I'm old enough to remember when there was, oh damn what was it, something about some gunman? Some picture of Trump with his fist raised? I know I'm getting older, but I think something like that happened.
"I think the Biden ...was right to perceive that dissent from the left hurt Clinton. Progressives need to decide if they want to win."
I think Progressives are likely to do the right thing this time, because the expectations are different.
In 2016 many people -- not only progressives -- thought that Hillary's election was assured. Trump was treated as a joke, and his campaign had serious problems at every level. Given those expectations, leftists thought that the election came down to a choice between neoliberal Hillary and yasqueen Hillary, and they pushed for the second one.
No one treats the prospect of Trump's election as a joke this time. No one thinks that the choice is between a moderate Kamala and a maximalist Kamala. People have a clearer sense of the danger, both its magnitude and its likelihood.
There will still be some stupid leftists saying stupid things here and there. But I think most progressives will show more discipline. Fear can be salutary that way.
I think it's a real worry that the left successfully pushes Kamala to adopt several hard-line policy issues. Will you declare a climate emergency, will you go further on debt cancellation, etc. Definitely agree that she's a better option than Biden and I'm in the bag for no matter what, but she's a California Democrat and her instincts could make her more predisposed to accepting logic like, "Adopt these positions to help juice young progressive turnout!"
Fingers crossed her and her team make the right moves. Our country depends on it!
The good news is that with the lack of a true primary, there's just less opportunities for the left to do this. Ideally we skip the "pander to the left during the primary" section of the election and skip right to the "pivot to the middle."
As a Californian who has watched her stumble over many years, the problem is that her "instincts" on catering to leftists come from her sister Maya Harris, who constantly pours terrible advice into her ear. Has Kamala learned to ignore her sister over the last 4 years? I sure hope so.
Isn't that the sister married to the chief legal officer of Uber? A company that did a valuable service in breaking up the stagnant old taxi medallion system by selling its ride dispatching services at a loss for a long time to undercut the competition and gain market share. But that now seems to be acting more like a company in stage 2 of the monopoly game, using the dominant position it gained by selling at a loss to jack up prices on drivers who buy its dispatching services.
I'm not sure about that, I just remember it was Maya Harris who convinced Kamala to fire her excellent chief of staff in 2020 and that her big play was to attack Joe Biden over forced bussing from the 70s. Kamala can't win if she doesn't lean on "Copmala," and her sister is going to hate that.
How is Uber able to do that? Don’t people still use Lyft? I certainly do. (And they’re the ones who even invented the ordinary-person-with-a-car model! Uber started as licensed black car drivers only until Lyft forced them to pivot.)
They have a 70%+ market share so that's a lot of power, but there's also reporting saying similar about Lyft. Of course, this info is only as good as the reporting, but assuming it's not totally inaccurate they are both taking a bigger share from drivers.
The VC gravy train of maying $2 to make $1 is over, they need to profit. It isn't clear to me they'll jack things up to monopoly profit level prices - but the clearing price could easily be 2x current prices. On the other hand taxis have been making a comeback and people are still price sensitive and can take alternatives, so while they can extra higher premium, there is a price where it would be much too high and they start losing volume on the margin. I think we'll see them trying to hit that point of maximization.
That makes sense. A duopoly can do this too. Especially when both were just taking a loss for years trying to force the other out, and now have to deal with a non-zero interest rate world, and realize that self-driving isn’t going to come quickly and save them.
It's extraordinary: this woman was intensely, bitterly opposed to the effort to ease Joe Biden out (and very rude to Yglesias!), like, 24 hours ago. Now you'd be forgiven for thinking she's got "Kamala for the People" tattooed, uh, somewhere. And to be clear, it's a good sign! Fundraising is apparently off the hook, too.
That's pretty much exactly what I'd expect from a loyal Democrat who doesn't really have insider info. It's not that extraordinary - if you want to beat Trump first and foremost, you have to strongly support the nominee. When it looked like that would be Biden, you support Biden. The instant it's not Biden, you support the new nominee.
Oh, sure, I'd expect nearly all the Democratic left to come around. I'm just impressed by the turn-on-a-dime rapidity of it all, and the seemingly effortless ability to stifle emotion. There's no way all her white hot, anti "new ticket" Tweets were manufactured outrage. She was mad as hell.
On a similar note, I happened to notice George Takei of Star Trek fame—and in recent years a very prominent lefty activist—deleted ten days of similarly themed tweets, and is now all in with Kamala. And again, this is a very good sign if one's desire is to see the end of Donald Trump's political career.
The belief among a lot of pro-Biden progressive people is many of the people pushing Biden off the ticket, also wanted Harris off the ticket in a total coup of the ticket 80 million people voted for. Now that Kamala is the likely nominee, they're ready to go.
Huh? I thought I recalled Matt writing that Harris was acceptable as an alternative to an 81 year old in no condition to campaign? Maybe not maximum enthusiasm, but not “total coup” either.
I think it’s both - Matt sees a Harris ticket as second-best to a popular-governor ticket, and would take the latter if he could get it. His earlier article was to convince people that Harris was still a better choice than Biden, such that fear of her doing badly wasn’t a good enough reason for Biden to stay in the race.
Based on a group chat I’m in that went full Biden dead-ender, this was indeed what they are thought. I watched it happen in real time. Every link they sent was to Threads. Seems like that is a super left wing bubble.
But not Matt since he, you know, published a long piece making the argument that we would be better with Kamala.
The pro-Biden coalition at least for a bit was AOC, Bernie, and the Clinton's vs. Pelosi, the Pod Save America types, Ezra Klein, centrist donors, but also all the leftist streamers as well. Hasan, whose by far the most prominent left-wing streamer on Twitch got frustrated and turned off AOC's explanation via IG Live why she was with Biden live on stream.
Online at least, it seemed more generational than ideological.
Among the 20/30-somethings on Twitter who are left-wing but still pro-Democratic, they've been on the dump Biden train for a while, and obviously TikTok has been anti-Biden for a bit, while places like Threads which a bit older. On a still somewhat prominent blog comment section I comment on that's full of a lot of older left-wing Democrat's, it was almost all they're trying to coup Joe, even as some of the people who posted on the blog were for him standing down.
Say Joe should stand down was smart, saying we needed an open convention or Joe Manchin still when it was obvious nobody wanted to run against Kamala was kinda silly.
There was a vocal contingent of accounts (including NHJ) trying to make the argument against Biden stepping down by indicating that was somehow racist against Black primary voters. If their actual goal was to insure Harris got the nomination by cutting off the possibility of an open convention, maybe that was some impressive nine dimensional chess. More likely stopped clocks, etc.
I’ve been amused by how quickly everyone on the left seems to have pivoted to having very positive feelings toward the criminal justice system. “Did you hear she used to be a prosecutor?!”
I mean, as long as Kamala's campaign is basically Biden's policies without the old guy, the wider Left will be on-board. If she tries to make DLC 2: Electric Boog-A-Loo, a lot of that will dissipate, but the good news is, I've seen zero evidence of that, which is y'know, why Matt is tweeting about Joe Manchin being a not bad idea.
Joe Manchin is not a good idea, either. While it’s only the left that hates him with a white-hot passion, there’s no evidence that he sets moderates’ hearts ablaze or really gets any reaction at all from “normies.” Annoying leftists is not disqualifying, but it’s not enough either.
You can donate 40 bucks for the Democratic Season Pass, get a unique Kamala skin, a new dance, and access to stream, but not vote in, the brokered convention live!
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[NOTE: comments will be differently abled. The Democratic party regrets the ableist language in our previous post. It was extremely insensitive and the Party will continue to work with and support marginalized communities.]
I think it's less important what the progressives demand than how Kamala responds. I recommend a little Southern cooking here, give them that classic Southern expression, "oh bless your heart, honey" which translates into New Yorkese as "get the f**k outta heah."
I'd add that a lot of progressives thought 2020 would be easy, too. That was a reason so many Dems jumped in and why multiple top-tier Dems endorsed M4A.
More than 2016, which felt flukey, 2020 scared Dems into realizing that Trump/MAGA had a 46% floor and they couldn't just wing it. (The post-election fury at the "defund the police" slogans was part of this - they'd just won but they blamed social justice activists, who they had mostly supported, for shaving off points/seats.)
Also, not as bad but more likely to occur: What will hurt Harris on net is twitter leftists constantly talking about her being the first woman /AfroIndian president, which will feed into the "DEI Candidate" narrative.
I'm saying the damage of twitter leftist bubbles is that journalists are seeped in them and treat them as a great representation of what people in general want to read, so if Twitter talks a lot about it today, you can bet that in a week or two, NYT, WaPo, etc will be talking about it.
And the White House is the mother of all aging accelerants. The photos of Abraham Lincoln 1860 vs. 1865 are harrowing—and still haunting after all these years.
My wife made this point that I don't think sunk in enough in Democratic party circles as far as why Biden's age was a real issue; it's the universal part of life that literally everyone can relate to. Every single person has a grandparent, parent, aunt/uncle family friend who they witnessed decline in old age. They know the signs, they know that things can deteriorate faster than you think and know that even if you don't know the actual medical issue wrong (dementia vs Alzheimer's vs something else) they can tell grandpa/uncle Joe isn't the same person he was just a year ago. So every swing voter can say "don't tell me this isn't an issue, I watched my grandad go from easily being able to play with his grandkids to having difficulty moving from the kitchen to the living room in no time".
