"Tension" In The Harris Campaign

I was intrigued by the mention in an Axios story I linked yesterday of "tension" among staff in the Harris campaign:

BRIAN FALLON, the campaign’s senior adviser for communications, is generally considered the key person. But the interview has to be coordinated with Harris’s official office, where the communications director is KIRSTEN ALLEN. We hear there are some tensions.

Although there';s general confusion about who's actually running the show, at least some people think it's this same Brian Fallon:

Brian Fallon is managing and hiding Kamala Harris, because Fallon and the rest of her handlers know there is very solid reasoning for why Kamala Harris was never considered a viable alternative to Biden before.

So who is Brian Fallon? According to Wikipedia,

Brian Edward Fallon Jr. (born 1981 or 1982) is an American political operative. He was the national press secretary for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, a role he began in March 2015, and is currently a senior advisor for Kamala Harris's 2024 presidential campaign. In 2018, he founded the legal advocacy organization Demand Justice.

. . . In 2023, Fallon stepped down from Demand Justice to join Joe Biden's 2024 presidential campaign as communications director for Kamala Harris. After Harris was elevated to the top of the ticket, he became a senior communications advisor.

As of this morning, Axios expanded, sort of, on the "tensions" it mentioned yesterday, although it mentions absolutely no names other than Mike Donilon, who's left the campaign, Marc Elias, and Eric Holder, big-poicture types who don't seem to be involved day to day. Especially unmentioned is Brian Fallon:

The good vibes of Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign mask tensions among competing factions, as Harris loyalists and Obama alumni are grafted onto what had been President Biden's campaign.

New people are remaking the campaign on the fly. The result is a large and at times unwieldy team, with internal worries about cohesiveness when inevitable stumbles arise, six people involved in the campaign tell Axios.

Biden's campaign was insular, with a few long-serving aides making big decisions. The Harris campaign has become a diffuse "Frankenstein" team with multiple power centers.

But here's an example I found yesterday before the latest Axios piece came out:

CNN’s John Berman asked the campaign communications director for Vice President Kamala Harris twice what was behind Harris’s “changed” position on fracking — and twice he failed to get an answer.

“Fracking. The vice president has changed her position on fracking in Pennsylvania. Do you know why she’s changed her position?” Berman asked Michael Tyler ahead of Harris actually sitting down for her first major interview Thursday, which will also be with CNN.

Harris once pushed for a fracking ban, but changed this position after launching her 2024 presidential campaign. In 2019, she said there was “no question” she supported a fracking ban. Harris’s current campaign though has said she does not support a ban. Tyler said Harris has been “very clear,” but stuck to more general statements about energy policy.

. . . Before moving on, Berman warned Tyler the “fracking thing” is likely a topic that will need to be discussed in the future.

“Alright, again, I imagine the fracking thing will come up again in the future,” he said.

So who is Michael Tyler? The story characterizes him as "campaign communications director for Vice President Kamala Harris", while Wikipedia characterizes Brian Fallon as "a senior communications advisor". According to AOL,

The Biden-Harris reelection campaign announced that Michael Tyler, the former national press secretary at the Democratic National Committee (DNC), will be its communications director.

. . . He is slated to start on the campaign full time at the beginning of next month [July 2024].

So Tyler is a Biden hire, brought on very late in the game for the Biden-Harris campaign. Brian Fallon is also a Biden hire, but his role was specifically as Harris's commuications director for her vice presidential role in the Biden-Harris campaign. On the other hand, the Axios quote from yesterday that I linked at the top of this post says "the communications director is KIRSTEN ALLEN". But who's actually running communications for the Harris presidential campaign now that Joe is out of the picture? Who knows?

On the issue of fracking, for inastance, Kamala's putative changes in position are attributed only to anonymous sources:

“There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.”

Those were the words of Kamala Harris when she ran for president in 2019, and there was every reason to believe her. Throughout her career, from California to Washington, she has been soundly progressive on energy issues, ardently supporting the Green New Deal, opposing drilling on federal lands and even working to prosecute oil companies for alleged so-called “climate crimes.”

