The Subliminal Walz

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 senator from, what state? What do they bring? There's all this public record about the other factors that you would include. But the vetting ... is where you really have to do the deep dive to make sure that somebody meets the other criteria, but that can at best bring value, at worst, be neutral, because you sure don't want someone to bring the ticket down," he added.

After less than a week, we've seen how this has worked out for Harris. Walz's "stolen valor" issue actually has two angles: the first is that Walz previously extended his enlistment in order to remain at the command sergeant major rank, but he reneged on the commitment when he learned his unit would be deployed to Iraq, and he retired instead. The second is that he repeatedly issued, or allowed to be issued on his behalf, misleading or false statements that he had served in combat in Afghanistan, when he never served there or in any other combat zone.

Here's where we're getting into subliminal territory. Although, and his former top aide Anita Dunn confirms this, Joe Biden's fall from grace was never reflected in the polls, and nobody seems to know precisely what it was that sealed his fate, it's occurred to me that in retrospect, the Uncle Bosie episode from last April may have been the first hint that the fall was impending:

Was President Joe Biden's uncle eaten by cannibals? That appears to be what he suggested − twice − this week when he said the remains of his uncle, a military veteran who died during World War II in a plane crash off the New Guinea coast, were not recovered.

Biden's telling differed from an account published by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, which says Biden's uncle, Ambrose Finnegan, and two other men "failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash."

. . . "And my uncle − they called him Ambrose. Instead of 'Brosie,' they called him 'Bosie,' Biden said. "My Uncle Bosie was a hell of an athlete, they tell me, when he was a kid. And he became an Army Air Corps, before the Air Force came along. He flew those single-engine planes as reconnaissance over war zones."

"And he got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be − there were a lot of cannibals − for real − in that part of New Guinea," Biden continued.

. . . Biden brought up the circumstances of Finnegan's death while discussing how former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican frontrunner, reportedly disparaged American soldiers killed in combat as "suckers" and "losers" while president, according to military officials who worked for Trump. Trump has denied the allegations.

In Biden's case, he embroidered the details of his uncle's death to make it seem that he was shot down in combat and then eaten by cannibals in what came off as a blatantly political attempt to discredit Trump. It didn't help at all that he referred to an Uncle Bosie, which created an overall impression of feckless vainglory. I don't think it's a coincidence that a renewed wave of allegations that Joe had pooped his pants, first in April on the White House lawn, then in June at the D-Day commemoration, emerged around the same time as the Uncle Bosie story.

My theory of what brought Joe down, if the polls didn't, was in fact that by mid-June, Greg Gutfeld was making poopy-pants jokes about Biden on his show practically every night. I think the poopy-pants meme needed some kind of subliminal permission, and what gave it that permission was the Uncle Bosie story.

So now we have a situation in which a woman, Speaker Emerita Pelosi, claims credit for having taken the presidency away from Joe "like a child", in Trump's words -- in effect, she emasculated Joe, took away his alpha male presidential status, and replaced him as a candidate with a woman. Remember the insight I've heard that Gerald Ford lost the 1976 election because two women tried to assassinate him.

Two women, Pelosi amd Harris, then identify a man whom they find acceptable to be number two to a woman, Tim Walz, "Tampon Tim", who, unlike the alpha males Mark Kelly or Josh Shapiro, won't upstage Kamala. Tampon Tim then, incredibly, swaggers onto the scene with a record of dodging combat service while claiming to be an Afghanistan vet. Well, open season. As of last night, even the legacy media was on the case.

This in turn gives subliminal permission, much as it did for Biden's poopy-pants meme:

Tim Walz & his Lt Governor love a Parade✔️🌈 pic.twitter.com/sm5vQGuhls

— Marla Hohner (@marlahohner) August 8, 2024

Whether Walz is a closeted gay -- who knows, but I can't rule it out -- he's clearly been outed by Pelosi and Harris as a submissive, beta male. But it's gotten worse -- worse, indeed, than poopy-pants for Biden. All you have to do is search "Walz horse" on the web to learn more. It's false and scurrilous, of course, but then, we're in politics, where these things happen. What's remarkable is the speed with which this has taken place.

There's another aspect of subliminal permission here -- you can't hit Kamala very hard, because she's a girl, and she's more or less a minority. But you can hit Emhoff, and you can hit Walz, so they're taking hits that are subliminally intended for her as well. But leaving even that aside, there's something inescapably cheesy about these two men who surround her.

They're Selling A Fantasy. Is It Working?

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.

