Harris-Walz Is Comedy Gold

Over the past couple of weeks, we've begun to see public appearances from Kamala, however scripted and closely controlled, as well as joint events with Tampon Tim. What we still haven't seen is a good comedy impression of these performances, but I've got to think one is on the way -- in fact, Trump himself, whose standup talents are acknowledged, could well begin to imitate either one at his rallies, as he had been doing with Joe.

One thing that's become plain is that neither Kamala nor Tim is comfortable with a national campaign. Walz has been a state-and-local-level politician throughout his career, and the photo at the top of this post shows how stiff and uncomfortable he seems on a national stage. It's also plain that Harris, despite a campaign for vice president in 2020 and four years in office, has never actually had to compete -- she's been a California machine politician who checked the right boxes, and her electoral contests were just pro forma.

Thus her stump style is nasal, syrupy, and oddly hyperactive. She shifts randomly in and out of a black accent. There's a lot of over-the-top excitement with wild and incongruous hand gestures. Part of the problem is that she's reading from bland text off the teleprompter but trying to add expression to make it sound like it's spontaneous, and it never quite comes off. For instance,

I won't say that comics and impersonators should be studying this, because I'm sure they are. This goes back to the point I've been making, that it wasn't the polls that made the lizard people force Joe out of the race, it was, after early June, weeks and weeks of near-nightly poopy-pants jokes from Gutfeld. The more I saw of those, the more I kept thinking this couldn't go on -- he'd turned Joe into a toidy joke that was reinforced every time Joe made a public appearance with his affectless persona as though he'd just pooped his pants once again.

And this goes to Hillary's performance in the 2016 election. One of the best insights -- and I can't remember who it was that gave it -- was that if Hillary didn't make public appearances for some number of days, she'd inch upward in the polls. As soon as she gave a big speech, she'd fall back. The more people saw of her, the less they liked her. And that was without standup comics doing imitations. Now, there's Gutfeld.

And this leaves out Tim Walz, who unfortunately is setting himself up as the submissive foil to Boss Girl Kamala. Look at his expression in the photo at the top of this post -- "I can't believe I'm here! I've made it!" And Kamala is egging him on. They've both made it! Joy! Except look at how his suit collar stands away from his neck -- it's a cheap suit that doesn't fit. The man is a bumpkin (Click on the photo for a larger view).

In effect, they've won the lottery, a form of unearned entitlement, which in the rough justice of Bugs Bunny cartoons is a setup for an ultimate fall. I think that this feeds the impression that Walz in particular is a dunce and ripe for comic takedown, but of course, the Boss Girl, even if she's temprarily able to order Dunceboy around, is set up to fall herself. The subliminal public imagination is waiting to see this. Neither has the self-awareness to understand what they're walking into. On the other hand, this is an aspect of the public imagination that Trump somehow instinctively grasps as an entertainer and now a politician.

I keep thinking of one of the classic scenes in cinema, the exchange between Dirty Harry Callahan and his lieutenant in Magnum Force:

“You’re a good man lieutenant. A good man always knows his limitations.”

I think the basic problem with both Kamala and now her comical sidekick Walz is that neither knows their limitations, and it simply shows.

Whose Idea Was Kamala?

Chris Queen asks at PJ Media this morning:

Is it just me, or is Kamala Harris acting like she doesn't want to win the presidential election? Nothing her campaign has done comes across as the tactics of a team that wants to get across the finish line.

He cites yesterday's case of the video she made with Walz that consists entirely of giggly small talk about white guy tacos and such, and he links to Matt Margolis:

As Vance has said, "Kamala Harris isn't running a presidential campaign, she's producing a movie."

