Newer Questions Keep Popping Up Every Time There's A New Question

In this morning's news,

In the coming days, Kamala Harris and surrogates for her campaign are doing events in blue states that are supposedly safe for her.

Well and good -- but then I said, "Surrogetes? She has surrogates? Who are they?" The story quotes Breitbart, which says,

The campaign is sending Harris and her top surrogates — ticket mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and husband Doug Emhoff — to blue states after a weekend of planned swing state visits.

So her top surrogates are a couple of cheesy old white guys, especially Doug Emhoff, whom the press has called a sex symbol. So I asked myself off the top of my head who Trump's surrogates are, and I answered J D Vance, RFK Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, Byron Donalds, Don Jr, Eric, Lara, the 13 Gold Star families in the Arlington controversy, Rep Elise Stefanik, Gov Kristi Noem -- the list keeps getting longer. Why does Kamala have so few surrogates?

But the main story at the links above has to do with Kamala traveling to New Hampshire, which since Joe's withdrawal has not been thought to be in play. Thus Newsweek as of just this morning:

Donald Trump's team's claim that New Hampshire will be "in play" at the 2024 election looks unlikely to come to fruition, with polls and experts suggesting Kamala Harris will win the Granite State in November.

It was recently reported that a former GOP official will no longer be involved with Trump's campaign after he determined that New Hampshire should not be considered competitive, urging fellow volunteers to focus their attention on the swing state of Pennsylvania instead.

Tom Mountain, a Massachusetts volunteer for the Trump campaign, said in an email obtained by The Boston Globe that Trump was "sure to lose by an even higher margin" in New Hampshire in November than he did in 2016 and 2020, citing "campaign data/research."

Trump lost New Hampshire to President Joe Biden by 7 points at the last election. At the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton managed to win the state over Trump by just 0.3 percent, or around 2,700 votes.

But Breitbart quotes Mark Halperin on X suggesting this may not be the case:

2. “New Hampshire may not be in the top tier of swing states in the 2024 election, but Granite Staters are still poised to get some attention this week from one of the presidential candidates.
News 9 has learned that Vice President Kamala Harris will travel to the greater… https://t.co/JLBPjZVlV2 pic.twitter.com/MKM9RSdSF2

— Mark Halperin (@MarkHalperin) September 2, 2024

Halperin raises the possibility of other explanations, but he acknowledges these are unlikely. Gateway Pundit concludes,

If Democrats are worried about Minnesota and Virginia, their internals must look absolutely awful.

But why would they look so bad, with the legacy media in gaslight overdrive for Kamala? Public polling in Minnesota doesn't look good:

KSTP/SurveyUSA poll: MN presidential race tightens after DNC, Walz pick After what many consider a successful Democratic National Convention in Chicago where Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz launched their campaign as running mates, our new KSTP/SurveyUSA poll shows Harris’ lead in Minnesota cut in half from a month ago.

According to our poll, Harris now leads Republican Donald Trump by five points, 48% to 43%, with four percent preferring another candidate and five percent undecided. Last month, Harris, in her first appearance in our poll as the Democratic presidential nominee, had a 10-point lead, 50% to 40%.

. . . Former Minnesota DFL Party Chair Mike Erlandson agrees, saying the 10-point lead for Harris last month might have been the result of excitement about a shake-up in the race with President Joe Biden dropping out.

Since Trump consistently outperforms public polling, a five-point lead isn't reassuring. The overall sentiment among commentators seems to be turning in the direction that with excitement subsiding over Joe's exit from the race and Kamala taking over, conditions are returning to roughly where they had been before Joe's exit, with Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Virginia potentially back in play.

But this also comes back to the question of time and resource management. Where should Kamala, or Democrats generally, be spending their time and money with a little over 60 days until the election? Typical analyses of Kamala's strategy say her path to 270 Electoral College votes involves winning Pennsylvania and two other key states. In one scenario, the other two are Michigan and Wisconsin; in another, the others are North Carolina and Georgia.

In other words, her main effort should be going to five states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, and North Carolina. Why are her handlers sending her and her few surrogates to Minnesota, Virginia, and New Hampshire at all? One possibility is that we're back to Nancy Pelosi's expressed reason for pushing Joe out of the race, down ballot candidates. She anticipated Joe would lose, but she hoped a replacement, even if it lost the top of the ticket, might be able to bring off House and Senate majoritiea and thwart Trump.

This says that the lzard people, who are probably controllng how their large donations are spent, may be discounting the likelihood of a Kamala victory -- as are the bookies and now again, Nate Silver. But another intriguong questoni is where, if anywhere, Kamala herself thinks she should direct her main efforts. Based on the controversies of the past few days, especially over her fake black accent, he main goal is reasserting her blackness:

She seems mostly to be trying to address her deep insecurity over how the African-American community sees her -- but that has little to do with winning the November election. I'm not sure if hwer situational awareness or sense of proportion is any better than Joe's, and it could well be worse.

The Harris-Walz Campaign Has Become The Butt Of Jokes

Here's an example of the pickle Tim Walz is in. Via ABC News, Republicans want voters to think Walz lied about his dog. False GOP claims could cause real damage:

Republicans turned Tim Walz’s outing at a dog park nearly three years ago into an attack on the Democratic vice presidential nominee this week, working on a false online narrative to paint Walz as a liar.

The intended takeaway was that Walz somehow lied about the identity of his dog, Scout, by describing two different dogs as his beloved pet in separate X posts. Social media users shared screenshots of the posts as alleged proof that the Minnesota governor exhibits a pattern of deceit, garnering thousands of likes, shares and reactions across platforms.

