The Empress Dowager Speaks

My chief takeaway from the photo above is that Judy Woodruff, 77, has a much better plastic surgeon than Nanxy Pelosi, 84, but I doubt if either lady has had her last visit to the face doctor. It used to be that refusal to acknowledge the pasaage of time was thought to be a character defect, but apparently no more. I used to watch The PBS News Hour, and I thought Judy Woodruff looked cadaverous 25 years ago, but that's been fixed. Nevertheless, the problem I see is that Speaker Emerita Pelosi is still running the world, or at least, she thinks she is.

Her remarks came during an interview with Woodruff at last week's Democrat comvention, which she probably gave after more than a few sips of wine. Via The Gateway Pundit:

“I made a prediction today to Al Hunt [Woodruff's husband and media heavyweight] , that would be. He said maybe you can win 5 [House seats]. I said, I want 10. He said, Is that your prediction? I said, I want 10 at least. We want 31 when we won and win. Now remember, in the last election they said we were going to lose 30 or 40 seats. What? I, they didn’t know what they were talking about. We would, we know our, we’re different from the president. We’re very discreet. Reptilian. Cold blooded. These are the races we have to win. Others are winning the whole country. 10.”

This comes in the wake of Nancy claiming credit for pushing Joe Biden out as a presidential candidate, so that would add some credibility to her implication here that she's the one who's actually runnng the world. But wait a mpoment. She didn't just start running the world when she decided Joe needed to go -- if she was running the world in 2024, she was running it in 2020, when she put Joe in. And she was running the world just the month before in 2024, even as of June 5, when

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Wednesday joined a chorus of Democrats rallying to President Biden’s defense after the Wall Street Journal published a report casting doubt on the president’s mental acuity and performance in private meetings.

Pelosi, in a statement on the social platform X, criticized the reporting for glossing over Democrats’ accounts of their interactions with the president and, instead, focusing on “attacks by Republicans.”

This, of course, was before the June 27 debate, the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump, and the successful Republican convention, which apparently forced her to recalibrate. But let's consider, in the interview above, she clearly takes credit for limiting Republican gains in 2022, so we must assume she was running the world then as well. So who decided it was a good idea to let Joe run for reelection in 2023? It must have been with her approval.

But she was Speaker from 2007 to 2023, with a gap of eight years between 2011 and 2019, when she was nevertheless House minority leader. She was probably running the world then, too, and I've got to assume she greenlighted Hillary's run in 2016, when she must have felt, along with everyone else, that Hillary was a sure thing. Hillary should have been running for reelection in 2020, right? There should have been no need for Joe to bother his head about running for president ever, leaving 2020 aside.

In fact, Joe was a Plan B forced on Nancy and the lizard people when Hillary lost in 2016, and it looks to me as though there was never a good plan for the Democrat future after Hillary lost and Joe just squeaked by in 2020. Let's face it, the insiders apparently knew all along that Joe couldn't make it to the 2024 election, and they never came up with a plan to deal with it -- not until July of 2024, when the plan turned out fo be Kamala at the last minute.

If Nancy's version of her discreet, reptilian, cold-blooded administration of rhe world during her tenure as Empress Dowager that she gave in the Woodruff interview is accurate, she's captivated by delusions of her own competence, and this delusion of competence has culminated in the last-minute designation of Kamala Harris as the Democrat candidate this year, with her running mate, Tim Walz.

Look at the smugly adoring glance Judy Woodruff gives Nancy in the photo above. They're still running the world, at least in their own minds. When I was a lot younger, I used to hear wise people say to be careful of people who refuse to acknowledge the passage of time. They had a point. But I have another question -- why haven't the lizard people stepped in? Yeah, Joe needed to go, but that waa back in 2023, and Nancy didn't take care of it then. Seems to me that Nancy needs to go now.

This Isn't Nothing

n the wake of the Democrat convention, Alan Dershowitz, the most prominent living Jew, announced (here and here), specificially at the second link, "I am no longer a Democrat. I am an Independent."

