Here's What Puzzles Me About Kamala's Fox Interview

Up to a few weeks ago, astute observers had been saying that Kamala's real campaign manager was Brian Fallon, who was the architect of the strategy that kept her away from press conferences and interviews. And up to a few weeks ago, it's hard to argue that this wasn't a success. The polls were stuck with her leading by about 3 points in the popular vote, for instance.

Then, out of the blue, a sudden consensus emerged that Kamala had a problem with black men, and whether it was in response to that or for some other reason, she began to give softball interviews to friendly outlets. The problem was, though, what the Brian Fallon faction of the campaign recognized, that no matter how friendly the interviewer or the format, she performs poorly, often offering up soundbites like "not a thing that comes to mind" when asked how she'd differ from Biden policies -- which promptly make their way into Trump commercials.

Given a week or more of that kind of experience, the powers behind the scenes in her campaign -- presumably not Brian Fallon at this stage -- decided to play to that weakness. If she did poorly on The View, they'd put her on Charlemagne tha God and Fox. What on earth did tney have in mind? Here's a take that gets things at least partly right:

In what was widely seen as a Hail Mary move by Kamala’s campaign, the vice president agreed to an extended interview on Fox News, one of the exceedingly few national TV interviews she’s done since she was anointed the Democrat Party’s post-Biden nominee.

She "agreed to an extended interview" with Fox, but that wasn't what Fox got: she showed up 15 minutes late, and her handlers ended it early with what Baier called a "hard wrap". So it sounds like her handlers had a plan to minimize her potential weaknesses by keeping things as short as possible while hoping she could filibuster her answers and run out the clock, but at best, this didn't work out as well as they expected. One commentator gave the best-case interpretation:

The vice president has been slipping in the polls over the past couple of weeks. Although sitting for an interview with Fox was a risky move for Harris, she had hoped that a strong performance might help jumpstart her campaign and even bring back some of the joy and good vibes she had going over the summer.

Unfortunately for her, it’s unlikely that she attracted many – or even any – new supporters on Wednesday evening – and may even have driven some independent and undecided voters away.

All in all, not a good night for Harris.

The question I have is what problem the Harris campaign was rying to solve by doing the Fox interview. A web search on "kamala fox interview hail mary" brings results that suggest that indeed, this was a risky move by the Harris campsign to reverse declining polls and regain momentum -- as would be a Joe Rogan interview the campaign has also been mooting. The UK Daily Mail summarized the post-debate spin from pro-Harris commentators:

[S]upporters of Harris accused Fox News of conducting an 'ambush' interview and argued that she did well.

'Kamala Harris (strong) handled an ambush Fox interview light years better than the hash Donald Trump (unstable) made of the Fox pep rally disguised as a town hall,' Harris campaign advisor David Plouffe wrote on X.com.

Brian Stelter, a media analyst from CNN described the interview as a positive result for Harris.

'A lot of viewers are going to come away saying, "Wow, she's willing to do that. That's a sign of toughness and strength,"' Stelter said in a clip shared by the Harris campaign on social media.

But did it do what the campaign needed it do do -- change the narrative and regain momentum? I don't think so. The figure who got the biggest boost was Bret Baier, who was universally expected to be his normal tepid self, soft on Harris, when his forceful approach turned out to be a surprise. From the Daily Mail,

'Kamala Harris just ran into a Bret Baier buzzsaw when asked about the number of illegal aliens in the country,' wrote conservative communicator Steve Guest as the interview aired.

Baier's interview style drew praise from former Fox News personality Megyn Kelly.

'Bret is crushing this and she is incapable of defending her deadly border policies,' she wrote.

. . . Others who were not big fans of Baier indicated they were impressed by his performance.

'I forgive Bret Baier. He's literally ending Kamala Harris's campaign before our very eyes!' wrote Vince Langman, a supporter of Trump.

The one who changed the narrative and regained momentum was Bret Baier, whatever the outcome for Kamala. The campaign did a very poor job of understanding and managing risk, and I'm wondering who's in charge now.

"Why Isn't She Working Hard?"