So now of course I expect wall to wall coverage in the Times/CNN/NBC News/WaPo about how Trump is too old and doesn't have the stamina for a campaign or to be President (see him falling asleep during his trial and the convention).
This is exactly right, Colin. We've all dealt with that with parents or dread it happening to ourselves and it was deeply uncomfortable to watch the nation's leader go through that.
Compared to that, Trump's conviction on business and election fraud charges is simply too abstract and too divorced from our lives.
But you're totally wrong about how the media will pivot to Trump's age (yes, I know you're being ironic). They will now pivot to Harris's raw youth and lack of experience and maturity.
Gonna guess it's going to be highlighting her failed primary bid. Specifically, bring up all the cringe inducing aspects; stuff she said about intersectionality or some such and claim this this as is as "racist" as anything Trump said. Or some version of "Whether it's Kamala's laugh or Trump sacking the Capitol Building, both sides have a problem with appealing to moderate voters who want normalcy" or something.
I'm being pretty cynical here, but I just listened to Greg Sargeant's interview with Rick Wilson. I'll state up front that I think Wilson and Lincoln Project is a bit grift(ish). Nonetheless, hearing him talk about how it was literally his job to "work the refs" so news was more favorable to GOP than it otherwise would be and also listening to him not that there are still reporters trying to claim Trump has a new "tone" after the failed assassination attempt even now 9 years later despite ample evidence to the contrary just wanted to make me bang my head against the wall and yes is bringing out this cynicism in me.
Actually no. To clarify, Wilson was saying how pre 2015 one of his roles was to "work the refs" in MSM. And how successful he was doing so.
He was trying to make the point that a lot of media coverage soft peddling Trump's authoritarian tendencies, or downplaying the dangers of a second term and trying to claim Trump's softening his town is all downstream from efforts by operatives like himself to weaponize MSM "both sides" framing so as to make GOP candidates seem more palatable than the really are.
Again, I find Wilson to be a bit grift(ish). Very convenient that he's putting forth an argument that lefty "resistance" people like myself are primed to want to hear. But also don't think he's completely lying about this either if that makes any sense.
Is he grift(ish)? I suspect that abandoning the side you've worked with for decades for an uncertain future in between them and their opponents is not the safest career move. It seems to be working out well for him (along with the Bulwark folks) but that was never a sure thing.
Very well said. I aged more in the first two years of parenthood than in the preceding 10. My loved ones aged more between 80 and 82 than 70 and 72. Onwards, at different paces.
Oh great. I bet you're the type of person who tells people at parties that it so happens that the steering wheel and the brake are also accelerators. :-)
SwainPDX said he didn't know what monotonic meant. I figured it would be good to give the most accurate information. If somebody wanted to set me off at a party they should say that steel is iron with carbon in it.
Yeah, I suspect Matt was grasping at something and realized he had to meet a deadline to make sure this post was up on time because bitcoin would decidedly NOT be the topic I would pivot to in order to differentiate from Biden.
So much of the discourse last 2 years is about how much of polling and views on candidates is based "vibes" and I can't think of something with more hateable "vibes" than crypto/bitcoin. My twitter feed is basically half crypto spam at this point. And yes I know most people aren't on Twitter. But most voters do have pretty negative "vibes" about Wall Street and VC bros. Pivoting to being pro crypto would be the equivalent message "hey swing voters in PA, you know the "bro iest bros who ever broed" that you hate so much and post photos of Instagram on their dad's yacht? And also the "Section guy" (hat tip Josh Barro) that you found so hateable in school. We think it's a great idea if we empowered these people more and made sure they made another 20 billion dollars. Vote for me!"
I have a WhatsApp account to talk to friends and relatives in other countries. Most of the time when I get a message there it’s actually a crypto scammer adding me to a mega group.
When I was in college, I used to instant message with friends using a mixture of AOL instant messenger, ICQ, and Yahoo messenger, and I ended up installing a program on my computer (Trillian) that could do all three. Then for a few years I didn’t do instant messaging of any sort, until I started doing SMS somewhat late. It sounds like there’s back to a proliferation of messaging apps. I don’t really understand what combination of social dynamics and introduction of new features leads to proliferation and consolidation of this sort.
Matt has written negatively about crypto at times, but I haven't really seem him write much that was pro govt regulations/bans on crypto, I assume because it's difficult to make those kinds of arguments from a specifically neoliberal perspective.
For orthodox neoliberals, if a bunch of people want to engage in purely voluntary market transactions to buy computers and electricity to perform expensive mathematical calculations that serve no objective real-world purpose, that’s their business.
Sure, from a bird’s-eye societal planner point of view, we could say they’re wasting electricity and other real resources to no actual gain, but using that point of view is uncomfortably close to government picking winners and losers, command economy, etc.
Could that be more about either reducing campaign contributions to Trump and/or getting more tech money for herself? It might not be politically meaningful but my sense is that a lot of crypto money is going to Trump now and maybe its more economic?
I suspect the bitcoin thing is to get Silicon Valley to stop going full Trump.
It would also not hurt for Kamala to come out and say something like "A tax on unearned capital gains is probably the stupidest idea I have heard in decades, and I would veto any such bill."
Overtime is already baked in by employers and workers: either they will pay and you want to work, or not. I don't think there will be large marginal effects on hours worked at all, and if there are, that simply means that workers want the money, and who are you to say they shouldn't have the chance to earn it? It's one of the only ways for hourly workers to increase their take home in a meaningful way, and if the marginal productive value isn't already there for an employer to offer overtime in the first place, I don't see a situation where suddenly there's pressure to work extra hours.
I say all this as a guy who has at least 10 hours of OT (plus unlimited optional OT beyond that) baked into my schedule 9 months a year.
I would contrast that with tipping where the employer clearly has an incentive to reduce payroll in favor of tips because it's free money.
"...who are you to say they shouldn't have the chance to earn it?"
Why mandate premium overtime pay in the first place? Why get in the way of workers and employers freely negotiating whatever hours/compensation they want?
Because, for good reasons, we prefer employers having two 40hr/wk workers rather than one 80hr/wk worker. We’ve put a thumb on the scale to push them to opt for more workers working fewer hours. I don’t think it makes sense to then turn around and use the tax code to incentivize overtime work.
But... We already incentivize overtime work by offering a higher wage to the worker. Workers either refuse OT or they want it badly, there's not much in between, and employers generally avoid it for all kinds of reasons. I don't think my proposal shifts that dynamic except that the worker gets more money for work they are likely already doing.
The higher wage to the worker does the work, not the tax burden on the worker. You relieve the tax burden on the worker without relieving the wage burden on the employer.
First, mandating premium pay for overtime does not incentivize the use of overtime, it disincentivizes it. As an extreme example, suppose we mandated that hours worked over 40/wk be paid at 10x normal compensation. Well, at that point it should be obvious that no employer would ever agree to have a worker work more than 40 hours, right?
And I do believe that if you allow compensation through two channels, and one channel is taxed and the other is not, you should expect to see more compensation moved to the untaxed channel, by hook or by crook.
OT currently pays 1.5x. If you eliminate the tax it now pays 1.7x? (ish?)
You yourself have "unlimited optional OT" - mightn't you work more if you're earning 1.7x instead of 1.5x at no additional cost to your employer(beyond the normal OT stuff)?
How would that not incentivize you, the worker to work more hours?
"Shouldn't have the chance to earn it" - Total productivity (hours worked * productivity) can actually go DOWN with enough OT (not just marginal productivity, but TOTAL). I'd rather not encourage it. The fact that the employer has to pay 1.5x helps discourage it somewhat, but if we're just giving "free" money to the employee?
(I worked one job with heavy OT and I did in fact make a lot of money - I got a net pay cut when I switched to a non-OT position even though the hourly for the first 40 was much better, I definitely was ok throwing extra hours for more pay at that time in my life)
Well, obviously if I earn more per hour I can work less hours and make the same money, and this effect is stronger if people are already working OT. If someone is comfortable at 40, do you think a slight bump is enough to push them into working an unhealthy amount?
And OT is usually taxed at a higher withholding rate because to the accountants it appears to push your earnings towards the next bracket. I think the math is more like an extra .25 to .3, but I'm open to being wrong about that.
If total productivity goes down, then that seems like a natural limiter on the deleterious effects you are worried about?
Except people always seem unaware that total productivity goes down, despite the numerous studies on it.
Everyone agrees marginal productivity drops(that's obvious) but in my own industry (video games), crunch (unpaid OT!, since we made enough/full-time to be 'exempt') is always reported/framed in terms of "they did this terrible thing to employees in order to get the game out on time" but never "they did this terrible thing to employees and it went on long enough that the game was actually later/worse than it would have been"
I've seen so much of that that I'm _very_ averse to anything which encourages OT.
Some game companies have policies that explicitly limit the amount of "comp time" you'll get for working OT and I advise people to think of it as "do not work more than this - that's their way of telling you not to do more than that" (without literally forcing you to go home if an extra hour tonight really _will_ be worth it because you're fixing a key bottleneck for everyone else when they start work in the morning)
The whole “the prosecutor versus the felon” framing that we’ve been hearing a lot over the past few weeks makes me think that we’re going to get at least some “Kamala Harris is a Cop” (complimentary)-type messaging in this campaign, which makes me somewhat optimistic.
The 2 biggest things I feel are missing/wrong in that add as a general election
1) Needs updating for his additional crimes (convicted felon!)
2) "in every possible way the anti-trump" is great in a Democratic primary, but in the general the swing voters have some things they _do_like about Trump, so try not to make them think of those things.