Also in ther wake of the convention, Bobby Kennedy Jr, the most prominent living Kennedy and namesake of his martyred father, endorsed a Republican candidate for president and reiterated his previous departure from the Democrats.

“The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, against colonialism, imperialism and unjust wars,” he went on. “We were the party of labor, of the working class. The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment. Our party was the full world against big money interests and corporate power. True to its name, it was the party of democracy.”

As you know, I left that party in October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values that I grew up with. It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag and Big Money,” Kennedy lamented.

Although the Kennedys identified as Catholic, and it suited the hierarchy of the US Catholic Church at the time to tolerate this, they were never very Catholic in their personal affairs. The Democrats began to lose the Catholic vote early in this century, and prominent US bishops have now distanced themselves from prominent Catholic Democrats, in some cases, like Archbishop Cordileone of San Francisco, going so far as to deny Speaker Emerita Pelosi communion. The liberal Cardinal Gregory has called Joe Biden a "cafeteria Catholic", which has Biblical echoes in the Old Testament prophets declaring that the Almighty no longer supports the kings of Judea.

So Bobby Jr's departure from the Democrats has less to do with the Catholics, who had already left the New Deal coalition, than it does with the Kennedys, who up to now had unanimously lent their glamour and prestige to the old Democrat coalition. Whatever Bobby Jr's siblings may say, the Kennedys are no longer unanimous, and it looks like Bobby Jr is the last flamboyant public Kennedy in the old, Joe Sr mode in any case.

This is simply a continuation of the conflicts that first emerged in the 1968 and 1972 Democrat conventions, in which the New Left gained control of the Democrat party and began to shed much of the old New Deal coalition:

The great political failure of the 1960s was the New Left's inability to bring the labor movement into its great liberationist tent. There were lots of reasons for that, one of them being that most big union leaders didn't want to be in that stinky tent with a lot of hippies, feminists, dashiki-wearing black militants and "fags." (That last comes from AFL-CIO leader George Meany's description of the New York delegation to the disastrous 1972 Democratic convention: "They've got six open fags and only three AFL-CIO representatives!") Also, not a small matter: The New Left opposed the Vietnam War; again, most labor leaders supported it.

Still, the inability to forge a political movement that was as much about class as race and gender rights haunts the United States today. We saw the shadows of that struggle even in the 2008 presidential campaign, as supporters of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama traded charges of "racism" and "sexism," but few paid attention to the increasing openness of white working-class voters, especially men, to pick a Democrat again in a time of profound economic crisis. . . . The decline of the labor movement hobbled the Democratic Party, and so far nothing has come along to replace it, to represent the great majority of Americans who are disadvantaged by the ever-increasing power of corporate America and the wealthy.

This, of course, is the point Bobby Jr made while endorsing Trump. At the same time, Bobby Sr's opportunism when he campaigned on a New Left agenda before his assassination in 1968 allowed a Kennedy nostalgia movement to hijack rhe Kennedy brand, when neither Joe Sr nor John was anything like a New Leftist. This is the mistake David Axelrod makes when he says Bobby Sr "battled fiercely & eloquently against poverty, injustice and for economic fairness", or Bobby Jr's siblings make when they endorse "the values that our father and our family hold most dear".

The image of Bobby Sr, martyred after only briefly hoppimg on Eugene McCarthy's 1968 momentum, has been a key underpinning of the post-New Deal Democrat narrative. With his namesake publicly renouncing the post-New Deal party, it's sn underrated step in dispelling the Kennedy myth. In this, Bobby Jr isn't just a traitor to the Democrats, he's a traitor to his class. As the link just above suggests, the New Left has a strong class identity, and it would prefer not to truck with the working class. The new-style Democrats like the Kennedys because they're rich, not because they stand for anything.

And let's not forget that the rift between Alan Dershowitz and the residents of Martha's Vineyard has a strong class bias. Martha's Vineyard residents have confirmed that they are, indeed, shunning him, for reasons much like the complaints of Bobby Jr's siblings:

You defended and gave cover to this president who relentlessly disrupts and destroys all that we value and causes massive and lasting damage to our political system, our courts, our standing in the world, the environment and more.