This is the question that at least some observers are posing about Kamala as she appears to be falling behind in the polls, at least according to this piece at Breitbart:

Harris has repeatedly said she is running as an underdog, but her schedule does not appear to mirror those claims. Harris’s Tuesday schedule shows one event — she will sit for an interview with Charlamagne tha God at 5 p.m. Eastern.

Typically, candidates in the final stretch of a presidential campaign traverse battleground states, speaking with as many undecided voters as possible at town halls, local events, and campaign rallies.

. . . “Why isn’t she in three battleground states a day? Why isn’t she in four media markets in Pennsylvania today rather than one?” political analyst Mark Halperin said on The Morning Meeting. “If you assume she’s behind, which, again, I think she is right now, not by a lot. Why isn’t she working hard?”

Questions about Kamala's campaign ineptitude aren't new. This CNN post mortem of her abortive 2019 campaign for the 2020 nomination has a similar theme:

As Harris’ jump in the polls steadily gave way over the summer, senior aides within the Baltimore-based campaign began to search frantically for a message that would reinvigorate the sputtering campaign.

Instead, according to people close to Harris, the search exacerbated a series of central issues within the campaign: A lack of clear messaging from the candidate and combative infighting between some of Harris’ longtime aides from California, her sister-turned-campaign chairwoman Maya Harris, and campaign manager Juan Rodriguez.

. . . Others accused Rodriguez of overseeing a campaign rife with mismanagement, an assertion that centered on the fact that Harris had over $35 million to spend but still struggled to fund a successful campaign.

That, according to sources, is a lingering question that has infuriated Harris and top officials: How could the campaign spend so much money, without being able to place TV ads when they count?

“That will be the central question to examine: Where did the $35 million go? Why was the campaign structured like this?” said a person close to Harris.

The campaign’s financial situation was also more dire than widely known, said one former aide. For example, the campaign has only reserved less than $10,000 for a digital ad that they had touted with much fanfare earlier this week. The ad was ultimately never released online and the buy was canceled Monday.

I've seen occasional references to extravagant spending on Kamala's personal travel expenses during the 2019 campaign, including first-class airfare and five-star hotels, a pattern she established in her 2016 campaign for the US Senate, as well as during her tenure as California Attorney General:

A review by The Hill of California campaign finance records reveals that Harris’s expenditures follow a pattern: The Democratic candidate regularly charges thousands of dollars in luxury travel and hotels to her campaign.

Meanwhile, Harris’s staffers usually take cheaper flights and stay in hotels for closer to $250 a night, according to both inside sources and state campaign finance reports.

. . . While the Harris campaign’s spending has come under scrutiny this election cycle — most recently in a National Journal report on luxury travel — The Hill’s investigation reveals that these expenditure patterns are consistent from January 2011 through the present.

In a standard trip, for example, Harris billed her campaign $2,482.70 in January 2013 for Delta Airlines “airfare for candidate from Washington D.C./campaign events/Presidential Inauguration,” according to state records.

On that same trip Harris stayed in D.C.’s upscale St. Regis hotel, billing her campaign $3,434.74 for a four-night stay, a nightly rate of $858.69.

. . . Harris’s filings since July 1, 2014, are less detailed and do not specifying the trips’ purposes, but the cost patterns are similar.

There is a stay at the St. Regis for $974.71; at The London NYC for $2,257.33; a United Airlines fee for $4,297.80; a $472.35 fee for limousines in New York; and $180 for limos in Aspen.

All these items were charged to Harris’s campaign account.

What we're seeing in the 2024 campaign, for instance over the past week, is travel to single=event cities in battleground states -- yesterday's trip to Detroit for a half-hour interview with Charlemagne Tha God but no other events, for instance, which would involve a luxury hotel stay and expensive travel with only the one brief campaign-related event to justify the extravagant expense.

I think the answer to the question in this post's title is that Kamala has never been a hard worker, andthis has alwaqys been clear to people who've followed her career. As an opinion piece at The Hill put it over the weekend:

I have spoken with three Democratic operatives behind the scenes who all believe the race is slipping away from Vice President Kamala Harris. They offer four major reasons why this is happening.

