If The Election Is So Close, Why Is The Smart Money Acting As If It Isn't?

Attribute whatever motive you want to Jeff Bezos, for instance:

ex washington post editor: “Trump waited to make sure that Bezos did what he said he was going to do, and then met with the Blue Origin people,” he said on Saturday. “Which tells us that there was an actual deal made."

The implication is that Bezos offered to squash a potential Washington Post endorsement of Harris in return for giving Bezos's Blue Origin favorable treatment for contracts in an upcoming Trump administration. Let's accept this -- Bezos has never had Rockefeller-level PR -- but then, let's also grant him the cupidinous instincts this implies.

Why would Bezos see the point in making this deal? If the election were flip-a-coin close, which among other things might imply that a WaPo endorsement could tip it to Kamala, why change course? I think a reasonable conclusion is that insiders seem to think it's not close at all. Here's the headline at CEO Today: Trump’s VIP Tech List: CEOs Scramble to Suck Up to the Ex-President!

In a series of recent statements, Trump asserts that several tech CEOs are actively reaching out to him. Prominent figures like Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, and Mark Zuckerberg, head of Meta, have faced criticism from Trump in the past, particularly regarding what he perceives as the suppression of conservative voices on their platforms. Yet, as the polls tighten in the race against Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump claims these leaders are becoming more favorable toward him, aligning their interests with the possibility of a Trump victory.

According to reports from the Washington Post, influential business leaders are adopting a cautious approach, potentially recognizing the implications of Trump’s return to power. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has made his support for Trump explicit, contributing financially to his campaign.

The link goes into more derail on Bezos's business interests as they relate to Trump:

Former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has recently faced scrutiny for the Washington Post’s decision to refrain from endorsing presidential candidates, which Trump criticized. According to Trump, Bezos called him after the assassination attempt, expressing amazement at the unfolding events. Trump noted, “Despite the fact you own the Washington Post, I appreciate it.” Bezos' connection to government contracts, particularly through Amazon Web Services and Blue Origin, adds another layer of complexity to his relationship with Trump.

A Trump presidency could lead to significant changes in how Amazon operates, particularly regarding government contracts. Historically, Trump has leveraged federal contracts as a tool for both rewarding and punishing companies based on their alignment with his administration’s agenda. If Trump were to regain office, Amazon might find itself navigating a landscape with more direct ties to the federal government, influencing everything from regulations to contract awards. Additionally, Trump’s focus on domestic manufacturing could pressure Amazon to adjust its logistics and supply chain strategies to prioritize U.S.-based operations.

Again, if the election were the tossup we're being told it is, why would people like Zuckerberg, mentioned here, Bezos, or Warren Buffett, via Business Insider, suddenly be hedging their bets?

Warren Buffett has not endorsed Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, and made it clear this week he will not publicly back either presidential candidate.

. . . The Berkshire CEO's reticence may seem surprising as he's previously thrown his weight behind Democratic presidential candidates. He organized fundraisers for Barack Obama in 2011 and stumped for Hillary Clinton in 2016, even walking on stage at a rally to hammer Donald Trump over his bankrupt businesses, reluctance to publish his tax returns, and rude treatment of others.

Yet the 94-year-old billionaire explained why he's now keeping his mouth shut during Berkshire's annual shareholder meeting in 2022. Buffett said he'd learned that "you can make a whole lot more people sustainably mad than you can make temporarily happy by speaking out on any subject."

Translation: Buffett doesn't want to make Trump sustainably mad at him, when it's not worth making Harris temporarily happy, because it's certain Trump will win on November 5, and she will lose. His BNSF Railway won big when Biden canceled the Keystone XL Pipeline, because it meant oil shipments from Canada would continue to come by rail. It was to his advantage to support Biden early in 2020; now he needs to appease Trump early in 2024, because he needs to control the damage when Trump reverses this policy.

Yet the Wall Street Journal, thought to be the organ of plutocracy, still feigns obtuseness:

A week from the election, we have bipartisan consensus on two points regarding Pennsylvania.