She's is at a table, seemingly running a meeting, in a mask. She opens by saying "I am Kamala Harris, my pronouns are she and her, and I am a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit." Several replies point out that she's talking to a group of blind people, which reduces it's awkward weirdness by .0021%.
It reduces the awkward weirdness by 100%. It’s extremely weird to describe your location and appearance to someone that’s not blind. It’s not weird at all to do that for blind people.
This is like attacking her for doing weird hand motions while she’s speaking to deaf people.
No, as I said to Sam, this is like attacking her for signing to a deaf person about the quality of her voice. "I am Kamala Harris, my pronouns are she and her, and I am a soprano."
When was the last time you listened to a reporter on the radio and said "I wish I knew what this reporter's pronouns were" or "I wish I knew what that person was wearing"?
I don't claim to understand why anyone would want it but this is a thing blind activists have asked people to do.
It's arguably tedious and weird for a general audience but when you're speaking to a group of disability activists including blind people I don't understand why anyone would find it objectionable.
Yeah, I think it's more tedious and weird than objectionable.
Part of what's going on in the video is that Harris is performing highly-legible acts of respect and deference in order to cultivate a political constituency. If it were a different group, she might bow, shake hands, or lavish praise on one of their heroes.
But it has a normative component too. It promotes the idea that people should defer to small groups of activists who purport to represent the population that shares the relevant identity characteristic, instead of engaging in the messy and sometimes difficult process of negotiating individually across boundaries and differences with one another. That's the part likely to put off swing voters: the implication that people should take etiquette lessons from passionate, partisan advocates, whose customs and demands seem reasonable at first glance, but unfamiliar, and don't always survive scrutiny.
Sometimes that's justified, but other times it turns out to be "Latinx". Briefly describing one's appearance before speaking is not obviously a net positive contribution to a meeting or presentation: I expect a lot of people would find it a useless distraction and I'm not convinced that majorities of blind people prefer it. I'm willing to listen, but I don't think Democratic politicians trying to make inroads with activists have an especially good track record with this sort of thing.
It seems categorically different to give these folks--some of whom likely used to see--a casual description of something basic like the color of an outfit vs a technical description of one's singing vocal range. Also, if people are really going to be persuaded by random clips of candidates saying weird shit, then no one is voting for Trump. The average voter will pay attention to ads, speeches, and debate performance, supplemented by their priors about the two parties. It's a toss-up.
The deaf community and the blind community on average have very different ways of understanding their disabilities. Most of the deaf community considers ALS a perfectly good communication tool and language. They wish it were more widely used so they could be more easily accomodated but they don't think that they are missing anything by not knowing someone's vocal range.
The blind community does not have that same posture and do like to be provided with all the information that a sighted person would have. That can include what the person is wearing or a description of any graphics being shown.
I work with many people with hearing and vision impairments. There is diversity of opinion in each as there is in any large group of individuals. But I am not aware of any deaf person who has been interested in knowing my vocal range. I have often been asked by someone with vision impairment to describe in detail what they are not seeing in a meeting.
I really wish that we as a society would stop vilifying folks communicating with others in the way that they wish to be communicated with. It is fine if it seems weird to someone else but it is just basic respect. What Kamala Harris is demostrating there is just a good cultural awareness and respect for what has been most consistently requested by folks who are blind.
I regret choosing that example, "I'm a tenor". I tried to think of something punchy, and I didn't think people would get so monomaniacally fixated on it that they'd miss the point. Substitute whatever you like: "I've got a Southern accent", "My voice is gravelly and rasps because I smoked for fifty years", whatever. The idea is that "I'm wearing a blue dress" isn't in even close to offering ALS "subtitles" in a setting like that. The only actual argument I've heard in favor of the practice is that it gives visually impaired participants something to hold on to or distinguish the speaker. Therefore, a deaf person might benefit in the same way from the speaker characterizing their voice.
Alternately, turn it around: the equivalent of an ALS interpreter would be to have someone providing running commentary. "Now she's frowning. She just threw her head back. She can't look the guy in the face." That would provide legitimate contextual information relevant to the proceedings (though admittedly, it would be overwhelming).
It sounds like your opinion is rooted in direct experience, and I have so many questions.
Of the people with visual impairments that you've interacted with, what percentage have expressed a preference for the specific practice of speakers briefly describing themselves?
Are you confident that the people you've interacted with are representative of the broader population (of people with visual impairments)?
What overall proportion of that population appreciate the practice, would you estimate?
Do you think there's a share of the population that's actually annoyed by the practice? What about cranky ADHD blind lady, who doesn't want a bunch of extraneous information? What about the participants that just want the meeting to be over as soon as possible so they can get back to work?
I outlined my deeper objections elsewhere in the thread (https://www.slowboring.com/p/17-thoughts-on-the-transformation/comment/62951168), and I'll try to summarize them here. Pre-emptive, presumptive, one-size-fits-all practices like this that run roughshod over individuals are usually irritating at two levels. First, at the gut level: opportunistic politicians frequently adopt synthetic rituals because activists demand them, and those rituals are often selected for their awkwardness and difference, because a politician willing to pay that cost is more valuable that one willing to do something self-evidently reasonable. Second, at a philosophical level. It conceives of the social world as a universe in which you are obliged to pay attention to self-appointed representatives of every demographic group, in order to keep up on the etiquette and manners required for interactions. The contrasting worldview involves negotiating with individuals and respecting their idiosyncracies.
It is not clear to me where this particular practice falls. I'll gladly respect any person's desire for this. If it turns out the custom has wide support and little opposition, I'll even make it a default. But the environment in which it arose is suspect: among the extremely empathetic, yes, but also political figures cultivating alliances and moral exhibitionists (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/against-land-acknowledgements-native-american/620820/).
“So, Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So, basically, that’s wrong, and it goes against everything that we stand for.”
In the way that politicians normally do— by running ads, doing media appearances, and generating “earned” coverage in ways that allow them to advance preferred narratives. Stuff like this clip is likely to be at most a very small fraction of what voters see and hear from Harris. Biden’s candidacy was doomed precisely because he couldn’t do that.
(I’m much more worried about Harris adopting an ineffective messaging strategy, in part because her 2020 campaign miscalibrated badly and alienated both progressives and moderates at the same time.)
At least she didn’t say “I’m a bi-racial Black and Indian American woman wearing a blue suit”? Honestly if I’m her I ignore it and pretend it never happened. It was 2020, brain worms were going around faster than Covid.
I knew someone would beat me to this. I've already used the "prosecutor vs felon" line with some people I know who are Kamala skeptics with effectiveness. And I say this as someone who does find merit in the "Kamala is a cop" argument used negatively.
Regarding item 2: Are you saying you have zero concerns about Biden's cognitive decline and how it affects his day-to-day job as President? It's not like being President is easy -- look back at how previous Presidents have aged even before they ran for reelection.
Read the Hur Report¹ again, where he describes the President as a "sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory". I think he should step down and that would be helpful to Kamala Harris. Seeing someone in the job is a great way to overcome concerns. She wouldn't have to PROMISE to moderate as you suggest -- she could actually implement policies that show her moderation.
¹ What a missed opportunity this was back in February to have this report. A healthier politics would have reacted to this with sober and clear analysis rather than branding it as a smear job.
A significant part of why people didn’t take Hur seriously is that he didn’t have compelling evidence for his claim of Biden’s cognitive decline. Go back and read the transcript for Hur’s interview with Biden in October 2023 for the report. Biden comes across pretty normal.
There’s a large “boy who cried wolf” aspect to Biden’s decline. A significant number of people have been saying that Biden was incapable of being president since 2019, which is clearly false, but that really damaged everyone’s credibility on the issue.
I mentioned it before in another comment but see that infamous Fox News clip where they cropped out the part of the video showing Biden walking over to greet a parachuter and made it seem like he was wondering off. Like having an absurdly doctored video only hurt their argument that Biden was too old.
Also, like good bajallioneeth piece of evidence that Fox is a propaganda arm first and news second. Like you had a very real story and instead it was more important to cater to the very worst impulses of your hardcore audience.
Before he made the fateful decision to choose money and influence over being a real reporter Tucker was...a real reporter. And he made that famous (in political circles) quip that there needed to be a conservative version of New York Times...and got booed for it (probably the start of his descent into actual Fascism). This was (I think) the original intent of The Daily Caller; an attempt at being a real investigative news org that focused on left or left of center malfeasance. And it failed (At least in it original intention). In retrospect a bit of a "canary in the coal" mine as far as the right's increasingly anti-intellectual turn.
If there isn't compelling evidence in the interview, then why is the Biden administration fighting so hard to avoid releasing the recordings?
Or check out this from the WSJ today:
"Hur had a unique vantage point. Outside of Biden’s core staff and family, he was the only person to the public’s knowledge who had spent such an extended period interviewing the president, spending five hours over two days in October asking Biden detailed questions."
That's pretty wild that Hur was the only person to spend that kind of time with Biden outside his core staff and family. If he were having more significant issues, would the people needed to invoke the 25th amendment even be around him enough to know?
How often does a president spend five hours over two days with anyone who is not core staff or family? That is by no means "pretty wild". Presidents are pretty busy people and not many people outside of core staff get much face time with them.
Either Hur got access to him that was way more than normal and he noticed things that others didn't. Or you can say that Hur clearly didn't spend enough time with him to have valid concerns raised. But I don't see how people can make the claim that Hur didn't spend enough time with Biden to see something, but also that he spent way more time with him than almost anyone else did.
