Debate Team Is What The Nerds Do To Get Into Harvard

I was thinking about another puzzle when I got up this morning: why do "the polls" say most people thought Kamala "won" the "debate", when the more respectable polls say Trump is inching ahead in electoral preference? The title of this post came to me in the shower: debate team is what the nerds do to get into Harvard. Look at Nate Silver's Wikipedia entry, for instance:

As a student at East Lansing High School, Silver won first place in the state of Michigan in the 49th annual John S. Knight Scholarship Contest for senior high school debaters in 1996.

Silver actually went to Chicago; same differece. But this reminds me of a presentation on cognitive dissonance I heard from psychology profs as an Ivy sophomore myself: looking back, it was remarkably cynical. Their point was that experiments had shown that the more unplesant an experience was -- like, just for instance, hazing -- the more respondents were inclined to rate it as valuable. The experiments involved things like requiring subjects to memorize nonsense syllables under harsh conditions, being told that this would lead to intense personal development or something.

Indeed, the subjects reported they'd been broadened and enriched by the experience. Ever since, I've been scratching my head over what those profs actually knew -- here they were talking to a bunch of underclassmen who'd been dragooned into sacrificing much of a normal childhood and adolescence in the elite university admissions rat race under the pretext that it would lead to their personal development or something. By the time they'd gotten into an Ivy, they'd been flattered into thinking they'd achieved something enormously worthwhile from a thoroughly unpleasant experience.

Winning first place in the State of Pennsyltucky in the 63td annual Throckmorton P Davis Scholarship Contest for senior high school debaters is just one part of that process. And let's face it, it's boring and unpleasant, so it must be really important. So we have a presidential debate, which all the important people tell you is really important and really decisive, but just because it's a debate, who are people goimg to say "won" it? Obviously, the nerdy teacher's pet who's bound for Harvard. Definitely not Don, the class clown, with his wisecracks about eating the dogs and cats.

This is how Kamala fits into the scheme. She's the annoying Social Studies teacher with the nasal voice, the one whose class you've got to sit through and say all the right things, and you've got to stay on her good side to avoid visits to the assistant principal. Don the class clown has flirted with suspension all year for his wisecracks in her class. But she's the debate team's faculty adviser.

So who "won" the "debate"? 95 of 100 couldn't care less, but if pressed they'll say they guess the nerdy teacher's pet. Whom do they like? Don the class clown, of course. Not all of them will admit it to a stranger over the phone, or worse, to an online poll that has their name, address, and social security number, and probably too, the e-mail of their employer's HR department.

This goes to the brilliance of the people behind the Trump campaign. They put an unflitered Kamala out in front with every opportunity:

Kamala speaking in her fake accent says "hello to all my divine 9 brothas and sistas" followed by a loud cackle pic.twitter.com/DJ3NUqC10j

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) September 15, 2024

Nasal voice, angry schoolmarm facial expressions, fake accent, cackles -- she's pnony, annoying, and unpleasant, which is why she "won" the "debate". But as Sundance pointed out on Thursday,

If candidate Kamala Harris becomes visible, talks or tries to discuss policy, her tenuously fabricated support levels will collapse. Or, as those around Brian Fallon openly admit, if Harris campaigns, she loses.

If Kamala Harris campaigns, holds press conferences, or talks publicly about her policy proposals, she will lose. This is the problem that Brian Fallon is trying to manage[.]

The Trump campaign is doing all it can to help her get her message out.

Yeah, Trump Lost The Debate All Right

Via the Mew York Post,

The internet is lapping up a catchy new parody song poking fun at former President Donald Trump’s “they’re eating the cats” debate comment — with the music video raking in hundreds of thousands of views Friday.

. . . A video of the tune had raked in more than 267,000 views on X Friday — with fans howling with laughter and calling it the purr-fect fall “banger.”

It’s “too too, too good,” one listener gushed, while another called it “brilliant.”

