"Short Race"?

Two pieces in two days at Real Clear Politics say Kamala has the benefit of a "short" presidential campaign. Yesterday, Sean Trende concluded:

In short, we can’t think of this campaign as a traditional campaign. It’s a sprint, and a shorter sprint than people acknowledge.

This morning, Karl Rove echoed:

This presidential election was one of America’s longest: . . . But with Mr. Biden’s withdrawal and replacement by Vice President Kamala Harris, it suddenly became one of the shortest.

Regular visitors know that my estimate of both Karl Rove and Sean Trende isn't high, but here I think they've about pegged out on the obtuseness meter. The traditional start of the presidential campaign season is Labor Day, but even if we put the start farther back at the summer nominating conventions, which is when we learn for sure who the actual nominees will be, I don't see how this year's schedule differs much from any other.

In fact, it's very similar to 1972, the campaign nobody wants to mention. That year, Thomas Eagleton was replaced as George McGovern's vice presidential nominee on August 1, which forced a campaign reboot much like this year's replacement of Joe with Kamala -- but we're on almost precisely the same schedule now.

Karl Rove's op-ed at The Wall Street Journal is behind their paywall -- normally, aggregators aren't supposed to link to something behind a paywall -- but from the little we can read, I think his argument must be very close to Trende's. Trende says,

This campaign is a lot like the old kids’ game of “don’t let the balloon touch the ground.” . . . Kids bounce a balloon around, and they do so until the balloon touches the ground. In the long run, kids can’t really win the game, as gravity inevitably wins out. But if the goal is to pass time while parents pull together some last minute aspect of the party, the kids can theoretically win.

Well, I must have gone to a lot of well-run parties when I was a kid, because I never played this game and hadn't heard of it. But Trende's implication seems to be that this is something parents use to distract kids' attention from the fact that the magician didn't show up, or maybe the party store was out of piñatas. In other words, this is a suddenly improvised Plan B, which simply doens't bode well. Trende himself acknowledxges that gravity is likely to win.

As I've been saying since Joe withdrew, the basic Democrat problem is there's been no serious Plan B, not just for this year's campaign, but since Obama's second term, when he had no clear successor. Obama chose Biden as his running mate in 2008 because, as a white Catholic from a southern state, he balanced the ticket, but he was also, even as of 2008, too old to upstage Obama and not terribly bright as well. Obama clearly never thoujght Joe was any sort of credible successor.

Obama favored Hillary, the 2016 election turned out to be a fluke, but let's recognize that the Democrats had no Plan B to replace Hillary after she lost, and Joe turned out to be more of a Plan Z than a Plan C; he barely squeaked by in 2020, helped by COVID and a basement campaign, as well as the ability of his handlers and press enablers to conceal his actual condition.

I think where Trende's analogy fails is when he suggests that only the period from now to November is the bouncing ball. He seems to think Joe's withdrawal from the race is analogous to Aunt Lizzie forgetting to check if the party store had piñatas, and Mom and Dad suddenly had to improvise the afternoon of the party. It isn't like that. Joe's party store never had piñatas in stock at all, and everybody pretended this wasn't the case long before the party.

The main problem, even before we try to look at individual candidates, is that so many parts of the Democrat New Deal coalition have already left the party -- southern whites, Catholics, labor, and now many Jews -- that the remaining stalwarts -- radical feminists, minority agitators, LGBT++, parlor socialists, and Ivy Leaguers -- aren't enough to win a national election. Joe, a token southern white Catholic, was the last candidate who could credibly maintain the fantasy of the New Deal coalition.

In fact, Joe's handlers effectively acknowledged this problem by cooking up the "lawfare" campaign against Trump -- Joe coulsn't run a campaign based on the traditional New Deal imterest groups, because they'd begun to see the Republicans were doing a better job at representing those interests, so the handlers had to find distractions. In effect, Joe's handlers wanted to bypass the electoral process, which they succeeded in doing with the Democrat primary season, and which they wanted to do with the national campaign by putting Trump in prison.

In other words, the problem wasn't that the campaign season would be long or short, the problem was that there was still a campaign season at all. On one hand, Trump beat back the "lawfare" threat -- nobody says "convicted felon" any more, that's been overtaken by events -- and on the other, Joe, the last credible southern white Catholic Democrat, collapsed as a candidate.

His replacement is a faux generic minority woman cipher who right now is being pumped up by legacy media. On one hand, the traditional summer-fall presidential campaign season is plenty long enough to sort the candidates out -- Dukakis was ahead in the polls in the 1988 campaign; Kerry in 2004 -- and here was plenty of time for the electorate to review the issues. On the other, no amount of time can compensate for a clearly flawed candidate, like McGovern in 1972, Mondale in 1984, or Hillary in 2016.

It almost seems like both Trende and Rove are trying to forget that Joe put himself into what amounted to a premature fall campaign by early June, when it became clear that the "lawfare" strategy had backfired. He then underook European trips to look presidential, while hoping to knock Trump out in an early debate. The difficulty was his underlying weakness as a candidate, which included his failing health, and he withdrew, apparently in exhaustion, after only six weeks of serious campaigning.

Trende wants to use an obscure kids' party game as a metaphor for the current state of the post-Joe campaign. I think a better paradigm for how things are going is Murphy's Law, which applies to bouncing balloons as much as anything else:

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong. Corollary: If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then.

Or, put another way, for Kamala as a candidate, what could possibly go wrong, especially over the course of 100 days?