So when is the media going to turn on Harris? I don’t know but I’d guess it’s going to happen pretty soon. It’s inevitable for all the reasons Brian Beutler spelled out in his excellent piece today in Off Message: As happily as it ended for liberals, the early weeks of July were their darkest since November 2016, illuminating only how various elites will respond if Donald Trump wins the election. What we saw was disturbing: When it appeared that Trump would win the election all but unopposed, we did not see officeholders take steps to batten down the hatches of the political system, or media figures apply extra scrutiny to the presumptive president. (In 2016, media elites explained away their insipid obsession with Hillary Clinton’s emails by citing her poll numbers—she would likely be president, after all, and thus merited a thorough scrubbing.) Instead, we witnessed what the scholar Timothy Snyder has famously described as “obeying in advance.” Some of these gestures were truly ominous.
Uncategorized
Just like Trump’s Truth Social Back when Trump first picked JD Vance, I wrote that the did it at the behest of Tucker Carlson and his sons Uday and Qusay which seems to have been the case. He was also taken with Vance’s zealous defenses of him on Fox News and the fact that he’s got a truly nasty approach to politics which is right up his alley. But I think he was also discombobulated by the assassination attempt which frightened him far more than anyone’s let on. The decision has been a total disaster. The unmarried cat ladies insult has been revealed to have been a standard line from him for years as well as dozens of other bizarre statements. His political shape-shifting from Trump hater to ult worshiper was so precipitous he seems to have had some kind of interplanetary personality transplant. And then there is the “couch” thing which is one of the most hilarious memes to ever hit the political internet. No politician can recover from that. Trump is having to try to clean up after his VP which is not good, especially since nobody does clean-up worse than he does.
David Graham at The Atlantic looks at the way Harris and Trump are portraying themselves in the race and I think his analysis is right. Harris says she’s the underdog and she is. The Democrats have been trailing slightly all year and the media has, until now, had Trump as the clear front-runner (even though the polls haven’t really shown that clearly at all.) Trump, meanwhile, is still a juvenile whiner, which his pathetic cult followers can’t seem to get enough of: Biden and other Democrats argue that he has been an underrated president, but that hardly matters if most voters don’t agree. By painting herself as an insurgent, Harris can try to shake off the despair and ennui that have plagued much of the party in recent months. Doesn’t everyone love an underdog? Harris’s messaging tells Democrats that they shall, or at least can, overcome. That is appealing to American progressives, who see themselves as perpetually fighting to change the nation for the better. Trump’s approach comes from the opposite direction: a sense among him and his supporters that they used to control the country and no longer do.
It can be wildly creative
Trump spent the 2016 campaign saying that Hillary Clinton didn’t have the “strength and the stamina” to be president, which was his thinly veiled way of saying that a woman can’t do the job. He’s doing the same thing to Harris: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump suggested thatVice President Harris wouldn’t be able to stand up to world leaders because of her appearance, adding that he didn’t want to spell it out but viewers would know what he meant. “She’ll be like a play toy,” Trump — who has a history of using sexist attacks and stereotypes in campaigns against women — said in a Fox News interview with Laura Ingraham, a portion of which aired on Tuesday night. “They look at her and they say, ‘We can’t believe we got so lucky.’ They’re going to walk all over her.” Trump then turned to look directly at the camera and added: “And I don’t want to say as to why.
I hadn’t heard of Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, before this past weekend. But like many people, I’ve been struck by the pivot he’s signaled in how the Democrats, and the left more generally, should talk about Trump. Asked by Jake Tapper why he insists on calling Trump “weird” rather than an “existential threat to democracy,” which is how most Democrats and progressives have been describing Trump since 2016, Walz said: It gives him [Trump] way too much power. Listen to the guy. He’s talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks, whatever crazy thing pops into his mind. And I thought we just give him way too much credit. When you just ratchet down some of the scariness […]
Meanwhile, the youts are involved too:
“It’s an incel platform, dude” MAGA Republicans: Totally not weird. If you’ve watched Democrats flounder for years to find messaging that actually catches on, that actually smacks down Republicans’ vapid posturing over family and patriotism, you’re not alone. Remember Rep. Steny Hoyer’s (D-Md.) stillborn effort to sell how you can make it in America if we “make it in America”? I winced. Well, with a new generation comes more facile minds, quicker wits, and sharper tongues. Consider if you will, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his response to Sen. J.D. Vance’s suggestion that Americans without children have “no physical commitment to the future of this country.” Buttigieg responds, “When I was deployed to Afghanistan, I didn’t have kids back then. But I will tell you, especially when there was a rocket attack going on, my commitment to this country felt pretty, pretty physical.” And the crowd goes wild. Republicans’ economic populism is just posturing, Buttigieg argues. It’s more body language than policy. It’s an act.
Good luck with that Donnie… The problem isn’t Fox. It’s you and your people, all of whom sound like batshit loons.
Especially the people who know him best This guy is a smarmy loser and nobody can’ stand him: On the heels of a CNN analysis that showed Vance was the least-liked non-incumbent vice-presidential nominee in at least 44 years, the network also revealed that the GOP lawmaker has a double-digit unfavorable rating with voters across the Midwest. According to CNN, Vance had a 28% favorable rating and a 44% unfavorable rating — or a minus 16-point favorability rating — among voters surveyed in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin in July. For Republicans banking on Vance to help boost the party across the Midwest, his standing is far below where he’ll need to be in order to win over swing voters in key states like Michigan and Wisconsin. CNN data reporter Harry Enten during an appearance last week also pointed to data showing that Vance had a minus 5-point favorability rating after the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. “The people who know him best, the region that knows him best, they like him even less than America likes him,” he told the network’s Erin Burnett.