So all of a sudden, a 78-year-old teetotaling Republican becomes a Gen Z icon. Love him or hate him, they love him. But let's check in with Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics, who as I've been saying all along has brain waves amazingly well tuned to the conventional wisdom, as he acknowledges here:

Let’s start out by stating that the emerging conventional wisdom surrounding Tuesday’s presidential debate is probably correct. The night started out promisingly enough for former President Donald Trump. He handled initial questions about the economy reasonably well; the opening theme, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago,” is exactly the theme he wants heading toward November. Trump seemed surprisingly confident and calm. Vice President Kamala Harris seemed nervous and a bit off of her game. For the first five minutes or so, it didn’t seem like a repeat of the June debate, but it did seem like one where Trump might be fighting to a draw.

Harris then proceeded to grab Trump by the combover and drag him around the debate stage for 85 minutes.

. . . Overall, though, from a debater’s standpoint, it wasn't close. Trump was defensive, erratic, and made claims that either confused facts or were simply at odds with them. Harris, on the other hand, was confident and prosecuted the case against Trump with precision.

Well, I would find it entirely plausible if Sean Trende had actually been co-captain of his middle school debate team. "From a debater’s standpoint, it wasn't close" indeed. By the Friday after the debate, the pundits are writing ponderous think pieces under photos of Kamala making Lily Tomlin Ernestine faces, while ordinary people are grooving to Trump's TikTok video on their phones. Sean Trende and everyone else is ignoring the big takeaway from the debate:

One of the big problems for campaign director Brian Fallon, is Kamala’s linguistic pattern, ie. how she talks. There has never been a successful politician in history who talks through their nose in a nasal dialect; it is just too annoying to the average ear.

The same principle applies in business; there are very few people in leadership positions with linguistic afflictions (nasal talkers specifically). The only person with nasal linguistics (speech and dialect patterns) who came close to success, was Ross Perot.

Kamala Harris has a speech pattern that is very annoying. This sounds shallow, but it is a factual challenge that Brian Fallon is trying to overcome by keeping the principal quiet. Quite simply, every time Kamala Harris opens her mouth, she loses votes.

Her policies have nothing to do with it. All the Ivy League Republicans who keep urging Trump to stick to policies are missing the big point: listening to Kamala is like hearing fingernails scraping a blackboard. When Trump announced there would be no more debates, I felt a wave of relief that I wouldn't feel obligated to sit through another 90 minutes of nasal weepiness. But all the co-captains of all the middle school debate teams don't see things that way:

This week, after a debate with Vice President Harris that he apparently did not take entirely seriously, Trump said he would not debate her again. He said there was no need for a “third debate” because he had clearly won the first two. He was including the June 27 debate he had with President Biden, who had been the presumptive Democratic nominee at the time.

Perhaps that was not surprising, as Trump kept Biden in his sights throughout his debate with Harris this week — name checking Biden repeatedly without naming Harris once.

But what was surprising was Trump’s claim to having won both debates. Few would question he won the June 27 meeting with Biden, who seemed so diminished as to be hard to recognize.

. . . Yet here was Trump, on the afternoon after the debate, telling reporters he was not interested in a rematch with Harris because he had “won the debate according to every poll — every single poll, I think.”

Another indicator is Gutfeld: when Joe withdrew from the campaign, I sensed that Gutfeld was at a loss for a schtick to replace poopy-pants jokes -- through the end of July, they weere nightly, sometimes more than once a night. Now they're just once a week or less. But all of a sudden, Haitians eating dogs and cats have replaced poopy-pants, and Gutfeld is back on his stride.

That's become the most memorable moment from Tuesday's debate, which Trump clearly lost -- except nobody can drop Haitians eating dogs and cats, and nobody wants to hear Kamala talking through her nose.

My theory has been that it wasn't the June 27 debate that took Joe down -- Gutfeld had already done it with poopy-pants jokes. Beware the meme of Haitians eating dogs and cats.

What Does Springfield Tell Us About Aurora?