The first is Harris herself. She is simply not a very good candidate. She lacks confidence and is seemingly terrified to take any unrehearsed or unvetted policy questions. This liability is not a surprise to those who follow politics closely, but is a new concern for a number of voters.

Maybe more to the point, she's always been more interested in the perks of office than the office itself, and this is reflected in her campaign style, which isn't going to change. She likes the luxury hotels, the limos, the security bubble, the sycophants. What she doesn't like is the need actually to do any of the work. What you see is what you get.

What's Going On At The Overton Window?

WATCH: @JDVance flips the script on a New York Times reporter by pointing out that the government, media, and Big Tech rigged the 2020 election by teaming up to censor the Hunter Biden laptop, costing President Trump millions of votes.🔥 pic.twitter.com/2EO9Tl3v0a

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 11, 2024

It occurred to me yesterday that Sen Vance is suddenly forcing the Overton window, the range of potential policy subjects that are considered appropriate for polite discussion, wide open. His recent exchanges with highly respectable lady journalists on January 6 and Aurora have had the effect of asking why "deplorable" opinions shouldn't be just obvious, not disreputable. Here's his exchange with Martha Raddatz of ABC:

Raddatz: "The incidents were limited to a handful of apartment complexes... A handful."

Vance: "Do you hear yourself? Only a HANDFUL of apartment complexes were taken over by Venezuelan gangs and Donald Trump is the problem??"pic.twitter.com/6PlNAPur8y

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 13, 2024

Is this just Vance? Effective as he is, I think something else is going on. Last night I was watching a National Geographic series on Witches: Truth Behind the Trials. which in passing mentions witch hunts as a type of moral panic. This rook me back to the view I've expressed here that the 2020 phenomena of COVID lockdowns, masking, and Black Lives Matter riots were also a moral panic.

In fact, I've thought that COVID as a disease took on a metaphorical aspect, that it was a societal sickness that needed to be cured, at least in part, by canceling perfectly good and popular TV shows like Live PD and Cops -- but the real sickness was Trump, and that was behind his defeat in the 2020 election. The subtext of the lockdowns and masks was that, at least for the people who supported them, they fended off the Trump disease, and in fact, they might cure it in society at large.

But in reviewing other moral panics, from witchcraft to secret rooms with bad clowns at pre-schools, I've consistently found that they die out and end with a "morning after" phase, following which there's a final collective recognition that there were never witches, or there was never a secret room at the pre-school where the bad clown killed rabbits.

Let's recognize that over the past year, a general recognition seems to have emerged that things under Trump were better than they are now. In addition, the traditional 2016-2021-era objections to Trump -- that he paid hush money to a porn star, for imstance, or that he incited an insurrection on January 6, have not only lost their former effect, but in fact they had a contrary impact when court cases were brought against him for those prior allegations, and their actual effect was to improve his standing in the 2024 polls.

This says to me that not only is the 2020 COVID-BLM moral panic over, but even the "morning after" phase is also over. The Live PD producers, for example, were able to bring back the show with a duplicate studio look, the precise format, and two of the three original hosts on the REELZ channel as On Patrol: Live in 2022 after A&E canceled the show in 2020 at the height of the moral panic. If anything, On Patrol: Live, essentially the same show, has lost any controversy that ever attached itself to Live PD. This is how much the country has changed.

What's going on, I think, is a basic societal re-perception of Trump, in many ways equivalent to the much better established re-perception that a witch in the public mind is not only not a threatening or harmful idea, but is actually nothing more than a Halloween costume or a cartoon character.

This is what Vance has actually been exploiting -- the uber-respectable lady journmalists are trying to revive the peception of Trump as a social sickness, the cause of a moral panic, when the moral panic is in fact now long under the bridge, and by now we're even beyond the "morning after".

