Back To 1972

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, for many of the reasons Barack Obama chose Biden as his running mate.

. . . By Saturday, the team had whittled the list down to three names — Walz, Shapiro and Kelly — who were told to prepare for face-to-face meetings with Harris.

But let's recall that earlier lists of possibilities looked more like this: Gavin Newsom, J B Pritzker, Mark Kelly, and Gretchen Whitmer, with some also-rans like North Carolina Gov Roy Cooper, Kentucky Gov Andy Bashear. and eventually Minnesota Gov Tim Walz. For whatever reason, Newsom seems not to have been mentioned much in early running, and Pritzker had the same problem as Shapiro, plus he was short and fat. He wasn't taken seriously, or at least not as seriously as Shapiro.

But the field also began to narrow itself. By July 29, both Whitmer and Cooper had taken themselves out of the running. Whitmer is 52, 8 years younger than Harris, and has a credible political future outside the vice presidency, Cooper, 67, claimed he withdrew because his lieutenant governor might try to seize power while Cooper was out of state for a campaign event, but this seems weak, and likely Cooper felt he didn't need the exertion of a losing campaign as he was on the verge of retirement.

So Harris's choices were limited, much like McGovern's in 1972. But given the short list of willing candidates, she went beyond even that. According to the NBC link,

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was a dark horse from the start, left off early lists of potential running mates. But no one used the 16 days since President Joe Biden stepped aside more effectively than Walz, who charmed Harris and national Democrats alike with a Diet Mountain Dew-fueled media tour that labeled the opposition as “weird” and won him a spot in history.

So, once most of the other possible candidates were crossed off the list, according to the link, Walz joined it, with the final three consisting of Mark Kelly, Josh Shapiro, and Walz. I don't think it's too hard to surmise Kamala's thought processes here: Mark Kelly was a combat figher pilot and then a space shuttle pilot before his political career, which says he's an alpha male, although he's 60 and looks older. The NBC link has little to say about why he was ruled out:

Kelly had the most impressive résumé of any candidate, but many Democrats see him as an underwhelming speaker and personally cool.

Some Harris allies also felt he was not loyal enough to Biden in the trying weeks after his poor debate performance and believed he had not done enough to defend the administration’s border policies, according to a person familiar with the process.

In other words, as an alpha male, he was likely to upstage Kamala and make her complicity in Biden's policies look bad. Shapiro had similar disadvantages besides his Jewish heritage:

But perhaps more important than any specific issue was concern that Shapiro’s personal ambitions could conflict with hers — something raised directly to Harris’ team by an adviser to Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who has clashed publicly with Shapiro.

“I would not want to be ahead of Josh Shapiro in the line of succession,” said a senior Democrat who has worked with him.

Shapiro is 51, 9 years younger than Kamala, ambitious, and he could be a credible prospect for 2028. He'd be working against Kamala his whole time as her vice president. The word seems to be that she didn't cross him off her list so much as he crossed her off his list:

Pennsylvania Gov. JOSH SHAPIRO’s team felt that his own interview with Harris did not go as well as it could have. There was “not a great feeling” coming out of it, according to a person in touch with Shapiro’s advisers. A person familiar with the selection process told our colleagues that, after their meeting on Sunday, Shapiro called Harris’ team and made clear that he was “struggling with the decision to leave his current job as governor, in order to seek the vice presidency.”

Or put another eway, he didn't need eight years as vice president under Kamala when he'd prefer to run for president himself in 2028, but beyond that, after reading Kamala face to face in the interview, he decided she was goinmg to lose in November, and he didn't need to be identified with that, either.

This brings us to the material cause of Walz's pick: the most attractive potential candidates for Kamala's running mate either specifically ruled themselves out -- Whitmer and Shapiro -- or were ruled out because they might add too much to the ticket -- Kelly and Shapiro. Why would this be? Because Whitmer and Shapiro, as well as Newsom, want to run in 2028. They don't want to waste their political appeal on a losing 2024 campaign.