I ended yesterday's post with a puzzle. According to the links, the Springfield, OH city elders somehow made a policy decision to encourage Haitian immigrants to move into town, because the local proletariat was unreliable, ungrateful, and unsuited to the low-pay jobs the employers had to offer. Bringing in a replacement working class was thought to be a win-win, the employers would get docile, grateful, and hard-working new employees, while the town would prosper. The links yesterday weren't completely clear on whether the Haitians were legal or illegal, but this story in the UK Daily Mail says,

Springfield experienced a wave of legal Haitian migration in 2020 in a bid to revitalize the struggling local economy.

Willing to do the blue-collar jobs locals were unenthusiastic about, the Haitians, who were already in the country legally, moved to the town.

Within a few years, 20,000 immigrants arrived, swelling Springfield's population, which was only 58,000 in 2020. These people arrived with social security numbers and working permits, they've paid taxes and occupied previously boarded up, abandoned homes.

Thw story here implies these Haitians are legal immigrants, but apparently they are only in the US under Temporary Protected Status, which allows them to work and travel but doesn't give them legal residence. As a result, the account is misleading, and as we'll see below, there may be a parallel situation in Aurora that's leading to similar results there.

Of course, the Springfield story has anything but a happy ending. There are unconfirmed complaints about the Haitians eating pets and waterfowl and traffic accidents resulting from their unfamiliarity with US traffic laws, but leaving those aside, there are confirmed issues with the Haitians crowding the native-born poor out of medical and housing benefits, to the point that state officials have had belatedly to address the problems.

But if the Haitians are prospering as the new town proletariat, why are their families overwhelming puiblic assistance resources? This just doesn't compute. And I'm scratchinmg my head at the reference in the Daily Mail story that they've renovated previously abandoned homes. That costs money, no matter how much sweat equity you put into it, yet the Haitians are overwhelming public assistance. Who is paying to rehab the bandos?

Are these rehabbed bandos rental units, or what? If so, who are the landlords, and who pays the rent? This brings me to the X post I embedded yesterday:

This is an absolutely insane video.

A Springfield, Ohio homeless advocate tells the city council that landlords are kicking people out of their homes and replacing them with Haitians and that the Biden-Harris government is paying them to do it.

He says he personally knows… pic.twitter.com/edNKl4tpDz

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 12, 2024

The gentleman here strongly implies that the rehabbed bandos are in fact rental units, and the migration incentives favor the Haitians, to the point that the landlords can renovate the homes and get some type of voucher money for the rent, which is above the market value that the native-born poor had been paying. So far, we don't know the details of whatever program is being used to subsidize renovations or provide vouchers for rent -- the mainstream media is neglecting its responsibility here, but a link below gives details of a possible equivalent program in Aurora. I'll see what I can do to fill in the gaps as the story progresses.

But the question of how the slumlords benefit from government subsidy of illegal or quasi=-legal immigration brings us to the stories about Aurora, CO and the apartment blocks said to have been taken over by the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang.

Beginning last year, a large influx of Venezuelan migrants, some of them members of the notorious Tren de Aragua street gang, reportedly had “taken over” a series of apartment buildings in Aurora—and unleashed terror. Last month, Venezuelan migrants were allegedly implicated in an attempted homicide, an arrest of purported gang members, and shocking security footage that showed heavily armed men forcibly entering one of the apartments. In response to the chaos, police mobilized en masse and vacated one of the complexes after the city, alleging code violations, deemed it uninhabitable.

The root of the problem, as I've begun to suspect with Springfield, turns out to be subsidies to slumlords for housing illegals or quasi-legals. In Aurora, "a landlord called CBZ Management, a property company that operates the three apartment buildings[, is] at the center of the current controversy."

The story begins in 2021, when the Biden administration signed the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) into law, allocating $3.8 billion in federal funds to Colorado. The City of Denver, which had declared itself a “welcoming city” to migrants, drew on this reservoir of money to launch its Emergency Migrant Response resettlement program, with the goal of housing and providing services to a massive flow of migrants.

. . . According to public records, between 2023 and 2024, [two non-profits,] ViVe Wellness and Papagayo received $4.8 million and $774,000, respectively; much of this funding came from the Migrant Support Grant, which was funded by ARPA. Then, in 2024, ViVe secured an extra $10.4 million across three contracts, while Papagayo received $2.9 million from a single contract to serve migrants; two of those five contracts were awarded to implement the Denver Asylum Seekers Program, which promised six months of rental assistance to nearly 1,000 migrants.