Again, there's a strong sense that Dershowitz is a traitor to his class -- and indeed, if Dershowitz identifies as a New Deal Democrat aligned with labor, Jews, Catholics, and other ethnics, and middle class prosperity, this might well be the case.

It's hard to avoid thinking we're at an inflection point in the alignment of US political parties equivalenmt to the pre-Civil War period.

Bad Kennedy

What strikes me about Bobby Kennedy Jr's endorsement of Trump is how prominent Democrats like David Axelrod view it as a betrayal of the Kennedy myth:

Robert F. Kennedy was my political hero. He battled fiercely & eloquently against poverty, injustice and for economic fairness.
Sadly RFK Jr, who made a rambling exit from the race today, proves that sometimes an apple DOES fall far from the tree...in this case, down a hill and…

— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) August 23, 2024

His siblings agree:

I am sharing a personal statement that my family and I have made in response to my brother’s announcement. pic.twitter.com/j7vTTabNYZ

— Kerry Kennedy (@KerryKennedyRFK) August 23, 2024

However, with John Jr dying with his cokehead wife and sister-in-law in an aircraft accident attributable to his own incompetence as a pilot and Caroline maintaining a low public profile, Bobby Jr is by far the most prominent Kennedy of his generation, and unliike John Jr, he's maintained some level of gravitas. The track record of the others, especially when John Jr was expected to carry the torch, isn't good.

His problem is that as a once-loyal Democrat, he had the temerity to try to challenge Joe Biden in a 2024 primary contest. What was especially peculiar about this is the poor judgment of the Democrat establishment in resisting a primary challenge to Joe, when every indication is that there should have been one, since as we've been slowly learninng, Joe's cognitive decline was well known to insiders throughout much of his term in office.

I've been saying all along that Democrats made a series of blunders starting in 2016, first in enabling Hillary's candidacy that year and apparently discouraging Biden from running, but then supporting Biden in 2020 as the only alternative to Bernie Sanders, when it was apparently understood that Biden wasn't in a condition to run for re-election in 2024 -- but then discouraging any other Democrat from opposing Joe in primaries that year, when a younger, more viable candidate should have emerged.

On one hand, Bobby Jr was never likely to do well as a Democrat, since his views overall tend toward the libertarian when they aren't actually far left. On the other hand, he's probably closer to the original Kennedy brand, which is to say the one created by the family patriarch, Joseph Kennedy Sr. Although claiming to be a New Deal Democrat, Kennedy Sr had an ambiguous relationship with the h8ghly controversial Father Charles Coughlin, an anti-Semitic and isolationist Roosevelt opponent. This was in large part because Kennedy Sr felt he controlled the Catholic vote, and Fr Coughlin was an asset.

When Roosevelt appointed Joe Sr ambassador to the UK,

Kennedy hoped to succeed Roosevelt in the White House, telling a British reporter in late 1939 that he was confident that Roosevelt would "fall" in 1940 (that year's presidential election).

. . . Kennedy rejected the belief of Winston Churchill that any compromise with Nazi Germany was impossible. Instead, he supported Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement. Throughout 1938, while the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany intensified, Kennedy attempted to arrange a meeting with Adolf Hitler. Shortly before the Nazi bombing of British cities began in September 1940, Kennedy once again sought a personal meeting with Hitler without the approval of the U. S. Department of State, in order to "bring about a better understanding between the United States and Germany".

. . . Throughout the rest of the war, relations between Kennedy and the Roosevelt administration remained tense, especially when Joe Jr., a Massachusetts delegate at the 1940 Democratic National Convention, vocally opposed President Roosevelt's unprecedented nomination for a third term, which began in 1941. Kennedy may have wanted to run for president himself in 1940 or later.

Thus the Kennedy patriarch had idiosyncratic beliefs, while he was primarily interested in his own advancement. In this, it seems as though his grandson Bobby Jr is, contra David Axelrod, an apple that didn't fall far from the tree at all. On the other hand, Kennedy Sr's political instincts don't seem to have carried him very far in his own career -- though a little like Donald Trump, he had several careers, first in real estate, then in Hollywood, and finally in politics, unlike Trump, he failed in politics.