The similarity with 1972 is the material cause of the vice presidential choices, Eagleton/Shriver in 1972, Walz in 2024 -- they're driven by the likelihood that the ticket will lose in November. The difference is that McGovern at least wanted the best running mate he could get; Kamala just wants someone who won't upstage her. And let's keep in mind that, according to the NBC link, her handlers wanted a middle-aged man -- but they got one who looks as old as Biden, with a lot of baggage. This is the choice forced on a likely loser.

Joe And Kamala Head To Sit Room

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 a purposeful smirk in another of his ill-fitting suits that's grown too big for him. I question if he's fully aware of what's goimg on.

And what are they going to do when they go into the Sit Room? We've heard that that they seldom communicate, that the customary weekly lunches between the president and vice president have long since been discontinued, and Kamala disdains briefings. So I suspect this photo op is entirely pro forma.

In fact, the increasing conflict between Israel and Iran is almost certainly a result of Joe's evident incapacity, and that's because Netanyahu isn't taking Joe seriously and discounts Kamala's prospects in November. So regarding the assassination of Hamas terror group leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, this has been Netanyahu's time to act. Breitbart reports that the New York Times thinks Netanyahu has "gone rogue":

The New York Times published an analysis Friday in which it claimed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had “gone rogue” by killing terrorists who had killed Israeli citizens, rather than acquiescing.

. . . Taking out Hezbollah’s second-in-command in a targeted strike was a way of forcing Hezbollah to pay a price, and reestablishing deterrence, rather than risking a major ground war and all the civilian casualties that would come with it.

Likewise with the apparent Israeli hit on Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, a billionaire who lived a life of luxury while ordering thousands of deaths, both Israeli and Palestinians. (President Joe Biden, who is trying to stop the war short of an Israeli victory, said the death of the arch-terrorist “has not helped.”)

. . . But it is an election year, and Biden prefers to look for ways to appease Iran and its terrorist proxies — which, critics say, is the very reason that the Middle East has reached the point of conflagration in the first place.

As I've been noting, Netanyahu is a US politician as much as an Israeli, and he's playing the odds based on what he sees of the current US administration -- Joe's condition appears to be deteriorating rapidly, while Kamala for now doesn't have access to the levers of power, and if she did, she wouldn't know what to do with them. Secretary Blinken doesn't take orders from Kamala, and I strongly suspect that if she tried to give him any, it wouldn't turn out well.

Meanwhile, Joe is apparently more and more detached, which leaves Netanyahu to his own devices. This in turn serves as a deterrence to Iran: through early summer, Iran and its proxies could rely on Joe to pressure Israel to hold back on its retaliation in Gaza, as well as its response to the initial Iranian drone attack on Israel. With Joe fading, Israel's respone is less predictable -- the problem for Iran is that a full-on retaliation from Israel would be devastating; its only hope is for Joe to lean on Netanyahu to limit its extent, but this is now less certain. Thus, Iran is holding back to reconsider its options.

Meanwhile, whatever may have been said in the Sit Room yesterday probably evaded both Joe and Kamala -- all it was was a brief photo op. What will happen between Iran and Israel is beyond Joe's control, which is all the worse for Iran.

There Was The 1972 Election, But Also, There Was 2008

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 Nikkei 225 falling more than 12%, its worst one-day drop since the crash after Black Monday in 1987. Losses cascaded across Europe and the U.S., as investors dumped riskier assets and flocked to safety.

The declines extended what has been a dizzying few days on Wall Street during which this year’s most popular trades have been aggressively unwound. A selloff in tech shares continued Monday, with Nvidia, Meta and Apple each losing 9% or more. (The iPhone maker took an extra hit from news that Berkshire Hathaway had slashed its Apple stake.)

Via CNN,

Japanese stocks suffered their biggest ever daily loss Monday as fears about a US economic slowdown sent shock waves through global markets.

The Nikkei 225 index of leading stocks in Tokyo lost a staggering 4,451 points, its biggest drop in history. The index closed more than 12% down, taking its losses since early July to 25% and entering bear market territory.