. . . We spoke with a former CBZ Management employee, who, on condition of anonymity, explained how the process worked. Last summer, the employee said, representatives from Papagayo began working with CBZ Management to place Venezuelan migrants in the company’s Aurora apartment complexes. When a Venezuelan individual or family needed housing, the NGO would contact the regional property manager, who then matched them with available apartments.

It was a booming business. According to the employee, Papagayo arranged hundreds of contracts with the property manager. The NGO provided up to two months of rental assistance, as many migrants did not have, or were unable to open, bank accounts. Within six months, according to the employee, approximately 80 percent of the residents of these buildings were Venezuelan migrants. The employee also noted that the buildings saw gang activity and violence.

The employee, however, alleges that these agreements were made on false pretenses. To convince the hesitant employee to accept the migrants, Papagayo made assurances that the tenants had stable jobs and income. With limited English and facing a minimum six-month wait for work permits, though, many migrants were ineligible for legal employment, struggled to find stable jobs, and ultimately fell behind on rent.

It sounds as though these circumstances are what's also going on in Springfield: although some of the Haitians are apparently good, steady workers, many others are not; their work permits may be delayed, their English and other skills may not be what the employers need, and they aren't actually working -- but the slumlords get subsidies for their rent. The circumstances outlined above indicate that the slumlords are complicit in setting up situations where gamgs can take over their apartment blocks. According to the New York Post,

A Colorado landlord has agreed to sell a troubled apartment complex that was taken over by the violent Venezuelan migrant gang Tren de Aragua.

Landlord Zev Baumgarten has been fighting with the Denver suburb of Aurora over the Aspen Grove after the city accused him of allowed it to become a trash-ridden, gang-infested hellhole, according to records obtained by the Denver Gazette.

Baumgarten is also the owner of another apartment complex where a viral video showed a crew of gun-toting thugs breaking into a unit, according to the Gazette.

. . . In June, attorneys for the landlords had sent letters begging police and local officials for help, claiming Tren de Aragua had “forcibly taken control” of Aspen Grove. The city finally deemed the site a “criminal nuisance” and evicted the residents.

Last month, a video surfaced at a separate apartment complex showed a gun-toting crew breaking into a unit.

That’s when Baumgarten found himself facing more than 80 charges for building code violations, ranging from vermin infestations to power outages.

But it looks like Baumgarten enabled the whole situation by playing the NGOs' game, accepting both their subsidies and the gang member tenants they provided while placing them in uninhabitable facilities -- and then blaming the problem on the police!

I strongly suspect something similar has been going on in Springfield, and no doubt in many other places all over the country. Both sweatshop employers and slumlords are political donors and have friends in the local machine, which I'm sure is why the Springfield mayor, city manager, and police department all deny there are any Haitians eating pets in their town. Somebody needs to look into who's renting those rehabbed bandos, to whom they're renting them, and what kind of subsidies they're getting for doing it.

My guess is that what;s trickling out now is just a tiny part of the story.

The Springfield Geese

One of Trump's most controversial claims in Tuesday night's debate was that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH were eating local people's pets:

"They're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats," Trump said during an answer to a question about immigration. "They're eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what's happening in our country, and it's a shame."

. . . David Muir, the ABC News anchor co-moderating the debate, immediately fact-checked Trump's claims, saying that the city manager in Springfield, Ohio, told the network there had been no credible reports of pets being harmed, injured or abused by people in the city's immigrant community.

PolitiFact chimed in:

But are the social media claims true about the immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets and dining on local waterfowl? City spokesperson Karen Graves, in a statement to PolitiFact, said no.

"In response to recent rumors alleging criminal activity by the immigrant population in our city, we wish to clarify that there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community," Graves said.

Nor are there reports about ducks and geese being killed and eaten, Graves said.

The mayor of Spriogfield has also denounced reports of Haitians eating cats and ducks as a "rumor":

Local officials and community leaders have vehemently denied these claims, stating that no evidence supports such a disturbing accusation. The Springfield Police Department has conducted thorough investigations and found no reports of any such incidents.

