In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Let's see if I can tease out yesterday's developments. JD Vance was on all the alphabet-network Sunday shows, mostly keeping up the "stolen valor" attacks on Walz, although his remarkable performance on a wide range of issues revealed Trump's wisdom in naming Vance his running mate. This is no Mike Pence. But one of his consistent points was that neither Walz himself nor Kamala was on any such show defending him. In fact, the only Democrat defending Walz yesterday was Nancy Pelosi . Let's look at this. In an interview that aired Sunday on MSNBC’s “Inside with Jen Psaki,” Pelosi said, “First of all, it’s a sign of the bankruptcy of their ideas. They don’t have anything to say, so they make up things.” . . . Pelosi argued the Harris-Walz campaign should “just dismiss” the allegations. “Yeah, they should just dismiss it, because if people lie, as they are lying, and you hear the lie enough times, it sort of becomes … kind of accepted in...

SAVAGE: Trump plays a compilation ROASTING Kamala Harris’ word salads for 3 Minutes Straight 🤣 pic.twitter.com/qRBWtPGhcj — Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 10, 2024 At his Thursday press conference, Trump characterized Kamala as “dumb", “incompetent". and “low IQ." In his Friday Montana rally, he introduced the montage linked above that reprises well-known clips from interviews or statements she's given over the past several years. They suggest she's dumb, incomptent, and low-IQ. This isn't new. Politico noted a week ago , Donald Trump broadsided Kamala Harris in a string of derisive social media posts on Saturday, focusing his attacks on the vice president’s intellect after a week that saw her both out-fundraise him and surpass him in some battleground state polls. In a succession of Truth Social posts after calling off his planned ABC debate with Harris, Trump called Harris “low IQ,” “dumb,” and said she lacked the “mental ca...

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...