It's Over

The big quote yesterday was from Mark Halperin:

Former President Donald Trump is on track to win the 2024 presidential race based on the early voting numbers trickling in, according to a longtime political journalist.

“If the early vote numbers stay the way they are, and that’s a big if, we’ll almost certainly know before Election Day who’s going to win,” Mark Halperin, editor-in-chief of the 2WAY video platform, said Tuesday.

Halperin is an interesting case. He grew up in Bethesda as a member of the ruling class, although like me, he didn't go to Sidwell Friends (I went to B-CC; he went to Walt Whitman). He went on to Harvard and had a predictable career as a senior political analyst in corporate media, including ABC, NBC, MSNBC, and Showtime, but allegations of sexual harassment brought this to an end in 2017. As of the 2024 campaign, he seems to have worked hard to rehabilitate himself as the centrist honest broker among all the commentators, so he has a lot riding on this prediction. If he's right, he can probably get back into corporate media.

The headlines on Real Clear Poloitics are baleful: from Politico, The Clock Is Ticking on Kamala Harris:

Since her strong convention speech and superb debate performance, Harris has run out of what her campaign calls tentpole moments. She now needs to drive news in other ways. Appearing with Cheney is a way to do that, but it’s of limited utility if that’s the beginning and end of the messaging.

This remains a winnable race for Harris, but she’s getting hammered in television ads for being a liberal thanks to the far-left stances she took in her ill-fated presidential bid. If she says nothing to contradict that onslaught, voters will believe it. No matter how much she says Donald Trump is a bad man.

The clock is ticking.

But beauty is as beauty does. The conventional wisdom is she had a "superb debate performance", but the one memorable phrase from the debate was Trump's "they're eating the dogs and cats," and everything memorable since then has been Kamala fails. From The Hill:

There is growing fear in Democratic circles that the presidential race could be slipping further away from Vice President Harris.

To be sure, Democrats still think Harris can defeat former President Trump. The margins are so close in the seven battleground states likely to decide the contest, a shift toward either candidate or a mistake in the polling could be decisive.

. . . “Everyone keeps saying, ‘It’s close.’ Yes, it’s close, but are things trending our way? No. And no one wants to openly admit that,” one Democratic strategist said. “Could we still win? Maybe. Should anyone be even slightly optimistic right now? No.”

Every indication, which Halperin has picked up, is that the election isn't going to be close, especially if early voting means it could well be called before election day. But Ed Kilgore at New York Magazine is clinging to the verities:

It’s always possible the polls are all wrong and either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris is on the brink of a decisive victory on November 5. For one thing, it’s close enough in the seven battleground states that either candidate could win all of them. But make no mistake: This apparently very close presidential election reflects a deeply divided electorate where the potential changes in either direction we all talk about constantly are glacial and arguably self-canceling.

. . . Very big differences in the direction of the country will flow from tiny shifts in one direction or another of a closely divided electorate. It’s why anxiety levels are so high right now among those paying avid attention to politics, even though the outcome may depend on “low-propensity voters” barely paying attention at all.

But "the polls" are changing daily. As of this morning, Harris's lead in the RCP average is at 1.1%, up slightly from Monday's 1.0%, but down roughly a point from the previous week. The rule-of-thumb calculation has been that the RCP average underestimates Trump's final peformance by about 3 points, which suggests, as numerous polls recently also do, that he will win both the Electoral College and the popular vote.

The Best Take On Trump's McDonald's Visit

PRESIDENT TRUMP: "I've now worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala" at McDonald's 🤣 pic.twitter.com/RMeivIPPd0

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 20, 2024

From Phil Boas at the Arizona Republic:

This was supposed to be “Senile Sunday,” the day Harris and her surrogates made the case that Donald Trump is too old and mentally infirm to be president. They made the point repeatedly on the Sunday shows.

Kamala Harris even launched the day with an ad and this tweet:

“Donald Trump is exhausted, unstable, and unfit to be President of the United States.”

Other surrogates and campaign people picked up the theme and piled on.