“That was a crash. It smelled like 1987,” Neil Newman, head of strategy at Astris Advisory in Tokyo, told CNN. He was referring to “Black Monday” in October 1987, when global markets plunged and the Nikkei lost 3,836 points.

Fears of a sharp slowdown in the US economy have raised expectations that the Federal Reserve will have to slash interest rates.

Meanwhile,

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is feeling more emboldened to act against Iran after US President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 election, according to a report in the Telegraph that cites a senior Israeli official.

The official tells the British newspaper that Biden was seeking to “restrain” Netanyahu while he was still in the race, and had “told him not to respond too harshly to Iran’s attacks.”

Over the past couple of weeks, I've focused on the 1972 election as a parallel case to this year's campaign, with McGovern's difficulty finding a running mate before his party's convention exacerbated by his need to find another one when he had to replace Thomas Eagleton, himself something of a Plan F or G, two weeks later. But given the circumstances we're beginning to see, a better parallel might now be 2008:

In the fall of 2008, many news sources were reporting that the economy was suffering its most serious downturn since the Great Depression. During this period, John McCain's election prospects fell with several politically costly comments about the economy.

On August 20, John McCain said in an interview with Politico that he was uncertain how many houses he and his wife, Cindy, owned; "I think—I'll have my staff get to you," he told the media outlet. Both on the stump and in Obama's political ad, "Seven", the gaffe was used to portray McCain as somebody unable to relate to the concerns of ordinary Americans. This out-of-touch image was further cultivated when, on September 15, the day of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, at a morning rally in Jacksonville, Florida, McCain declared that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong," despite what he described as "tremendous turmoil in our financial markets and Wall Street." With the perception among voters to the contrary, the comment appeared to cost McCain politically.

On September 24, 2008, after the onset of the 2008 global financial crisis, McCain announced that he was suspending his campaign to return to Washington so he could help craft a $700 billion bailout package for the troubled financial industry, and he stated that he would not debate Obama until Congress passed the bailout bill. Despite this decision, McCain was portrayed as somebody not playing a significant role in the negotiations for the first version of the bill, which fell short of passage in the House.

. . . All the aforementioned remarks and campaign issues hurt McCain's standing with voters. All these also occurred after the onset of the economic crisis and after McCain's poll numbers had started to fall. Although sound bites of all of these "missteps" were played repeatedly on national television, many pundits and analysts say that the actual financial crisis and economic conditions caused McCain's large drop in support in mid-September and severely damaged his campaign.

There are two issues. One is that at some point, either Joe or Kamala, or both, is going to have to make a convincing statement about the current situation and what they intend to do about it -- but neither, as far as anyone can tell, is capable of saying anything even at the level of John McCain in 2008. The other issue is that, as in 2008, the outgoing administration owns the economy, Bush-McCain then, Obama-Harris now.

The timing could not be worse for Kamala Harris, whose name is one half of the "Biden-Harris" administration. It was her voice that credited "Bidenomics" with the state of the economy. She is tied to all of these policies, and if the economy does go into a full-blown recession, then it will fall on her.

The current big issue, whether Trump will debate Kamala on September 10 with ABC or September 4 with Fox, is going to be overtaken by events pretty quickly, while the prospect of a sudden economic downturn is going to force Kamala out of her basement to answer questions, something Trump is eminently capable of doing. Nor do I think Kamala's choice of running mate is going to amount to much of anything, other than a by-the-way illustration of her overall bad options.

The Subliminal Emhoff

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 managed to keep his first marriage together.

So from the start I always kind of asked what Kamala was doing with him, because she's much more of a national figure who for her age is at least not a frump, whereas Emhoff is kind of a nebbishy male frump. A subsidciary puzzle was what the appeal of Emhoff was to Dr Jill that she would let herself be caught French kissing Mr Nebbishy Frump at last year's State of the Union. So these questions already bothered me.

But here's another. Arhold Schwarzenegger's reputation took a hit when his wife, Maria Shriver, divorced him after learning he'd fathered a child with the couple's longtime housekeeper. But I have a feeling the public tends to give men like Schwarzenegger, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump himself something of a pass -- they are, or were in their prime, attractive alpha males.