Then Biden dropped out, Kamala was named the nominee at the behest of whomever it is that tells Obama and Pelosi what to do, and suddenly evearything has changed. Here's Byron York, a peer of Sean Trende in the cohort of conventional obtuseness, on August 5:

[S]o far, the Biden gambit, the sudden switch forced on the president by powerful Democratic Party insiders, appears to be working. In early July, before the wild series of events that rocked the race — Trump assassination attempt, GOP convention, J.D. Vance, Biden withdrawal, rushed delegate vote for Harris — Trump had a lead of slightly more than 3 points over Biden in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls. Now, two weeks after the Biden/Harris swap, Trump’s lead over Harris is less than a point.

But I'm still left with the same question: what does all this say about the polls? For whatever reason, the people who tell Obama and Pelosi what to do were looking at something besides the polls when they told them to make Joe skedaddle. On the other hand, the polls do seem to be something they can control when they want to, which is what seems to be happening now. And this puts us up against another puzzle, as David Harsanyi puts it at The Federalist,

[N]ot one journalist in the corporate or legacy media has explained how Biden’s obvious senility could turn from a democracy-corroding MAGA misinformation operation into an accepted reality in a single day.

If they were fooled for three years, how can we trust them? If they weren’t fooled, and they didn’t tell us, how can we trust them?

All we know at this point is that people who aren't elected officials are making consequential decisions, and those decisions include who is eligible to be an elected official. He goes on,

The Democrats’ new presidential candidate, who’s never won a single primary vote, might have been crowned but hasn’t given a real interview or even an extemporaneous political statement since Democrat bigwigs pushed Biden aside. In a functioning liberal ‘democracy,’ this would be pretty big news.

However, these people aren't infallible. Trump has lately been giving Biden credit for some level of insight into the current situation,

"The presidency was taken away from Joe Biden, and I’m no Biden fan," Trump said. "From a constitutional standpoint, from any standpoint you look at, they took the presidency away, and people are saying he lost after the debate and he couldn’t win."

. . . "But just to take it away from him like he was a child?" Trump said, adding that Biden is "a very angry man right now."

"I can tell you that he’s not happy with Obama, and he’s not happy with Nancy Pelosi," Trump said. "He’s not happy with any of the people that told him ‘you’ve got to leave.’ He’s very unhappy, very angry."

The problem is that the lizard people aren't infallible. Now and then it's gotten out that Biden resents Obama's decision to promote Hillary's candidacy in 2016, which delayed Joe's run to 2020, which in turn resulted in Joe being in less of a condition to function in office than he might have been four years earlier. This also leaves out the question of how Joe, once he promised Rep Clyburn he'd choose a black woman running mate, was induced to pick Kamala. The word at the time was that she was Obama's choice:

Joe Biden's firm belief in the experience and his extensive discussions with many friends, including former President Barack Obama who served as "a sounding board" over the last three months, helped the Democratic presidential nominee zero-in on Indian-origin Senator Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential running mate.

. . . Barack Obama, the first Black American President, said Kamala Harris "is more than prepared for the job," adding that it is, "a good day for our country".

So it's arguable that Obama, who put Kamala onto Joe's 2020 ticket and appears to have been a principal figure in pushing Joe out in favor of Kamala in 2024, is the architect of the current dilemma -- which itself is beginning to look like Joe redux:

I am starting to think that Kamala Harriss's cognitive health is an issue. She can't complete sentences, is mostly incoherent, and her party/media/campaign are hiding her and treating her as if she is Joe Biden aka a veal calf.

— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) August 6, 2024

So it looks like the lizard people are back to the same project they've had since 2020, covering up for a puppet who basically isn't all there -- except, as I think Trump correctly observes, Kamala isn't even as smart as Joe. We'll have to see how it goes.

How Did "Tampon Tim" Happen?

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 opportunity, given the alternatives.

But let's detour into what he thought of Vance pn July 15. He repeated the middle-school commonplace of what a running mate adds to a ticket and concluded Trump

picked J.D. Vance, a vice-presidential candidate who adds absolutely nothing to the ticket. In fact, he might make things more difficult for Trump.

Except that Vance, a former Marine who served in combat in Iraq, has been the face of the swift boat 2.0 campaign against Walz. At the link,

“When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, do you know what he did? He dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him – a fact that he’s been criticized for aggressively by a lot of the people that he served with,” said Trump running mate Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance. A Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq, Vance added, “I think it’s shameful to prepare your unit to go to Iraq, to make a promise that you’re going to follow through, and then to drop out right before you actually have to go.”

As of yesterday, Sean Trende still thought Vance brought nothing to the ticket. It seems to me that Trump was almost clairvoyant in the role Vance could possibly play against Kamala's eventual choice, but I think this stems from Trump's instinctive recognition of Vance's overall abilities. He's thinking of Vance as someone with multiple positives outside a particular stage of a campaign who could potentially be a successor down the road, and so far, I think he's been right.