Then the fry chef went to work in Bucks County, Pa.

The cook who was too old, too tired and too senile to be president took the entire contents of the freezer bag labeled “Democratic Party” and emptied it into his metal basket.

Then he deep fried it in hydrogenated vegetable fat.

Boas hints at the bigger context:

The whole thing was deliciously insane, bizarre in the way that America does bizarre.

It’s what the Democrats have never understood about Trump or the country.

America is weird.

And if you don’t understand what Trump did at McDonald’s and that it was a breakthrough in this campaign, then you don’t understand Trump or the country.

Corporate media is deeply puzzled that Trump isn't following the game plan they think he should at the end of the campaoign. Why on earth is he going to hold a rally at Madison Square Garden?

Donald Trump is reportedly fixated on hosting a rally at New York City’s famous Madison Square Garden arena, despite most political experts believing the Empire State and even Trump’s hometown of New York City are squarely in the blue column for 2024.

“I’m gonna fill the Garden,” he reportedly boased in recent days to a confidant, who spoke anonymously to The Bulwark.

The Trump ally added that the Republican “has just been obsessed with this for at least a year. This is his campaign. So it’s happening.”

The story is clearly convinced that this is yet another sign that he's unstable and unhinged, but it's doing its best to come up with charitable explanations:

One could simply be for hometown pride.

Trump, despite changing his legal residency to Florida in 2020, was born in New York City, and still derives part of his political appeal from his (often exaggerated) career as a New York real estate developer.

Another might be a combination of that pride plus the former president’s fondness for doing things people say he can’t.

“We just rented Madison Square Garden,” Trump said with evident glee last week at a rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania. “We’re going to make a play for New York.”

Sidney Blumenthal at The Guardian, for his part, is not looking for harmless explanations:

Trump’s climactic rally will not be in the spirit of any past presidential event ever held there. His gathering for the great racist replacement theory will be the culmination of his spiraling descent since the Charlottesville rally in 2017 when neo-Nazis chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” “Fine people on both sides,” Trump said then. Now, at his night at the Garden, Trump will revive the memory of the infamous American Nazi mass rally held there on 20 February 1939 through his reflected Hitlerian rhetoric.

. . . Trump has been inevitably drawn to the Garden, in the city that made and unmade him. He is irreversibly entrapped in his endless neurotic syndrome of desperately seeking approval there that he constantly repels and success he inexorably undermines, a cycle of failure, rejection and humiliation. He wants New York to love him unreservedly, but his relationship with the city has been one long unrequited romance. His true love affair has always and only been with himself.

In other words, he's unstable and unhinged. The thinking seems to be that the race is razor-thin, much too close to call, and Trump should be focusing on certain counties in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and North Carolina, because that's what Kamala's doing. Renting Madison Square Garden is at best chasing a chimera, but much more likely, it's indulging grandiose Hitlerian delusions. But Blumenthal is clearly afraid that delusional or not, Trump might actually realize his nefarious vision:

Three years after FDR spoke at the Garden, another rally was held there, on 20 February 1939, under the sponsorship of the German American Bund, raising the slogan of “America First”, to advance the great replacement theory that Jews and other “inferior races” were displacing white Aryans. The Nazis claimed the mantle of true Americanism and Christian nationalism. Swastikas framed a gigantic portrait of George Washington as the backdrop to the stage.

. . . In 2019, a seven-minute documentary about the Nazi rally of 1939, A Night at the Garden, was nominated for an Academy Award. To promote it, a 30-second TV ad was produced with the tagline: “It Can Happen Here.” The line was a reference to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, about a populist demagogue defeating FDR and imposing a fascist regime.

I think there's actually a deep understanding, although coupled with deep anger, jealousy, and resentment, at Trump's success in this year's campaign. People like Blumenethal understand quite well Trump's strategy at McDonald's and Madison Square Garden -- he's playing for the win. He's outperforming both his 2016 and 2020 record, after all. I don't think this is going to be close.

