Kamala's Interview Was A Permission Slip

Back in June, I noted that Joe's episodes on his trips to Europe early in the month amounted to a "permission slip" that allowed polite opinion to address openly the issue of Joe's increasingly apparent cognitive decline that had been on everyone's mind, but nobody up to then had been allowed to discuss. What I noted at the time was that Gutfeld had begun to incorporate Biden poopy-pants jokes into almost every night's routine -- and even a comic needs permission for this sort of thing. But just last night, Gutfeld said,

Some people dispute the claim thatt Kamala Harris worked at McDonald's in the past. Meanwhile McDonald's claims their records show just one clown working here.

He ran a acreen shot of Ronald McDonald. Even a comic needs permission for this sort of thing. The extent of the damage from Kamala's CNN interview slowly began to be visible only over the course of yesterday. For instance, at The National Review,

National Review senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke, on today’s edition of The Editors, told listeners that Kamala Harris’s Thursday interview with CNN “was a catastrophe because it exposed the case against her as being true.”

“I’m going to dissent from the ‘it was fine’ judgment that I’ve seen around the web and heard on this podcast — and rendered after her convention speech myself — and say that this was a catastrophe,” said Cooke.

“That was the best she could do.”

As Cooke pointed out, “All of the advantages that were conferred upon her by Dana Bash’s easy questioning, by the editing, by the combination of interview and infomercial that they put together, yielded that. The word salad you just mentioned was the first clip CNN released, the highlight. . . . That. That was the best that she could do.”

. . . “Harris is clearly absolutely incapable of doing anything impressive. And that interview showed it.”

Oddly, Cooke's take that the interview was supposed to provide her with every advantage, but she blew it anyhow, echoes the general impression observers drew from Biden's disastrous June 27 debate -- the muted mics, lack of audience, and hostile moderators were presumably set up to favor Biden and put Trump at a disadvantage -- but Biden blew it anyhow.

Brandon Morse at Red State points out the basic problem:

Every time the Harris campaign exposes their candidate to the public, the public reacts negatively. It happened after the DNC as well.

The syrupy tone, the nasal voice, the phony black accent, all rub people the wrong way, but they're hesitant to admit it. After all, she's the Vice President of the United States, a female, and notionally African-American. People need special permission to acknowledge what everyhone is nevertheless thinking.

The same thing happened with Biden. What people saw was a doddering, vain, querulous old man who just wasn't likeable, but they weren't going to admit it, especially not to a stranger over the phone. The polls changed hardly at all after the June 27 debate, when the insiders seem to have concluded, polls notwithstanding, that Joe had to go. And Joe kept arguing up to the day before he withdrew that the polls showed the race was a tossup.

I think we're going to see the polls continuing to show the race is a tossup, but there are events that nevertheless give people a permission slip to think otherwise. My guess is that Gutfeld is going to have a lot more Kamala jokes.

Kamala Sat Woozy In The Kiddie Chair

I was a little worried before Kamala's big interview that it would turn out like Joe Biden's first debate against Trump in 2020: he exceeded expectations by giving a mediocre performance that nevertheless had no obvious gaffes. This was a major hurdle, and he got over it. What if Kamala had an equivalent performance? It turns out I didn't need to worry.

The first thing that struck me was something a lot of people noticed, but nobody really followed through:

Did they put Kamala in the kiddie chair I had to sit in when I went to talk to the kindergarten teachers about my children?

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) August 30, 2024

Well, it turns out that Kamala is 5'4". Walz is 6'2". But Dana Bash is 5'2", so this doesn't explain why Kamala appears to be so much shorter between both Walz and Bash in the photo.

When I looked more carefully, I saw that both Walz and Bash are in ordinary dining room style chairs, which force both into upright posture, while the seat back behind Kamala looks like she might be in a swivel chair, and that in turn is letting her sit hunched over. I wouildn't be at all surprised if Kamala demanded the swivel chair as appropriate to her being the most important person in the room, and there you are.

But this brings us to the just-concluded negotiations with ABC over the rules for the September 10 debate. The focus had been on muted mics, but the basic assumptions were that the rules for the CNN debate on June 27 would continue, and this included:

Both Biden and Trump will stand at identical lecterns, with their positions on stage determined by a coin toss administered by CNN.

But here's the rub: Joe Biden is 6'0"; Trump is 6'3". As long as they aren't precisely side by side in a shot, this isn't noticeable. But if Kamala is 5'4" -- almost a full foot shorter than Trump -- and is standing behind a lectern identical to Trump's, this is going to be a problem. Even if she wears heels and stands on a box, it's going to be awkward. I'm sure this is why the Harris campaign is said to have tried to get ABC to change the rules to allow a seated debate -- but ABC didn't budge.

There's another, less noticeable problem that a few people have pointed out. What is that white object under Kamala's chair? One mentioned "dirty dishes" in he backgtround, and Dana Bash has a mug of either coffee or water next to her, while neither Kamala nor Walz has any sort of cup at hand. But one or two others have ventured the theory that the white object under Kamala's chair is a mixed drink, set aside just before filming.

Nobody can say for sure, but a few people, like Mark Dice, have taken note:

At 4:45, he says,

I casn't help but notice that she looks like an absolute train wreck, and there are rumors that she may be sippin' a little bit too much of the sauce.

A TikTok commenter on the stream asked flat out, "Are you drunk?" All I can say is that she does look like she's got a pretty good buzz going, the sort of woozy vibes I used to see when Aunt Matilda got really serious and started explaining why she's a genius. I got the same vibes from this moment in a speech she gave the same day in Savanna:

KAMALA: "He even called for termination of the United States supreme, the c— the supreme land of our nation!"

What? pic.twitter.com/A68E6TLSFq

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 29, 2024

I did a web search for images on "kamala interview woozy" and got a lot of results, for instance:

As I keep saying,, the important points are subliminal.

"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.