*to be clear, I'm not saying you're making that argument, but its one I've heard often.
Beyond that, if its true that his cabinet or the VP doesn't spend much time with the president, it reinforces my last question which is how effective can the 25th amendment be if the people responsible for enforcing it don't spend any time with the president? The reality is that the reporting suggests that Biden was unusually cloistered for a president.
Regardless of what Hur saw directly, heard about, etc. in relation to Biden’s mental capacity, the contents of his report and the interview transcript did not have compelling evidence to back up his claim that Biden had “diminished faculties in advancing age”. If you make an explosive claim and can’t provide strong evidence to back it up, many people are not going to believe you, regardless if your claim is true!
On top of that, Hur wrote “Biden would likely present himself to a jury ... as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Based on Biden’s own stubbornness and self-perception, I am very skeptical that he would offer that defense. Offering inflammatory speculation like that is obviously going to alienate Democrats. Not a smart choice from Hur if he wanted to be taken seriously on his claims about Biden’s capacity.
I would have a lot more faith that the transcripts don't contain that if the Biden administration would release the recordings. They thought they would be so damaging that they are going to court to stop Congress from getting access to it. I want to emphasize just how extreme that is: the president is going to court to stop audio records from being given to a house impeachment panel when they have already releases the transcript. You can argue, as they do, that since the transcript has been released there is no need for the audio. But if they have released the transcript, why should the president care about the audio being released? It's very clearly because they thought it would so damaging that even though they don't have a legal leg to stand on, they are still fighting it to drag it out past the election.
As for Biden being to stubborn to use his age as a defense, I don't buy that either. Plenty of proud people do all kinds of things to avoid being convicted of a crime. If you're a prosecutor, you can't assume the defendant won't take advantage of something that is very obvious. And if you think that Hur should not have included that, then the alternative was for him to recommend prosecution, which would have been better right?
1) Harris becoming President for the first time while also becoming the nominee for the first time in the home stretch of a campaign would also be a suboptimal governance outcome.
2) There is no realistic way of forcing Biden to step down and effort expended pursuing that is better placed trying to defeat Trump IMO.
He is just obviously too frail and cognitively impaired to serve as POTUS right now. Now, it may be electorally optimal for Democrats to ignore that reality. But I thought Matt had been promoting NOT telling helpful lies to the public, especially when they are transparent lies. Undermines voter confidence.
It is not at all obvious. And, you, unless you happen to work in his cabinet are obviously not in a position to be certain of this. It may or may not be true but it is silly to pretend like _you_ know.
Biden cannot consistently present coherent thoughts on live television. His gait, posture, and facial expressions all show us that he is frail and declining with diminished attention. The evidence of my eyes and ears tells me he is incapable of taking that 3am phone call if there's a world crisis!
I don’t think Biden has cognitive decline. It is energy. He doesn’t have the energy to go full tilt and I doubt most his age are able to have the energy to lead a country.
I mean I sound weird when I am tired and my friends usually find me the most sharp and articulate one in the group.
I don't know that Biden does or does not, which seems a problem. He doesn't get in front of the public much and when he does, it's not great even with a bunch of support - teleprompters everywhere.
Been saying that his sleep apnea is the variable here. The "constant" is otherwise normal mental and physical changes associated with aging (which isn't cognitive decline in the "dementia" sense that people insinuate).
Once he's out of office, I wouldn't be surprised if he starts looking more refreshed. If he had some form of dementia, then we wouldn't necessarily expect improvement.
Right - low energy can often be easy to detect in people you know well. Determining degrees of cognitive decline requires medical/psychological/neurological assessment.
This is why I keep calling out ageism - older people are often not what they appear—like any other group prone to be stereotyped, you have to actually interact with & get to know people as individuals.
It’ll be interesting to see what “retired” Biden is like in a few months.
Two things can be true. Left of center people like myself were possibly too dismissive of the Hur report and the Hur report put its thumb on the scale to make Biden seem more doddering than he really is.
To give maybe a clearer example of what I'm getting at is that Fox News clip of Biden supposedly wondering off when in fact just out of frame was a parachute jumper he was walking over to greet. It's both seems true that Biden has declined physically and mentally just in the past 6-12 months and that Fox was being extraordinarily duplicitous and making it seem like Biden was exhibiting signs of truly late stage dementia as opposed to maybe troubling initial signs of it.
People were dismissive of the Hur report partly because the Biden team and much of the Democratic leadership were lying to us about his condition.
The speed of the change from "he's fine" to "he must step aside" is proof that they all knew well before the debate. It makes me angry the way they lied to us.
Every indication is that, Biden was working closely with a very tight circle of advisors and didn't spend a ton of time outside of that. I don't think many people had first hand experience of his performance outside of that group. I'm willing to believe the debate was confirmation for people who previously only had a guess as to his true condition.
Which “they” are you talking about that both pivoted quickly and had any way of knowing before the debate? The only people who would likely have been in any position to know never pivoted.
I don't believe the stories that Biden has been hermetically sealed off from members of his staff, Democratic leaders in Congress, donors, media figures (Joe Scarborough comes to mind) and Cabinet officials, such that they all thought he was just fine up until the debate night.
The staff never pivoted. The leaders in Congress only pivoted by reading between the lines. Donors pivoted big time, but I think they were never to be trusted, and also may never have been in on things. I don’t know about Joe Scarborough.
I find it inconceivable that Garland is *so* incompetent he would appoint a Trump hatchet man for the investigation. That's always been the most damning part of the Hur investigation. He was vetted and selected by Garland.
"the Hur report put its thumb on the scale to make Biden seem more doddering than he really is"
How do you know this?
I don't that its not true, but I don't know that it is true either. Given what happened, unless you have really strong evidence of that Hur was trying to put his thumb on the scale, it seems more likely that he was documenting what he observed. If you have that evidence, can you share it with the rest of us? Otherwise it comes across as pure partisan denial of which there has been way to much about regarding Biden's age.
The entire reason for the report was to determine whether to charge Biden with willfully retaining documents and specifically determine whether there was enough evidence to charge Biden. It wasn't until the very end of the report that he actually got into whether there was evidence to actually charge. The first part of the report seemed entirely devoted to documenting Biden misspeaking or lapses in memory. https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4463408-hur-overstepped-mandate-with-gratuitous-biden-slams-say-ex-doj-dems/
Now to your point, the "critics" in this case are all former Democratic administration officials. Of course they are going to be critical of a report that makes Biden look bad. And the thing that too many left of center of people didn't acknowledge probably enough is that Hur likely didn't lie (or at least totally make up) very real lapses in memory and signs of cognitive decline. But the critics have a point. This is supposed to be a report that documents whether there is a sufficient evidence to charge the President. Going into painstaking detail as to his cognitive missteps is yes "gratuitous" and yes putting your thumb on the scale.
This isn't true, though. Part of his analysis requires him to determine if a crime was committed -- it was -- and also if he believes a prosecution would be successful. The part about how a jury would see him goes directly to the likelihood of a conviction.
I'll echo what John from FL said. The report said that a crime was committed, but that a prosecution would be unsuccessful. Then it laid out why a prosecution would be unsuccessful.
There was no winning with this report - if he had simply left it as "prosecution would be unsuccessful so we're resolving this" it would have been called a coverup.
My question to you is this -
If you were Hur's shoes where you interview the president about a criminal matter and you see things that gravely concern you about his capacity to the extent that you think a jury wouldn't find him guilty because of that. Would you stay quiet about it, or would you announce it to the public? Would you be satisfied if someone did that and it was Donald Trump instead of Biden? Or twist it a bit more - if you are investigating Trump and find strong evidence that he committed a crime with Epstein, but that evidence was compromised and can't be used, or that the statute of limitations has clearly expired - would you report that out, or would you consider it outside the bounds of your investigation and so not report it even though its in the clear public interest to make it public?
My strong sense at this point is Hur pulled his punches in describing Biden. The Pod Save America crew describe seeing Biden in person on two occasions as being completely lost and incoherent. Like he didn't know where he was lost and incoherent.
I think the thing to pay attention to now is how they deploy Biden on the campaign trail. If he gives interviews where he bungles names, trails off and calls Harris “VP Trump”, he risks dragging her down.
If he’s nowhere to be found the Trump campaign will say he’s incapacitated. Really any candidate will have to thread this needle with Biden, but especially Harris.
More slip ups are (probably) needed before Republican’s 25th amendment attacks can damage Harris, but the “Biden’s decline is a cover up” narrative is out there and it will continue to be a liability as long as he remains President.
I think what Biden is demostrating is that with the very slight cognitive decline that comes with aging, Biden is having some difficulty in fluidly vocalizing his thoughts. That isn't surprising given his history with a speech impediment. I have occassional ephasia as a result of my dsylexia when I am stressed. I suspect that will be worse when I am Biden's age. But there isn't any sign that he doesn't understand what is going on or can't make good choices. Stumbling over your words is bad as a candidate but less impactful as a president.
A lot of policy wonks get this part wrong. A President is not some symbolic head like the King/Queen of England whose job is to smile and wave at the peasants. While you may have a team of people working for you and executing different roles, you still have an obligation to go out and defend their work and policies successfully. Why would I give credit to someone for signing some bill passed by the Congress if the outcomes and the execution is lacking?
100% agree. If he resigned now she still has time to go around looking presidential. Then the question of "can a black woman do this job" is already answered and she goes into the election with the power of incumbency.