On one hand, it's easy to see where Bobby Jr, as a descendant of Joe Sr, would see common interests with Trump, maybe not too far from how Joe Sr saw common interests with Roosevelt. On the other, I'm inclined to think that in a historical context, Bobby Jr is the authentic Kennedy, even if other members of his extended family claim he's the opposite.

So insofar as there's a remaining magic to the Kennedy name, it's Bobby Jr's to do with as he chooses -- with the caveat that John Jr's example shows that generation of Kennedys hasn't had the best judgment overall. But if anyone knows now how to use the Kennedy name effectively at all, it may well be Donald Trump.

The Empress Dowager

According to Wikipedia, Empress Dowager

is the English language translation of the title given to the mother or widow of a Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese monarch in the Chinese cultural sphere.

An empress dowager wielded absolute power over the harem and imperial family and sometimes even for important issues that were necessary, the emperor or officials went to empress dowager to consult. Empress Dowager's position was second after the emperor, but she was ahead of him in respect, because the emperor lowered his head in front of her to show his respect and stood in front of her with respect and politeness, even was precise in the way he spoke and faced her. Numerous empress dowagers held regency during the reign of underage emperors. Many of the most prominent empress dowagers also extended their control for long periods after the emperor was old enough to govern. This was a source of political turmoil according to the traditional view of Chinese history.

I'm not sure why nobody's yet attached this title to Speaker Emerita Pelosi, especially since she's now demonstrated that she has the effective power to remove a sitting US president. Butr now she seems to be distancing herself from Kamala. According to Fox News,

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insisted in a new interview that she wanted an "open process" to replace President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket but Vice President Kamala Harris "took advantage" of the opportunity.

"Many of us who were concerned about the election wanted to have an open process. It was an open process, anyone could have gotten in," Pelosi said during an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

. . . "[Harris] had the endorsement of the president, and she, politically astutely, took advantage of it and shut down — not shut down, but won the nomination. But anybody else could have gotten in," Pelosi continued.

. . . Pelosi has been repeatedly asked to explain what went into the president's decision to step aside from the 2024 race, and if she had anything to do with it. Pelosi told CNN's Jake Tapper on Monday that she did what she had to do, despite also denying that she had orchestrated the pressure campaign.

"You know what?" Pelosi said. "I had to do what I had to do. He made the decision for the country. My concern was not about the president, it was about his campaign. As he has seen with the exuberance, the excitement that has come forth in our country."

But here's my question: if she's so powerful, how come the whole Biden crisis suddenly arose this past July and nobody anticipated it? Every indication is that Washington insiders had been aware of Joe's decline beginning from the time he took office in 2021, and there seems to be at least an impression that he expected to be a one-term "interim president", at least until he decided he wouldn't, and the same insiders endorsed this, effectively forbidding an open primary season in 2024.

But with no open primary season, Robert Kennedy Jr, who had originally intended to run as a Democrat, elected to run instead as an Independent. Dean Phillips, although he was at a disadvantage for starting his campaign late, was also hindered by state Democrat parties that kept him off the primary ballot in favor of Biden.

Clearly the time to have discouraged Biden from running was at the latest mid-2023. By late in the year, key Obama adviser David Axelrod was expressing public doubts about Joe's candidacy. The question still remains why Obama and Pelosi didn't act to end Joe's candidacy when there was still time for the open primary process to select his successor that Pelosi now claims she wanted.

One answer might be that insiders were putting their faith in the "lawfare" strategy that would eliminate Trump as a potential opponent, but there are problems there, too. The first is that it became apparent early this year that none of the indictments against Trump stood a practical chance of coming to trial before the election, and only the weakest, the New York hush money case, actually did, but even that conviction had no effect on Trump's performance in the polls.