Doug Emhoff is not, he's more in Harvey Weinstein's class. If he's gotta get an outside piece, it's not as though starlets and interns are lining up at the office door. He's gotta schtup the governess, there's nobody else. And the governess has to go along, or she'll lose her job. But this is being a sexual predator, a Harvey Weinstein. Mr Cheesy's current wife, Kamala Harris. is against sexual predators:

"As many of you know, before I was elected Vice President and before I was elected a United States Senator, I was an elected Attorney General and an elected District Attorney. And before that, I was a courtroom prosecutor.

"So, in those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women. . . . So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump's type. I know the type and I have been dealing with people like him."

So what's she doing married to a bush-league Harvey Weinstein? Nor can she insist that she's shocked, shocked:

The relationship and the circumstances around it were known four years ago to Joe Biden’s vetting committee as Harris was herself going through the running mate process before being picked for the ticket, a person familiar with the conversations told CNN. The person also said that Emhoff had told Harris about the affair well before they got married.

So apparently that makes it OK, huh? But we still have the problem that Michaelah Montgomery raised while speaking at a Trump rally in Atlanta last night:

Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown admitted in 2020 to an extramarital affair with Kamala Harris.

Brown also admitted to giving Harris her first official state job.

In a short article in the San Francisco Chronicle Brown admitted to the extra-marital affair and to appointing Harris to two state commissions.

. . . “Aside from her record as a prosecutor, why don’t we ask Mrs. Willie Brown if Kamala Harris cares about black families,” Montgomery said.

But beyond the sexual histories of both partners, we have the peculiar, indeed weird, situation that Emhoff's ex-wife seems to think she, Kamala, Doug, and the kids are all still in some kind of blended family. I quoted her last week:

". . . For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I,” Kerstin Emhoff said in a statement first provided to CNN. “She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.”

Kamala herself agrees that this is all one big, happy, blended family, and Doug's ex is her BFF:

Just before the 2020 election, Harris spoke again about the importance of her blended family and how Kerstin Emhoff played a significant role in ensuring her relationship with her two step-children was positive.

“One of the keys to my relationship with Cole and Ella is their mom,” Harris told CNN at the time. “The thing about blended families — if everyone approaches it in the way that there’s plenty of love to share, then it works.”

In a 2020 profile in The Washington Post about Doug Emhoff, Kerstin Emhoff recalled one night when she, her ex-husband and Harris were having dinner in Manhattan. Kerstin Emhoff said she “nearly spit out her wine” when she learned that Doug Emhoff surprised Harris with a trip to Italy, which he planned entirely.

“I don’t know what you’ve done to this man,” Kerstin Emhoff recalled telling Harris. “But it’s great.”

Well, as long as there's plenty of love to share, it's copacetic, at least at Esalen. But this is strange. It goes beyond schtupping interns or romping with porn stars, there's something a lot deeper going on here, and the governess business can't be isolated. There's got to be more that will come out. How, for instance, does the French kiss with Dr Jill fit into the blended family?

But even if nothing further does emerge, there are two issues. One is the subliminal effect of the wannabe First Dude schtupping the governess and Kamala apparently being OK enough with it to marry Mr Cheesy. The other is that the Biden vetting team was aware of it in 2020 and thought it wasn't a problem. How'd that happen?

The Other Day I Talked About Murphy's Law

Getting past the simple definition of Murpnhy's Law, "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong", it's worth going into what's thought to be the origin of the name:

The law's name supposedly stems from an attempt to use new measurement devices developed by Edward A. Murphy, a United States Air Force (USAF) captain and aeronautical engineer. The phrase was coined in an adverse reaction to something Murphy said when his devices failed to perform and was eventually cast into its present form prior to a press conference some months later[.]

. . . [During an initial test,] it became apparent that they had been installed incorrectly, with some sensors wired backwards. .. . Murphy blamed the failure on his assistant after the failed test, saying, "If that guy has any way of making a mistake, he will."

