In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I don't think we've seen a presidential politician with a visual instinct like Trump's since either Roosevelt, and that includes Reagan. The harumphs from the corporate media have been non-stop, George Takei, Star Trek has-been, said, “In fairness, it’s not really a Trump garbage truck until it’s on fire.” Rolling Stone's headline was, "Bizarre: Billionaire Trump Awkwardly Dresses Up as a Garbage Truck Driver". Newsweek says, "Video of Donald Trump 'Struggling' to Enter Garbage Truck Goes Viral". CNN said, Donald Trump broke out the props Wednesday in the final days of this chaotic campaign as the former president seized on a garbled remark by President Joe Biden that seemed to insult Trump voters as “garbage.” Trump emerged from his plane ahead of a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, wearing a bright orange and yellow safety vest before climbing into a garbage truck – with a big “TRUMP” sign emblazoned on the side – to take questions f...

Politico has a piece from yesterday that I can only call wishful thinking: Kamala Harris is counting on suburban voters to do what they’ve done since Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016: reject him. It may be the single most important piece of her electoral math. While Donald Trump has made inroads with Black and Latino men, polls in the late stage of the election show the suburbs could still power her to victory. The latest Wall Street Journal poll found Harris leading among suburban voters by 7 percentage points, while a Reuters/Ipsos analysis showed the vice president winning suburban households by 6 points. . . . Inside the Harris campaign, aides said they believe they will improve on President Joe Biden’s performance with suburban voters in 2020, driven by college-educated voters and women who are turned off by the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and by the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Another piece there from yesterday claims this is in fact paying off: ...

Attribute whatever motive you want to Jeff Bezos, for instance : ex washington post editor: “Trump waited to make sure that Bezos did what he said he was going to do, and then met with the Blue Origin people,” he said on Saturday. “Which tells us that there was an actual deal made." The implication is that Bezos offered to squash a potential Washington Post endorsement of Harris in return for giving Bezos's Blue Origin favorable treatment for contracts in an upcoming Trump administration. Let's accept this -- Bezos has never had Rockefeller-level PR -- but then, let's also grant him the cupidinous instincts this implies. Why would Bezos see the point in making this deal? If the election were flip-a-coin close, which among other things might imply that a WaPo endorsement could tip it to Kamala, why change course? I think a reasonable conclusion is that insiders seem to think it's not close at all. Here's the headline at CEO Today: Trump’s VIP Tech List: ...

A recent feature of the Harris campaign has been the disappointing appeaarances of celebrities Lizzo (in Detroit October 19) and Beyonce (in Houston October 25) to endorse Kamala. Lizzo spoke, at least according to YouTube clips, for about seven minutes, notably claiming that if Kamala wins, the whole country will be like Detroit, but didn't perform. This also happened with Beyonce at the Houston rally : Beyoncé fans were left furious after the singer failed to perform at a Texas rally for Kamala Harris. The star took to the stage in her native Houston to endorse the Vice President on Friday night. Some fans had waited more than 12 hours before packing into the city's Shell Energy Stadium expecting a performance, after rumors she would sing swirled online and the Washington Post reported on her expected appearance. The singer appeared to come tantalizingly close to delighting the crowds when she began to talk about how it is time for America to 'sing a new song...

Let's continue down the road I started yesterday, a contrarian-revisionist reinterpretation of "Fabian socialism", which has been the consensus social democrat strategy in the West since the late 19th century. It is effectively a delaying strategy to appear to make concessions to the threat of class revolution, but the concessions, although expensive, are token, while they're made and financed by the middle class and upper proletariat (Paul Fussell's "high proles"), and the institutions of upper-class privilege remain untouched. One feature of the Trump era is that key demographic groups are beginning to recognize that this strategy in fact doesn't work for them, even though it had been sold as to their benefit. For instance, Barbara Clark is the perfect example of a voter—whether black, white, Hispanic, or from any other ethnic group—who defies stereotypes. This defiance often leads to voters such as her being overlooked as people who coul...

In Ferdinand Lundberg, The Rich and the Super-Rich (1969): Those few newspapers that make a practice of printing foreign news occasionally survey Latin American countries. The writers are invariably grieved to find a small oligarchy of big landowners in control, with the remainder of the population consisting of sycophantic hangers-on and landless, poverty-stricken peasants. But I have never seen it remarked that the basic description, with the alteration of a few nouns, applies just as well to the United States, where the position of the landowners is occupied by the financiers, industrialists and big rentiers and that of the peasants by the low-paid employees (all subject to dismissal for one reason or other just like the peasants). If anyone in the past few days seeks vindication of Ferdinand Lundberg's views, he need look no farther than the events surrounding the decisions by the once-totemic Los Angeles Times and Washington Post not to endorse a presidentiual ...

The Babylon Bee had a story a few days ago, Trump Campaign Raises Millions Overnight With New Donation Ask: 'How Much Would You Pay To Not Have To Listen To Kamala Talk The Next 4 Years?' I hope they would bundle that with an assurance that when Kamala leaves the public eye, she'll take Dougie with her. Earlier this month, he was minimizing the allegation that he'd slapped a date in the valet line at the Cannes film festival: Second gentleman Doug Emhoff dismissed scrutiny of his personal life during an interview on Friday, calling tabloid investigations into his past relationships and comments about Vice President Kamala Harris a “distraction.” “We don’t have time to be pissed off, we don’t have time to focus on it,” Emhoff said in excerpts of an interview that will air in full Monday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “It’s all a distraction. It’s designed to try to get us off our game.” Emhoff did not directly address allegations published by the Daily M...

