In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I'm still thinking about the effect of subliminal images on the presidential campaign, most recently last week's story of Kamala's husband , the cheesy predator Doug Emhoff and the affair with his kids' nanny that ended his first marriage. According to the UK Daily Mail , the news sparked "panic in Harris's camp". Ever since Kamala announced that Tim Walz was her running mate on Tuesday, that story was eclipsed. But in the runup to the announcememnt, the consensus was , [I]t's unclear exactly how much a running mate helps the candidate at the top of the ticket -- and the downside of picking someone not ready for the bright lights of a national campaign are severe, possibly making the lack of negatives superior to any possible positives a contender brings. "At the end of the day, the most practical thing is, do no harm," said former Sen. Doug Jones, D-Ala., a Harris ally. "Who's the governor of which state? Who's ...

The Trump-Biden polling was uniform for at least eight months since last fall -- the Real Clear Politics aggregates were predictable, the pro-Trump and pro-Biden polls balanced out, with Trump generally running from 0.5 to 3 points ahead. And no event affected this -- there were no bounces or craters resuiting from the New York civil judgments, the State of the Union, the collapse of the Fulton County case, Trump's conviction in the New York hush money case, Hunter's conviction in Delaware, Biden's visible decline from the D-Day commmoration onward, or even the June 27 debate. Yet even though the polls never really moved during all these events -- and Biden himself pointed this out repeatedly -- the people who really made the decisions, viz, the people who tell Obama and Pelosi what to do, decided by early July that it was time for Joe to go, he couldn't win in November. What does this say about the polls? UPDATE: Biden's former top adviser Anita Dunn agrees. ...

Somewhere between 24 and 48 hours after Kamala announced she'd selected Minnesota Gov Tim Walz as her running mate, it looks like any possible advantage he might have brought to the ticket evaporated. Even that paragon of obtuseness Sean Trende scratched his head at Real Clear Politics : There are basically three good reasons to make a vice-presidential selection. The first is to help deliver a key state in which the vice-presidential candidate resides. The second is to help counteract a narrative developing about the candidate. The third is to calm a restive base. . . . Vance did none of these things. The same is true of Walz. Wait a moment. This is what they teach you in middle school civics class, and Trende thinks he's some sort of big-deal pundit? He goes on for another 750 words or so about how Kelly or Shapiro would have been better choices and concludes, Regardless, I don’t think Walz probably leaves Harris all that much worse off. He’s more of a missed oppo...

Despite a brief detour into 2008 on Monday, I'm back to thinking the 1972 election is the closest parallel to what we see this year. The most visible Democrat problem then was the running mate, which is precisely what we see now, but the material cause of the problem was that McGovern was going to lose the election, and nobody, starting with Ted Kennedy, wanted to be the loser's running mate. So let's look at what happened to Kamala's field of choices to see if there are parallels to this year. This story at NBC News says With a looming deadline that Democrats concluded they had to meet to finalize their nominee, people close to Harris and outside allies began a few days before [Biden's] announcement to start thinking about what her campaign might look like and started batting around names of potential running mates at daily meetings. Almost immediately after Biden dropped out, her team concluded that it most likely had to be a middle-aged white man...

As of yesterday, the photo above appeared at the top of this story at The Hill, Biden, Harris head to Situation Room as Iran threatens attack on Israel , but by this morning, the photo has bern replaced with short video clips of other news, although the text of the story remains. I tend to believe it's authentic, because it's otherwise so phony. It's clearly intended to show that Joe and Kamala are on top of things, and it's got to be recent, because I can only surmise that Kamala's handlers are telling her to pose for pictures where she isn't cackling. They're belatedly waking up to the fact that she utterly lacks gravitas. In fact, I did a web search for images of "Kamala not laughing", and all I could find was pictures of Kamala laughing. In the other hand, a web search for images of "Kamala serious" brought up mostly images of Kamala suppressing a cackle. Joe in the photo above, on the other hand, is squinting with sort of...

Last Thursday, I asked what could possibly go wrong for Kamala as a candidate, especially over the course of 100 days. I was thinking about this especially in the context I brought up Saturday , I don't think it's out of line at all to envision a world crisis coming up in the next months with Joe literally incompetent to deal with it, a White House staff in disarray, and a collection of amateurs and bunglers on the Harris staff and campaign incapable of maintaining a cohesive and consistent response, domestically or diplomatically. This is where Murphy's Law is definitely going to kick in. This morning, according to the Wall Street Journal , A stock-market selloff intensified around the world, sending U.S. indexes sliding and volatility spiking to its highest levels since the Covid-19 pandemic. In early trading, the Nasdaq Composite tumbled more than 4%. The S&P 500 fell more than 3% and the Dow was around 2.6% lower. Turbulence started in Japan, with the ...

From the first time I saw a photo of Second Dude Doug Emhoff, I thought there weas something cheesy about the guy. Yesterday the UK Daily Mail confirmed my surmise : Kamala Harris’s husband’s first marriage ended after he got his children’s nanny pregnant, DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal. Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff cheated on his first wife Kerstin with the blonde nanny, who also taught at their children’s pricey private school. OK, we're dealing with R-rated materai here that will never get a full explication in polite opinion, but one of my chief interests is Trump's ability to exploit subliminal messages, and boy, is this a subliminal message. Let's start with the question I had before any of the nanny business broke: there's nothing special about Emhoff, especially in the sex appeal department. Among his peers, former Hollywood lawyers around 60 years old, is Kevin Morris, at least in photos a much sexier guy who unlike the Second Dude has manage...