OK, Here's What Happened With Nate Silver

Over the past winter and spring, I linked pretty frequently to Nate Silver's Substacks, especially the February essay where he listed a series of tasks Joe Biden needed to undertake to turn his electoral prospects around. Back then, he was especially worried that Joe wasn't doing interviews:

This is bad, folks. Biden’s doing a lot fewer interviews than even the media-hostile Trump. And when he does them, his performance is still just mediocre. That’s why something like turning down a Super Bowl interview ought to be highly concerning.

His prescription:

Over the course of the next several weeks, Biden should do four lengthy sitdown interviews with “non-friendly” sources. “Non-friendly” doesn't mean hostile: nonpartisan reporters with a track record of asking tough questions would work great. A complete recording of the interviews should be made public. The interviews ought to include a mix of different media (e.g. television and print) and journalistic perspectives.

I've revisited this essay several times, especially in light of Joe's withdrawal from the race. What strikes me now is that Silver saw this at the time as a simple question of strategy: all his handlers needed to do was make a simple adjustment and set him up for some interviews. His reasoning was that yeah, there would be some gaffes, but statistically, they could be discounted, and the fact that he'd actually done some interviews would count in his favor. Or somethong like that.

In hindsight, it's become clear that Joe's condition was far worse than we'd been led to believe, and his handlers' main task was simply covering this up. The idea of having Joe do "four lengthy sit-down interviews" over the next several weeks was vain fancy, and by four months later, we saw the inevitable outcome. It's a little peculiar that anyone, certainly including me, ever saw this as a reasonable suggestion.

So in any case, it's maybe time to reassess Nate Silver as a reader of omens, even before we get to his more recent assessments of the race involving Kamala Harris. But as of June 26, he said, "The presidential election isn't a toss-up":

it was certainly a close race, but we’d reached the point where it would be dishonest to call it a toss-up.

. . . if we’re being honest, pundits who obsess over whether Biden is 1 point ahead or behind in national polls are kind of missing the point. Because national polls being tied don’t make for a toss-up race — but instead one where Trump has a material advantage in the Electoral College.

Except that as of August 1, with Kamala now in the formula, he'd changed his mind:

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. It’s not exactly 50/50, but close enough that a poker player would call it a “flip”: Democrats have ace-king suited, and Republicans have pocket jacks.

And two days later, he was esplaining Why she should pick Shapiro:

Why Shapiro? What’s the positive case? Well, Shapiro is the extremely popular governor of what is by far the most important swing state. He’s highly charismatic and he’s qualified. He seems to want the job. This is about as obvious as things get in politics. You need a good reason to not pick Shapiro[.]

Well, for good or ill, and for whatever reason, obvious or not, she didn't go with Shapiro. By August 5, the day before Kamala didn't pick Shapiro, Silver was even more bullish:

Harris rose again in our forecast today: in the span of a week, she’s gone from a 37 percent chance of winning the Electoral College to a 53 percent chance. The race is still a toss-up for all intents and purposes, but if you’re sweating the details, you’d rather have the 53 percent side of a bet than the 47 percent half.

But by August 10, his most recent take on the election, he's begun to back off again:

And yet there’s a part of me — just a part — . . . . That thinks it was probably a mistake for Harris to pick Tim Walz instead of Josh Shapiro, but that not wanting to disrupt the campaign’s favorable trajectory with a higher-risk pick was a valid consideration.

. . . The Harris campaign is going to need more cushion, because it could very, very easily lose the Electoral College in an election held today — outside of that NYT polling, the race still looks pretty close to a toss-up — and it still faces headwinds like economic volatility, immigration, and Biden’s baggage.

It's worth remembering that Silver sees himself as a statistical modeler, not a campaign consultant. His background is in playing professional poker, which boils down to passively predicting outcomes, not trying to influence them. Still, he's been giving advice. In February, he told Biden to do four sit-down interviews in the next several weeks. Two weeks ago, he told Kamala to pick Shapiro. The man is not clairvoyant -- if you want someone who's currently a lot luckier, go for Trump.