Trump, The Media, And The Achilles Paradox

Corporate media's take on the polls channels the Achilles Paradox:

in logic, an argument attributed to the 5th-century-bce Greek philosopher Zeno, and one of his four paradoxes described by Aristotle in the treatise Physics. The paradox concerns a race between the fleet-footed Achilles and a slow-moving tortoise. The two start moving at the same moment, but if the tortoise is initially given a head start and continues to move ahead, Achilles can run at any speed and will never catch up with it. Zeno’s argument rests on the presumption that Achilles must first reach the point where the tortoise started, by which time the tortoise will have moved ahead, even if but a small distance, to another point; by the time Achilles traverses the distance to this latter point, the tortoise will have moved ahead to another, and so on.

This is, of course, absurd. The link continues.

Aristotle’s solution to it involved treating the segments of Achilles’ motion as only potential and not actual, since he never actualizes them by stopping. In an anticipation of modern measure theory, Aristotle argued that an infinity of subdivisions of a distance that is finite does not preclude the possibility of traversing that distance, since the subdivisions do not have actual existence unless something is done to them, in this case stopping at them.

But the conventional take on the presidential race is that Trump, as Achilles, can only come closer and closer to Harris, the tortoise, but he can never pass her:

A dead heat is getting even hotter for Kamala Harris. . . . The polls say the race is tightening slightly. According to RealClearPolitics’ Sept. 29 average of national polling in a two-way race, Harris leads Trump 49.1 percent to 47.1 percent. That 2-point spread is down slightly from Harris’ 2.2-point advantage a week earlier.

The problem is that Achilles is gaining on the tortoise. As Mark Halperin's Democrat advocate on his 2Way stream, Dan Turrentine, put it the other day,

If you just go back now for the last three to four weeks in Michigan and in Wisconsin, not that Harris was up seven and it went down to four, down to one. It's gone from three, to two, to one, to tied. And at the same time, those Senate candidates, Casey, Slotkin, and Baldwin are seeing the same deadlock.

Halperin himself sums things up later in the same podcast:

[Trump's people] don't necessarily think they're the favorite in Michigan and Wisconsin, but they're not worried about losing it. You don't hear from them, oh my goodness. What you hear is we're moving up, what the three of us are hearing.

We're moving up in those two. We're going to win the three Sunbelt states and we're stronger in Pennsylvania than she is. That to me, if the whole thing's about the Electoral College, you take any of the Rust Belt states away from her, it's very difficult for her to win.

Very difficult. It's not mathematically impossible, but it probably won't happen if she loses any of them. She can replace Pennsylvania with either Georgia, North Carolina, and then one other of the Sunbelt states.

If she loses Pennsylvania and she wins either Georgia or North Carolina, then she just needs one of the other three. That's not impossible, but what I'm telling you today is things are not moving right for her.

The race is "tighter than ever" only if you accept the Achilles Paradox.

UPDATE:

Former President Donald Trump has caught up to Vice President Kamala Harris in a new NBC poll released Sunday. Trump is tied with Harris at 48%, and leads by 47%-46% in an “expanded ballot” with third party candidates.

The poll also shows that Trump’s popularity is increasing, as Harris’s declines, with three weeks until Election Day.

The Michigan Bishops Collectively Grow A Pair

I wasn't sure I was going to post on Bossgirl Gretchen Whitmer's skit with the Doritos and the kneeling influencer, but the response of Michigan's bishops set me to do it. For most of my life, Catholics, especially the bishops, have basically apologized for being Catholic, and they've never really objected to even the most offensive portrayals, like Tom Lehrer's "The Vatican Rag" (1965):

A spoken introduction describes the song as a response to the "Vatican II" council—which, among other things, broadened the range of music that could be used in services—and humorously proposes this rag as a more accessible alternative to traditional liturgical music. The song begins:

First you get down on your knees
Fiddle with your rosaries
Bow your head with great respect
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!

The lyrics mockingly list a number of Catholic rituals such as confession, the Eucharist, and Rosaries, and suggest the irony of modernizing an age-old institution like the church.