The first is that the presidential contest is way too close to call. The second is that only one contender has coattails. Both candidates for Senate—Republican challenger Dave McCormick and Democratic incumbent Bob Casey—agree on who that is: Donald Trump.

If the election were really "way too close to call", why is Casey acting as though Trump is going to win? Now we even have Alan Dershowitz saying he can't vote for Harris:

Like everyone else here, he won't say he's voting for Trump, but if he;'s saying he won't vote for Harris, that's the same thing. I think he's too smart to throw his vote away by voting for Jill Stein.

November 5 isn't going to be cloae at all.

Did Kamala Pay Lizzo And Beyonce For Their Appearances?

A recent feature of the Harris campaign has been the disappointing appeaarances of celebrities Lizzo (in Detroit October 19) and Beyonce (in Houston October 25) to endorse Kamala. Lizzo spoke, at least according to YouTube clips, for about seven minutes, notably claiming that if Kamala wins, the whole country will be like Detroit, but didn't perform. This also happened with Beyonce at the Houston rally:

Beyoncé fans were left furious after the singer failed to perform at a Texas rally for Kamala Harris.

The star took to the stage in her native Houston to endorse the Vice President on Friday night.

Some fans had waited more than 12 hours before packing into the city's Shell Energy Stadium expecting a performance, after rumors she would sing swirled online and the Washington Post reported on her expected appearance.

The singer appeared to come tantalizingly close to delighting the crowds when she began to talk about how it is time for America to 'sing a new song'.

However, rallygoers were ultimately left disappointed when the 'Single Ladies' hitmaker made a brief appearance in which she said she was not there as a celebrity, but as a mother.

Typical reaction was Slugga: The Beyoncé bait and switch is the most Kamala thing ever. But this left observers with a nagging question: had the Harris campaign paid Lizzo and Beyonce for their appearances, even though they didn't perform? The fact checkers were on the case, at least as far as Lizzo was concerned:

In person, attendees applauded Lizzo’s brief speech. Online, some social media users said Lizzo’s support cost the campaign a pretty penny.

"BREAKING: Lizzo charged the Harris-Walz campaign $2.3 million for a single appearance at a Detroit rally," read an Oct. 22 post by an X user whose account is affiliated with a conservative account, @ConservativeOG.

Other Republicans shared this claim on X, including Sean Spicer, onetime press secretary to former President Donald Trump and an account. "You have to be pretty desperate to pay @lizzo to appear at a rally," Spicer wrote when he reshared the $2.3 million claim on X Oct. 22.

. . . We found no evidence that Lizzo was paid to make those remarks. The Harris campaign confirmed to PolitiFact that the posts’ claims are untrue.

We searched using Google and Nexis, a news database, and we found no credible news reports or other indications that the Harris-Walz campaign paid Lizzo for her appearance at the Harris event or her endorsement.

Similar questions have come up over the Beyonce appearance:

You tellin me Kamala paid Beyoncé 10 million to speak….. and they couldn’t even work it in the deal that she performs?

Shows you how desperate they are and how bad they are at negotiating business

You trust these people wit ur money? 😂

— AB (@AB84) October 27, 2024

Kamala Harris gets booed off stage in embarrassing attempt to mix a political rally with a free Beyonce concert.

Rumor has it Beyonce demanded a large sum of money and refused to even travel outside of Houston, Texas, where she lives. Beyonce has a private jet and could have… pic.twitter.com/U7kc8Oaonj

— Matt Wallace (@MattWallace888) October 26, 2024

So far, there's been no official fact check of these claims, but frankly, they have the ring of truth. Celebrities at that level see value in their names alone. I would imagine that their agents must be involved in any potential use of their names, and they aren't going to give this valuable asset away to anyone, fashion brand, breakfast cereal, or political candidate -- and even if the celebrities wanted to give away their endorsement for free, their agents wouldn't allow it.