One thought is that the political left in the US has been pushing itself into irrelevancy for a while. The influence and cache they had over discourse has greatly atrophied since 2016 and 2020. They cannot really influence narratives like they used too.
The culture that the left created, and the media’s 101 self-inflicted wounds, are a big part of why Trump is still competitive. More Democrats/people on the left should’ve stepped up and offered wisdom, but there was a real climate of fear. Strange, unfortunate time.
Yeah, it's a bit remarkable how much lower the volume from the left has been. Not sure if that is because they realized their brand was poison or just got tired or what. Or maybe it's just harder to act like you are being persecuted when it's your side in the oval office.
Leftist here. Hello. I was very left-loud during BBB/IRA. I felt very sad about the failure on CTC, child care, and pre-K, but otherwise pleasantly surprised by the legislative achievements. Once the Republicans took the house, legislation was over. Now, I’m loud but the focus is defensive; we need to beat Trump, so I sound mostly like the rest of the Democratic coalition. I would have loved to primary Biden if possible, but it would have lost and been a disaster for a) the left’s reputation in Dem coalition and b) chance of beating Trump this year. AOC/Bernie have done a great job of balancing a) wielding influence, b) maintaining influence, and c) being responsible to important goals larger than factional struggle.
Obviously some leftists disagree and think I’m complicit in genocide, co-opted, etc., but I honestly think that the left you describe as lower-volume is that way out of a mix of being pleased by parts of the last 4 years and a responsible approach to the needs of the moment.
Thank you for your pragmatism. If winning isn't your first priority, it doesn't matter what the second is. Hopefully there are lots of pragmatic leftists like you out there. Once Trump is gone feel free to say whatever you want at any volume.
At the same time, I’m interested to hear what part of the left brand you see as poisonous.
Open borders (a position I believe in almost as strongly as other core values like freedom of speech, btw) is clearly bad politics.
But i don’t believe there’s clear evidence of Bernie-leftism being poisonous. Maybe Bernie would gave beat Trump in 2020, maybe he wouldn’t have, but the fact that a politics so far from 40+ years of the mainstream seems like a potential national winner suggests to me that economic leftism is not politically poisonous.
It's hard to say about Bernie leftism, his principles were all about economics. He wants to limit immigration to keep wages high and never got into the race stuff, so maybe his brand is fine (although he's certainly not my cup of tea). The poisonous part was the race and gender politics. Combined with the border that's what's really killing the party with voters right now and the biggest group they are losing ground with is Hispanics.
I've been surprised by the number of people rushing to endorse Kamala today without a contest.
A year go, if I had described a Trump vs Kamala contest, every left-leaning person I know would moan, curse, or cry.
They had little confidence she could win.
If you had asked Trump around the same time who he wanted to compete again, pretty sure he would have said: Kamala.
Since then, Biden's age caught up with him, and he imploded during the debate. But after dropping out, we're now in the same terrible spot we dreaded a year ago.
Why is everyone so happy?
I agree we're in a better spot after Joe's departure, but it still feels like a very bad spot, and people aren't realizing it because we're one step better than we were 2 days ago.
Did Kamala improve as a candidate since the 2020 Democratic primaries, when she dropped out before 15 other candidates, the day after after Steve Bullock (who is that?)
Too many people seem fully ready to back a candidate that couldn't crack the top 15 in the Democratic primary.
Everyone should just cool it and look at the talent out there.
The problem IMO isn’t so much the people “rushing to endorse” as the fact that none of the strong alternatives indicated a desire to run.
Whitmer, Shapiro, etc are making the calculation that it’s better to take a dive and run for 2028. I think it’s a mistake, but it’s given Harris-skeptics nobody to rally around.
I think "taking a dive" is an ungenerous reading of the situation. Consider that at this point in the cycle, a typical governor running for president has been taking a crash course in foreign policy for over a year, been getting security briefings from the current administration since they sewed up the nomination, and has a built a team of trusted advisors mixed in with members of the party than have been playing at the federal level for decades. And still governors who ascend to the presidency seem to step on a lot more rakes than other presidents. Whitmer, Shapiro, et al don't have that policy support system, and probably don't think they can spin something up to get prepared in time. Winning the election is critical, but it's also important to govern well once you do.
There's probably something interesting to be written about how the old saw "Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line," has been completely flipped since Trump arrived on the scene, though.
I agree, feels like it’s just so late in the game that the safest bet just seems like everyone rallying around Kamala and hoping her team are all Slow Boring subscribers.
I previously thought that the odds of an open convention would be a bit higher than most did, probably because I found Ezra's argument for them compelling. But once I saw everyone line up behind Harris, I realized that I should have known that it would be unlikely for the same reason Biden faced only token primary challengers: there's a bit of an inverse collective action problem that if one person takes that chance, and it fails, they could risk being a pariah in their own party.
I’ve been trying to imagine what framing someone would need to use. Like Buttigieg coming forward and saying, “I am a faithful servant of the Biden-Harris administration and would be happy to support Harris as the nominee. But I am also willing to humbly put my name forward, should the delegates decide that another option is needed.”
It would be good for someone to do that in case of another moment that looks like the debate. But I don’t think a governor can while still supporting their constituents.
Today's Democrats are the risk-adverse party. So rushing to endorse the VP who has a 50% chance of beating Trump is better than waiting to see a bunch of Democrats launch last minute campaigns and beat up on each other for a month, then end up with a possibly wounded and inexperienced candidate to go up against the Orange Menace.
Shapiro is one of the frontrunners for VP so I think he is being sincere. If he joins the ticket and they win he has the inside track on running for the big job in 4-8 years; if they lose he can win reelection in 2026 and run in 2028 as planned.
I think this is exactly right. I think at this point in the race, Trump is likely to win no matter what, but the Democratic VP gets a good profile-building opportunity over the next 4 months to make sure they can crush Vance in 28.
Wouldn't be so confident in Trump's odds at this point. His campaign has been setting this thing up as a referendum on age and now he'll have to sleep in the bed he made
Maybe. Odds are definitely higher now that Biden has stepped down. If I was Whitmer or Shapiro and I had privately been talking with Biden ahead of time, I still would have declined to be the presidential nominee, and accepted the VP nomination myself.
At this point, the sheer unlikelihood of prevailing against Kamala Harris has to be playing a major role. Unless the VP stumbles badly in the very near future, it's hard to see what a Newsom or Beshear or Pritzker would gain from almost certain defeat.
On top of which -- and I say this as someone who is very cognizant of the points made in the top level comment -- I think this may actually be an instance in which a necessarily heavily bruising primary might actually be bad for overall party enthusiasm. Normally I'm skeptical of that kind of argumentation -- primaries are *supposed* to be bruising -- but I think this might be a special case where any kind of credible run at the current VP (and rebuttals thereto) would necessarily have to be especially ugly, and we only have so many news cycles left before the election. Given that Harris is so heavily favored to win, the intra-factional contest seems like it's likely to be more acutely negative-sum than usual without the attendant tradeoffs (i.e., selecting a candidate from a wide field to cater to voters and several months to let gaffe-memories fade) that would justify it.
Good point. Primaries these days are typically wrapped up by early March or so. The most prominent recent examples of primaries that went very late both involved Hillary Clinton (2008, 2016). The first of these didn't harm the Democratic nominee—conditions were simply overwhelmingly favorable that year for an Obama win.
But it's hard to deny that in 2016, the highly vituperative Democratic primary didn't hurt the ticket. It was nasty—and hard feelings helped fuel defections to third parties that cycle—with disastrous results.
And again, if Harris is facing robust, substantive competition over the next few weeks from Democratic rivals, the start of her general election campaign will effectively be delayed until almost Labor Day. That seems very risky.
I mean ... since Ezra's article seemed to really kick think whole thing off, I'm just going to be sympathetic to his point that a true contested convention would *dominate* the news cycles with Dem issues. That's not nothing and I think the winner emerges way more powerful. A soft baton pass to Harris feels like the worst of all outcomes.
I don't think all news is good news here. There'd be a ton of news cycles but it would be "X isn't able to unite the party" or "Y has too many defects to be the obvious nominee." I think you have a lot of bad outcomes (the civil war gets won only barely) and the only better outcome (some amazing candidate, significantly better than Harris, swoops in and somehow unites everyone and isn't scathed by fighting) is pretty unlikely.
By endorsing Harris, I think Biden's taken Ezra's version of an open convention off the table.
Yes, Democrats already burned up whatever “get your shit together” allowance we had, and then some. We don’t have time for chaos. It’s one shot left here.
Personally I'm not so quick to think that Whitmer or Shapiro would be a better candidate. They have never actually ran for president before so they have very little name recognition and there's not much time before the election to explain themselves to voters. In my mind it's actually a much bigger risk than Harris, who has already run a campaign, even if that campaign didn't go the distance. Biden also ran a campaign that didn't go the distance, and then ran another one that did.
I actually think Klobuchar would be the safest bet this cycle, but given that most Harris-skeptical types are calling for Whitmer, Shapiro, or Newsome (ugh), there's just no way to consolidate around any other candidate. Harris gets it by default. We could do worse.
Right. Most voters are not that plugged into the rising stars of either party, unless they happen to live in the state where that particular rising star currently works. The Democrats do not need a month or so hitting each other over the head with hammers before the election. If Nikki Haley can stump for Trump without the media questioning it, the Democrats do not owe anyone an explanation for lining up behind their candidate, especially after everyone in the media and half the party spent the past month or so trying to badger Biden off the ticket. This was the most obvious outcome, if all those people got what they wanted. They got what they wanted. And given the speed with which the endorsements came in from almost all possible alternatives, I would say this was in the works for a while, and would not be surprised if Biden himself had not spent some time greasing those particular wheels. Now if they can pick a VP option that is more interesting than Tim Kaine, they will mostly stick the landing.
