We Forgot 1968

There was a pre-post mortem of the Harris campaign at Real Clear Politics yesterday that made all the usual references to 1972 and 1988:

This sort of thing has been seen before and with serious consequences. Here is the history:

Like Harris, McGovern had an embarrassing vice presidential pick in Thomas Eagleton (he was eventually forced to ask Eagleton to withdraw after pledging to back him “1,000 percent”) and then got attacked over and over on his far-left record while his reckless changes on policy positions made him subject to devastating Nixon attack ad depicting the South Dakota senator as a political weathervane. So too, Dukakis had his share of recurring problems and self-inflicted wounds. . . that included the infamous and rather comic moment when in answer to criticisms of his national security bona fides he appeared riding around in a tank with an ill-fitting tank commander’s helmet.

I've been mentioning McGovern and Dukakis all along here as well, but it dawned on me just this morning that neither I nor anyone else has drawn any parallel with 1968. Lyndon Johnson was the last incumbent before Joe Biden to withdraw from a race for renomination and reelection, which he did in March of that year. While the timing of events and their juxtaposition differ this year, one important similarity is that Biden, at least by this phase of the campaign if not earlier, has lost the support of the intellectual left, as had Johnson much earlier in the cycle.

In Johnson's case, that's made clear by rhe famous cartoon linked at the top of this post:

The Vietnam war is extremely controversial and was so from the very beginning. While American interest and involvement in Vietnam preceded President Johnson, the war became his greatest failure. In 1966, Johnson underwent surgery to remove his gall bladder, and in a display of characteristic crassness, he lifted his shirt and exposed a foot-long scar to the press just days after the operation. This cartoon combines both of the President’s predicaments by making the scar resemble the country of Vietnam.

Johnson's loss of intellectual support was also evident in the success of the play MacBird!, written by a a member of the anti-war movement at UC Berkeley:

MacBird! is a 1966 satire by Barbara Garson. It was self-published ('Grassy Knoll Press') as a pamphlet, and the full text appeared in the December, 1966 issue of Ramparts magazine. It was staged in February, 1967.

The play superimposes the John F. Kennedy assassination onto the plot of Shakespeare's Macbeth.

The play burlesques Shakespeare's Macbeth, with lines drawn from other plays such as Hamlet, and Richard III, with Texas and Boston accents. The plot follows MacBird from the 1960 Democratic National Convention, when he becomes John Ken O'Dunc's Vice President ("Hail, Vice-President thou art!"), to Ken O'Dunc's assassination, at the urging of Lady MacBird. Robert Ken O'Dunc then defeats MacBird at the 1968 convention.

In the play, Kennedy becomes "John Ken O'Dunc", Lyndon Johnson becomes "MacBird", Lady Bird Johnson becomes "Lady MacBird", etc. As Macbeth assassinates Duncan, so MacBird assassinates Ken O'Dunc. As Macbeth is defeated by Macduff, so MacBird is defeated by Robert Ken O'Dunc (Robert F. Kennedy).

By this point, Saturday Night Live has dropped any pretense of generosity toward either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, especially in its October 13 show:

The NBC sketch comedy show's [October 13] cold open depicted Trump (played by James Austin Johnson) declining another presidential debate with Harris (Maya Rudolph), but agreeing to compete with her on the game show "Family Feud."

. . . During the game, the contestants were asked to name something they keep in their glove compartment. After ringing in, Rudolph's Harris gave a long-winded response about her family history before finally answering, "A glock, Steve. A big old glock." Samberg's Emhoff, so impressed by Harris' answer, gave the exact same response − which turned out to be on the board again (another gun).

Biden, meanwhile, was depicted by Carvey as being confused about where he was, mistakenly calling Harvey "Regis" (aka Philbin, who died in 2020) and asking to buy a vowel. "I'm not the old one now, Trump is," he said. "The only difference, I know when to walk away: about six months too late!"