The phrase first received public attention during a press conference in which [project head John] Stapp was asked how it was that nobody had been severely injured during the rocket sled tests. Stapp replied that it was because they always took Murphy's law under consideration; he then summarized the law and said that in general, it meant that it was important to consider all the possibilities (possible things that could go wrong) before doing a test and act to counter them.

This suggests that the concept formed at first in a burst of exasperation but quickly changed into a principle of planning and quality assurance -- if you can reasonably anticipate an adverse outcome, the prudent course is to examine its potential causes and do what's necessary to avert them. Thus Murphy's Law isn't just a passive observation of a perverse universe, but a caution about the need for humility and a perception of potential mishaps in arranging any sort of affairs.

This, of course, is one component of what we think of as competence, and the other day I referred to the problem when I talked about the potential that the Harris campaign could, as Sean Trende put it, just keep a balloon bouncing in the air between now and the election, anticipating that nothing could go wrong. We're already starting to see indications that this isn't going to happen. For instance, Kamala Harris VP Pick Leaked by Incompetent Philly City Staffer:

Kamala Harris' vice presidential pick was leaked on Friday due to an incompetent staffer not understanding how to schedule posts on social media.

In a move that will no doubt rankle the Harris campaign, a video promoting Josh Shapiro as the choice was pushed out by the X account owned by Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker. It was immediately apparent that the post was meant to be scheduled for early next week when Harris is set to join Parker and others in the city to officially announce the VP pick.

I'm not sure why it would be so important to keep her choice of running mate secret until Tuesday -- I mean, who cares all that much? -- but if it was in fact so important, the campaign should have been on top of it, and that would include releases on social media. If the campaign can't control this sort of thing, it's not a good sign going forward.

But let's look at the odd developments in the death penalty case against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other defendants for planning the 9/11 attacks. While Kamala wasn't directly involved, and as far as I can discover, she hasn't commented or tried to take credit, this is all attributable to the Biden-Harris administration. As of yesterday, it was announced:

The US has reached a plea deal with alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other defendants accused of plotting the 2001 terror attacks, according to the Defense Department.

The pretrial agreement – reached after 27 months of negotiations – takes the death penalty off the table for Mohammed, Walid Bin ‘Attash, and Mustafa al Hawsawi, prosecutors said in a letter, obtained by CNN, sent to the families of 9/11 victims and survivors shortly before the Department of Defense announced the news in a press release Wednesday evening.

Astonishingly, the prosecutors then acknowledged that, er, something could go wrong!

“We recognize that the status of the case in general, and this news in particular, will understandably and appropriately elicit intense emotion, and we also realize that the decision to enter into a pre-trial agreement will be met with mixed reactions amongst the thousands of family members who lost loved ones,” prosecutors wrote in the letter.

And indeed, something did go wrong, right away, and big time!

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin on Friday revoked the shocking plea deals that would have spared the death penalty for the accused mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and two alleged accomplices.

In an official memo, Austin, 70, announced he had relieved the official responsible for signing off on the widely criticized plea agreements from authority and would instead assert his own authority in the matter.

. . . Family members of the Sept. 11 terror attacks who were outraged to learn the plea agreements would take the death penalty off the table applauded the abrupt reversal.

“Oh, that’s good news. Because the majority thought that was a cop-out on somebody’s part to give them a life sentence instead of the death sentence,” retired FDNY Deputy Chief Al Santora, who battled 9/11 illness and lost his firefighter son Christopher in the attacks.

“I think they got so much publicity that they changed their mind.”

But this raises intriguing questions. Did the judge who approved the plea deal notify Secretary Austin beforehand? Did Austin approve it before he disapproved it? Did anyone notify the Harris campaign that this was coming? Did the campaign have any input? Who's running the show? Someone should have been not just aware of the potential outcome -- the prosecutors spelled that out in their letter, after all -- but should have been proactive enough at minimum to delay the announcement until after the election, if for some reason they felt they couldn't disapprove it. But hey, they had to disapprove it anyow once it came out!