But let's go to her choice of Walz as her running mate. What's peculiar is that one of Trump's senior campaign advisers, Chris LaCivita, who is a longtime Republican operative, in 2004 engineered the Bush campaign's use of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against John Kerry, which proved to be highly effective. Walz, as it turned out, had misstated his military record much as Kerry had, and LaCivita was already in place to dust off the swift boat strategy. Matt Margoolis notes at PJ Media,

Tim Walz hasn't exactly had the best introduction to the nation. Despite the best efforts of the campaign and the mainstream media to brand him as a midwestern centrist and "America's dad," among other things, it's hard not to wonder if Walz will be the next candidate the campaign will force off the ticket to make for someone less controversial and with less baggage.

. . . We all know that the mainstream media is in the tank for the Democrats, but sometimes stories are so big that the press can't ignore them. Just like Joe Biden's botched withdrawal from Afghanistan or his disastrous debate performance with Donald Trump, Walz's stolen valor, his past DUI arrest, and even his praise of an antisemitic Muslim cleric have seen coverage in the liberal media.

Walz may be the presumptive nominee, but if the Democratic Party was willing to throw an incumbent president under the bus, it would swap him out just as easily. Many on social media are speculating that it could happen.

In fact, he's letting himself be turned into a clown opposite Kamala. According to the UK Daily Mail,

Tim Walz has been accused of peddling racial stereotypes after telling Kamala Harris he cannot handle anything hotter than a 'white guy taco'.

The Democrat's VP pick made the startling claim in a ten-minute chat between the pair posted to Harris's YouTube channel.

'Here's the deal,' the told [sic] Minnesota Governor told her. 'They said to be careful and let her know this, that black pepper is the top of the spice level in Minnesota, you know?'

The Vice-President peeled away laughing from the exchange, but the deprecatory remarks left a nasty taste in some viewers' mouths.

'This isn't cute,' tweeted David Marcus of Fox News. 'Walz is being used as a clown to mock white people.'

. . . 'It's like a minstrel show lampooning white, Midwest stereotypes,' tweeted DC radio host Larry O'Connor.

. . . 'It's political theater,' sighed Danny Hellman. 'Tim Walz has to take a submissive role as the flavor-challenged boring White man next to Kamala Harris's spicy, pepper-growing multicultural girl boss.'

I've already said here that the subliminal image of Walz as a submissive clown isn't playing well, but this seems to be part of Kamala's campaign strategy. And this takes us back to why Walz was shortlisted as a vice presidential candidate:

Former Attorney General Eric Holder, who was one of former President Barack Obama’s closest confidantes, led the vetting for Harris for her running mate selection process. Asked if Holder and other Democrats, like those who might want to seek the Democrat nomination for president such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, and more, purposefully saddled Harris with a weak running mate in the hopes she loses this year thereby clearing the way for them in 2028 so they would have a shot at the nomination in four years, Trump said he did not know.

Indeed, as I've noted here, the whole vetting team were all Obama alumni, including Jen O'Malley Dillon and former White House Counsel Dana Remus. Somehow they either completely overlooked Walz's National Guard controversy, even though it had come up in his earlier campaigns, and his DUI, or they deliberately put him on the short list perhaps knowing that Kamala wouldn't want someone smarter or more alpha like Mark Kelly or Josh Shapiro.

It's simply hard to avoid the conclusion that if Kamala really wanted to win the election, she would have chosen either Mark Kelly, who might have helped her carry Arizona, or Josh Shapiro, ditto for even more important Pennsylvania, as against Walz, who doesn't help her with anyone but submissive white dudes. A week ago, I quoted Mark Halperin, who provided about tne only possible explanation, "On deadline, one guy's easy, one guy's hard."

One guy's submissive and won't challenge her; the other choices are too smart and too alpha. Easy! But all this does is beg the question of why Obama and Pelosi, who were behind the coup, so quickly chose Kamala, when they could have chosen literally any natural-born US citizen over 35. Remember, they had already bypassed the primary process, and Joe's delegates at the convention would go to whomever they told Joe to support -- but they chose Kamala.

So far, I think J D Vance has the right of it: she's starring in her own movie. How much of this did Obama and Pelosi knowingly plan?