But in recent weeks, anonymous campaign spokespeople have told media outlets that Harris “would not ban fracking.” Well, which is it? Only Vice President Harris can answer. And so far, she has not specified her energy policies.

So far, the only conclusion we can draw is that nobody's in charge -- but isn't that how we got Kamala as a candidate in the first place? I don't sense the ingredients are in place for a good outcome here.

I'm Starting To Sense Real Incompetence

I want to keep looking at yesterdy's main topic, the dispute over the September 10 debate rules and whether the Harris campaign wanted to change them. My big question yesterday was, "why did the Harris campaign spend a whole day on this, which only focused attention on Harris's perceived weakness in debate?" I asked it before the dispute was resolved later in the day, at least in the eyes of the Trump campaign, when Trump himself posted,

The Rules will be the same as the last CNN Debate, which seemed to work out well for everyone except, perhaps, Crooked Joe Biden. The Debate will be “stand up,” and Candidates cannot bring notes, or “cheat sheets."

Throughout yesterday, the Harris campaign denied the initial Trump claim that they'd insisted on a seated debate with opening statements and notes, focusing on the question of whether the mics will be open or muted, which was a trivial issue on which Trump himself saId he had no preference. CNN confirmed Trump's version of the outcome, including the original rules for muted mics:

The rules for the debate will largely mirror the terms used by CNN for its June debate, including that microphones will be muted as the other candidate speaks and no studio audience will be present, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.

But later Tuesday, the Harris campaign said that discussions are ongoing with ABC over whether microphones will remain on, according to a source familiar.

My puzzlement here is twofold, and it echoes my concerns yesterday. First, the CNN rules, including the muted mics, were thought to be disadvantageous to Trump. But Politico pointred out that Trump shockingly thrived under those rules:

Heading into the debate, many assumed that these new rules would hurt Trump; he’s the bigger interrupter, he feeds off live audiences and he lives to dominate and spread chaos. But the rules, and the effective moderation from Tapper and Bash, turned out to be a major boost for him.

. . . [T]he new format left Biden to speak in uninterrupted stretches of time, where his halting speech and inanimate affect were on obvious display. One could argue that Biden, who can easily be scattered, benefited a bit from the rules as well. This time, unlike 2020, he didn’t have to beg Trump, “Will you shut up, man?” But as the evening progressed, Biden supporters must have wished that Trump could misbehave so that Biden could shame him.

This seems to have been the Harris campaign's only takeaway from the June debate: they need to jigger the rules so Trump will have an outburst and Kamala can scold him for it! But Trump himself, as I pointed out yesterday, had no preference; he's clearly capable of effective repartee under either rule, and he knows it.

So this brings me to the other half of my puzzlement -- not only did the Harris campaign choose this hill to die on, but they spent not just one day, but two full days dying on it. And they allowed the Trump camp to play the whole battle out, including the Harris campaign's ultimate defeat, in public.

But on top of that, let's keep in mind that the Harris campaign seems to have been focused almost exclusively on this negotiation over Monday and Tuesday. The campaign seems otherwise to have been largely inactive since the convention, per Politico:

Harris has had a light schedule since accepting the nomination Thursday in Chicago, and several sources said she has been using the time not just to prepare for her Sept. 10 debate with Trump, but to map out a media strategy for the next few weeks.

Here are some of the questions rattling around about the decision …

— Who should you send your pitch to? One source of intrigue concerns who in Harris world will actually make this decision. BRIAN FALLON, the campaign’s senior adviser for communications, is generally considered the key person. But the interview has to be coordinated with Harris’s official office, where the communications director is KIRSTEN ALLEN. We hear there are some tensions.

Fallon, whose name appears three times in quotes I linked in yesterday's post on the open mic issue, was characterized there as "spokesman for the Democratic nominee" -- appears to have been completely preoccupied with that whole feckless struggle. The link says there are tensions within the campaign, and I wonder if the whole kerfuffle overthe debate rules was driven by power struggles within the campaign.

Meanwhile, Trump has been campaigning with RFK Jr and Tulsi Gabbard, J D Vance did the Sunday talks, Dr Phil is airing interviews with Trump and RFK Jr, and beyond that,

Later in the week, he returns to Michigan, as well as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, to hold campaign events. Trump's running mate - Sen. JD Vance of Ohio - stumps in Michigan on Tuesday.