The piece at Real Clear Politics that doesn't mention 1968 concludees,

In hindsight, that Harris’s campaign would devolve into chaos and disorder may always have been a matter of when, not if. Her short-lived 2020 run was slammed by insiders as having “no discipline, no plan, no strategy.” Harris’s vice presidential tenure has been similarly chaotic, with an astonishing 92 percent staff turnover rate and myriad reports that Harris mistreats those under her. And no one should forget that as early as one of her first real interviews, a comment she made pandering to gun owners – her “I own a Glock” claim – led to comparisons to Dukakis’s “look at me I can drive a tank” moment.

But I think, it's just as big a factor that the avant-garde left has begun to drop any charade of support for either Biden or Harris.

2019 Redux

Doing web searches on Kamala, I'm suddenly coming up with stories on her failed primary campaign in 2019, for instance at Politico on December 3 of that year, The spectacular collapse of Kamala Harris:

On Monday, hemorrhaging cash and way down in polls — and with autopsies of her failing campaign being performed on the live body — Harris mercifully decided to drop out. She told her staff in a call Tuesday, sounding clearly disappointed, according to one participant, as she shared her decision to bow out.

Even when the hype around Harris was at its apex, her advisers and confidants wondered if the freshman senator was ready for a presidential run. In each of her past campaigns — first for district attorney of San Francisco, then California attorney general and the Senate in 2016 — Harris improved immensely, rising to the moment and giving her best performances when her back was against the wall.

This time, the moment — and the stage — proved too large. Kamala the campaigner couldn’t live up to Kamala the idea. And her campaign let her down.

The intriguing thing is how applicable the 2019 post mortems now seem to her current position:

Eventually, her most memorable moment — her exchange with Biden in the June debate over busing for school desegregation — turned into a mess when Harris flubbed the follow-through. She offered a muddled, shifting answer that allowed Biden’s campaign to paint her as opportunistic and a hypocrite.

Her polling sugar high subsided. She slid to the level of Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard and never recovered.

Look at the headlines now, just from the past few weeks: Dem strategists fret Harris 'sugar high' is over; Kamala Harris’ ‘sugar high’ has ended: Michael Whatley; Is Kamala Harris' 'sugar high' wearing off?

The current narrative is also similar to 2019's, a campaign that started with a lot of promise that's runniong out of steam:

The Democratic nominee is in a statistical dead heat in crucial states with Trump, the Republican former president, according to public and internal campaign polls cited by Democratic sources, sparking a round of finger-pointing and second-guessing from some corners.

It is a frustrating moment for a whirlwind campaign that opened with a huge jump in enthusiasm and cash when she replaced President Joe Biden in July, put on a robust Democratic convention and was widely hailed as the winner of her only debate with Trump.

Pieces like this still bravely maintain the "statistical dead heat" fiction, but Kamala's standing in the Real Clear Politics averages has been declining all week; as of this morning, her lead in the national popular vote is down to 1.3%.

An oddly prescient conclusion in the 2019 Politico post mortem discussed her political future:

[B]ehind the scenes, advisers were talking about ways to protect her long-term reputation and extricating her from the mess. Harris is 55 years old.

. . . Now, Harris has become among the most coveted endorsements in the race.

Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama, a Biden supporter, said he wasn’t surprised by Harris’ decision to pull the plug. “I think she’s got an incredible future, but this was just not going to be the year and I think doing something now rather than continuing was smart,” Jones said.

Perhaps more importantly, Harris is still very much in the veep stakes, Jones said. (Biden was asked about this Tuesday, but declined to answer.)

So we're looking at the seeds of 2024, which were planted in 2019. Biden, a bad choice for nominee, made an even worse choice for his running mate.

Her disadvantages were well known at the time: there was no there there, and she was open to charges of hypocrisy. The problems, though, could have been avoided if the powers behind the scenes, like then-Speaker Pelosi, had prevailed on Biden to withdraw as a 2024 candidate much earlier. At that point, there would have been a much better opportunity to see that Kamala would never be a viable candidate.

Mark Halperin, Sean Trende, And A Coming Mental Health Crisis

In the video clip above, Mark Halperin tells Tucker Carlson that the impending Trump victory on November 5 "will be the cause of the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country". That's sayng a lot. Let's think a moment about what a big mental health crisis actually looks like.