The Race Hasn't Changed

I've pointed out recently that, up to Kamala's replacing Joe on the ticket, the polls had been unchanged since last fall, with Trump's lead in the Real Clear Politics aggregate national vote fluctuating from about 0.5 point to 3 points, depending on the most recent poll they ran through their model. Trump's felony conviction in New York, for example, changed nothing. Joe's very public brain freezes in June changed nothing. His loss in the June 27 debate, the clearest and most indisputable loss in any presidential debate, ever, changed nothing.

The assassination attempt on Trump on July 13 changed nothing. All of a sudden, the emergence of Kamala as the new Democrat turned everything upside down, or at least this is the story. I've been deeply suspicious of the unchanging polls all year, especially when the consensus simply acknowledges that the poll aggregtes underestimated Trump's vote totals in both 2016 and 2020, but for some reason, nobody seems to want to explain this or do anything to make things more accurate.

But in any case, as of this morning, the Fox News poll, which is consistently anti-Trump, has the race precisely where it was before Kamala changed everything:

No matter how many major events intervene, and goodness knows there have been several, the state of this year’s presidential race doesn’t seem to change.

Vice President Kamala Harris trails former President Donald Trump by one percentage point in the latest Fox News national survey, 49-50%.

Last month, she was also behind Trump by one point, 48-49% -- as was President Joe Biden, with the same 48-49% result.

Between those two surveys, there was an assassination attempt on Trump, the Republican National Convention was held, Ohio Sen. JD Vance was chosen as Trump’s running mate, Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris, she was certified as the Democratic presidential nominee and selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, and they held several campaign events with record-breaking attendance.

Fox News is one of the prestigious polls RCP includes in its aggregates. For whatever reason, other polls in that group haven't been issuing recent results, but a few polls have been similar over the past week or so. For instance, the UK Daily Mail:

The latest Daily Mail survey shows Trump still edging out Harris nationally by two percentage points, garnering 43 percent support to Harris’s 41 percent support. However, that two-point gap is outside the ± 3.1 percent margin of error, setting up what the Daily Mail describes as a “nail-biter of an election in November.”

The outlet cites another survey, as well, which shows respondents largely viewing Trump as the more “strong” and “charismatic” candidate.

As of today, Rasmussen Repoerts continues to find that Trump has rebounded:

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that, in a two-way matchup, 49% of Likely U.S. Voters would vote for Trump, while 45% would vote for Harris. Three percent (3%) say they’d vote for some other candidate and two percent (2%) are undecided. These findings are just slightly changed from a week ago, when Trump led by five points, with 49% to Harris’s 44%.

Rasmussen Reports suggests as well that pollsters, including those that make up the RCP aggregates, have been oddly reluctant to do as many polls since the beginning of August:

On @RCPolitics
# of state polls in the first 13 days of August - 28
# of state polls in the last 13 days of July - 73

Weird.

— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) August 15, 2024

What this suggets to me is that legacy media has been mildly interested in stirring up interest by claiming the race has changed, but since these are the dog days of summer, nobody's working especially hard at it, and I don't think anybody, at least among the elites, seriously thinks Kamala has a chance. This, I'm pretty sure, is why Josh Shapiro came as close as he could to claiming he didn't actually want to be Kamala's running mate, because he didn't.

If he was as ambitious as Fettermsn claims, why wouldn't he want the job? After all, Fetterman's implication was that vice president would be a step up for him, or he wouldn't want it. I think the answer is that he's going to run for president in 2028, and he knows Kamala is going to lose in November.

For that matter, why did Kellyanne Conway register as a foreign agent for Ukraine? I think that one's fairly simple, too. Zelensky is assuming Trump will win in November, and he wants someone on his side who has Trump's ear. Remember that Trump's most recent characterization of Zelensky is "maybe the greatest salesman of any politician that’s ever lived". Zelensky is playing his cards in anticipation of Trump winning and looking for the best deal he can get.

I would be on the lookout for other such signals in coming weeks. The smart money -- which, I fear, isn't Nate Silver -- knows nothing's changed.

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.