It would have been better to have had a proper primaries in their proper time. But it's now time for the candidate to focus on the general elections, adopt a moderate posture, and fight for swing voters. An internal competition would force Harris (and other competitors) to focus on intra-party concerns and adopt a liberal posture that is close to where the party delegates are. In all likelihood, Harris would win anyway, but would be in a substantially weaker position to win the general elections.
Letting the nomination simply fall to Harris as the default without even an appearance of a process is the worst thing they can do to appeal to swing voters.
I get this idea, but I think this is not true. Swing voters are swing 'cuz they don't pay attention. They'll go by vibe, not by an analysis of process.
Exactly: We shouldn't conflate "Shit that Ross Douthat might not like" with "Shit that people whose favorite passtime is watching Dancing with the Stars might not like."
Yep, this seems right to me. My in-laws aren't exactly swing voters (they were lifelong Republicans until Trump, now they seem pretty committed to the Democrats), but to them it's just natural that if the nominee isn't Biden, it should be Harris. I don't think they really know who the serious contenders would be if it wasn't Harris. And my MIL loves Dancing with the Stars.
"but to them it's just natural that if the nominee isn't Biden, it should be Harris"
Exactly. Most people hated the choice between Trump and Biden, and they will now assume the nominee is going to be Kamala. They will watch a debate here, a speech there, and then decide whether they find Kamala more appealing than Trump. It would be better for the country if she were in fact charismatic and warm and well-spoken, but maybe she'll pull it off anyway.
I can't entirely take credit for this idea as I saw it on reddit last night, but basically, if you asked a random man on the street what is supposed to happen now, he'd probably answer "The VP takes over". The average person has no strong normative feelings about how the parties pick their nominees.
The "vibe" on Kamala though is that she's there because of the kind of demographic box checking that swing voters hate. She has to make a plausible showing at being the strongest candidate. Riding with her on "vibes" is absolutely a recipe for losing.
She was elected by 81 million Americans. If Americans were sufficiently disdainful of her candidacy, they could've stuck with Trump and his VP, Mike Pence (a much better VP than Vance will ever make).
I don't think Biden could plausibly endorse someone other than Kamala. I do think it's important that the party create the space for at least 1 or 2 of the serious challengers to make a case at the convention. Rushing to keep Whitmer/Shapiro/whoever from putting themselves in contention is a massive failure.
The only way I see it is someone saying they are putting their name forward as an option just to ensure the delegates have a choice, but not as a real run. I can imagine Buttigieg doing it appropriately humbly. I can’t really imagine anyone else doing it.
I think he totally could have endorsed someone else if he wanted to. Doing so would not have created as much immediate unity as endorsing Harris has, but it was certainly plausible. Whether or not that's wise is up for fair debate, of course.
I doubt they'll care after Labor Day when the general election campaign is in full swing. Too much of a process issue, which is not what voters care about.
The people who are currently big mad about the perceived situation where Dem/Admin elites hid Biden's lack of capacity from the public while killing a serious primary are people they need to vote for Kamala if she's going to win.
To be fair, I think one of them was already a Republican, and the other one was a New York Times columnist. So that is probably 2 in the bag for Trump.
I'd like for Democrats to avoid the appearance of a total, blatant "coronation" if possible. Not sure what that would look like (I doubt Democrats do, either: it's been nearly sixty years since that party has had a competitive convention!).
Maybe Dean Phillips throws his hat in ring? Or Joementum (Manchin, that is)? And so Harris gets it on the second ballot?
But realistically, a consensus "pass the torch" dynamic may be best. Because if Kamala Harris has to vigorously campaign against other Democrats for the nomination, the general election effort to beat Trump will get off to a very late start. That's just reality. And that sounds dangerous. So, I'm candidly hoping for a muddle: something pretty close to Harris closing out the field early, but just the patina of an open convention so as not to feed the MAGA coronation narrative.
By the bye: I really think the Vance pick could come back to bite Trump on his ample posterior. Not the pick I'd have made unless I'm truly waltzing to 270 electoral votes, which seems unlikely now.
My past selves and my future selves agree on very few things, but they were able to coordinate on meeting at my present self. Without even communicating!
One of the things that gets me about the GOP peacocking at the convention (go back and read some of the reporting about Convension goers basically acting like it's a coronation) is that it's not like the polls shifted all that much since the debate. In fact, it's actually pretty astonishing how consistent they've been. They clearly shifted enough to get Biden's attention. And given the shift was the result of a problem he clearly demonstrated he can't address, I understand why it may have been the final nail that persuaded him to step aside. But it remains the case the shift was quite modest.
Democrats have been consistently overperforming polling since 2021. The party is now made up increasingly of people more likely to vote. Also, polling misses are historically pretty random. There's a belief out there that because Trump outperformed his polls in 2016 and 2020 it's a guarantee that he will outperform his polls by 3-4% in 2024. When in reality flipping a coin and having it be heads twice in a row is a completely normal thing to happen. I've noted this before, but I think we actually still underestimate how much Covid upended life in 2020-2021. And one of those places I suspect is polling. I saw it noted before that one of the reasons that polling likely overestimated Biden support in 2020 is that Democrats and left leaning voters were more likely to actually be sheltering in place, staying home and trying to adhere to Covid restrictions. This actually seems pretty plausible to me as to one of the reasons polling overrated Biden's support.
My point isn't that Trump is still the favorite right now. Harris has a lot of work to do including trying to distance herself from 2020 primary Harris. Election held today Trump likely wins. It's more that we might be in luck that GOP actually started to believe their own hype and think their basically guaranteed to have a 1984-esque Reagan landslide. Like even if election was held today, it seems likely it would still come down to like 80,000 votes across three swing states again.
Yeah. I'm optimistic. I mean, there's a case for pessimism in that Trump should be behind Harris by fifteen points given the fact that he's a 78 year-old convicted felon who tried to overthrow the government and who was found liable for rape.
But pessimism gets us nowhere. And again, this thing should be winnable.
True. Probably not feasible, even if a heavyweight like Whitmer or Shapiro entered. Kamala Harris will be the nominee. And I expect a good one. In the off chance I'm wrong, Democrats cold (incredibly) get yet another bite at the nomination apple, because the convention's not for another four weeks.
They don’t need to for Ohio. But I hear that California and Washington have deadlines during the convention, so they have to be very confident they can get it wrapped up at the beginning of the convention.
I was wondering about that myself. Hence my (typo-marred) "could get" above. Maybe it will be official before Chicago starts. But I personally don't see the need for that, and it might generate "the fix is in" accusations that even a lot of apolitical normies might hear about.
You need somebody who would get Kamala under 50% to force a 2nd ballot - Manchin would not be competition to Kamala anywhere outside of this comment section and Ruy Texeria's Substack.
I mean, actual centrist Democrat's are mostly fine because actual centrists who want to hippy punch for legitimate ideological reasons are slowly disappearing, but centrist commenters who if they had to be given a choice, prefer Donald Trump over many Democrat's on immigration, tax, Title IX, and other cultural policies, not so much.
2020 was a bad time for a former prosecutor to be running for president. Times are different now and she has gained the experience of almost four years of working with the president.
Most normal people - people who don't read SB - have no idea who Whitmer, Shapiro, Beshear, et al are. The mainly know Newsom for the French Laundry debacle. In terms of sheer name recognition, never mind getting out the word about policies and skills, there isn't a lot of time.
Kamala dropped out because there was no runway to the nomination, instead of running pointlessly to get 9% in New Hampshire like Elizabeth Warren. Or y'know, Joe Biden dropping out after Iowa instead of continuing to run and getting 3% in New Hampshire in 2008.
I feel like this point is often missed. You run to win, and you make strategic decisions that you hope maximize your chances to win, rather than maximize your expected value of vote percent or duration in the race.
First prize is you win, second prize is a set of steak knives, third prize is you're fired.
Right - Kamala didn't have lane, so she backed out before wasting time and money and now she's the nominee and Steve Bullock's greatest accomplishment since then was losing a Montana Senate race by slightly fewer points than generic Democrat.
I wonder if it’s because actually dropping everything and mounting a campaign to run for President in four weeks is kind of insane, vs. talking about it in an online forum, which is so easy? This is like fantasy politics league. In the real world, they would have had to have done this a year ago. I do wish people could have had the sense to push harder against Biden running for re-election; unfortunately his legislative successes made it harder to argue against his impulse to act like he had defeated father time. But as for the various candidates that have been named, the last thing they want to do is endanger party unity in a likely losing fight that is impossible to organize in such a tight time frame.
I suspect one of the issues is that Biden's cognitive and physical decline is probably recent. So in July, 2023 he was probably still as mentally sharp as July, 2020 and still seemed as physically capable as well.
I agree with your point, but there wasn’t time to do a bake-off and get a popular governor the national exposure needed. It would have had to have been someone everyone already knew (Michelle Obama, Mark Cuban, George Clooney, etc.). There also is the deadline to get candidates nominated so they can be on all 50 ballots. I think by waiting until now, Biden ensured that Harris was the only feasible option.
My hope for the Harris candidacy is (1) that she stays true to herself rather than let progressives pull her to the left or moderates pull her to the right, and (2) she plays to her strength and prosecutes the hell out of Trump. Four months of putting him on the stand would make Trump crack, and it will be beautiful when it happens.