In one post, from June 2022, Walz is pictured hugging a black dog. The caption reads, “Sending a special birthday shoutout to our favorite pup, Scout.” The other, posted in October 2022, showed Walz beside a brown and white dog with the caption: “Couldn’t think of a better way to spend a beautiful fall day than at the dog park. I know Scout enjoyed it.”

In response, Walz supporters shared posts on social media showing that Walz was simply playing with someone else's dog while mentioning Scout in the caption.

The seemingly innocuous post was not the only fodder that has been used against Walz in recent days. A joke he cracked in a campaign video with Vice President Kamala Harris about eating “white guy tacos” was used to accuse him of lying about how much he seasons his food. Opponents have also taken issue with Walz describing himself as a former high school football coach, pointing out that he was the defensive coordinator.

Those dastardly Republicans! But all this does is add to the list of Walz's fabrications and embroiderings that have come to light since Kamala named him as her running mate. The most recent one surfaced Friday:

Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) has long described the moment in 2004 that inspired him to run for public office. In Walz’s telling, the “folksy” high school teacher and two of his students attended a campaign rally for President George W. Bush as an educational experience. However, Walz says, all three of them were denied entry upon event staffers noticing a John Kerry sticker on one of the students’ wallets — an exchange that the Atlantic dubbed a “KGB-style interrogation.”

There’s just one problem: This version of the political origin story for the Democratic vice presidential nominee, who is already facing “stolen valor” accusations over claims about his military service from combat veterans, contains significant inaccuracies.

For one, Walz was admitted into the Bush rally, according to a source familiar, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the August 2004 event. The two teenagers Walz arrived with, Matt Klaber and Nick Burkhart, were not his students, the Washington Examiner confirmed.

Moreover, the teenagers were barred from the event after a confrontation that made local news earlier in the week — leading to them initially being denied tickets.

Here's what makes all these stories good standup material. What makes a joke funny?

1. “The presence of some sort of norm violation, be it a moral norm violation (robbing a retirement home), social norm violation (breaking up with a long-term boyfriend via text message), or physical norm violation (purposefully sneezing directly on a child).
2. A ‘benign’ or ‘safe’ context in which the violation takes place (this can take many forms).
3. The interpretation of the first two points simultaneously. In other words, one must view, read, or otherwise interpret a violation as relatively harmless.”

. . . The structure of a joke varies, but the general format includes setup, which introduces the characters, settings, and situation; and punch line, which delivers the plot twist or benign violation. Jokes also have narrative elements: character(s), story arc, conflict, and resolution.

If you want to write a longer joke, consider peppering the entire anecdote with smaller joke clusters: mini setups and punch lines within the larger structure of the story. These “jab lines” incorporate humor throughout the entire joke-text.

Tim Walz is turning into a perfect standup routine: he's a bloviating politician, complete with cheap suits and cheesy affect. He commits repeated and predictable norm violations -- he tells lies about himself, but these are safe and more or less harmless, although some involve circumstances that can be construed as shirking duty and pretending he didn't. Each of these more or less harmless lies is resolved with a predictable but safe humiliation that still leaves him deflated.

By the way, the ABC story at the link says the Republican claims about Walz and a dog could cause "real damage" -- to whom? The comic context here is that this is "safe". Someone can't understand a joke.

But now we add another joke to the set:

In April, Harris appeared on The Drew Barrymore Show, where she was asked if she worked at the fast food restaurant.

'I did. Yes, I did work at McDonald's,' the vice president said. 'When I was at school...I did fries. And then I did the cashier.'

. . . Speaking to workers at a labor rally in Las Vegas in 2019, the future vice president first referred to her time at the Golden Arches.

'I worked in McDonald's,' she said to the crowd. 'I was a student when I was working at McDonald's.'

Trump himself, the ultimate foil, popped this particular balloon:

Trump was speaking at the Moms for Liberty convention in Washington on Friday when he expressed skepticism over this piece of Harris's biography, which she has used to proclaim her ordinary background.

'She also said, "I worked at McDonald's.'' Turned out she didn't work at McDonalds," the former president mentioned to the audience.

'Did anyone see that?' he continued. 'After an exhaustive study that took about 20 minutes, they found out she never worked there.'

Yes -- as soon as I heard about her McDonald's claim, I realized that if she'd worked there, they would have deducted her Social Security payment from her check, and they (as well as Social Security) would, or in this case wouldn't, have a record. (As far as I can see, this also wouldn't be a violation of confidentiality, because in this case, McDonald's would simply be confirming that there is not an employment record, which could otherwise be confidential.)

Several points are worth noting here. All these stories make up a single comedy set, and they fit the definition, which includes the requirement that they be "safe"-- they are politicians predictably telling harmless lies about themselves. There are resolutions -- the truth is revealed, and in one case, it's revealed by Trump, who is himself an acknowledged master of standup. But the revelation, especially in Walz's case, reopeatedly makes him a buffoon, and indeed a buffoonish sidekick to an annoying bossgirl-wannabe who tells the same sort of lies.

But what's telling is that even if each of these resolutions is "safe", they nevertheless trivialize both Walz and Harris, and each iteration of the routine trivializes them a little more. It isn't good for a candidate to become the butt of jokes. Think of Gerald Ford in a pratfall that became comedy gold on SNL, Jimmy Carter and the killer rabbit, Mike Dukakis riding a tank, or John Kerry windsurfing. If history is any guide, I don't see a good outcme here. I continue to think Trump is in controi of the subliminal campaign.

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.