This is incompetence. But let's look at one of the causes farther back in the chain:

Joe Biden climbed back up the stairs of an airplane that had just arrived and he wasn’t flying on, as Kamala watched in amazement

I mean, he legitimately has no idea where he is or what he’s doing
pic.twitter.com/g5dBZ0CqXo

— Ian Miller (@ianmSC) August 2, 2024

It looks more and more as though Joe's condition is quickly deteriorating, and his adminisration is in disarray, with key staff already leaving and replaced in his inner circle by Hunter and Dr Jill. What could possibly go wrong?

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.

The State Of The Honeymoon

Just yesterday, of all things, Nate Silver announced that the race is a toss-up.

Now that the election is in kamala_mode, however, it’s far from clear whose position you’d rather be in, and I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to bet either on Harris or on Trump. At FiveThirtyEight, we actually had a formal definition of a “toss-up”, which is an election where each candidate had at least a 40 percent chance of winning. We’re now quite comfortably into that territory. As of this afternoon’s model run, Harris’s odds had improved to 44.6 percent, as compared to 54.9 percent for Trump and a 0.5 percent chance of an Electoral College deadlock.

This, of course, is based on a model, and I would suggest that putting the percentages down to a decimal point is at best misleading. The problem is that, as this memo from a pollster to the Trump campaign points out, the fundamentals of the race haven't changed.

The Democrats deposing one Nominee for another does NOT change voters discontent over the economy, inflation, crime, the open border, housing costs not to mention concern over two foreign wars. Before long, Harris' "honeymoon" will end and voters will refocus on her role as Biden's partner and co-piiot.

An additional problem is Kamala's weakness as a candidate, versus Trump's quickness at seizing opportunities. A good many commentators are misreading the Real Clear Politics numbers, for instance Elizabeth Stauffer at Legal Insurrection:

Although early polling still shows Trump ahead of Harris, she has managed to narrow the gap to a startling degree.

The RealClearPolitics average of head-to-head polls shows Trump 1.4 points ahead of Harris by a margin of 48.1 to 46.1 percent. Before Biden withdrew from the race, Trump led by 3 points.

The RCP national average fluctuates from day to day, depending on how the most recent poll has been plugged into the model. A pro-Trump poll will raise the average for a few days until the next pro-Harris poll comes out and knocks down Trump's standing by maybe 2 points. Comparing a day in mid July when Trump was up by 3 to a day in August when he was up by 1 is meaningless, this same thing has been going on since last year.

But dealing with Trump at his best, as I've been saying, is a question of subliminal messaging. Let's look at the latest controversy over Trump's appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists. For starters, Jesse Watters is correct in the simple observation that it ripped the news cycle right out of Kamala Harris's hands by creating a new controversy that put him back as the center of attention. But Joy Reid at MSNBC pointed out the subliminal message it conveyed:

To the president and board of NABJ: Y’all got played. Donald Trump showed up at the convention for exactly three reasons. . . to try to dispel the notion that he’s scared to debate a Black woman. Second, to steal the attention that Vice President Kamala Harris has hijacked from him because she’s just more interesting, and her support is more joyous and rooted in popular American culture. Three, to create clips to play for his very white, very right-wing mega fan base of him standing up to the Blacks.

The piece at Gateway Pundit goes on,

Joining Reid, April Ryan, White House correspondent for The Grio and an MSNBC contributor, said “It was a shock and awe moment. I’m still trying to deal with it.”

But Gateway leaves uut what was revealing about the Harris campaign: Kamala was invited to the event, but Trump himself pointed out that she didn't attend. Trump characterized this as bad faith on the part of NABJ, but had she attended, this would effectively have been at least a quasi-debate. We must assume that Kamala's handlers wanted to avoid any such opportunity. Scott Adams, who underatands subliminal messaging, outlined the actual message Trump sent:

How much did I enjoy that? 10/10.

Who changed the conversation about all of politics? Trump did.

Did you hear the word weird yet today?

He managed to changed the entire cycle to 'Why are you being such a bitch' basically.

Basically she was just a total bitch, and he just treated her like a bitch.

. . . it's the best thing I've ever seen in politics.

Now if you tell me that the men sitting in the audience hated that, did they?