There are a couple of bellwether items in this morning's news. Most intriguing: Los Angeles Times editorials editor quits when owner won’t endorse Harris : Los Angeles Times Editorials Editor Mariel Garza quit on Wednesday, weeks after the paper’s owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, announced it would not endorse any candidate this cycle. With Election Day two weeks away, Garza took issue with her employer shifting away from the tradition of endorsing presidential candidates. The paper has backed the Democratic candidate since 2008. The Los Angeles Times is the biggest newspaper in Vice President Kamala Harris’s home state of California and endorsed Harris when she ran for the Senate in 2016 and for the office of attorney general before that. On one hand, this is not your grandfather's LA Times : The news shook Southern California like an earthquake: Los Angeles Times , family owned for 118 years, was being sold to Chicago-based Tribune Co. . . . On March 11, there were three...

The big quote yesterday was from Mark Halperin : Former President Donald Trump is on track to win the 2024 presidential race based on the early voting numbers trickling in, according to a longtime political journalist. “If the early vote numbers stay the way they are, and that’s a big if, we’ll almost certainly know before Election Day who’s going to win,” Mark Halperin, editor-in-chief of the 2WAY video platform, said Tuesday. Halperin is an interesting case. He grew up in Bethesda as a member of the ruling class, although like me, he didn't go to Sidwell Friends (I went to B-CC; he went to Walt Whitman). He went on to Harvard and had a predictable career as a senior political analyst in corporate media, including ABC, NBC, MSNBC, and Showtime, but allegations of sexual harassment brought this to an end in 2017. As of the 2024 campaign, he seems to have worked hard to rehabilitate himself as the centrist honest broker among all the commentators, so he has a lot riding on...

PRESIDENT TRUMP: "I've now worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala" at McDonald's 🤣 pic.twitter.com/RMeivIPPd0 — Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 20, 2024 From Phil Boas at the Arizona Republic : This was supposed to be “Senile Sunday,” the day Harris and her surrogates made the case that Donald Trump is too old and mentally infirm to be president. They made the point repeatedly on the Sunday shows. Kamala Harris even launched the day with an ad and this tweet: “Donald Trump is exhausted, unstable, and unfit to be President of the United States.” Other surrogates and campaign people picked up the theme and piled on. Then the fry chef went to work in Bucks County, Pa. The cook who was too old, too tired and too senile to be president took the entire contents of the freezer bag labeled “Democratic Party” and emptied it into his metal basket. Then he deep fried it in hydrogenated vegetable fat. Boas hints at the bigger context: The whole thi...

A week ago, I noted that the Real Clear Politics popular-vote polling average had Kamala with a 1.8% lead . Just this past Friday, I noted that her lead was down to 1.3% . As new polls were released over the weekend, it continued to fall, until by this morning, it's down to 1.0%. On one hand, this is a lagging indicator, since the average includes old polls that haven't been updated. On the other, it includes polls that have proved highly inaccurate and biased toward Democrats in the past. But on top of that, a "national popular vote" average is Democrat-leaning, since it totals votes in high-population, Democrat-leaning states like New York and California, when the Electoral College is meant to limit big-state advantage in elections. So far, I've seen basically no cogent commentary on what this decline in Kamala's popular vote averages means. However, it comes in the wake of the vice presidential debate Octobrr 1, her Call Her Daddy interview October 6, ...

There was a pre-post mortem of the Harris campaign at Real Clear Politics yesterday that made all the usual references to 1972 and 1988 : This sort of thing has been seen before and with serious consequences. Here is the history: Like Harris, McGovern had an embarrassing vice presidential pick in Thomas Eagleton (he was eventually forced to ask Eagleton to withdraw after pledging to back him “1,000 percent”) and then got attacked over and over on his far-left record while his reckless changes on policy positions made him subject to devastating Nixon attack ad depicting the South Dakota senator as a political weathervane. So too, Dukakis had his share of recurring problems and self-inflicted wounds. . . that included the infamous and rather comic moment when in answer to criticisms of his national security bona fides he appeared riding around in a tank with an ill-fitting tank commander’s helmet. I've been mentioning McGovern and Dukakis all along here as well, but ...

Doing web searches on Kamala, I'm suddenly coming up with stories on her failed primary campaign in 2019, for instance at Politico on December 3 of that year, The spectacular collapse of Kamala Harris : On Monday, hemorrhaging cash and way down in polls — and with autopsies of her failing campaign being performed on the live body — Harris mercifully decided to drop out. She told her staff in a call Tuesday, sounding clearly disappointed, according to one participant, as she shared her decision to bow out. Even when the hype around Harris was at its apex, her advisers and confidants wondered if the freshman senator was ready for a presidential run. In each of her past campaigns — first for district attorney of San Francisco, then California attorney general and the Senate in 2016 — Harris improved immensely, rising to the moment and giving her best performances when her back was against the wall. This time, the moment — and the stage — proved too large. Kamala t...