It's hard for me to avoid thinking that in the days after the Democrat convention, Trump has shown effective time management, while the Harris campaign seems to have had tunnel vision over the debate rules. The question of time management is important, because experienced observers are beginning to recognize that time is putting the Harris campaign at a disadvantage:

Democratic Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell said Monday on CNN that the media tends to “over-exaggerate” the “importance” of Vice President Kamala Harris sitting down for an interview, defending the vice president by noting her campaign hasn’t been around for a long time.

. . . “She’s only had a vice presidential nominee for two weeks. She had to go into convention. They had to orchestrate that. She turned a whole campaign over from one person to another. So Labor Day is coming, the fall is here. I think we‘re 72 or 71 days left in this election,” Dingell continued. “You‘re going to see some of those things that you want to see happen. We can‘t get it all squeezed into one day. We‘ve got to remember this hasn’t been a lot time of candidate Harris.”

Ah, the vice presidential nominee. This goes again to the question of resource management -- Trump since before the Democrat convention has effectively deployed J D Vance in the traditional attack dog role, and he's put new surrogates like JFK Jr and Tulsi Gabbard to immediate use. But Politico has this to say about how the Harris campaign is using Tim Walz:

One of the issues that Harris world is currently working to address is how to deploy running mate TIM WALZ in the media. The danger in sending him out to do big solo interviews is that he might not have a full command of where Harris is on every issue. As someone pointed out to us last night, Harris talks about the “opportunity economy,” but if Walz were asked to define it, would he know how?

But Walz is too Minnesota nice to be an attack dog, while Harris has no consistent policies. How can he respond to obvious questions about Kamala's current views on electric vehicles or the border wall if she changes them from day to day? How can he reconcile the apparent differences between her policies now and her policies in 2019, when Kamala herself can't do this?

In other words, what I'm beginning to see is that important things aren't getting done when it's past time to do them; in the meantime, her staff is picking unneccessary public fights that they can't win, and she doesn't have surrogates that she can manage effectively.

If she's frequently impaired, of course, that's certainly a credible explanation. At this point, I think we can expect new misjudgments and blunders from her campaign on a regular basis.

What Are They Trying To Accomplish?

The big story yesterday was Microphone dispute threatens September presidential debate:

The Trump campaign is stirring up speculation that the September 10 presidential debate on ABC will not occur. Former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, raised concerns over a microphone rule dispute with the Harris campaign.

The Trump campaign has called for microphones to be muted except during a candidate's turn to speak, as was the rule during Trump's CNN debate with President Joe Biden, CNN reported[.]

. . . Vice President Kamala Harris's campaign has requested unmuted microphones during the entire debate.

"We have told ABC and other networks seeking to host a possible October debate that we believe both candidates' mics should be live throughout the full broadcast," Brian Fallon, spokesman for the Democratic nominee, said in a statement.

"Our understanding is that Trump's handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don't think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own," Fallon added. "We suspect Trump's team has not even told their boss about this dispute because it would be too embarrassing to admit they don't think he can handle himself against Vice President Harris without the benefit of a mute button."

Or something like that. There are other versiona of the story:

“Enough with the games. We accepted the ABC debate under the exact same terms as the CNN debate. The Harris camp, after having already agreed to the CNN rules, asked for a seated debate, with notes, and opening statements. We said no changes to the agreed upon rules,” said Jason Miller, senior adviser to President Trump.

. . . “This seems to be a pattern for the Harris campaign. They won’t allow Harris to do interviews, they won’t allow her to do press conferences, and now they want to give her a cheat-sheet for the debate. My guess is that they’re looking for a way to get out of any debate with President Trump,” he concluded.

According to Politico,

It’s clear the veep’s team is hoping to get Trump to lose his cool on mic.

“She’s more than happy to have exchanges with him if he tries to interrupt her,” one person familiar with the negotiations tells Playbook. “And given how shook he seems by her, he’s very prone to having intemperate outbursts and . . . I think the campaign would want viewers to hear [that].”