It's instructive to do a YouTube search on "narcissism", a vaguely defined term that covers a range from ordinary self-centered boastfulness to full-blown Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The YouTube search will reveal that there's an enormous cottage industry of narcissistic victim therapists ranging from licensed counselors and PhD psychologists to uncredentialed "life coaches" who offer advice to people who've encountered "narcissists" in their families, in marriages and dating relationships, at work, in church, at recreatioon, and just about everywhere else.

Many people who hear the term "narcissist" can bring up highly manipulative, dishonest, and unscrupulous people in their own experience who've caused damage in their own lives. The YouTube phenomenon says to me that the number of people who feel they've been victimized by "narcissists" is enormous. A former pastor at our Roman Catholic parish sometimes referred to an "epidemic of narcissism" in his homilies. According to the Cleveland Clinic,

Experts aren’t sure how common NPD [Narcissistic Personality Disorder] is. According to research data, between 0.5% and 5% of people in the U.S. may have it. Between 50% and 75% of cases affect men and people assigned male at birth (AMAB).

However, many people hide narcissistic beliefs or behaviors (informally known as “covert narcissism”). Because of that, it’s hard to estimate how many people truly have NPD.

Except that Narcissistic Personality Disorder requires a diagnosis from a qualified mental health professional, but narcissists don't seek out qualified mental health professionals. According to Dr Ramani Durvasula, a PhD psychologist who posts frequently about narcissism on YouTube,

It’s unlikely that this type of person will walk into a therapist’s office, let alone heed their advice.

“They have to be aware that they have caused harm to other people,” she says. “A very, very, very small percentage of narcissists are ever gonna get there.”

On one hand, a person can have harmful narcissitic traits without being diagnosed with NPD, while on the other, neither people who are narcissistic but not narcissistic enough to have NPD nor people with full-blown NPD are likely to wander into a mental health professional's office, so estimates that "between 0.5% and 5% of people in the U.S. may have it" are simply meaningless. Judging simply from the prevalence of self-announced narcissistic victim therapists on YouTube, the extent of the narcissism epidemic is probably far greater.

So how does this compare with Mark Halperin's warning of an impending "greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country"? Compared to the epidemic of narcissism, it's insignificant. Nevertheless, he has a point. To look at this, I want to examine the latest exercise by that avatar of obtuseness, Sean Trende: In Retrospect, I Still Think They Were Bad Veep Selections.

Let’s recall that there are a handful of things that a pick can do. It can shore up a wavering portion of the party base, as Mike Pence did for Donald Trump in 2016. It can reinforce a message, as Al Gore did for Bill Clinton in 1992. Or it can help deliver a state, as LBJ likely did for JFK in 1960.

Walz still doesn’t seem to have delivered any of this. The polling in Minnesota is roughly where it was prior to the Walz pick. This means that Harris-Walz will carry the state, but Democrats were already poised to do that. Republicans haven’t won Minnesota since 1972. If they win it this cycle, the election is already over.

Well and good, this is the conventional wisdom, for which Trende is well known. But how does he apply the conventional wisdom to J D Vance?

What about Vance? He seems to have done his job, debating Walz skillfully and carrying the MAGA flag. But he also doesn’t seem to have energized voters beyond the party faithful. Post-assassination attempts, I don’t think GOP turnout could be juiced any further. If anything, some of the baggage gathered from his 2022 Senate race turned some voters away.

. . . Vance’s debate performance was impressive, and suggested that he might fulfill Trump’s presumed intentions for him: to be the MAGA heir-apparent after Trump is gone. He may prove to be the elusive “Trumpism without Trump” candidate. But for that to matter, Trump has to win the election. And Vance likely didn’t help make that happen.

Trende wrote this on October 16, only two days ago, apparently convinced the race is still a tossup, and he's saying that good as Vance is, he hasn't moved the needle. Except that the needle has moved, Trende's own RCP average now has Trump leading in all the battleground states, and Trump looked nothing if not presidential at last night's Al Smith Dinner, with his oppenent ceding the field entirely.