But at least for now, Silver seems to have dropped prognosticating the election, because he's on a book tour.

Today is publication day for On The Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, my new book about gambling and risk, and a lot of other things. And if we’re being honest, I’m feeling a little overwhelmed. Traditional publishers like mine believe in a cluster marketing strategy — having their authors do a lot of media in short succession, which is carefully timed to the launch. So suddenly, you’re probably seeing a lot of Nate everywhere you look.

The last thing he's going to do is talk realistically about Kamala, because that would spoil all the puffery on the talking-head shows his publisher has him booked to pitch his book. What's a little strange is this all puts him right back where he says he doesn't want to be:

Three-and-a-half years ago, when I first conceived of On The Edge, I was feeling discontented — maybe even lost. . . . I wasn’t sure the whole Quasi-Celebrity Election Forecaster Guy thing was working. As I wrote in the book proposal, I felt like “Shamu on exhibit at SeaWorld”, performing tricks for people but not on my own terms.

So now he's on a book tour set up by his publisher saying things his publisher tells him to say, because he doesn't want to perform tricks for people on someone else's terms. And the very last thing he's ever going to do is depart from the media line on Kamala.

But how much insight does he really have into what's going on if he couldn't discern that there was no way Joe Biden could do four sit-down interviews, while at the same time Kamala is avoiding interviews just as much as Joe? What does he think is behind this, especially if the reason neither wants interviews is the same? What does he think the effect will be that Kamala didn't choose Shapiro -- or indeed, that maybe Shapiro, on reflection, didn't choose Kamala?

I doubt if he'd place a serious bet on Kamala winning the election now, but of course, he can't say that.

Yet More On The Subliminal A-Walz

If evidence is needed that the stolen valor attacks on Tim Walz are effective, Hillary Clinton, of all people, came out to defend him on X yesterday:

Tim Walz served honorably for two decades.

Then he joined Congress and worked to pass a new GI bill that helped fund the college educations of millions of veterans—among them, JD Vance.

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) August 12, 2024

This echoes the defense Nancy Pelosi made over the weekend in the story at The Hill that I linked yesterday:

“So first of all, he was in the National Guard 20 years, he thought he’d stay 20 years. But then 9/11 happened, so he signed up for four more years. He retired from that to run for Congress months before his unit was assigned to being deployed,” she added. “So it was after he left, so they’re just trying to confuse things.”

. . . “[Walz] came to Congress and was respected by our colleagues, elected to be the top Democrat on the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, where he, and working with Chet Edwards on the Appropriations Committee and on the Authorizing Committee … made historic advances for veterans, meeting their needs, more than had been done since the GI Bill during World War II,” Pelosi said.

I would call this the blah-blah-blah defense: it makes no direct reference to his premature retirement in the face of deployment, but then it goes blah-blah-blah. Served honorably, blah blah, worked for veterans in congress, blah blah. Since the defenses from both women are so similar, they must be coordinated -- after all, as best I can tell, these are the highest-level Democrats who've commented on the stolen valor issue at all.

Here's the problem with the subliminal message. This is old-time politics, attacking the opponent's masculinity, he's a coward, afraid to fight, and by golly, it's working just like it's supposed to! The only way you can really counter it is to have some even more masculine John Wayne figure come out, snarl some pithy remark that implies Walz's equipment is twice the size of Trump's and Vance's combined, and accuse Vance of being a closet cross-dresser.

This isn't happening. Instead, two conniving, unpleasant old ladies, one of whom just unseated Joe and cut off whatever vestigial masculinity he had, are going blah-blah. If Joe comes out on Walz's behalf, that will just make things more comical. Can the Democrats get either Bill Clinton or Barack Obama to vouch for Walz? I kinda doubt it -- it would put their prestige on the line, and they don't need that at this stage, Walz is too much of a loser.