The Needle Is Moving

A week ago, I noted that the Real Clear Politics popular-vote polling average had Kamala with a 1.8% lead. Just this past Friday, I noted that her lead was down to 1.3%. As new polls were released over the weekend, it continued to fall, until by this morning, it's down to 1.0%.

On one hand, this is a lagging indicator, since the average includes old polls that haven't been updated. On the other, it includes polls that have proved highly inaccurate and biased toward Democrats in the past. But on top of that, a "national popular vote" average is Democrat-leaning, since it totals votes in high-population, Democrat-leaning states like New York and California, when the Electoral College is meant to limit big-state advantage in elections.

So far, I've seen basically no cogent commentary on what this decline in Kamala's popular vote averages means. However, it comes in the wake of the vice presidential debate Octobrr 1, her Call Her Daddy interview October 6, her 60 Miniutes interview October 7, ansd her Fox News interview with Bret Baier October 16, but before Trump's visit to a Bucks County, PA McDonald's yesterday. The size of the crowds out to see Trump makes me wonder if the polls are missing something important:

Just LOOK at this crowd outside the Trump McDonald’s in PA

Holypic.twitter.com/IuQgpqXaOb

— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) October 20, 2024

Because the RCP average is a lagging indicator, it doesn't fully reflect the trend in the most recent polls:

A new Fox News poll, conducted between October 11 and 14 among 1,110 registered voters and 870 likely voters, showed that Trump is leading Harris by 2 points among registered and likely voters, on 50 percent to her 48 percent, which falls within the poll's margin of error, a 4-point swing from when Harris was leading Trump by 2 points a month ago.

Additionally. the latest ActiVote poll, conducted from October 3-8, showed Donald Trump holding a 1.2-point lead nationwide with a 3 percent margin of error. That came after a September poll from ActiVote had Kamala Harris ahead by 5.4 points.

Trump has also seen positive signs in the swing states. RealClearPolitics' poll tracker last week showed that Michigan had flipped in favor of Trump for the first time since July 29. Nevada and Pennsylvania have also gone Republican.

But neither of these polls was done in the wake of the Fox News Bret Baier interview. Nevertheless, The Hill reported today,

Former President Trump overtook Vice President Harris in the Decision Desk HQ/The Hill election forecast Sunday, the first time he has been deemed the favorite over her this cycle.

The model predicts Trump has a 52 percent chance of winning the presidency, while Harris has a 48 percent chance, as of Sunday.

Since late August, the election forecast put Harris’s chances of winning between approximately 54 percent and 56 percent. In early October, however, those dynamics began to shift, and the election forecast predicted both candidates’ chances to be closer to 50 percent.

On Oct. 17, the model predicted the two candidates were equally likely to win next month, and Trump took the advantage Oct. 20.

This represents a shift of as much as 8%, but the piece nevertheless concludes,

[T]he race remains a toss-up, according to the election forecast, since the polling in all seven states remains within the margin of error, meaning typical polling inaccuracies could shift the results in either direction.

As of this morning, most respectable opinion is still withholding judgment on whether Kamala's October shift in strategy to do interviews has been effective. For instance, at The Guardian:

Once interview-shy VP plunged into podcast populism and interview with shock-jock Howard Stern after polls showed her slipping against Trump

First came “joy”, with some cosy but unmemorable TV sit-downs with sympathetic hosts, a Vogue cover, and a billion dollars to spend on TV ads. Then reality hit: Kamala Harris’ strategy to win over a mysterious sliver of undecided US voters was not working and she was slipping back in the polls.

So the vice president went on Fox News, part of a pitch to white working-class women, who voted for Trump more strongly in 2020 than 2016. It was a win for Fox’s news division – 7.8m viewers, or four times host Bret Baier’s nightly average – but was it a win for the Harris campaign?

Well, was it? All we get is a shrug:

But will any of it matter? There are no guarantees that undecided or unengaged voters today will be any less undecided in two-and-a-half weeks’ time.

It says a lot that the pundits are willing to say so little, when it's indisputable that the numbers are actually shifting. And especially in the past week or ten days, something's clearly changed.

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.