. . . Some Catholics criticized "The Vatican Rag" as blasphemous. After one show at the Hungry I, Lehrer's performance of the song led to a confrontation with the actor Ricardo Montalbán, who happened to be in the audience. According to a former Hungry I bouncer, Montalbán approached Lehrer in a fit of rage, yelling, "I love my religion! I will die for my religion!" to which Lehrer responded: "Hey, no problem, as long as you don't fight for your religion." In May 1967, a Putnam County, New York, schoolteacher used Lehrer's "Vatican Rag" and "National Brotherhood Week" as examples of modern satire for her seventh-grade class; the outcry was such that the school board banned the songs and censured the teacher, and she quit three months later and left the area.

Although the Wikipedia entry at the link makes it plain that many rank-and-file Catholics found the song blasphemous and offensive, there's no reference to any Catholic bishops speaking out about it -- and as far as I'm aware, neither did any Kennedy. A web search on "Fulton Sheen Vatican Rag" comes up empty. If you think about it, prominent Catholics at the time were probably more willing to seem aligned with the Berrigan brothers, and objecting to "The Vatican Rag" wouldn't fit the program.

This is a far cry from the days when every Hollywood script had to be run by the Hays Office.

So it's maybe nothing new that an alt right Catholic would condemn the silence of both the media and prominent Catholics at Gov Whitmer's skit -- that's dog-bites-man:

Here's a question: Where are all the supposedly uber-Catholic Democrats like, say, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi? Why aren't they condemning this disgraceful depiction of the most sacred part of their religion? Biden is play-acting that he's in charge of hurricane relief efforts, while Pelosi is off promoting her new book. Their silence is shameful.

But Pelosi and Biden are both octogenarians and part of the Catholic generation that wanted to be hip like the Berrigan brothers. What's man-bites-dog here is that younger, hipper Catholics, now including a lot of the US bishops, are starting to speak up. From the Diocese of Lansing's web site:

The Bishops of Michigan have expressed their “profound disappointment and offense taken” with Governor Gretchen Whitmer for posting a video skit on social media showing the state's Governor feeding a Dorito corn chip to a kneeling podcaster in a manner that is widely being perceived as a mockery of the Holy Eucharist.

“The skit goes further than the viral online trend that inspired it, specifically imitating the posture and gestures of Catholics receiving the Holy Eucharist, in which we believe that Jesus Christ is truly present,” said Paul A. Long, President and CEO of the Michigan Catholic Conference which represents the seven dioceses of the state, October 11.

Whitmer issued the usual non-apology:

There ZERO serious people who believe this. Whitmer “denigrate[s]” the Catholic faith every day with how demonically pro-abortion she is. Has the @MICatholicConf talked to her about THAT?! Besides, such a post is an admission of guilt! May Kamala lose MI and lose it badly! https://t.co/eYT9aT68Lr

— Rebecca Downs🇺🇸🟦🇮🇱 (@RebeccaRoseGold) October 12, 2024

But the public complaint from the Michigan bishops is part of a trend, with the Archbishops of Los Angeles and San Francisco beginning to take public positions on political issues that affect Catholics, as well as the Archbishop of San Francisco and the Bishop of Santa Rosa denying Nancy Pelosi communion on the basis of her public support for abortion, the Bishop of Springfield, IL denying Sen Durbin communion on the same basis, and Cardinal Gregory of Washington calling President Biden a "cafeteria Catholic".

So far, I'm not aware that Bp Barron has commented on the Whitmer skit, but I'm sure he will if he finds it appropriate. These are not your grandfather's Catholics, nor their bishops.

Nobody Believes The Real Clear Politics Averages

*TRUMP INTERNAL POLLING: TRUMP LEADS IN ALL BATTLEGROUND STATES pic.twitter.com/PPQnSsryDp

— Election Wizard (@ElectionWiz) October 10, 2024

A few people are starting tgo say it: Election tilts toward Trump as suspicions grow that some polls may be masking true size of his lead,

Harris currently leads Trump by 2.0% in the RealClearPolitics polling average, with 49.1% support to his 47.1%. That figure includes a Rasmussen Reports survey showing Trump with a two-point lead, a Reuters/Ipsos survey showing Harris up two, a Morning Consult poll with Harris up five, a Yahoo News poll with the race tied, and a number of other surveys. A New York Times/Siena College survey showed Harris up three points.