"There is absolutely no truth to these rumors," said Rob Rue, the Mayor of Springfield. "Our city is committed to welcoming and supporting all residents, regardless of their background or origin. We will not tolerate the spread of misinformation that harms our community."

However, this story provides clear documentation from police records of a report made on August 26 of four Haitians, each carrying the body of a goose. But the problem goes beyond pets and geese:

🚨 BREAKING:
SPRINGFIELD, OHIO UPDATE

Local mother and resident of 7+ years says that the 20,000+ Haitians are outpricing and pushing low-income renters like her out of the neighborhood with money from assisted living, food stamps, and other government aid.

She says she’ll… pic.twitter.com/MzFB25cF7S

— Tyler Oliveira (@tyleraloevera) September 10, 2024

Other residents interviewed by Tyler Oliveira say the problem goes back for months or years, but it appears that local officials, including as we see here the mayor and city manager, have been denying that it exists -- at least until Trump made it a front-burner issue:

The governor of Ohio will send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants that has landed it in the national spotlight.

Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said Tuesday he doesn't oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which some 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help impacted communities.

His news conference was held just hours before the presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former Republican President Donald Trump, where the divide over immigration policy was sure to be an issue.

Why has this been allowed to fester? Suddenly Ohio's Republican attorney general has got religion, too:

On Monday, Republican Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost also drew attention to the crisis when he directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending “an unlimited number of migrants to Ohio communities."

. . . “These dramatic surges impact every citizen of the community, every citizen,” he said, noting additional influxes are occurring in Findlay and Lima, Ohio. "Moms who have to wait hours in a waiting room with a sick child, everyone who drives on the streets, and it affects children who go to school in more crowded classrooms.”

On Wednesday, the Ohio State Highway Patrol will be dispatched to help local law enforcement with traffic issues that officials say have cropped up due to an increase in Haitians unfamiliar with U.S. traffic laws using the roads. DeWine said he is also earmarking $2.5 million over two years to provide more primary healthcare through the county health department and private healthcare institutions.

So all of a sudden, the Republican establishment, which had been turning a blind eye to the problems in Springfield and apparently Findlay and Lima, and very likely plenty of other places, is suddenly looking at suing the federal goverment and maybe even enforcing traffic laws. Sounds like J D vance may have been making some good points with those fellas.

But this link raises some worthwhile questions:

The migrant influx began when city officials worked with local business owners to recruit Mexicans on the southern border, Monaghan said. But that trickle turned into a flood of Haitians, he said, adding: “The rich have mobilized [migrants] to destroy the working and middle classes.”

. . . Amid the sudden displacement of Americans, Democrats and national media outlets prefer to divert the nation’s attention to rumors about missing pets in the city.

. . . Since 2021, Biden and his deputies have imported roughly 10 million legal, quasi-legal, and illegal migrants. Those migrants have absorbed nearly all of the extra lower-wage jobs created by President Joe Biden’s deficit spending. His combination of deficit spending, wage-cutting migration, additional low-wage jobs, and investor windfalls are the core of Bidenomics.

So there are people, some in fact Republicans, who are profiting from, or at least enabling, the influx of illegal migrants. Springfield is showing a new and valuable perspective. But there are aspects that don't compoute. The link describes Ohio businesses that want cheap, compliant labor -- which some illegals may certainly be -- but the Haitian community definitely isn't supporting itself with the earnings of the good workers. It's draining welfare and medical resources if it isn't eating pets outright, something the Ohio Republican establishment is only belatedly coming to recognize.

The Ohio employers who want cheap immigrant labor are getting a free ride at the expense of ordinary Ohio citizens. UPDATE:

This is an absolutely insane video.

A Springfield, Ohio homeless advocate tells the city council that landlords are kicking people out of their homes and replacing them with Haitians and that the Biden-Harris government is paying them to do it.

He says he personally knows… pic.twitter.com/edNKl4tpDz

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 12, 2024

I Must Have Watched A Different Debate

ABC News tries to fact-check Donald Trump on Springfield, Ohio.