I don't think they're going to tell you if they liked it.

Wasn't this precisely Joy Reid's point? This reminds me of the time Barbara Bush characterized Hillary as "a word that rhymes with witch", becasue we're getting into Hillary territory here, as Kamala's mentor and sugar daddy Willie Brown also pointed out, in the context of Trump's political acumen:

“He’s an entertainer, that’s all it is,” Brown argued.

And that can overcome everything else, all of Trump’s manifest liabilities?

“Oh yeah, if the public is fascinated with your antics, you survive,” he said, before lowering the boom. “It’s unfortunate, but you can’t really tell the voters they’re idiots.”

Brown was far more candid about Harris at lunch, before the debate, when Biden’s renomination seemed inevitable and his vice president was more unpopular than he was.

Brown worried out loud that Harris had “the Hillary syndrome” — that “people don’t like her” — and fretted it was not fixable. Thinking through Harris’s future if Biden were to lose, Brown said: “You need a Black woman on every goddamn corporate board in America!”

But the comparison to Hillary goes deeper, to the changed nature of the Democrat coalition. According to Ruy Teixeira,

In truth, the Harris coalition bears more resemblance to the Biden coalition. . . but without as many working-class voters. Or to the Hillary Clinton coalition. . . but with far fewer white working-class voters.

Start with the working class. While Obama carried them by 4 points, four years later Clinton lost them by 3 points. Four years after that, Biden lost them by 4 points and, four years later, Harris in the Times poll is losing them by 15 points.

Contrast this with the trajectory of the college-educated vote. As noted, Obama carried these voters by 6 points. In 2016, Clinton carried them by 13 points and four years later Biden carried them by 18 points. Today, Harris’ lead over Trump among the college-educated is 20 points. This takes the college-educated/working class margin gap from +2 under Obama to +35 today—that is, from doing barely better among college voters in 2012 to a massive class gap today.

. . . Finally, when looking at the nonwhite voting pool as a whole, we see the following trend in Democratic margin: Obama 2012, +64 points; Clinton 2016, +58; Biden 2020, +48; Harris today, +34.

It is difficult to look at these data and not see profound differences between the Obama coalition and the emerging Harris coalition. These differences reflect how much the party has evolved in 12 short years.

. . . Right now, [the Harris campaign is] on a narrow, polarized path to November and their [they're?] reckoning with Donald Trump.

In oher words, much more even than with Obama, Harris is running a campaign aimed at bourgeois white women, the sort of target Groucho Marx could take on -- and one side of Trump is the entertainer truth-teller who has just a dash of Groucho Marx. This is what Scott Adams and Willie Brown both instinctively see.

"Short Race"?

Two pieces in two days at Real Clear Politics say Kamala has the benefit of a "short" presidential campaign. Yesterday, Sean Trende concluded:

In short, we can’t think of this campaign as a traditional campaign. It’s a sprint, and a shorter sprint than people acknowledge.

This morning, Karl Rove echoed:

This presidential election was one of America’s longest: . . . But with Mr. Biden’s withdrawal and replacement by Vice President Kamala Harris, it suddenly became one of the shortest.

Regular visitors know that my estimate of both Karl Rove and Sean Trende isn't high, but here I think they've about pegged out on the obtuseness meter. The traditional start of the presidential campaign season is Labor Day, but even if we put the start farther back at the summer nominating conventions, which is when we learn for sure who the actual nominees will be, I don't see how this year's schedule differs much from any other.

In fact, it's very similar to 1972, the campaign nobody wants to mention. That year, Thomas Eagleton was replaced as George McGovern's vice presidential nominee on August 1, which forced a campaign reboot much like this year's replacement of Joe with Kamala -- but we're on almost precisely the same schedule now.

Karl Rove's op-ed at The Wall Street Journal is behind their paywall -- normally, aggregators aren't supposed to link to something behind a paywall -- but from the little we can read, I think his argument must be very close to Trende's. Trende says,

This campaign is a lot like the old kids’ game of “don’t let the balloon touch the ground.” . . . Kids bounce a balloon around, and they do so until the balloon touches the ground. In the long run, kids can’t really win the game, as gravity inevitably wins out. But if the goal is to pass time while parents pull together some last minute aspect of the party, the kids can theoretically win.