Actually, as of this morning, Harris's RCP lead is down to 1.8%, having been at 2% or more for many weeks. But as I've been saying all along, the national average is meaningless, since it's the Electoral College that casts presidential votes. And Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics would be the first to agree -- so why do they keep publishing this as though it means anythihg? The piece goes on:

But pollsters have pointed to an apparent disconnect between state and national level polls, with state-level surveys increasingly shifting toward Trump while Harris seemingly holds steady at the national level. They have further observed two consistent patterns of national polling that appear to vary widely due to methodology.

. . . Polling averages currently show Trump poised to take Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Arizona. Harris, for her part, holds narrow leads in Minnesota and Nevada. Should such results hold, Trump would handily carry the Electoral College, barring major upsets. The campaign released its own internal polling in a Thursday memo, showing Trump winning all seven of the key battleground states it tracked.

Which is jusst another way of saying the RCP average is meaningless. But the corporate media consensus for weeks has nevertheless been been that the race is a "stalemate", "razor thin", "essentially tied", "margin of error", and so forth. Here's the standard narrative at The Hill:

Vice President Harris’s slim national lead over former President Trump narrowed after the vice presidential debate last week, a survey published Monday found.

Harris is leading Trump by 2 percentage points, 48 percent to 46 percent, in a Yahoo News/YouGov poll conducted after the debate between Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio).

Yet again, the national lead, slim or fat, is meaningless, but the narrative keeps putting it in the lede. The piece goes on,

Polling after the Sept. 10 presidential debate, by comparison, suggested Harris was the winner, and her campaign has since pushed for a second debate against Trump. The former president has rejected the idea.

Her sharp performance, though, fell short of moving the needle in the key swing states needed to win in November. Nationally, Harris currently holds a 3.4 percentage point lead over Trump, according to The Hill/Decision Desk HQ aggregate polling, which has grown just slightly since the day before their debate, when she had a 3.2 percentage point lead.

So Harris is in the lead in a chimerical narional average, but she "fell short of moving the needle", another cliche. The Debate: Did It Move the Needle? Can a VP Candidate Actually Move the Needle? Bill O'Reilly: Did Kamala Harris Move The Needle? And so forth.

So we have the logical problem that the race is "deadlocked" in Kamala's favor, but she needs to "move the needle". Why, if she's ahead? We'll get sone sort of answer along the line that well, the polls had Clinton ahead by x in 2016, but Trump actually won by y, so we need to add a fudge factor to Trump's numbers, so the race isn't really "deadlocked" the way you might think it is if we use that word. So why do they use that word? Why do we need to add a fudge factor? That's when the professor decides he needs to answer some other student's urgent question, and we move on.

The first link at the top of this post cites contrarian pollster Richard Baris's objections to the consensus view:

“More polls today showing Harris down in keys states but also running way behind Clinton and Biden in another blue state. To the point I made yesterday, it's simply not possible for her to win the [popular vote] if she is running this poorly in NY, MD, NJ, CA, etc. Not possible math,” he wrote.

“I'm watching this being covered as a good thing for Harris. It's an absolute catastrophe for her,” Baris wrote, in response to Mason-Dixon/Telemundo data showing Harris leading Trump among California Hispanics 55% to 35%. Biden, by contrast, won that bloc 75% to 23%. Those figures mark a 32% swing in one of the state’s largest voting blocs toward Trump.

In other words, if Harris is losing so many of key Democrat constiutuencies -- labor, ethnics, Catholics, Jews, Latins, black men, and so forth, especially in populous blue states, but "the polls" say she's still getting a national majority, there's soething seriously wrong with "the polls", or as Baris puts it, "not possiblle math".

I'm increasingly convinced Trump is going to outperform significantly in this election.

Tim & Doug's Excellent Adventure

Tampon Tim and Doug went to a coffee shop, walked away from the counter without paying, and left Tim's daughter to inform the cashiers that a handler will be coming to pay with a credit card.