Via the Daily Caller:

Journalists worked to discredit the right’s newest line of attack, accusing Walz of stolen valor, and revived old arguments about “swiftboating.” The term originated during the Bush-Kerry campaign of 2004, when a Republican political operative by the name of Chris LaCivita helped organize Swift Boat veterans from Vietnam to scrutinize John Kerry’s service record, and the stories he told after coming home.

. . . LaCivita, now running the Trump campaign, and his staff will continue to hammer the message, using its own veteran Sen. J.D. Vance to “expose Walz’s military record.”

. . . In 2004, LaCivita organized “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” which worked to cast doubt on Kerry’s Vietnam record. Corporate media outlets have since deemed “swiftboating” to be representative of slimy politics. Politico, noting that the tactic could potentially be re-run for the 2024 election, argued that it “focuses attacks on the running mate, not the principal.”

“They’re scrambling to cover for him because they know this is a massive liability,” a source familiar with the campaign’s thinking told the Caller.

So, is it working? After the attacks began last week, according to the UK Daily Mail, Walz displayed signs of insecurity at the final joint rally held with Kamala:

Vice President Kamala Harris' running mate 'Coach' Tim Walz was criticized for his display of unbridled enthusiasm during their latest rally in Las Vegas.

As the music blasts through the speakers, Walz overflows with exuberance in the short clip. He happily waves to the huge crowd of party supporters cheering for him.

But while his energy and gusto was praised by attendees, many online critics questioned his 'bizarre' behavior.

. . . In a video circulating on X, the Minnesota Governor can be seen joyously clapping as the crowd goes wild and he walks around onstage from the podium.

While some X users suggested that the former teacher had 'villain energy', others suggested he had 'jazz' or 'spirit fingers'.

Beyond that, '

Hearing Team Kamala is talking about how Walz is rapidly changing his overall demeanor as a person, he's snapping at longtime aides for small things, becoming totally disagreeable

— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) August 12, 2024

Ed Morrissey, whom I don't ordinarily esteem, does make an apposite point at Hot Air:

Harris picked Walz in part because of his "dad" vibes and ability to project leadership. This looks like another case of a missing dad in Democrat society. The clear impression is that Walz isn't ready to answer questions about his record, both in office and in his repeated claims about his service record. And so Walz has joined the stealth campaign strategy that Biden pioneered and Harris has to adopt out of necessity.

However, if Walz has to adopt it out of necessity too, then why choose him as a running mate in the first place?

In other words, the Harris campaign needed some testosterone, especially after two woman, Pelosi and Harris, emasculated Joe Biden and subsituted him as a candidate with Harris. But the attempt to do it with "Coach" A-Walz has proven flaccid -- in fact, it succumbed to one of the simplest and oldest strategies in the playbook, portraying the opponent -- or in this case, the opponent's vice presidential surrogate, who'd been added to the ticket to projecf masculinity -- as cowardly and unmanly.

I'll bet the Coach Walz T-Shirt model in the photo at the top of this post is a cat lady.

Tampon Tim Morphs Into A-Walz, But That's The Least Of It

Let's see if I can tease out yesterday's developments. JD Vance was on all the alphabet-network Sunday shows, mostly keeping up the "stolen valor" attacks on Walz, although his remarkable performance on a wide range of issues revealed Trump's wisdom in naming Vance his running mate. This is no Mike Pence. But one of his consistent points was that neither Walz himself nor Kamala was on any such show defending him.

In fact, the only Democrat defending Walz yesterday was Nancy Pelosi. Let's look at this.

In an interview that aired Sunday on MSNBC’s “Inside with Jen Psaki,” Pelosi said, “First of all, it’s a sign of the bankruptcy of their ideas. They don’t have anything to say, so they make up things.”

. . . Pelosi argued the Harris-Walz campaign should “just dismiss” the allegations.