In other words, to be even theoretically successful, the "lawfare" indictmemts, like the effort to get Joe to drop out, came at least a year too late to be effective. If Nancy Pelosi had absolute power, a 21st century Empress Dowager, why couldn't she make this happen? Instead, she's apparenmtly now focusing on limiting the damage to down-ballot races:

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi privately told President Joe Biden in a recent conversation that polling shows that the president cannot defeat Donald Trump and that Biden could destroy Democrats’ chances of winning the House in November if he continues seeking a second term, according to four sources briefed on the call.

More recently, she's blaming New York Gov Hochul:

Two years ago, New York was a key reason Democrats lost the House. The party lost roughly a half-dozen competitive races, including then-campaign Chair Sean Patrick Maloney's ouster in the Hudson Valley. Pelosi blamed at least some of the party's problems on incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul, who won in 2022 by a closer-than-expected margin that has been blamed for dragging down other Democrats downballot.

So it's Joe's fault, it's Hochul's fault, and now it looks like she's gonna put the blame on Kamala if November goes sideways. I think the bigger problem is the Empress Dowager herself. If she was running things, why didnb't they turn out better?

We're Still In 1972

I keep saying that the closest historical parallel we have to this year's presidential campaign is 1972, when the Democrats were forced to swap out their vice presidential candidate only weeks after he'd been nominated. But even before that, another parallel is that year's Democrat convention, which is one of the few in modern history, either Democrat or Republican, that didn't produce a bounce in the polls, however brief it may have been.

This site lists the respectrive poll bounces for each party following its nominating convention for each presidential election since 1964. The bounce for McGovern in 1972 was 0; the bounce for Nixon that year was 7.

In fact, the Democrat bounce was bigger in other years that still turned out badly for them -- in 1980, Jimmy Carter got 10; in 1984, Walter Mondale got 9; in 1988, Michael Dukakis got 7. The only bounces that were worse for either party was John Kerry's -1 in 2004 and Mitt Romney's -1 in 2012.

Wednesday's inept scheduling was reminiscent of 1972's speech delays as well:

UPDATE 10:48 p.m. ET:

Oprah is done now, and Democrats wasted more time with a Walz propaganda video–and now Maryland Gov. Wes Moore is speaking to waste more time. Zero chance Walz makes it to the stage in primetime tonight.

UPDATE 11:00 p.m. ET:

Now Pete Buttigieg is speaking, and Democrats have officially screwed up their convention for the third straight night by talking too long with meaningless programming that pushed their vice presidential candidate now past primetime. How embarrassing.

UPDATE 11:05 p.m. ET:

Buttigieg is done now, and then the Democrats played another messaging video. And now on stage is John Legend doing some kind of performance. We’re still awaiting Tim Walz, and it’s getting far later than when Biden took the stage on Monday and when Obama took the stage on Tuesday. The DNC is officially a disorganized mess.

Walz finally took the stage at 11:22. What's intriguing is that commentary after Biden's speech Monday night was unanimous in saying it had been deliberately delayed past prime time to take attention away from Biden, who was yesterday's news. But why deflect attention from Walz? There are only two explanations, one that it was incompetence, bad enough, the other that it was deliberate, which is even worse, a tacit acknowledgement that Walz was a bad choice.

While nobody has put out any preliminary polling bounce for this year's Democrat convention, the disorganization behind it, which is also credited for the 1972 speeches runnibng hours behind schedule, has already been heavily reported:

The Democratic National Convention — off to a smooth start by all outward metrics — has also featured logistical headaches, like long lines, bad internet connections, expensive price tags, and limited access to the floor, leaving many of the 15,000 credentialed media grumbling, and their representatives openly battling convention organizers.

. . . Journalists, including those from Semafor, waited hours to get to the convention hall. When they arrived, they found what Slate’s communications director, Katie Rayford, described as a “wildly disorganized” scene.

TV network executives also told Semafor that the event was more expensive. Broadcast suites inside the United Center were nearly double the cost and much smaller than those offered a month earlier at the RNC.