Vance's job wasn't to move the needle. Trump likes Vance because Vance is moving the Overton window, which I've pointed out here, or to put it a little differently, he's shifting the paradigm.

He goes up against the schoolmarmish lady journalists who insist that no normal person believes the 2020 election was stolen, and he says "I'm normal, and I think it was stolen." Or they insist that Venezuelan criminal gangs taking over US apartment buildings isn't important, because only "a handful" were taken over, and he castigates them indignantly for minimizing the problem -- "Do you hear yourself?"

He's challenging the corporate public narrative, and the problem is that he and Trump are in fact doing it with some degree of success. Mark Halperin is probably correct that the corporate public narrative, which is self-serving, is probably not good for the country's overall mental health, and an adjustment in the direction of sanity will probably throw some less stable people off balance. At the same time, those less stable people who've been relying on the corporate public narrative almost certainly picked it up at their colleges and universities, which says something about the population that will have a mental health crisis when Trump wins the election.

At least they'll have the money to spend on therapy -- but as far as what the real mental health crises facing the country are, I think Halperin badly misses the point. the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country"

Here's What Puzzles Me About Kamala's Fox Interview

Up to a few weeks ago, astute observers had been saying that Kamala's real campaign manager was Brian Fallon, who was the architect of the strategy that kept her away from press conferences and interviews. And up to a few weeks ago, it's hard to argue that this wasn't a success. The polls were stuck with her leading by about 3 points in the popular vote, for instance.

Then, out of the blue, a sudden consensus emerged that Kamala had a problem with black men, and whether it was in response to that or for some other reason, she began to give softball interviews to friendly outlets. The problem was, though, what the Brian Fallon faction of the campaign recognized, that no matter how friendly the interviewer or the format, she performs poorly, often offering up soundbites like "not a thing that comes to mind" when asked how she'd differ from Biden policies -- which promptly make their way into Trump commercials.

Given a week or more of that kind of experience, the powers behind the scenes in her campaign -- presumably not Brian Fallon at this stage -- decided to play to that weakness. If she did poorly on The View, they'd put her on Charlemagne tha God and Fox. What on earth did tney have in mind? Here's a take that gets things at least partly right:

In what was widely seen as a Hail Mary move by Kamala’s campaign, the vice president agreed to an extended interview on Fox News, one of the exceedingly few national TV interviews she’s done since she was anointed the Democrat Party’s post-Biden nominee.

She "agreed to an extended interview" with Fox, but that wasn't what Fox got: she showed up 15 minutes late, and her handlers ended it early with what Baier called a "hard wrap". So it sounds like her handlers had a plan to minimize her potential weaknesses by keeping things as short as possible while hoping she could filibuster her answers and run out the clock, but at best, this didn't work out as well as they expected. One commentator gave the best-case interpretation:

The vice president has been slipping in the polls over the past couple of weeks. Although sitting for an interview with Fox was a risky move for Harris, she had hoped that a strong performance might help jumpstart her campaign and even bring back some of the joy and good vibes she had going over the summer.

Unfortunately for her, it’s unlikely that she attracted many – or even any – new supporters on Wednesday evening – and may even have driven some independent and undecided voters away.

All in all, not a good night for Harris.

The question I have is what problem the Harris campaign was rying to solve by doing the Fox interview. A web search on "kamala fox interview hail mary" brings results that suggest that indeed, this was a risky move by the Harris campsign to reverse declining polls and regain momentum -- as would be a Joe Rogan interview the campaign has also been mooting. The UK Daily Mail summarized the post-debate spin from pro-Harris commentators:

[S]upporters of Harris accused Fox News of conducting an 'ambush' interview and argued that she did well.

'Kamala Harris (strong) handled an ambush Fox interview light years better than the hash Donald Trump (unstable) made of the Fox pep rally disguised as a town hall,' Harris campaign advisor David Plouffe wrote on X.com.

Brian Stelter, a media analyst from CNN described the interview as a positive result for Harris.

'A lot of viewers are going to come away saying, "Wow, she's willing to do that. That's a sign of toughness and strength,"' Stelter said in a clip shared by the Harris campaign on social media.