Kamala Harris' reaction to this exchange might be her most cringe moment yet. pic.twitter.com/mhjaeqw8Bs

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) September 11, 2024

The consensus take on last night's debate was something like this:

Trump wasn't at his best, but it wasn't all his fault. Two things were all on him, however: his preparation — or lack thereof — and the fact that he walked into the lion's den of bias in the first place.

Kamala Harris didn't provide much real competition for Trump last night. The bar was low for her — all she had to do was show up and not be Joe Biden. Mission accomplished. She spent the evening doing little more than regurgitating DNC talking points from New York Times and WaPo editorials from the last few years. It was remarkably brain-dead, but it was all she needed.

I keep making the point here that subliminal messaging is far more important than whether you can make the middle school debate team. Most presidential debates aren't memorable, but a few, like the October 13, 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debate, are thought to have helped tip that year's election. Another was the October 17, 2000 third debate between Dubya and Al Gore. The New York Times quoted the moderator, Jim Lehrer of PBS:

After the debate I walked out with my family, and one of my daughters said something I’ll never forget. She said, “Oh Dad, isn’t it something, what Gore did?” I stopped and said, “What do you mean?” Because as a rule, I only look at the candidate who is speaking. She said, “All that huffing and puffing and eyerolling and sighing.” I said, “My God, I didn’t know anything about it.” And she said, “Well, Dad, that’s going to be the lead of the debate stories.” And she was right. That night proved beyond any shadow of any doubt that body language is truly important in a presidential debate.

The piece quoted another insider:

It was the third debate when Gore finally invaded Bush’s space. He walked over right next to Bush and hovered as Bush spoke. Bush shot him a quick look — it was perfect.

Conventional ideas about debate prep had nothing to do with it, and the actual effect of Gore's attempts to steal the spotlight took days to sink in -- but sink in they did. Another example is the second 2016 debate on October 9 of that year. Trump is thought to have damaged his chances against Hillary Clinton badly, at least according to The Guardian:

That banging sound you heard were the last nails being hammered into the coffin of the Trump campaign. Or it might have been the thumping of Donald Trump as he stalked the debate stage.

. . . Wounded animals behave in strange ways, and Donald Trump was nothing if not strange at the second presidential debate. He went far beyond barking his usual interruptions and conspiracies[.]

But what seized my attention in that debate at the time was Hillary's strange outfit -- I remember commentary following the debate saying she looked like a penguin, but attempts to bring this up via a web search this morning have been unsuccessful. On the other hand, other commentary at the time suggested she was nevertheless intent on making a bold fashion statement:

Clinton opted for a hint of the unexpected in this navy Lauren suit with white lapels over a white crewneck top. She chose kitten-heeled pumps, sans bows, to complete the look.

Except that it made her look like a penguin, or maybe an old gay queen dressed for the ball. I think in hindsight the message it sent was that she wasn't taking Trump seriously -- he was just a bit player in her big drama, where her Ralph Lauren outfits were newsworthy events. I couldn't shake the impression that something was deeply off -- and I think more than a few others got the same subliminal nudge.

So let's move to what we saw in last night's debate. Clearly there was an expectation that Trump would somehow finish Kamala off in the same way that Joe finished himself off on June 27 -- but Kamala's handlers seem to have succeeded in keeping her away from alcohol while programming quasi-policy set-piece statements into her. Mark Halperin told Megyn Kelly that it was a C-plus performance, which was all she needed, and she won the debate.

If this were the middle school debate team, Halperin might be right. The problem is the subliminal effect. Let's leave aside for a moment the mugging for the camera while Trump was talking. The first thing I noticed was that her hair was suddenly four inches longer than it had been a day or so earlier. She'd added extensions for a full Louis XIV effect, going, like Hillary, for an incongruous glamour look. But by the time of her closing statement, either the botox had given out or the lighting was wrong, because little wattles began to dangle under her chin while she was talking.