So why was there no performance if the campaign paid them so much just to show up? I would assume that if either were going to perform, there'd be multimillions more involved, band, backup singers, stage sets, lighting, and so forth, and this would be for a free concert. People who buy tickets pay for this:

The prices for standard tickets to Beyoncé's concerts from StubHub start at approximately $102 on the lower end to nearly $400, depending on the venue. Vivid Seats offers similar price ranges for standard Renaissance World Tour tickets, ranging from about $100 in Las Vegas to $375 in Houston.

Beyonce performed at Mercedes Benz Stadium in Atlanta on Aug. 11-12, 2023 which had an attendance of 156,000 fans. It took in $39.8 million. These numbers would be beyond the capability of the Harris campaign to hold a "free" concert, and her agents wouldn't allow the product to be cheapened for anything less.

How on earth would anyone think they could get into a concert that normally costs $1-400 for free? What does it say about the Harris campaign that they'd even try to bamboozle the crowd this way?

What this does say about the Harris campaign is that it almost certainly had to pay big bucks for even a short segment of Beyonce's time and the use of her name, and it could only try to get away with a vague suggestion that anyopne who attended would get something more.

Did any of this pay off? According to Newsweek,

Vice President Kamala Harris' odds of winning the 2024 presidential election have worsened over the past 24 hours, according to a leading bookmaker.

On Friday, Betfair offered odds of 6/4 (40 percent) on Harris achieving victory on November 5, compared to 4/6 (60 percent) for former President Donald Trump. As of Saturday morning, Harris' odds had lengthened to 8/5 (38 percent), while Trump saw his odds cut to 5/8 (61 percent)—suggesting that those placing bets didn't think Harris' rally with Beyoncé on Friday gave her an immediate boost.

. . . Speaking to Newsweek about the change in odds, Betfair spokesperson Sam Rosbottom said: "Despite Harris' chances improving slightly this week after her Obama and Springsteen rally on Thursday, punters appear unconvinced by her A-list backers.

"And Harris' hopes that Beyoncé might help her run the world appear dashed, too, after the megastar's appearance at a Democrat rally in Houston failed to move the needle in her favor."

So this was a Hail Mary, or maybe more accurately, an attempt to pull off a Hail Mary on the cheap. It failed.

The Proletarian-Middle Class Realignment

Let's continue down the road I started yesterday, a contrarian-revisionist reinterpretation of "Fabian socialism", which has been the consensus social democrat strategy in the West since the late 19th century. It is effectively a delaying strategy to appear to make concessions to the threat of class revolution, but the concessions, although expensive, are token, while they're made and financed by the middle class and upper proletariat (Paul Fussell's "high proles"), and the institutions of upper-class privilege remain untouched.

One feature of the Trump era is that key demographic groups are beginning to recognize that this strategy in fact doesn't work for them, even though it had been sold as to their benefit. For instance,

Barbara Clark is the perfect example of a voter—whether black, white, Hispanic, or from any other ethnic group—who defies stereotypes. This defiance often leads to voters such as her being overlooked as people who could change not just the presidential election, but also the majority in the Senate.

Clark is a black female who has been a registered Democrat for almost all of her adult life and voted for former President Barack Obama twice.

. . . “After we got Obama in the first time, and nothing happened, nothing changed, I said, ‘Whoa, what’s going on?’ And the local Democrats told me, ‘They won’t let him,’” Clark explained.

. . . “My answer to them was, I said, ‘Well, he’s got to step up and say, “I’m the president.”’ But nothing changed in our community,” she added.

This is echoed in a recent essay by Amity Shlaes, We Are Living In Lyndon Johnson's America:

Counterintuitive as it is to recall, the riots that ripped up Los Angeles and Detroit in the Johnson years [1965-67] came after passage of Johnson’s two great civil-rights laws, not before. As [aide Joseph] Califano reports, the Watts riots so distressed Johnson that he chose to disappear for more than twenty-four hours, an eternity for a chief executive.

. . . Rather than consider the possibility that African Americans were saying they needed something beyond more federal laws, Johnson, upon his return, simply passed further measures, including the Model Cities program, another Washington try at bettering the life of cities’ middle classes and the urban poor.

In short, these experiments were not experiments in the true sense, for they lacked science and accountability. They were actually plays, or Hail Marys, or political forays.