But let's go back to how things have turned out for Walz. Stephen Kruiser's take:

When they went with one of the least strategically sound choices they had for the Number Two spot, I knew that my fear of the DNC turning into a well-oiled machine before the election wasn't going to be realized.

. . . Tim Walz is a target-rich candidate for mockery. The more that undecided voters learn about him, the less there is to like. The coastal Democrats don't care about stolen valor — Dick Blumenthal is the senior senator from Connecticut, after all. That doesn't seem like the kind of thing that is going to play well with the voters that the Democrats should be going after, which brings back to why I think this is more flailing on their part.

. . . The addition of Tim Walz to the ticket just keeps things nice and insular. Joe and Martha Swingvoter in Flyover Country, USA aren't looking at Walz and thinking, "That's what I've been waiting for from the Democrats!" They're still flailing; they're just smiling a lot more while they are doing it.

Stephen Green at Instapundit echoes my take from yesterday:

One explanation, of course, is that Dems don’t expect Kamala to win and that the better candidates said no.

Another potential factor is the apparent haste with which the Walz selection was made. The UK Daily Mail followed up on the "panic" in the Kamala camp over its story from last weekend about Second Dude Doug Emhoff's affair with his chlldren's nanny and the end of his first marriage:

'Put bluntly it's not a good look and Harris and her team know it. News of the affair has dominated coverage of the candidate over the weekend and sparked panic in her camp.'

. . . Harris tried to put the affair behind her with Tuesday's choice of outsider Tim Walz, as her running mate, hoping the spotlight would shift to the Minnesota Governor's rock-steady 30-year marriage.

The problem continues to be that Walz was thoroughly vetted by a committee led by campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon, former Attorney General Eric Holder, and former White House counsel Dana Remus.

By last Thursday, Holder and Remus had compiled their findings for a meeting Friday with a panel of trusted confidants who conducted the first interviews. They included Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., former Labor Secretary Marty Walsh and former Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, a top Biden adviser who has remained on the Harris campaign.

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.

All anyone can conclude is that the list of Walz negatives -- the stolen valor allegatioms, the DUI, his tacit approval of the Minneapolis riot that began the BLM cycle, and his support for extreme trans-enabling policies, all with rich video corroboration -- eluded the committee completely, or they didn't think they were important.

But that explains only how Walz made the short list, not why Kamala made the final decision. Mark Halperin has some good insights in yesterday's interview with Megyn Kelly:

Of the choice between Walz and Shapiro, he says,

There's a bunch of things, some issue-oriented, some personality, some based on her meeting with him, that made it clear that, on deadline, because she didn't have a very long runway here, one guy was easy, and the other guy was hard. One guy had vast, almost universal popularity within the party, the other guy, it turns out, has some enemies within the party.

. . . And then we get to the meeting on Sunday, where she meets face to face with those two . . . . It's a tale of two prospects, one, who does what a normal ambitious vice presidential candidate does: let's talk about this. What's the campaign gonna be like? How many of my people can I bring in? If we do win, what's my role as vice president?

These are questions people like John Edwards and Al Gore, when they were up to be on our ticket, they asked. . . . If you're the vice president, you demand that you're the last person in the room with the president when a decision's being made. . . . What was Walz's position? Walz's position was, "Hey, you want me to be the last person in the room, great! If you don't, all good!

And so, on deadline, when she needs a united party headed into the convention and the fall. . . . I haven't heard a single Democrat express anything but enthusiasm about the pick. . . . On deadline, one guy's easy, one guy's hard.

But Halperin keeps saying "on deadline". What on earth is the deadline? The Democrat convention is still more than a week away. Trump announced his pick of Vance the day his convention started. Why did Kamala have to pick Walz fully two weeks early? All I can think is that a sense of urgency was building even before last weekend, when according to the Daily Mail, the need to distract from the Emhoff story became even more urgent.

And although Halperin acknowledges Walz has a "liberal record", he doesn't factor in the stolen valor accusations, which have dogged Walz throughout his political career, and which so far have done quite a bit of damage to the campaign. As far as I'm concerned, this adds weight to the idea that, as I speculated yesterday, Kamala's interview with Shapiro gave him the impression that she wouldn't be a good partner, while Kamala got the impression that Shapiro's expectations were too high.

And that takes me back to the Eagleton scenario, that nobody else wanted the job, and a deeply flawed candidate was the only choice available.

UPDATE: And then there's this. . .

Wait till reporters start asking the gay bar owners in Minnesota about Tim Walz.

There’s a reason why he shakes his wife’s hand and panders to the gay community, and it’s not because he’s awkward…

It will all come out.@GovTimWalz pic.twitter.com/4uvMYDb8DG

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) August 8, 2024

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?