“Yeah, they should just dismiss it, because if people lie, as they are lying, and you hear the lie enough times, it sort of becomes … kind of accepted in their group,” she said. “And so, you have to say, ‘No, that didn’t happen.'”

The problem is that the dirt from people in his former unit keeps coming out, like the former chaplain of his unit callimng him "cowardly", or his former battsalion commander saying he "did not successfully complete any assignment as a Sergeant Major".

But why is Pelosi, now all but retired, the main figure who's coming out in Walz's defense? The reason is twofold. First, it's becoming clear that letting either Walz or Kamala defend him themselves would just make the situation worse. But also, Pelosi owns the pickle the Democrats are currently in -- she pushed Joe out and created the opening that gave them Walz. As Joe said just last night,

“A number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was going to hurt them in the races. And I was concerned if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic — you’d be interviewing me about why did Nancy Pelosi say [something] … and I thought it’d be a real distraction,” he told “CBS News Sunday Morning.”

This is echoed elsewhere in the Biden camp:

Anita Dunn, a White House senior adviser on communications who has since departed for a Harris super PAC, inveighed against Biden’s doubters in Congress and elsewhere in her first interview since the 81-year-old president dropped out of the 2024 race.

“You know, clearly there were leaders of the party who decided to go ahead and go very public. And that gave permission to other people to go public,” Dunn told Politico of the growing chorus of Democrats calling on Biden to abandon his run after his debate flop June 27.

Asked whether she was referring to “senators and House members” as well as “when Nancy Pelosi goes on TV twice when things feel like they’re dying down and reopens the debate,” Dunn shot back, “Absolutely.”

In fact, Pelosi herself took credit for forcing Joe out last week:

Now Pelosi admits she was behind the coup, saying she didn’t like how things were going.

“So I really wanted him to make a decision of a better campaign because they were not facing the fact of what was happening. Just a little background. I’ve never been that impressed with his political operation. I’m not,” she added.

. . . “So my concern was, this ain’t happening, and we have to make a decision for us this to happen, and the President has to make the decision for that to happen.”

“Let me just say, I won’t say necessarily I knew doing at that time. I knew what I was doing in the whole thing, not just that ship. Donald Trump would never set foot in the White House again.”

It sounds as though, late last week or over the weekend, someone -- that is, someone at the level of the people who can tell Obama and Pelosi what to do -- told Pelosi she broke it, and she'd better fix it. But she isn't the only one responsible:

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) appeared on 770 WABC’s “The Cats Roundtable” Sunday with host John Catsimatidis and dropped a bombshell: the Obamas are actually running Kamala Harris’ campaign behind the scenes.

The story lists numerous Obama alumni who either, like Joe's former campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon, who is now Kamala's campaign chair, or David Plouffe, who will now be joining the campaign, but another story in Politico says it isn't that simple:

Kamala Harris’ campaign is navigating internal tensions as a team of new senior strategists take hold of an operation largely staffed by people hired when Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee, according to six people, including aides familiar with the dynamics.

Longtime Harris loyalists are also chafing at the continuing presence of some Biden aides known for disparaging the vice president, three of the people said.

. . . Jen O’Malley Dillon, the former Biden White House official and campaign chair, told Harris in a phone call that she needed specific assurances that some of the campaign’s new power players — including David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s former campaign manager — would not dilute her decision-making authority, two of the people told POLITICO.

. . . They described Plouffe’s title — senior adviser for path to 270 and strategy — as severely downplayed given that those duties are typically the purview of a campaign manager.

Let's poke around the edges here. As I pointed out in this post, Walz was vetted and short-listed by a group made up of Obama alumni Jen O'Malley Dillon, former attorney general Eric Holder, and Dana Remus. We don't know exactly how this happened, but the resullt of the whole process was as catastrophic as McGovern's selection of Thomas Eagleton in 1972. And it's starting to look like this was the outcome of Obama's micromanagement of the Harris campaign.