Just like every middle class person does lmfao.pic.twitter.com/a95EK7gyU0

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 9, 2024

A number of aggregators picked up the story yesterday of Second Dude Doug Emhoff and Tampon Tim Walz on some kind of joint campaign stop at the Otro Cafe in Phoenix, AZ. The focus was mostly on how they ordered drinks, didn't pay, and didn't leave a tip, with Walz's daughter forced to reassure the people at the counter that "someone" would soon make good the bill.

The whole context, though, had me scratching my head. The Otro Cafe is referred to in some of the stories as a "pastry shop". I looked it up on Tripadvisor, which says it supports Vegetarian friendly, Vegan options, and Gluten free. Is this a bro thing? I asked Wikipedia:

Bro culture is not defined consistently or concretely, but refers to a type of "fratty masculinity", predominantly white, associated with frayed-brim baseball hats, oxford shirts, sports team T-shirts, and boat shoes or sandals. NPR noted that bros could include people of color and women,

NPR identified four types of bros: dudely, jockish, preppy, and stoner-ish. In their description, dudely bros form close homosocial friendships in a group, jockish bros are defined by ability at team sports tempered by interest in alcohol, preppy bros wear "conservatively casual" clothes such as Abercrombie and Fitch and flaunt "social privilege", and stoner-ish bros may or may not use cannabis but speak in a relaxed fashion and exude the air of surfers.

. . . Oxford Dictionaries identify bros as those who use the word to refer to others, such as in the example of "don't tase me, bro", in which the taserer is not a bro, but the tased is.

. . . Since 2013, the term has been adopted by feminists and the media to refer to a misogynist culture within an organization or community. In a New York Magazine article in September 2013, Ann Friedman wrote: "Bro once meant something specific: a self-absorbed young white guy in board shorts with a taste for cheap beer. But it’s become a shorthand for the sort of privileged ignorance that thrives in groups dominated by wealthy, white, straight men."

So it looks to me as though Tim and Doug's trip to the vegan-friendly pastry shop was in fact an example of bro-bonding, except that both Tim and Doug are exceptionally cheesy buffoons who are so uncomfortable in their own skins that they'd be incapable of manifesting any authentic frat-lodge preppy, dudely, jockizsh, or stoner-ish confidence or ease. They're both wannabes pure and simple.

In fact they're in Arizona, a place where there are many dude ranches. But this is some sort of a campaign stop in a battleground state -- the best I can conclude is that the Harris campaign has sent the two bro-wannabes out to get the dude ranch vote. And there seems to be a growing recognition that Kamala has a problem with men:

MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell said on Sunday that Vice President Kamala Harris is struggling to resonate with White and Black male voters.

. . . "She's got such a big problem with men," Mitchell said, adding that support for Trump among that demographic could be underestimated.

, , , "I think is a great thing [sic]," said former White House press secretary Jen Psaki. "At this point, when everything matters, you have to take risks and people may make mistakes. It's worth it. Put them out there and have them doing a bunch of stuff."

So OK, Walz has been a disaster ever since his debate with Vance, while Dougie is turning out not to be the sort of modern male role model everyone thought he was. Gutfeld has been doing pregnant nanny jokes every night for weeks, and he's even begun to sneak in quick, sly references to slapping women in his latest monologues -- looks like they finally got those past Fox's lawyers.

But as Jen Psaki says, you have to take risks at this point. Put them out there and have them doing a bunch of stuff.

As the presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump inches closer to decision day, Aspen continues to be a popular stopping point on the campaign fundraising trail.

Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff is slated to arrive in Aspen on Friday, Harris’ campaign announced Tuesday.

The 59-year-old husband of Harris is also set to make appearances this week in Idaho and California. The Harris campaign confirmed Emhoff will make a reception stop in San Francisco on Friday before coming to Aspen later that day.

Well, I guess Dougie's still good for the vegan-friendly circuit, San Francisco and Aspen, maybe OK for the folks at the pastry shop, not so much for the male demographic, though. Not sure what the bossgirl will have Tim doing next.