She's 60, going for glamour, but with wattles. If you've got wattles, maybe you want to be more of a Margaret Thatcher thnan an ingenue, or maybe have a serious talk with your plastic surgeon.

The next thing wax the nasal weepiness. Every time subjects like women controlling their bodies came up, she'd sound like she was about to break into tears, but there was always this nasal harangue. This is going to get old if we're thinking about having to listen to it for the foreseeable futrure.

But then there's that matter of her making faces, mugging, smirking, silently laughing while Trump talked. Her expression in the tweet at the top of this post is a perfect echo of Lily Tomlin's Ernestine character on the old Laugh In show. But what comes off is that Kamala is trying to upstage Trump, and it looks petty and egotistical. What the people who are grading the debate as though it were the middle school debate team miss is that people are looking at this and deciding whether they feel comfortable with it on the nightly news for the next four years.

That's where Al Gore's huffing, puffing, eyerolling, and sighing did him in. That's where Hillary's penguin suit did her in. People don't want to vote for candidates who annoy them. I don't think we can discount the sublminal effect of the weepy nasal voice, the glamour look with the wattles, or the mugging and smirking on what the electorate thinks about Kamala.

Is Nancy Pelosi Nervous?

At the end of yesterday's post, I speculated idly about the lizard people possibly replacing Nancy Pelosi -- I don't think she gives the ultimate orders any more than Barack Obama, and certainly nobody believes that about either Joe or Kamala. A few hours later, I saw that this isn't just a vain fancy. In an appearance on The View recounted by Ed Morrissey,

Pelosi attempts to claim that the Bidens got her all wrong two months ago. Pelosi didn't want Biden to withdraw at all, she now claims. She only wanted Biden to revamp his campaign after his disastrous debate performance . . .as though his campaign looked like it suffered from middle-stage dementia on June 27.

He cites a tweet by Jacqui Heinrich:

Pelosi on The View denies she wanted Biden to drop out, but says his campaign needed to change.

PELOSI: "My point was we need a better campaign, as I said, a decision to win. I didn't see us on a path to victory. So it wasn't about him not running. It's just if this is the…

— Jacqui Heinrich (@JacquiHeinrich) September 9, 2024

The release of the New York Timwes/Siena poll \yesterday showed the race is in the same position it was just after Joe dropped out at Nancy's behest:

The results are essentially identical to the last time the New York Times/Siena poll asked voters for their preference in the aftermath of President Biden dropping out of the race in late July, with that poll also showing Trump with a 48-47 lead.

In fact, it looks to me as though we're in precisely the same place we were after July 13, when Nancy renewed her effort to get Joe to "do the right thing" and urged his long-term advisers to show him the polls -- when Joe insisted it was a margin-of-error race and Nancy finally got tough, saying something along the line of doing it the hard way or doing it the easy way.

In fact, I've got to surmise that if Nancy had internal polls that showed Joe in a significantly worse position than public polls at that time, any internal polls taken now probably reflect the same relative disadvantage for the Harris campaign now. In other words, the big switcheroo did nobody any good.

As Jacqui Heinrich pointed out in her tweet, though, Harris simply inherited the Biden campaign apparatus, less Anita Dunn and Bob Bauer, who apparently were made the scapegoats for Joe's June 27 debacle. Biden's campaign chair, Jen O'Malley Dillon, an Obama plant, is still the Harris campaign chair in Wilmington. Brian Fallon, who is felt to be Kamala's chief handler, worked in the same position as Kamala's handler with the Biden-Harris campaign.

As I pointed out in this post, most of the key people in the Harris campaign were Biden hires, with a few Obama inserts like David Plouffe. And as I pointed out yesterday, Kamala's debate prep strategy -- sequester the candidate with a studio duplicate, mock debates with a Trump surrogate, and policy cram sessions -- is precisely the one they had for Joe.

So I guess if I were a lizard person, I'd be asking Nancy and Kamala's handlers whether they might be doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result. And Nancy might be nervous -- but what options do the lizard people have? In a different time and place, the organs of state security would have effected a discreet disappearance for Nancy, with her image being subsequently airbrushed from official photos. But let's face it, the time to get Joe to drop out of the race was two years ago, not this past July.