Well, I must have gone to a lot of well-run parties when I was a kid, because I never played this game and hadn't heard of it. But Trende's implication seems to be that this is something parents use to distract kids' attention from the fact that the magician didn't show up, or maybe the party store was out of piñatas. In other words, this is a suddenly improvised Plan B, which simply doens't bode well. Trende himself acknowledxges that gravity is likely to win.

As I've been saying since Joe withdrew, the basic Democrat problem is there's been no serious Plan B, not just for this year's campaign, but since Obama's second term, when he had no clear successor. Obama chose Biden as his running mate in 2008 because, as a white Catholic from a southern state, he balanced the ticket, but he was also, even as of 2008, too old to upstage Obama and not terribly bright as well. Obama clearly never thoujght Joe was any sort of credible successor.

Obama favored Hillary, the 2016 election turned out to be a fluke, but let's recognize that the Democrats had no Plan B to replace Hillary after she lost, and Joe turned out to be more of a Plan Z than a Plan C; he barely squeaked by in 2020, helped by COVID and a basement campaign, as well as the ability of his handlers and press enablers to conceal his actual condition.

I think where Trende's analogy fails is when he suggests that only the period from now to November is the bouncing ball. He seems to think Joe's withdrawal from the race is analogous to Aunt Lizzie forgetting to check if the party store had piñatas, and Mom and Dad suddenly had to improvise the afternoon of the party. It isn't like that. Joe's party store never had piñatas in stock at all, and everybody pretended this wasn't the case long before the party.

The main problem, even before we try to look at individual candidates, is that so many parts of the Democrat New Deal coalition have already left the party -- southern whites, Catholics, labor, and now many Jews -- that the remaining stalwarts -- radical feminists, minority agitators, LGBT++, parlor socialists, and Ivy Leaguers -- aren't enough to win a national election. Joe, a token southern white Catholic, was the last candidate who could credibly maintain the fantasy of the New Deal coalition.

In fact, Joe's handlers effectively acknowledged this problem by cooking up the "lawfare" campaign against Trump -- Joe coulsn't run a campaign based on the traditional New Deal imterest groups, because they'd begun to see the Republicans were doing a better job at representing those interests, so the handlers had to find distractions. In effect, Joe's handlers wanted to bypass the electoral process, which they succeeded in doing with the Democrat primary season, and which they wanted to do with the national campaign by putting Trump in prison.

In other words, the problem wasn't that the campaign season would be long or short, the problem was that there was still a campaign season at all. On one hand, Trump beat back the "lawfare" threat -- nobody says "convicted felon" any more, that's been overtaken by events -- and on the other, Joe, the last credible southern white Catholic Democrat, collapsed as a candidate.

His replacement is a faux generic minority woman cipher who right now is being pumped up by legacy media. On one hand, the traditional summer-fall presidential campaign season is plenty long enough to sort the candidates out -- Dukakis was ahead in the polls in the 1988 campaign; Kerry in 2004 -- and here was plenty of time for the electorate to review the issues. On the other, no amount of time can compensate for a clearly flawed candidate, like McGovern in 1972, Mondale in 1984, or Hillary in 2016.

It almost seems like both Trende and Rove are trying to forget that Joe put himself into what amounted to a premature fall campaign by early June, when it became clear that the "lawfare" strategy had backfired. He then underook European trips to look presidential, while hoping to knock Trump out in an early debate. The difficulty was his underlying weakness as a candidate, which included his failing health, and he withdrew, apparently in exhaustion, after only six weeks of serious campaigning.

Trende wants to use an obscure kids' party game as a metaphor for the current state of the post-Joe campaign. I think a better paradigm for how things are going is Murphy's Law, which applies to bouncing balloons as much as anything else:

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong. Corollary: If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then.

Or, put another way, for Kamala as a candidate, what could possibly go wrong, especially over the course of 100 days?