JV Last at the Bulwark: My impression from the convention is that Republicans, from Trump on down, are absolutely certain he’s going to win. […] What I saw at this convention wasn’t confidence. It was overconfidence. It was complacency. I saw a party and a candidate who expect a coronation, not a campaign. Who believe that the general election will play out exactly as the primaries did. What I saw was a tired, meandering old man playing the hits. Still trotting out Lee Greenwood and Franklin Graham. He says this is an opportunity. He’s sure that Biden will step aside and that “Donald Trump will not run against a zombie campaign the rest of the way. He will be challenged by someone young, scrappy, and hungry.” I don’t know about that. It seems likely today but who knows? This drama seems to be continuing and the media can speak of nothing else. Last says, ” the Trump we saw last night can be beaten. And the fact that Republicans don’t realize this only adds to his vulnerability.” I think that’s right. If the Democrats can get it together.
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Dan Pfeiffer has some thoughts about how they plan to attack Harris if she does become the nominee: Despite their hatred of the “Crooked Media” (and Crooked Media), the Republicans follow the news. They know what is happening on our side. They built their entire campaign around beating Joe Biden — using concerns about his age as a proxy to frame the race as strong vs. weak. Thanks to Biden’s debate performance, that strategy worked well. As we stand today, Trump is a heavy favorite to return to the White House. The campaign wasn’t set up to beat Kamala Harris or someone else, so Trump supporters are begging Biden to stay in the race. As the convention continues, more and more Republicans are trying to shoehorn Kamala Harris into their speeches. Here’s JD Vance on Wednesday night: Other speakers previewed what I expect to be the top two attacks if Harris becomes the nominee. One, she was in charge of the border and therefore responsible for the chaos that is so prominent in Republican rhetoric.
AOC lays out the stakes In an hour-long live-stream, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) attempts to lay out the plusses and minuses of Democrats swapping out their presidential candidate (Joe Biden) this late in the election season. The election isn’t in November, she reminds viewers, it’s in September when the first ballots go out. The end of September to early October. She’s not seeing Beltway influencers gaming out the consequences of swapping out a presidential candidate without closely examining their watches and their calendars. Making a radical decision like this based on July polling, she reminds viewers, is unwise. She’s won elections where polling showed her down by double digits. An open convention at this point is convention is “crazy.” People considering one are not gaming out how that would play out. I’ve said repeatedly here to those who say, “Joe needs to go,” get back to me with a candidate and a plan and we’ll talk. AOC is in some of the rooms where these discussions among leading Democrats take place. When she asks the “Joe needs to go” faction for their plan, she gets back blank stares.
I wish there were more reporters willing to speak this way.
Permalink to this post A version of this piece as it originally appeared in the Harvard Business Review on September 19, 2018 is accessible here. I used to be largely indifferent to claims about the use of private data for targeted advertising, even as I worried about privacy more generally. How much of an intrusion was it, […]
Permalink to this post. That was the question of a Stanford/UCLA symposium held in October, 2022. We were asked to write five-page papers to answer the question. Here is the collection. My answer is below: “Should Donald Trump be returned to social media?” No, he should not. To be sure, it’s bizarre that the President […]
Permalink to this post AI is getting better at performing mass categorization of photos and text. A developer can scrape a bunch of photos from, say, Facebook — either directly, likely violating the terms of service, or through offering an app by which people consent to the access — and then use a well-trained categorizer […]
Permalink to this post I’ve been very lucky over the years to work closely with some extraordinary people on various research and other public-interest-minded projects through BKC. The title has been variously “research assistant,” “associate,” or “coordinator,” with lots of thinking through and writing about pressing issues with a sharp eye and a nuanced pen, […]
Permalink to this post This essay was originally published in November of 2017 as part of a series commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Zeran v. AOL case. Twenty years after it was first litigated in earnest, the U.S. Communications Decency Act’s Section 230 remains both obscure and vital. Section 230 nearly entirely eliminated the liability […]
Stuart Stevens knows Ohio. He worked for John Kasich, Rob Portman and focused on the state for George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. This piece in the Atlantic about what’s happened to the state since then is a fascinating look at the fascist takeover of the GOP: What happened to the Ohio GOP? For generations, it was the epitome of a sane, high-functioning party with a boringly predictable pro-business sentiment that seemed to perfectly fit the state. Today, it has been remade in the image of native son J. D. Vance, the first vice-presidential candidate to sanction coup-plotting against the U.S. government. In a speech to the Republican National Convention tonight that was virtually devoid of policy, he railed against corrupt elites and pledged his fealty to the man he once compared to heroin, suggesting that the American experiment depended on former President Donald Trump’s election. But don’t make the mistake of thinking this transformation was the result of a hostile takeover; that implies there was a fight. The truth is that the old guard surrendered to forces contrary to what it had espoused as lifelong values.