In other words, Johnson's Great Society legislation wasn't so much an effort to address the actual problems of civil rights and poverty as it was to create an impression that something was being done, when on one hand, it wasn't, but on the other, the huge and feckless expense would be borne by middle-and working-class taxpayers in the form of increased taxes and inflation. Shlaes continues,

While in office, Johnson, all politician, never . . . . took time to parse the downside of welfare-state expansion, or to consider that inflation caused by his spending might ravage paychecks. He did not consider that basing American immigration policy on compassion rather than logic or trade-offs would make it difficult for future lawmakers to control the nation’s borders. He did not ponder what increasing longevity would do to the fiscal outlook of his most beloved program, Medicare. In 1966 or 1967, he was too busy to think about all that.

. . . Though a failure of Johnson’s great military buildup in Vietnam is usually offered as the reason he did not choose to run again in 1968, one suspects that an eagerness to avoid seeing the ugly outputs, the results of his domestic work, played a role.

But Shlaes, at least here, doesn't cover Johnson's shift from Southern-state segregationist as Senate Majority Leader to ally of Dr King as president. This is the Johnson who is reported to have said in 1963,

These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. . . I'll have them n****** voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.

This suggests that Johnson's legislative moves weren't made with a pure heart or the best of intentions; his aim wasn't to fix the race issue, it was to "give them a little something", which would in reality be paid out in riots that set the community back for decades.

What we're seeing in the current election season is a growing alignment between all members of the non-college educated middle class against an alliance of the college-educated and the traditionally privileged. It's explained in tis NPR interview:

Well, we're talking about the education line, and whether or not you have a college degree seems to be one of the biggest predictors of how you're going to vote. If you have a college degree, more likely than not, you're voting Democratic. If you don't, more likely than not now, you're voting Republican. And that's a pretty big shift from what we had seen, you know, in the 1980s or '90s, even the early 2000s.

This brings us back to a less-acknowledged feature of the Fabian socialist project, the widening of access to college education. This is coered from different perspectives in David Brooks's Bobos in Paradise and Alan Dershowitz's Chutzpah. Brooks feels that the post-World War II GI Bill and the introduction of the Scholastic Aptitude Test created a genune meritocracy that in particular allowed Jews to compete for upper-middle-class jobs.

Dershowitz has a much more realistic view that the universities simply disguised their existing Jewish quotas under "diversity" criteria while continuing to give admissions preference to legacies, which simply perpetuated the old upper-class privilege. The middle-class applicants who won the admissions lottery were flattered into believing they'd gotten in on merit, so they enthusiastically supported the new regime, while the legacies, admitted the same old way as their forebears, could hitchhike on the prestige of those admitted on grades and SAT scores.

The problem is in the Trump era, the value of a college degree is declining. Once I switched my own career to tech, I found that the de facto qualifications for most IT jobs did not require a four-year degree, and many of my colleagues didn't have one. But if anything, the snobbery associated with a college degree has only increased, so that there's now an alliance between the newly respectable alumni of elite schools -- David Brooks is a perfect example -- and the legacies.

But again, the aspiring upper middle class that participates in the college admissions rat race finances this putative concession themselves, in the steadily increasing cost of the degree, financed by increasingly burdensome student loans. The legacies don't have this problem.

So what we're seeing incresingly is a recognition amonmg a growing segment of the electorate that the Fabian socialist project is a con -- in fact, an expensive con tha's financed by the people it's supposed to benefit. This is a good part of the basis for Trump's cuirrent success.

What's happening is on one hand a growing recognition of Ferdinand Lundberg's insight that I cited yesterday -- US society does at basis resemble a Latin American structure of a large population of peasants supporting a privileged ownership class -- but a relatively recent twist is that a segment of the peasants have been bamboozled into believing their interests correspond with the interests of the owners. But this is just another part of the Fabian socialist con.