This is the current situation trying to get into the Democratic National Convention perimeter. This is supposed to be a media entrance and hundreds of delegates got dropped off here and are trying to get in. So wildly disorganized @DNC pic.twitter.com/rD2NYm9Mfr

— Katie Rayford (@katie_rayford) August 19, 2024

Public interest in the convention is also down:

The television ratings of the first night of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) sunk 22 percent from 2016, according to Nielsen.

The ratings crash suggests that Vice President Kamala Harris is far less popular than the media purported [sic].

The continued scheduling delays, along with the other administrative snafus, suggest that the Democrats' heart isn't in this year's campaign, and even Barack Obama and Bill Clinton just went through the motions. Heck, despite his ADHD arm waving, even Tim Walz is just going through the motions.

What is it with Communist Slob Timothy Walz and the wild gesticulations? Freak! pic.twitter.com/juklqeJZee

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 22, 2024

What Are We To Make Of Tim Walz?

For now, I don't know what to do with the information overload that's the DNC. I have an inchoate impression that there's no real plan for the campaign, and there are lots of signs that nobody competent is in charge, and we'll have to see how things shake out. But in the meantime, I want to focus on Tim Walz.

For instance, what about whether he was really vetted? The best indication I can see is this:

🚨 BREAKING: I just confronted Eric Holder about why he didn’t vet Tim Walz over his Stolen Valor

Holder: “F*CK YOU!!!” pic.twitter.com/6j1gzdkW2P

— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) August 21, 2024

It's hard to avoid thinking that if Holder is so determined to run away from questions about whether he vetted Walz, he may regret his role, or at least the public perception of it. Via Breitbart,

According to the Associated Press, the process — managed by Holder — took 16 days, and ended with Walz being chosen. Since Walz was selected, he has been plagued by lies he told about his military service, forcing the Harris-Walz campaign to address one of them.

More complete accounts that I've seen say Holder headed a larger group of Obama alumni who came up with a short list consisting of Arizona Sen Mark Kelly, Pennsylvania Gov Josh Shapiro, and Walz. I reviewed what we know about the selection process in detail in this post.

The current consensus seems to be that Kamala went with her gut and chose Walz based on vibes, or something like that, although Shapiro's version suggests that he had serious second thoughts after his final interview with Kamala. Did he maybe think she was drunk?

Walz's latest comtroversy involves IVF:

In this case, he has been saying for months that he and his wife used IVF to have kids. He's been saying this, not coincidentally, just as the Democratic Party has been trying to turn conservative opposition to IVF into another winning campaign issue.

. . . Except, Walz and his wife never used IVF. They used a different procedure, one that does not involve the fertilization of embryos outside the body. It's an important distinction because a) that's literally what IVF means (in vitro means in glass) and b) no one opposed the treatment the Walz's actually used.

Walz's wife, Gwen,

clarified in a statement to CNN that she did not use in vitro fertilization to conceive, sharing new details about her and Gov. Tim Walz’s fertility struggles as the governor has highlighted their experience with infertility on the campaign trail.

. . . Intrauterine insemination, like IVF, is a common fertility procedure used by couples trying to conceive. But anti-abortion groups have pushed state officials to restrict IVF — when an egg is removed from a person’s body and combined with sperm inside a lab before being implanted.

However, no accounts I've seen of the controversy as it applies to the Walzes explain the specfic moral problem with IVF, although there are additional reasons the Catholic Church opposes it: during the process of fertilization in the lab, multiple eggs are harvested and fertilized, which can lead to multiple viable embryos. One or more of these can be selected and placed in the mother's womb, which means that other viable embryos aren't selected, and this is morally an abortion. For that matter, even if multiple embryos are implanted in the mother, some of these may also be aborted later in the IVF process.

For Walz to defend this process is questionable in itself. However, the overall issue of reproductive freedom has entered the vice presidential race:

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear sparked an outcry on Tuesday when he appeared to suggest GOP vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, should experience a rape-induced pregnancy.

. . . Beshear targeted what he called "extreme" abortion laws that have been enacted in various red states following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that overturned Roe V. Wade in 2022, and slammed the GOP's attacks that Democratic lawmakers support abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.