But did it do what the campaign needed it do do -- change the narrative and regain momentum? I don't think so. The figure who got the biggest boost was Bret Baier, who was universally expected to be his normal tepid self, soft on Harris, when his forceful approach turned out to be a surprise. From the Daily Mail,

'Kamala Harris just ran into a Bret Baier buzzsaw when asked about the number of illegal aliens in the country,' wrote conservative communicator Steve Guest as the interview aired.

Baier's interview style drew praise from former Fox News personality Megyn Kelly.

'Bret is crushing this and she is incapable of defending her deadly border policies,' she wrote.

. . . Others who were not big fans of Baier indicated they were impressed by his performance.

'I forgive Bret Baier. He's literally ending Kamala Harris's campaign before our very eyes!' wrote Vince Langman, a supporter of Trump.

The one who changed the narrative and regained momentum was Bret Baier, whatever the outcome for Kamala. The campaign did a very poor job of understanding and managing risk, and I'm wondering who's in charge now.

"Why Isn't She Working Hard?"

This is the question that at least some observers are posing about Kamala as she appears to be falling behind in the polls, at least according to this piece at Breitbart:

Harris has repeatedly said she is running as an underdog, but her schedule does not appear to mirror those claims. Harris’s Tuesday schedule shows one event — she will sit for an interview with Charlamagne tha God at 5 p.m. Eastern.

Typically, candidates in the final stretch of a presidential campaign traverse battleground states, speaking with as many undecided voters as possible at town halls, local events, and campaign rallies.

. . . “Why isn’t she in three battleground states a day? Why isn’t she in four media markets in Pennsylvania today rather than one?” political analyst Mark Halperin said on The Morning Meeting. “If you assume she’s behind, which, again, I think she is right now, not by a lot. Why isn’t she working hard?”

Questions about Kamala's campaign ineptitude aren't new. This CNN post mortem of her abortive 2019 campaign for the 2020 nomination has a similar theme:

As Harris’ jump in the polls steadily gave way over the summer, senior aides within the Baltimore-based campaign began to search frantically for a message that would reinvigorate the sputtering campaign.

Instead, according to people close to Harris, the search exacerbated a series of central issues within the campaign: A lack of clear messaging from the candidate and combative infighting between some of Harris’ longtime aides from California, her sister-turned-campaign chairwoman Maya Harris, and campaign manager Juan Rodriguez.

. . . Others accused Rodriguez of overseeing a campaign rife with mismanagement, an assertion that centered on the fact that Harris had over $35 million to spend but still struggled to fund a successful campaign.

That, according to sources, is a lingering question that has infuriated Harris and top officials: How could the campaign spend so much money, without being able to place TV ads when they count?

“That will be the central question to examine: Where did the $35 million go? Why was the campaign structured like this?” said a person close to Harris.

The campaign’s financial situation was also more dire than widely known, said one former aide. For example, the campaign has only reserved less than $10,000 for a digital ad that they had touted with much fanfare earlier this week. The ad was ultimately never released online and the buy was canceled Monday.

I've seen occasional references to extravagant spending on Kamala's personal travel expenses during the 2019 campaign, including first-class airfare and five-star hotels, a pattern she established in her 2016 campaign for the US Senate, as well as during her tenure as California Attorney General:

A review by The Hill of California campaign finance records reveals that Harris’s expenditures follow a pattern: The Democratic candidate regularly charges thousands of dollars in luxury travel and hotels to her campaign.

Meanwhile, Harris’s staffers usually take cheaper flights and stay in hotels for closer to $250 a night, according to both inside sources and state campaign finance reports.

. . . While the Harris campaign’s spending has come under scrutiny this election cycle — most recently in a National Journal report on luxury travel — The Hill’s investigation reveals that these expenditure patterns are consistent from January 2011 through the present.

In a standard trip, for example, Harris billed her campaign $2,482.70 in January 2013 for Delta Airlines “airfare for candidate from Washington D.C./campaign events/Presidential Inauguration,” according to state records.