WaPo And The LA Times: He Who Has The Gold Makes The Rules

In Ferdinand Lundberg, The Rich and the Super-Rich (1969):

Those few newspapers that make a practice of printing foreign news occasionally survey Latin American countries. The writers are invariably grieved to find a small oligarchy of big landowners in control, with the remainder of the population consisting of sycophantic hangers-on and landless, poverty-stricken peasants. But I have never seen it remarked that the basic description, with the alteration of a few nouns, applies just as well to the United States, where the position of the landowners is occupied by the financiers, industrialists and big rentiers and that of the peasants by the low-paid employees (all subject to dismissal for one reason or other just like the peasants).

If anyone in the past few days seeks vindication of Ferdinand Lundberg's views, he need look no farther than the events surrounding the decisions by the once-totemic Los Angeles Times and Washington Post not to endorse a presidentiual candidate in this year's election, which amount to an effective endorsement of Donald Trump. And as I covered Thursday, the wealthy plutocrat who owns the LA Times overrode the paper's editorial board in this matter, as did Jeff Bezos, the plutocrat who owns the Washington Post.

These events come in context, though. As I pointed out in Thursday's post, the influential and plutocratic Chandler family, whose fortune had been behind the LA Times, disinvested from the losing business a generation ago. The Graham family, which had owned the Post since 1933, sold the paper as a losing enterprise to Jeff Bezos in 2013. On one hand, the mere fact that the papers continued to be owned by Lundberg's class of financiers, industrialists, and big rentiers is nothng new, as he would be the first to point out.

On the other, the Chandlers and the Grahams both sold out simply to different financiers, industrialists, and big rentiers. Bezos in particular, although noted for highly aggressive business practices, has supported leftist politicians and causes:

According to public campaign finance records, Bezos supported the electoral campaigns of Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, two Democratic U.S. senators from Washington. He has also supported Democrats U.S. representative John Conyers, as well as Patrick Leahy and Republican Spencer Abraham, U.S. senators serving on committees dealing with Internet-related issues. Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Bezos have supported the legalization of same-sex marriage, and in 2012 contributed $2.5 million to Washington United for Marriage, a group supporting a yes vote on Washington Referendum 74, which affirmed a same-sex marriage law enacted in the state.

Neither Bezos nor Patrick Soon-Shiong, the current owner of the LA Times, had previously interfered with the generally leftist editorial positions of either paper, and their refusals to allow their papers to endorse Harris has come as a surprise. We must assume that both Bezos and Soon-Shiong spent many millions to buy these papers, and they did it with their business interests in mind, even if, at least at the time of the purchases, the papers were losing money.

Did something change? Let's assume for starters that Lundberg's view of financiers, industrialists, and big rentiers is correct, and the nature of their interests hasn't changed. If that's the case, we can see that the social environment in which they operate also hasn't changed -- by and large, they're selling their products to the population of sycophantic hangers-on and de facto landless, poverty-stricken peasants, while their papers are at least seeking to manipulate the collective opinions of that same population.

Up to very recently, it was to the advantage of corporate media's owners to project an image of sympathy for leftist agendas, although especially in the case of Bezos, he tended to conduct his day-to-day business much more in the style of post-Civil War industrialist robber barons. Whatever the Post said editorially was neither here nor there, and indeed, his donations to liberal Democrats were mostly to keep them off his own case. But somehow, late in this election campaign, push came to shove for both Bezos and Soon-Shiong, and what their papers said editorially actually made a difference, to the extent that they overrode their editors, who apparently had forgotten they were only hired help on the plantation, and effectively dismssed them.

Let's keep in mind that modern public relations was developed by John D Rockefeller, who was notwithstaning never acknowleged for saving the whales, as a means of humanizing his public image. His son, John D Jr, devoted his own career to remaking the Rockefeller family image as benevolent and public-minded. This strategy was generally adopted by the descendants of all the robber baron families, and my surmise is that they saw this as a means of temporizing with the threat of world proletarian revolution -- give them a little, make it seem like a lot, and defer the worker soviets for a few more years.

This strategy was then modified by the great social theorist Charles Manson, who envisioned an apocalyptic race war. In effect, this gave the rentier descendants of the robber barons a whole new worry -- it wouldn't be just the proletariat, but the inner-city lumpenproles who'd rise up against them, which created a whole new set of interests to be paid off and temporized with.

