In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

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...

In the video clip above, Mark Halperin tells Tucker Carlson that the impending Trump victory on November 5 "will be the cause of the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country". That's sayng a lot. Let's think a moment about what a big mental health crisis actually looks like. It's instructive to do a YouTube search on "narcissism", a vaguely defined term that covers a range from ordinary self-centered boastfulness to full-blown Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The YouTube search will reveal that there's an enormous cottage industry of narcissistic victim therapists ranging from licensed counselors and PhD psychologists to uncredentialed "life coaches" who offer advice to people who've encountered "narcissists" in their families, in marriages and dating relationships, at work, in church, at recreatioon, and just about everywhere else. Many people who hear the term "narcissist" can bring up h...

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 experienc...

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...

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?...

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 potent...