On that same trip Harris stayed in D.C.’s upscale St. Regis hotel, billing her campaign $3,434.74 for a four-night stay, a nightly rate of $858.69.

. . . Harris’s filings since July 1, 2014, are less detailed and do not specifying the trips’ purposes, but the cost patterns are similar.

There is a stay at the St. Regis for $974.71; at The London NYC for $2,257.33; a United Airlines fee for $4,297.80; a $472.35 fee for limousines in New York; and $180 for limos in Aspen.

All these items were charged to Harris’s campaign account.

What we're seeing in the 2024 campaign, for instance over the past week, is travel to single=event cities in battleground states -- yesterday's trip to Detroit for a half-hour interview with Charlemagne Tha God but no other events, for instance, which would involve a luxury hotel stay and expensive travel with only the one brief campaign-related event to justify the extravagant expense.

I think the answer to the question in this post's title is that Kamala has never been a hard worker, andthis has alwaqys been clear to people who've followed her career. As an opinion piece at The Hill put it over the weekend:

I have spoken with three Democratic operatives behind the scenes who all believe the race is slipping away from Vice President Kamala Harris. They offer four major reasons why this is happening.

The first is Harris herself. She is simply not a very good candidate. She lacks confidence and is seemingly terrified to take any unrehearsed or unvetted policy questions. This liability is not a surprise to those who follow politics closely, but is a new concern for a number of voters.

Maybe more to the point, she's always been more interested in the perks of office than the office itself, and this is reflected in her campaign style, which isn't going to change. She likes the luxury hotels, the limos, the security bubble, the sycophants. What she doesn't like is the need actually to do any of the work. What you see is what you get.

What's Going On At The Overton Window?

WATCH: @JDVance flips the script on a New York Times reporter by pointing out that the government, media, and Big Tech rigged the 2020 election by teaming up to censor the Hunter Biden laptop, costing President Trump millions of votes.🔥 pic.twitter.com/2EO9Tl3v0a

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 11, 2024

It occurred to me yesterday that Sen Vance is suddenly forcing the Overton window, the range of potential policy subjects that are considered appropriate for polite discussion, wide open. His recent exchanges with highly respectable lady journalists on January 6 and Aurora have had the effect of asking why "deplorable" opinions shouldn't be just obvious, not disreputable. Here's his exchange with Martha Raddatz of ABC:

Raddatz: "The incidents were limited to a handful of apartment complexes... A handful."

Vance: "Do you hear yourself? Only a HANDFUL of apartment complexes were taken over by Venezuelan gangs and Donald Trump is the problem??"pic.twitter.com/6PlNAPur8y

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 13, 2024

Is this just Vance? Effective as he is, I think something else is going on. Last night I was watching a National Geographic series on Witches: Truth Behind the Trials. which in passing mentions witch hunts as a type of moral panic. This rook me back to the view I've expressed here that the 2020 phenomena of COVID lockdowns, masking, and Black Lives Matter riots were also a moral panic.

In fact, I've thought that COVID as a disease took on a metaphorical aspect, that it was a societal sickness that needed to be cured, at least in part, by canceling perfectly good and popular TV shows like Live PD and Cops -- but the real sickness was Trump, and that was behind his defeat in the 2020 election. The subtext of the lockdowns and masks was that, at least for the people who supported them, they fended off the Trump disease, and in fact, they might cure it in society at large.

But in reviewing other moral panics, from witchcraft to secret rooms with bad clowns at pre-schools, I've consistently found that they die out and end with a "morning after" phase, following which there's a final collective recognition that there were never witches, or there was never a secret room at the pre-school where the bad clown killed rabbits.

Let's recognize that over the past year, a general recognition seems to have emerged that things under Trump were better than they are now. In addition, the traditional 2016-2021-era objections to Trump -- that he paid hush money to a porn star, for imstance, or that he incited an insurrection on January 6, have not only lost their former effect, but in fact they had a contrary impact when court cases were brought against him for those prior allegations, and their actual effect was to improve his standing in the 2024 polls.