This was the basis of the race grifts of the 1960s and 70s, which resulted in vast sums of public money being sent to inner-city programs with either no result or unintended consequences. In fact, much of this multitrillion-dollar transfer was simply passed through to Latin American drug cartels. The Black Lives Matter movement was little more than a last-ditch attempt to blackmail the public apparatus into maintaining this charade for a few more years.

I've run into a puzzle over the term "Fabian socialism", which is conventionally defined as "aiming at the gradual rather than revolutionary achievement of socialism". But why would the likes of George Bernard Shaw and the Webbs pattern their strategy after Fabius?

Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus (died 203 bce) was a Roman military commander and statesman whose cautious delaying tactics (whence the nickname “Cunctator,” meaning “delayer,” which was not his official cognomen) during the early stages of the Second Punic War (218–201 bce) gave Rome time to recover its strength. When Rome resumed the offensive against the invading Carthaginian army of Hannibal, Fabius waged a war of slow attrition, avoiding direct engagement whenever possible.

Wait a moment. A strategy of delay and attrition is a defensive strategy, not offensive. But Shaw and the Webbs were, at least ostensibly, promotimg an offensive strategy for implementing socialism. I think this gets things backward. The Victorian bourgeoisie were hardly revolutionaries, at least in a socio-political sense (what they did privately was their own business, and they sure did do it). If anything, we can characterize the strategy of the US post-Civil War industrialists and rentiers as gradually giving in to what they perceived as proletarian demands as a way to temporize while preserving their privilege.

I think this is a more accurate understanding of the "Fabian socialist" project -- it's primarily a way to maintain a privileged class while appearing to give in to potentially revolutionary demands without surrendering what's important. The problem with this model is that the concessions are made at the expense of the lower middle class, and indeed, one of the insights of current commentators like Mike Rowe is that this class is harder and harder to distingush from the proletariat.

Thus the Fabian model -- not the Fabian model of Shaw and the Webbs, but the Rockefeller-based model of gradual but unimportant concessions at the expense of the upper proletariat -- is collapsing, and a current, more avant-garde set of plutocrats including Trump, Musk, and Bezos has begun to see the need to rethink this social strategy.

The Return Of The Cheesy One

The Babylon Bee had a story a few days ago, Trump Campaign Raises Millions Overnight With New Donation Ask: 'How Much Would You Pay To Not Have To Listen To Kamala Talk The Next 4 Years?' I hope they would bundle that with an assurance that when Kamala leaves the public eye, she'll take Dougie with her.

Earlier this month, he was minimizing the allegation that he'd slapped a date in the valet line at the Cannes film festival:

Second gentleman Doug Emhoff dismissed scrutiny of his personal life during an interview on Friday, calling tabloid investigations into his past relationships and comments about Vice President Kamala Harris a “distraction.”

“We don’t have time to be pissed off, we don’t have time to focus on it,” Emhoff said in excerpts of an interview that will air in full Monday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “It’s all a distraction. It’s designed to try to get us off our game.”

Emhoff did not directly address allegations published by the Daily Mail earlier this month that he struck his then-girlfriend in public in 2012 — though the Harris campaign has denied the account in a statement to Semafor.

But it marked the first time he has acknowledged the effort by Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, to amplify unflattering stories about his and Harris’ respective past relationships.

“The stakes are too high, so all that other stuff you’re talking about bounces off,” Emhoff said, insisting he and Harris have not focused on the issue. “We’re not going to let it distract us.”

The New York Post added,

The second gentleman has never commented to the Daily Mail about the multi-sourced report — but an Emhoff spokesperson later called the slapping story “untrue” in a statement to Semafor.

Until Friday, MSNBC had not mentioned the alleged incident, even in passing. The alleged slap also hasn’t been covered by CBS News, ABC News, Time, Politico, the Washington Post, the New York Times, NPR, or the Associated Press, among other major outlets.