Also, please get rid of Biden’s campaign staff or at least the leadership. Bring in some killers from the Obama days. The Biden campaign lost all credibility for hiding the truth from the American people. We need vision, execution, and discipline.
It's really really bad if no one is willing to stand up and present a serious challenge. I feel like people don't seem to get that the "coronation" problem is a huge issue for the Dems. A huge part of the reason people are mad right now is that Biden got handed the nom without contest in the first place. It's a huge reason for the whole 2015 debacle that started this all. Even assuming Kamala is the nominee, having it look like this is being handed to her by similar "her turn" dynamics as Hilary is a major unforced error if the goal is to win the election. Kamala really really would benefit from a serious challenge. The party needs the drama and the media focus of a contested primary with a legitimately uncertain outcome. The Dems are losing to Trump right now, giving up the chance at a high drama nomination is to abandon a huge chunk of the potential upside of replacing Biden and that upside is what they need to make this competitive.
And Harris does not nearly have the amount of baggage Clinton had. I mean, was anyone mad when Obama got the nomination for his second term? Should someone have stepped up and challenged him at the convention? A lot of people already did not like Clinton (even if their reasons were not always on point), and she did seem to strong arm her way to the top, which left a bunch of Democrats disgruntled. Republicans would love someone to contest Harris, which will inevitably send a portion of potential Dem voters off into the wilderness grousing about the unfairness of it all. No one wants that, at least not anyone with a real interest in keeping Trump out of the White House.
I just am not aware of any evidence that a contested primary of an incumbent helps rally support of the incumbent’s party, which seems to be the implication of what you’re saying.
And please don't needlessly conspiracize. It just gives cover to actual wrongdoing if you assume everything is bad and corrupt based on literally zero evidence.
Kamala clearly did some deft maneuvering, locking down enough endorsements right off the bat that anyone who even wanted to challenge her would face an incredibly uphill battle. And none of them seem very interested. No one else polls THAT much better than her anyway.
Everyone's happy because we got a new candidate that has a chance at winning. And we didn't have to go through some bruising primary where everyone is catering to a different set of uncompromising assholes.
Starting veteran QB went down. Time to see if the prospect behind him has what it takes. Next Dem up.
Re #11 -- it seems like a lot of progressives really believe the notion that marginal voters are basically socialists. So while it was good for Trump to move left, it would also be good for Harris to move left.
They totally believe that. As one of many examples see this thread on r/WorkReform claiming that if Kamala Harris ran on Medicare For All she'd sweep 40 states.
One thing I've learned in the last few years is that the worst and most racist Republican complaint about black voters (they only vote Democrat to get welfare!) appears to actually be true of Zoomer progressives.
They may not be socialists in the standard of Bernie Sanders but they are not exactly happy with center left or center right "neoliberal" politics. Perhaps I overestimate the sense of dissatisfaction among some working class voters but I do think in economic terms, the views of the people on this thread are in the minority of what many voters think(at least in terms of economics). Vance was picked for a reason. Swing voters are not exactly the same as independents, moderates or generally undecided. Some people are saying they swing because they're not engaged or don't know that much. That's partially true, they swing but they also only vote when it's candidate who's transformational or is promising something radically different than the norm.
The problem for progressives is that while majorities of voters reliably poll in favor of many left-wing policy *outcomes* (Free healthcare for all, yay!), such support typically melts through the floor when you actually start trying to articulate a specific program (and especially how to pay for such a program) to accomplish those outcomes.
So, I'm not particularly talking so much about that as much as Free Trade, more libertarian economic policies. I'm saying what's going on is rejection of triangulation and reaganomics. I agree a lot of people don't want to pay for healthcare but they are also are pissed off about immigration, globalization and are for the Trump tariffs even if it costs them more. I think the problem is the positive framing of issues, that I like this idea more, rather than I hate this less. I sited Sanders more because of his anti-billionaire economic populism which appeals to a lot of voters. But you're right about outcomes but not agreeing about process but voters tend to vote on outcomes not processes. So, when you get into the details people tend to change their minds but they tend to vote on the outcome they want and saying there's no way within current processes only makes a not so small subset angrier, and makes them less encouraged to vote for any centrist. Many of them would also take exception to Yimbyism and take a very Malthusian view of economic growth. So for me it's a bit more complicated since a lot of people then sit out or get more extreme rather than tack to the center in terms of economics in voting patterns. In traditional economics there are winners and losers., many of the slow boring peeps are the winners and many of the swing voters are the losers.
Re. Point 6, I am interested to see if any of these hundreds of journalists looking at octogenarian performance in high office are now going to turn their attention to the new oldest man ever to stand. Many of the worries about Biden apply to Trump. The fact thar he is more energetically incoherent than Biden should not be the end of the matter.
In particular I'm surprised national journalists aren't showing more (selfish) interest in the self-control and mental ability of the vengeful, bitter, old maniac who's on course to take office with a fresh total immunity card. Maybe he's just about sane enough this year & next not to have critics arrested. But by 2028?
I've heard this said a lot but this is irrelevant to Trump. Expectations are all that matters here and Trump has behaved exactly to expectations. Biden obviously did not. That's the end of this one.
Some amount of progressives whinging about Harris saying moderate things may support her moderate credentials. They would try to curse her but bless her instead.
I for one am outraged that Harris is in a traditional marriage with a member of the opposite sex! Uh, gender! Uh, not really “opposite ,” because there’s no binary! The point is, this is a slap in the face to all of my LGBTQ allies!
Ugh, really? Well, that isn't going to do a lot to lure females back to the Republican party. And this attack is particularly painful to women who are unable to have children.
Yep. And think about it, a minute, it's not the slightest bit hard to believe. This is from the party home to folks who have criticized JD Vance's choice of spouse.
>>Republicans are going to pivot to “if he’s too old to run for re-election, he’s too old to serve and should resign,” which is honestly silly.<<
It's only "silly" in political terms if it doesn't work. And it may not! But it's exactly the kind of line of attack (among others) I'd be urging the Trump campaign to make if I were advising them. That, and, "Does Kamala Harris think it's a good idea for Biden to have the launch codes given his cognitive problems?" And Trump and his surrogates will use much less polite language than I just did.
But not to spoil the mood: I'm feeling elated this morning, as I know many of you are. Let's win this thing!
If they keep talking about Biden and most people think Harris isn’t Biden’s keeper (he’s her boss after all) then that seems fine. It’s energy they can’t use attacking her, and it draws a contrast, and looks spiteful.
I’m with you. I get that being president and running for president is hard, but we now have this awkward situation where the incumbency advantage is almost reversed…consider the benefits to handing the keys to West Wing to Kamala Harris…watching her BE president would be a big part of her campaign strategy; watching her stand behind the seal giving speeches and press conferences, watching her meeting with world leaders in the Oval, watching her doing barrel rolls in Air Force One. Anybody on the Left would benefit from that gravity.
Did Nixon permanently taint the idea of a presidential resignation?
Rather than Bitcoin, I think she could take a different approach to the FTC than Lina Khan and also have fewer regulations on AI. Also, she could signal she'll be tougher on the border and emphasize high-skilled immigration a lot more and make sure the tax code incentivizes R&D. That should be enough to win back over some of the Silicon Valley holdouts who lean Democrat and send a broader signal to the business community. Being tougher on crypto isn't an issue in the grand scheme of things and is probably the right thing to do anyway.
I think Lina Khan is really bad, but the AI regulations are extremely misrepresented by lots of people.
I know it's a slightly different set of people, but you can't at the same time say "This will be humanity's biggest invention since fire" (CEO of Google) or "The bad case — and I think this is important to say — is, like, lights out for all of us," (CEO of OpenAI) and also that you deserve to have 0 regulation or reporting requirements. The Wiener bill basically asks that you notify the government if you are training a massive model (but very few others) and that developers are held liable for issues with the software but only if they are running it themselves.
I couldn't be happier with Lina. The US had gotten way too afraid to actually break up monopolies. When Amazon forcing multiple entire publishers to sell all of their books at a loss on Amazon because they could fuck the publishers over worse, something has gone deeply deeply wrong.
Fewer regs on AI would be an awful, ridiculous stance, motivated almost entirely by gaslighting from the accelerationist Twitter crew. Please see: any of Zvi’s coverage of the White House E.O.
I actually think Lina Khan has been great! Most Americans agree that big business has gotten incredibly anti-competitive (it has), and aggressively going after businesses that have terrible practices that most Americans hates would absolutely be great for Kamala’s chances. Highlighting the FTC‘s lawsuit against Ticketmaster, and price gouging by pharmaceutical companies is a slam dunk.
The reason why conservatives allow Republican's to get away with saying moderate things is because, especially with Trump, they know he'll actually let them do what they actually want outside of like two things. He can say moderate things about abortion all day, then sign a 12-week national ban without an issue. Same thing w/ stuff like not mentioning deregulation and such, because the very rich people trust the GOP to put into office the kind of people in the EPA who will allow more dumping of chemicals in water or whatever.
OTOH, with the Democratic Party, there is no trust from the progressive side, because there are still plenty of moderates, including hey, yourself that tell candidates to not only speak moderately, but govern moderately. So, of course, large groups want said candidates to say what they stand for, so they're on the hook for it, because there is zero trust Democrat's won't throw them under the bus the first time they get a mildly bad poll.
