percent of Democrats approving of the job he was doing.
You find the same dynamic at work in almost every issue before the public.
In September, Gallup asked Americans, "Would you say you and your family are better off now than you were four years ago, or are you worse off now?" Just 7 percent of Republicans said they were better off than they were four years ago, and among independents, just 35 percent said they were better off. But among Democrats, 72 percent told the pollster they were better off now than they were four years ago. . . .
On issue after issue, a majority of independents are closer to the Republican position than the Democratic one. A whole lot of Democrats walk around believing that those who disagree with them are "extreme" or on "the fringe," when in fact they themselves are considerably further from the American center than the typical Republican is.
I suspect this is what people mean when they say America is "a center-right country." It certainly isn't a conservative paradise. But a majority of the public wants public policies steered in a slightly or somewhat rightward direction from the status quo. (I also suspect that in the Trump era, a certain segment of traditionalist Reaganite right-leaning individuals left the GOP and started identifying as independents — so the pool of self-identified independents in polls and the electorate is more instinctively conservative than in, say, the Obama years.)
Sports coaches often talk about the vital skill of "self-scouting" — looking at a team's performance with a gimlet eye and being brutally honest in assessing what's going well and what isn't. For much of the past year, Democrats convinced themselves that Biden was doing fine both in terms of health and performance, that the economy was and is doing fine, and that the electorate approved of how Harris is performing her duties as vice president.
There's been much ado about newspaper endorsements and non-endorsements lately, but the process really doesn't hold much suspense. Ryan Mills takes a close look at how newspapers across the country have approached battleground Senate races:
Michigan voters looking for voting advice in the state's critical U.S. Senate race are told by the Detroit Free Press's editorial board that Republican Mike Rogers "relies on tough-guy talk and manufactured outrage to appeal to voters."
In Florida, Republican Senator Rick Scott is a "partisan apologist" who is rich but "pretends to be a champion of the little guy," according to the left-wing Palm Beach Post.
Pennsylvania Republican Dave McCormick has a simple pitch to voters, the Philadelphia Inquirer says: "Everything is terrible, and it's all [Democratic incumbent Bob] Casey's fault."
And if Republicans in Texas thought the editorial boards at the state's biggest newspapers might have something nice to say about Senator Ted Cruz, think again: Cruz is a "tired act" and an "inveterate provocateur" who specializes in "angertainment," they say.
Those are just some examples of the pro-Democrat, anti-Republican sentiments that the editorial boards of big-city newspapers expressed in their Senate endorsements this year.
Many Democrats were in a huff last week when it was revealed that the leaders of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times had put the kibosh on their papers' endorsements of Democrat Kamala Harris in the presidential race — they say the decisions were made to avoid divisiveness and to reiterate their independence; critics say the moves are acts of "cowardice" in the face of the dire threat that is former president Donald Trump.
But Democrats in most of the states with battleground Senate races can rest easy knowing that their biggest newspapers are almost all supporting team blue in this year's election.
To get a better sense of how invested in Democrats most newspaper editorial boards still are, National Review reviewed the opinion sections of four dozen newspapers in the ten most consequential Senate battleground states: Arizona, Florida, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin.
While most small and mid-sized papers have given up on endorsements in all but an occasional local race, National Review identified 15 papers — mostly big-city dailies — that endorsed in their state's Senate race. Thirteen of them backed the Democrat.
In many cases, the endorsement process has become so predictable (and likely lacking in influence) that Republican candidates have simply stopped participating.
CODA
Some classic Bollywood beats, for Diwali.
Have a restful weekend, and thanks for reading.
Megyn Kelly -> Pete Hegseth responds to 2017 rape accusation. 🔥 vol. 3, issue 13 | December 6, 2024 Quick Hits All the news you need in...
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