However, the link above is to a story in Politico, so Dougie's denials are actually amplifying the story. More recently, he's been campaigning as a person of Jewishness, or something like that, as a Kamala surrogate:

Emhoff, in South FL, says Trump's recent Hitler comments concern him "as a Jewish person"

"We have to take this at face value b/c this is who Donald Trump is," Emhoff says. "He's already told us that he will blame the Jews if he loses."

+ touts Biden admin antisemitism strategy pic.twitter.com/CatrRy8f4T

— Gabby Deutch (@GSDeutch) October 23, 2024

However, according to the Forward, he first Mrs Emhoff wasn't Jewish, their children don't identify as Jews, and Dougie's own Jewish identity is apparently quite recent:

We knew it’d be a longshot to get [Emhoff's] increasingly in-demand — and also still enrolled in college — [daughter] Ella to join one of our Zoomversations with members of the Forward 50. But when the polite decline came, the reason threw me. “Ella is not Jewish,” wrote Joseph David Viola, the spokesman Ella’s Instagram refers queries to.

. . . Viola said in subsequent emails that Ella’s dad has been “celebrating Judaism for a few years now but out of an independent search,” and that Ella was living on her own in New York during this period. “It’s not something she grew up with,” he explained. “Ella truly has no qualms with the faith, but she does not want to speak on behalf of Judaism, as she does not celebrate herself.”

Nevertheless, according to CNN,

Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff on Friday will become the first known second family to host a Passover Seder at the vice president’s residence, a White House official says, a continuation of their efforts to celebrate Emhoff’s Jewish faith.

Harris told Israeli President Isaac Herzog during their phone call Thursday that she would hold a Seder in person at the Naval Observatory, according to a White House official.

But the distractions nevertheless continue. As of this morning,

Doug Emhoff's ex-girlfriend has spoken exclusively to DailyMail.com claiming that he slapped her in the face so hard she spun around at a 2012 celebrity event in France.

The woman, a successful New York attorney, is remaining anonymous, but decided to speak out after Emhoff, Kamala Harris's husband, denied the claims through a spokesman.

Emhoff's accuser, who DailyMail.com is naming only as 'Jane', initially declined to comment on the record. But Emhoff's denial, and his alleged hypocrisy by claiming to be a feminist in media interviews, finally became too much for her.

'What's frightening for a woman that's been on the other end of it, is watching this completely fabricated persona being portrayed,' Jane said.

'He's being held out to be the antithesis of who he actually is. And that is utterly shocking.'

And now he's an observant Jew who's gonna stand up to the anti-Semite Trump. Everything about this guy is phony.

The Puppeteers Abandon Kamala

There are a couple of bellwether items in this morning's news. Most intriguing: Los Angeles Times editorials editor quits when owner won’t endorse Harris:

Los Angeles Times Editorials Editor Mariel Garza quit on Wednesday, weeks after the paper’s owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, announced it would not endorse any candidate this cycle.

With Election Day two weeks away, Garza took issue with her employer shifting away from the tradition of endorsing presidential candidates. The paper has backed the Democratic candidate since 2008. The Los Angeles Times is the biggest newspaper in Vice President Kamala Harris’s home state of California and endorsed Harris when she ran for the Senate in 2016 and for the office of attorney general before that.

On one hand, this is not your grandfather's LA Times:

The news shook Southern California like an earthquake: Los Angeles Times, family owned for 118 years, was being sold to Chicago-based Tribune Co. . . . On March 11, there were three great American newspaper families: the Sulzbergers of the New York Times, the Grahams of the Washington Post and the Chandlers of Los Angeles's Times Mirror Co. A day later, there were two.

. . . The family patriarch, Gen. Harrison Otis, bought the newspaper in 1886. In the succeeding years, he and his son-in-law, Harry Chandler, bought most of Southern California -- at least the parts worth having. At the turn of the century, it was an Otis-Chandler syndicate that quietly purchased tens of thousands of acres of parched farmland in the San Fernando Valley, knowing that the fix was in to steal water rights from Owens Valley farmers 200 miles to the north.