And any request for a seated debate with opening statements just never happened:

As for Miller’s assertion that Harris wanted a seated debate with notes, Fallon pushed back vigorously. “All three parties (Trump, Harris and ABC) have agreed to standing and no notes, and we never sought otherwise,” he said. Another source familiar with the negotiations laughed when we asked if Harris ever asked to be seated, saying it wasn’t true.

Later in the day, Trump himself said he didn't care:

“We agreed to the same rules, I don’t know, doesn’t matter to me, I’d rather have it probably on, but the agreement was that it would be the same as it was last time,” Trump said when asked by a reporter if he wanted the microphones muted during the debate when the candidate is not speaking.

. . . A top Harris spokesman said Monday that the campaign considered the mic issue “resolved” after Trump’s comments.

Trump “doesn’t care – doesn’t matter to him whether or not the mics are hot, and frankly, that he would prefer if they were hot. So I think this issue is resolved,” Harris campaign communications director Michael Tyler said during an appearance on MSNBC.

So why did the Harris campaign spend a whole day on this, which only focused attention on Harris's perceived weakness in debate? Look at the allegation they made via Politico -- they want an open mic because "he’s very prone to having intemperate outbursts.” But mic hot or mic mute, Trump scores points. Think back to his second debate with Hillary, open mic:

“It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country,” Mrs. Clinton observed.

“Because,” Mr. Trump replied “you’d be in jail.”

Then go to the June 27 debate with Biden, muted mic:

“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either,” Trump said when he began his response to Biden’s comments.

Those remarks probably helped drive Trump's 2016 victory and pushed Pelosi to force Biden from the 2024 race. Intemperate outbursts indeed.

Trump is quick enough that he can take advantage of nearly any set of circumstances, and banking on any sort of likelihood that he'll embarrass himself with an outburst is seriously to underestimate him. He can score points either way, he knows it -- and likely Harris's handlers know it just as well. That's why I'm wondering why this whole exchange took place.

My theory is that the Harris campaign did in fact float the possibility of changing the debate rules, but once the story got out, they realized what a bad look this would be, since it would be a clear tell that the campaign had no confidence in Harris's ability to perform in the debate. So they quickly put out a version that omitted the business of opening statements and seated and concentrated on the open mic, which Trump himswlf saw as a trivial issue, and that gave them an excuse to drop the whole matter.

What this shows is the Harris campaign's extreme sensitivity to the problem of her potential gaffes in unscripted circumstances. Thus they're very cautiously teasing that maybe she'll sit for an interview soon:

[T]he vice president is packing her campaign schedule this week, starting with a bus tour in southern Georgia. She'll also sit for her first interview as a presidential candidate and ramp up preparations for her Sept. 10 debate against Trump.

But Harris's X account links only to the story linked above at Axios, which has little to say other than the Georgia bus tour on how she'll ramp up activities -- and tellingly, there's still nothing on what sort of an interview she'll be doing.

With only 70 more days until Election Day, VP @KamalaHarris is ramping up her campaign with bus tours and policy.

Read more here 👇https://t.co/noBpYrvPHG

— Madam President (@MadamPOTUS2024) August 27, 2024

Even the Axios link suggests the campaign is pretty much at a loss for strategy:

She has rolled out a few policy proposals to help first-time homeowners, the working class and others, but her senior advisers are tempering expectations that she'll put forward fully fleshed-out policy ideas before Election Day.

Their reasoning: There's not enough time.

Harris' late entry into the race has forced her team to set priorities, and Harris is calculating that her best move to counter Trump is to emphasize lofty ideals such as strength, decency, the rule of law and individual freedom.

In other words, as of now, the whole campaign is something of a Hail Mary play. The thing to keep in mind is that the Democrat establishment never had a serious Plan B when Hillary lost the 2016 election. The choice to back Biden in 2020 was forced on them when it looked like Sanders, a clear loser in the general elecion, was going to win the nomination -- but they seem then to have deliberately ignored the likelihood that Biden would be unable to campaign in 2024, and they procrastinated until the Harris candidacy was forced on them at the last minute. Now there's not enough time, as Axios acknowledges.

The problem continues to be that they've had no serious plan since 2016, and they're still winging it.

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?