. . . Vance blasted Beshear’s words on X, stating, "What the hell is this? Why is @AndyBeshearKY wishing that a member of my family would get raped?!? What a disgusting person."

For now, the subliminal effect of the controversy deflects attention from the Democrat claim to support reproductive freedom and redirects it, first, to Walz's repeated pattern of embroidering his life story, and second, to Beshear's out-of-line rhetoric. The bottom line is that in yet another critical line of attack against Trump, Walz weakens it, but then, so does Beshear.

But overall, it seems like there's a growing public impression that Walz is a buffoon. His oafish grin doesn't help at all. And we've still got the question of whether Obama in particular, in this case via Eric Holder in maybe deliberately omitting to vet Walz, is setting Kamala up to fail.

Joe's Subliminal Message At The DNC

I keep saying that the election cycle this year is closest to 1972, and another parallel is Joe's big farewell speech, which was pushed back almost to midnight Eastern time, reminiscent of McGovern in 1972:

The convention, which has been described as "a disastrous start to the general election campaign", . . . with sessions beginning in the early evening and lasting until sunrise the next morning. . . . A protracted vice presidential nominating process delayed McGovern's acceptance speech (which he considered "the best speech of his life") until 2:48 a.m.—after most television viewers had gone to bed.

Last night,

As the speakers leading up to Biden on the schedule began dragging on and on, speculation swirled about how and why the president had been shoved aside to speak when many Americans would already be asleep.

“This is awful. He literally set up a campaign and handed it over to them — do they have to cut him out of prime time?” one longtime Biden aide texted Axios reporter Alex Thompson.

But I would dispute the claim that Joe "literally set up a campaign and handed it over to them". As things have shaken out, 2024 has had two entirely separate general election campaigns, the first one being Joe's up to his withdrawal from the race on July 21, the second with the designation of Kamala as the new candidate in the following days. One thing the conventional commentators have gotten wrong is that Kamala's campaign wil be "short" and a "sprint".

No, it will be the traditional general election presidential campaign that extends from the summer nominating conventions to early November. So what was all that business that began a year ago with the Trump indictments and trials and ended with Joe's brain freezes, the debate debacle, and Trump surviving an assassination attempt?

That was a reprise, a do-over of the 2020 election, and in fact a de facto demonstration that the 2020 election was "stolen". Sometime around late spring, the conventional commentators began to pronounce that the electorate had decided they'd been better off under Trump than under Biden, although the polls hadn't changed much, with Trump leading within the margin of error, for many months. Over the month of June, there was rising public concern over Joe's mental state, driven by his public performance in Europe and brain freezes back home, culminating in the June 27 debate.

However, again, there was no change in the polls, except that there seems to have been a growing subliminal recognition among the elites that any success they'd had in 2020 and afterward in concealing Joe's actual condition had come to an end. In effect, they acknowledged that Trump had won the 2020 election, and in fact the business of January 6, 2021 wasn't all that far fetched.

Again, with no change in the polls, Obama and Pelosi made a final push for Joe to withdraw, and Pelosi, 84 years old, has been taking credit over the last few weeks for the outcome. Her age alone should put her judgment in this matter in question, but there's more to be said about this in a separate post. On one hand, though, this amounted to a much-belated concession of the 2020 election, a tacit acknolwedgement that it had been rigged by Joe's basement campaign, which had successfully concealed his actual condition -- but that doesn't fix the Democrat decisions that led up to either the 2020 or 2024 election.

Nevertheless, the circumstances of Joe's speech last night, a de facto 2020 concession speech as well as a not-so-tacit humiliation at the hands of Democrat stalwarts, were an indication that Joe was never in control; Pelosi had created him, and Pelosi at long last destroyed him, which is closer to the real problem.

But Joe's de facto concession speech sinply kicks off the second 2024 presidential campaign, under a Democrat party that, as it's periodically done, has reverted to the party of 1972, which the Wikipedia entry linked above characterizwd as

Previously excluded political activists gained influence at the expense of elected officials and traditional core Democratic constituencies such as organized labor.

Joe's concession speech is the start of a second, entirely separate presidential campaign.