Except that now, a new team of Obama alums, headed by David Plouffe, is coming in to fix the mess that the first team of Obama alums created. But as we're beginning to learn, Kamala herself seems to have an IQ in the dull normal range at best, and she seems to need constant supervision, quite possibly more than Joe, who is thought to have good days and bad. So who gets to run Kamala, the old Obama team or the new one?

This is turning into a cluster[bleep].

Does He Have A Point?

SAVAGE: Trump plays a compilation ROASTING Kamala Harris’ word salads for 3 Minutes Straight 🤣

pic.twitter.com/qRBWtPGhcj

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 10, 2024

At his Thursday press conference, Trump characterized Kamala as “dumb", “incompetent". and “low IQ." In his Friday Montana rally, he introduced the montage linked above that reprises well-known clips from interviews or statements she's given over the past several years. They suggest she's dumb, incomptent, and low-IQ.

This isn't new. Politico noted a week ago,

Donald Trump broadsided Kamala Harris in a string of derisive social media posts on Saturday, focusing his attacks on the vice president’s intellect after a week that saw her both out-fundraise him and surpass him in some battleground state polls.

In a succession of Truth Social posts after calling off his planned ABC debate with Harris, Trump called Harris “low IQ,” “dumb,” and said she lacked the “mental capacity” to debate him.

Respectable opinion is nervous:

Republican nominee Donald Trump has called her "crazy," "nuts" and "dumb as a rock." Republicans in Congress disparage her as a diversity hire. Right-wing activists and trolls have smeared her online with racist, sexist and sexualized barbs.

. . . The demeaning racist and sexist attacks threaten to distract from the Republican Party's concerted effort to focus on Harris' policies.

. . . The tension suggests Trump campaign efforts to tie Harris to President Joe Biden's record – particularly on immigration, crime and the economy – risk being overshadowed by personal attacks that show no signs of slowing.

But I wound up paying closer attention to Kamala's manner in the montage embedded above. For instnace, at 1:17,

Caribbean nations . . . island nations . . . in the Western Hemisphere . . . that is where the Caribbean is. . . we are also in the Western Hemisphere . . . they are our neighbors.

She isn't just tossing off superficial chatter here, she's struggling. She seems to know she's expected to display some level of gravitas; she's really working hard to come up with something, and the best she can do is try to sound like she's got something to say, but she can't quite make it -- and she knows it, too. There's a deep insecurity behind this persona.

I keep coming back to the X post I quoted from Mark Levin on Friday:

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

One thing I've come to realize abouit Trump is that people discount what he says as hyperbole or bombast, when actually he's displaying a certain level of insight. There's a predictable pattern: he blurts some uncomfortable truth, and the Wall Street journal wrings its hands and says this time he's gone too far, we've got to get back to the issues. What would Mitt Romney do? Well, Mitt Romney would be polite and lose the election.

The problem is that the same people who covered up Biden's cognitive deficit are fully aware of, and covering up, some sort of deficit with Kamala as well. It may well have something to do with low IQ, it may have something to do with drug use, or something entirely different -- but there's a problem, we're being gaslighted, and Trump is correct to point it out. And in fact, if there's a deficit, that's an issue. Even Pelosi finally indirectly admitted it was an issue with Biden, why isn't it an issue with Kamala?

This also goes to Trump's campaign strategy. We're in a season where every B-list pundit is running a piece on My Advice To Donald Trump, when let's face it, he's gotten where he's gotten since January 2021 without the help of any B-list pundits. They've been in a snit -- and the pro-Harris pundits are gloating -- because he's eased off on the rally schedule for a couple of weeks. All he's done is let the Harris campaign self-destruct with the choice of Walz as running mate, while he and Vance call out Kamala's inability to take questions from the press -- because she has a low IQ or something.

And for some reasoon, the legacy media is starting to ask why Kamala can't take questions. This actually sounds like a pretty savvy strategy to me.

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