This says to me that not only is the 2020 COVID-BLM moral panic over, but even the "morning after" phase is also over. The Live PD producers, for example, were able to bring back the show with a duplicate studio look, the precise format, and two of the three original hosts on the REELZ channel as On Patrol: Live in 2022 after A&E canceled the show in 2020 at the height of the moral panic. If anything, On Patrol: Live, essentially the same show, has lost any controversy that ever attached itself to Live PD. This is how much the country has changed.

What's going on, I think, is a basic societal re-perception of Trump, in many ways equivalent to the much better established re-perception that a witch in the public mind is not only not a threatening or harmful idea, but is actually nothing more than a Halloween costume or a cartoon character.

This is what Vance has actually been exploiting -- the uber-respectable lady journmalists are trying to revive the peception of Trump as a social sickness, the cause of a moral panic, when the moral panic is in fact now long under the bridge, and by now we're even beyond the "morning after".

Trump, The Media, And The Achilles Paradox

Corporate media's take on the polls channels the Achilles Paradox:

in logic, an argument attributed to the 5th-century-bce Greek philosopher Zeno, and one of his four paradoxes described by Aristotle in the treatise Physics. The paradox concerns a race between the fleet-footed Achilles and a slow-moving tortoise. The two start moving at the same moment, but if the tortoise is initially given a head start and continues to move ahead, Achilles can run at any speed and will never catch up with it. Zeno’s argument rests on the presumption that Achilles must first reach the point where the tortoise started, by which time the tortoise will have moved ahead, even if but a small distance, to another point; by the time Achilles traverses the distance to this latter point, the tortoise will have moved ahead to another, and so on.

This is, of course, absurd. The link continues.

Aristotle’s solution to it involved treating the segments of Achilles’ motion as only potential and not actual, since he never actualizes them by stopping. In an anticipation of modern measure theory, Aristotle argued that an infinity of subdivisions of a distance that is finite does not preclude the possibility of traversing that distance, since the subdivisions do not have actual existence unless something is done to them, in this case stopping at them.

But the conventional take on the presidential race is that Trump, as Achilles, can only come closer and closer to Harris, the tortoise, but he can never pass her:

A dead heat is getting even hotter for Kamala Harris. . . . The polls say the race is tightening slightly. According to RealClearPolitics’ Sept. 29 average of national polling in a two-way race, Harris leads Trump 49.1 percent to 47.1 percent. That 2-point spread is down slightly from Harris’ 2.2-point advantage a week earlier.

The problem is that Achilles is gaining on the tortoise. As Mark Halperin's Democrat advocate on his 2Way stream, Dan Turrentine, put it the other day,

If you just go back now for the last three to four weeks in Michigan and in Wisconsin, not that Harris was up seven and it went down to four, down to one. It's gone from three, to two, to one, to tied. And at the same time, those Senate candidates, Casey, Slotkin, and Baldwin are seeing the same deadlock.

Halperin himself sums things up later in the same podcast:

[Trump's people] don't necessarily think they're the favorite in Michigan and Wisconsin, but they're not worried about losing it. You don't hear from them, oh my goodness. What you hear is we're moving up, what the three of us are hearing.

We're moving up in those two. We're going to win the three Sunbelt states and we're stronger in Pennsylvania than she is. That to me, if the whole thing's about the Electoral College, you take any of the Rust Belt states away from her, it's very difficult for her to win.

Very difficult. It's not mathematically impossible, but it probably won't happen if she loses any of them. She can replace Pennsylvania with either Georgia, North Carolina, and then one other of the Sunbelt states.

If she loses Pennsylvania and she wins either Georgia or North Carolina, then she just needs one of the other three. That's not impossible, but what I'm telling you today is things are not moving right for her.

The race is "tighter than ever" only if you accept the Achilles Paradox.

UPDATE:

Former President Donald Trump has caught up to Vice President Kamala Harris in a new NBC poll released Sunday. Trump is tied with Harris at 48%, and leads by 47%-46% in an “expanded ballot” with third party candidates.

The poll also shows that Trump’s popularity is increasing, as Harris’s declines, with three weeks until Election Day.