Instead, we got a cockamamie lawfare strategy that utterly backfired and as the campaign has developed, turns out to have been completely irrelevant. Who greenlighted that? If only figuratively, some people are going to have to be airbrushed.

Kamala's Debate Prep Looks Just Like Joe's

We've had a couple of articles on Kamala's debate prep. What strikes me is that they really don't seem to differ from what we learned about Joe's debate prep before June 27. For instance,

Vice President Kamala Harris is holed up for five days in a Pittsburgh hotel, doing highly choreographed debate practice sessions before Tuesday night’s clash. There’s a stage and replica TV lighting and an adviser in full Lee Strasberg method-acting mode, not just playing Donald Trump but inhabiting him, wearing a boxy suit and a long tie.

In addition,

On Saturday, Fox News reporter Bryan Llenas revealed the extreme lengths Harris’s team is going to ahead of the debate.

“We know that Vice President Kamala Harris is in her hotel in Pittsburgh. They’ve got the lights as if it’s in a studio. They’ve got the stage. They’ve even brought in somebody who’s dressed and acting like the former President,” Llenas told GOP strategist Pete Seat.

This debate prep strategy mirrors tbhe accounts we had of Joe's, surrounding his disastrous June 27 performance. According to Reuters,

"It is my belief that he was over-coached, over-practiced. And I believe [senior aide] Anita Dunn... put him in a venue that was conducive for Trump and not for him,” said John Morgan, a Florida-based attorney and major Biden fundraiser.

Morgan said Dunn and her husband, Bob Bauer, the president’s attorney who played Trump in pre-debate rehearsals, should "be fired forever and never let back anywhere near the campaign."

Biden's debate strategy was signed off on by campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon, who helped him win in 2020 and was appointed in January to boost an uneven reelection campaign. Dunn, a longtime Biden aide and former Barack Obama campaign strategist, backed that strategy.

. . . Advisers set up a rigorous debate prep calendar, with Biden sequestered at Camp David for six days.

An inner circle, some close to Biden for decades, were involved: Ron Klain, his first White House chief of staff, Dunn, former White House counsel and long-time adviser Mike Donilon, as well as about a dozen other policy and political experts.

The best anyone can conclude is that having a Trump impersonator and a stage set up to mimic the conditions of the debate didn't work out, and the Anita Dunn-Bob Bauer power couple were in fact purged soon after June 27. According to the Reuters link,

As Biden and his aides settled in at Camp David six days before the debate, aides figured he had a lot to accomplish, more than his opponent. Trump could just complain about the present administration - and Biden would need the facts and some zingers at his fingertips.

They expected Trump would be far more disciplined and prepared than he had been in 2020 and believed that they would need to counter a string of rapid-fire lies.

In lengthy prep sessions, they peppered Biden with details, then followed them up with mock debates.

Various accounts suggest Joe didn't take well to the intense cram sessions, and he used cold symptoms to cancel many of them. It looks as though Kamala has responded to this regimen about as well as Joe did:

"What's the best part of debate prep for you?"

Kamala: "Being at the spice store!"pic.twitter.com/AoM29xdAXX

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) September 7, 2024

So although Anita Dunn and Bob Bauer were made the scapegoats for Joe's poor debate prep and left the White House afterward, it's hard for me to avoid thinking Kamala'a handlers are following exactly the same strategy. Jen O'Malley Dillon, after all, is still Kamala's campaign chair, even though she was the one who greenlighted the original Biden prep sessions, which included sequestering the candidate, mock debates, a faux studio, and intense cram sessions.

It looks like none of rhese things can fix a bad candidate, but it's also worth pondering what John Morgan, the Biden fundraiser quoted in the Reuters story, remarked: "Anita Dunn. . . put [Biden] in a venue that was conducive for Trump and not for him". That's turned out to be exactly the same venue that Kamala will now have, which her handlers tried and failed to change. Maybe they should have kept Anita Dunn and replaced Jen O'Malley Dillon -- or maybe the problem goes higher. Maybe they needed to replace Nancy Pelosi.