As the Chandlers and their newspaper gained influence, every up-and-coming politician in the Southland made sure to kiss their ring. Richard Nixon owed his career to favorable notices in the Times. Harry's son, Norman, and his activist wife, Dorothy, transformed Los Angeles into a cultural mecca, creating the Los Angeles Music Center and luring world-class talent to play there. "No Easterner can understand what it has meant in California to be a Chandler," David Halberstam wrote in a famous run-on sentence from his media history, The Powers That Be, "for no single family dominates any major region of the country as the Chandlers have dominated California, it would take in the East a combination of the Rockefellers and the Sulzbergers to match their power and influence."

However, the LA Times was sold again in 2018:

The Los Angeles Times, the largest newspaper in California, is being sold by the news company Tronc to the pharmaceutical billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, The Washington Post reported.

. . . Soon-Shiong, who is 63, would also acquire The San Diego Union-Tribune in the deal, according to the Post.

Soon-Shiong, who was born in South Africa to parents of Chinese descent, is best known for his high-profile crusade to fight cancer by matching genetic drugs to particular tumors through a high-powered database. But he has recently expanded his assets to include management over seven hospitals, two public companies, and a stake of the Los Angeles Lakers, among other holdings.

Soon-Shiong has also been moving in political circles, having worked on a blue-ribbon panel for former Vice President Joe Biden’s “Cancer Moonshot.” After the election of President Donald Trump, Soon-Shiong was reportedly considered for multiple administration roles, including the head of the National Institutes of Health.

Not covered in either ownership story linked above is the political move of the Chandler family from Nixon Republican under Norman Chandler (1899-1973) to leftist Democrat under his widow, Dorothy (1901-1997). This reflected the general political realignment of the post-Civil War industrial family fortunes over the same period. Through their political donations, as well as their control of corporate media, philanthropy, and univeristy endowments, they reflected and drove the overall cultural move to the left.

In this, politicians, especially leftist Democrats and moderate Republicans, served largely as their puppets, and this formula succeeded until the advent of Trump on one hand and the failure of Biden as a puppet on the other. A major outcome of Trump's success as a politician has been to realign a new generation of influential wealth, such as Elon Musk, away from the traditional post-Civil War industrialist agenda. It should be no surprise that many members of the new elite, like Musk and Soon-Shiong, don't originally come from the US themselves.

If nothing else, Soon-Shiong isn't just limning the political postures of the Sulzbergers or the Grahams, and we can only surmise that the puppet politicians that were routinely controlled by the traditional media families no longer meet his own needs.

But another phenomenon late in this year's presidential campaign has been the effective abandonment of Harris by other corporate media outlets. This includes Fox, whose interview of Harris by Bret Baier had the effect the Murdochs had previously hoped to gain by having Megyn Kelly interview Trump in 2020 -- namely, effectiverly ending his campaign -- and now CNN: Anderson Cooper Gives Kamala Harris a Bruising CNN Town Hall:

Cooper asked Harris why she pledged to reintroduce the bipartisan border bill if she won in November, considering her past opposition to a border wall. The Democratic nominee replied, "I'm not afraid of good ideas where they occur."

The CNN host then said, "So you don't think it's stupid anymore?" Harris, referring to Trump, replied, "I think what he did and how he did it did not make much sense because he actually didn't do much of anything."

The Trump War Room, an account affiliated with Trump's presidential campaign, posted a clip of the exchange on X, formerly Twitter, where it received more than 250,000 views.

The account also posted another clip from the town hall, which has been viewed more than 220,000 times. In the video, Cooper asked Harris about "record border crossings" in 2022 and 2023 before President Joe Biden issued an executive order in June 2024 that placed limits on the number of asylum-seekers allowed across the U.S.-Mexico border.

The host questioned why the administration didn't issue such an order in previous years. Harris replied, "Because we were working with Congress and hoping that actually we could have a long-term fix to the problem instead of a short-term fix."

Kamla's problem is that even the friendliest media interviews, like the one on The View, can't make her look good. Instead, like Joe Biden, she's turning into a defective puppet, something the puppeteers just can't use, and they've discarded her.

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.