In short, yes, the left knows the GOP are lying about being moderate. We also know a lot of Democrat's aren't lying about being moderate.
The actual messages you put forth as examples to Kamala to use are y'know, fine, and nobody will care about them outside of some people on Twitter with 646 followers, but of course, the one actual policy you picked is silly.
Now, I know the comeback will be, 'a more moderate candidate' will do better, but an interesting thing is in actual polling, people like Manchin don't do all that much better. The actual percentage of people willing to vote for a center-left candidate is somewhere between 44% and 54%, and a lot of that is far more determined by vibes, charisma, ads, opponents, and background than actual policy.
There is no world where you nominate Joe McModerate and get Reagan-style landslides with large majorities who will then do...not much.
Again, Gretchen Whitmer is ideologically to the left of Joe Biden, but did much better than he did.
Also, the fact you're so on board for a chaotic convention despite the fact actual politicians of every ideological stripe have gotten behind Kamala shows perhaps you need to decide if you want to win, because a convention where both sides attacked each other, and the nominee was either scene as a sellout to Wall Street and tech bros or a leftist radical wouldn't be actually better, but there's a 10% chance you might get somebody who might punch the hippies as much as you want.
It's Kamala or Chaos.
I also find it amusing the guy who was all on board for SBF before he was exposed as a massive fraud thinks the one random issue, which I'm sure was just random, was too kneel to the techbros and regulate a scam less, because some billionaire a-holes are unhappy about it (and I know, this comment section things words are violence only when it's talking about rich people with centrist views).
Or, maybe your wish for a non-Kamala candidacy is you're just worried there will be less people in a Kamala Harris administration who will care about what you write on Substack.
The reality is, the Coconut Train is leaving the station - get on-board or become the next Mark Penn or Dick Morris, talking to a less and less important sliver of the party base by the day. I still enjoy your writing, but the last day or so of flailing about for any chance of your preferred centrist candidate has been highly annoying.
It seems to me to be a core falsehood of the progressive movement that centrist Democrats are the bottleneck on advancing left-wing policy. Obama and Pelosi pushed the ACA against the advice of their political advisers, and duly got a shellacking in the midterms after enacting it. They were willing to pay the political price to deliver a huge progressive win. Biden spent ~2 years wrangling the biggest climate bill in history through Congress and likewise invested huge efforts delivering student loan forgiveness, even as it undermined his credibility on combating inflation.
All of this was possible because centrist democrats won in red states, and you'd get more progressive policy if you made it more of a priority to help the John Tester types to do that.
Except Matt, most of the stuff listed you either think should've never been happened or even been further curtailed, along with more factional attacking of the Left.
Matt thinks the IRA and ACA should have been curtailed or never happened? Are we reading the same Matt?
Student loan forgiveness I'll give you that, but that's only because he thinks the money is better spent elsewhere (and given the current fiscal situation, should be backed by tax increases). Not because he's ideologically opposed to government spending money to help people. Remember, he supported student loan forgiveness back when it looked like it would be the only way to get stimulus through.
I like to think that Biden spent ~2 years wrangling the biggest climate bill in history through Congress because of like, you know, the climate change problem.
Does that conflict with Binya's comment? He saw it as a big problem, and so he was willing to push for a big policy, even if that meant sacrificing some other priorities that might've been easier politically.
My point was this wasn't, or at least shouldn't be viewed as a "left wing policy," contra Binya. I know the right wing is perfectly happy to do jack about what is clearly a huge problem, but a lot of us who don't call themselves progressives or on the left wing care a great deal and are proud of Biden for getting this done.
But of course, the modern Democratic Party basically spans the entire range from what used to be the center-right (Obamacare is, after all, Romneycare), all the way to self-professed Socialists. We desperately need a proportional representation system so that we can do what the French did, and come together in coalition to fight fascism, but then also have distinct identities for various factions and a clear result in terms of which of those factions has more support from the public.
Except Matt has stated multiples times the Democratic Party should be more of a bottleneck on said policies. In Matt's perfect world, there would've been basically no student loan forgiveness, a likely smaller IRA, and COVID bill, and more rightward movement on various social issues. I'm old enough to remember immediately post-Dobbs that Matt was saying Democrat's should be OK w/ endorsing some abortion restrictions.
I have no actual problems with the centrist Democrat's who win and run in red states (Sinema & Manchin excepted, and even Manchin was mostly fine until the last year or so), I do have issues with centrist pundits who think we need to go even more to the right, largely due to to their own personal views.
But, people like Matt, James Carville, and others like him are prominent in the media, which is why progressives find the need to make sure candidates won't throw them under the bus, and decide not to pass said policies, because it might costs them 0.8 points with non-college educated white men in Michigan or whatever.
"0.8 points with non-college educated white men in Michigan or whatever" has been the difference between winning and losing the last 2 elections! To Donald freaking Trump. This stuff matters.
Except I disagree on the stuff that has caused those losses.
Again, Gretchen Whitmer is to the left of Biden & Hillary on everything, is a woman, and so on, and she ran over the GOP. Now, yes, part of that is state vs federal, bad GOP candidates, and so on, but it also shows that you don't need to be Joe Manchin or Krysten Sinema to win anywhere that's not a D+10 state.
Biden is a weak candidate who got crushed in primaries in 1988 and 2008. In 2020, well past his prime, he faced progressive opponents who supported toxic positions like decriminalising the border, handing him the nomination. *Then* it was decided the VP had to be a woman of colour, even though there were no outstanding candidates, passing over candidates with stronger resumes, most notably Whitmer. Seems to me like another instance of the progressive faction refusing to take responsibility for the consequences of its actions.
I think I would distinguish here between what people believe themselves and what they suggest be done to win elections. I don’t know who is personally moderate. I also have not been convinced that progressives have both a route to power and a way to govern effectively. So convince us, as opposed to talking about people’s hidden moderation. Try to persuade us on SB to join the “revolution” if you can.
The demographics of this comment section show a material and cultural reason why many of them will never be won over. Like, I'll be blunt - I want many commenters here to be materially worse-off in that I want them to have higher taxes, and I think it's culturally OK that they lose more power than they currently have.
It's fine to be opposed to that, but be honest about it. I frankly find the people who say they oppose what I'm for because they oppose it personally more honest than some paragraph about how pipefitters in rural Wisconsin would react to it.
I'll state my honest opinions on stuff as long as I find Matt's writing entertaining enough to give him $5/month and people can like it or not - when it comes to actual wide-scale change, in the short-term, it's far more likely to come from suburban women of all income levels continuing to shift left on things as the GOP gets more overt in it's nastiness than winning over centrist dudes who think all asylum seekers should be assumed are lying or are freaked out about transgender teens.
You sound like people who think the Jews are behind everything.
But you should forget about the biggest, horrible-ist bad actor in the world (this comment section) for just a section and actually think more about what real voters, including pipe-fitters in WI, want. It's not progressivism!
And if your cope is suburban moms, then your cope is pretty damn similar to your imagined enemies.
I don’t think Jesse is in any way antisemitic. His “demographic” comment refers to us SB people being complacent, upper middle class white bros who do not empathize sufficiently with poor people and people of color.
You honestly think suburban moms will lead the revolution? I agree that they will definitely support Democrats over abortion rights and dislike Trump. It is by no means clear to me that they will go to the barricades over asylum seekers and transgender teens. How many suburban moms have you met?
Sort of agree. I am an urban mom, but know enough suburban moms. On certain issues, they are a force, and transgender teens is definitely one of those because enough of them have or know transgender teens, and they are very fearful about where things are going in certain areas of the country. Fearful enough to nudge them into politics, or at least switching over to the Democratic party and voting.
I support higher taxes on myself, but we also have a deficit and we're not in a recession where we'd _need_ to do deficit spending, and interest rates aren't low where deficits are "free" so I'd support higher taxes on myself to bring that down so we have more wiggle room the next time we need it.
To the extent that middle-aged well-off white people like me lose cultural power, I do want to point out that there's no guarantee the cultural power goes to where you want it either, it might end up more on Trump's side.
This friend speaks my mind. I might just eke my way into the realm of people whose taxes would be raised, but probably not.
We simply have fundamental disagreement about how left economic policy actually plays out, and most likely a lot of disagreement about the premises, execution, and results of the progressive social program. But I have very little to lose from the likely centrified results (higher taxes, less "power" whatever that signifies??).
I simply think it's a lot of bad ideas bundled together in a weird self reinforcing, thought-negating paradigm that ends up with it's proponents self-immolating in circular autos-de-fe.
Is there a way to encourage progressives to be constructive? It seems for years now they have put faction over party or country with little pushback; which suggests action needs to be taken to change their incentive structure.
Is Biden really heroic? If Kamala wins, he'll surely be remembered that way, but there is a very possible future where she doesn't. I think then history remembers Biden as a man who sank his party's prospects with his stubbornness and pride, and then at the last possible second turned cowardly and let someone else take the fall for him.
If she loses, I think people will look back and say that the Biden team and Democrats should’ve faced reality and had an open primary. If she wins, we either get the statesman story, or a story about powerful Dems pushing him out by telling him that the entire party was about to insist that he leave.
She might lose! But I don't think anybody thinks her chances are _worse_ than his, and his current chances are still probably north of 10% so he's definitely giving something up, and I, at least, will remember this as a _good_ thing he did.
I think, win or lose, he'll be seen as having done the right thing. Your hypothetical would be true if it was just about polling numbers. In this case, his age forced the change. We'll probably memory hole his initial stubbornness because it was less than a month and happened before the convention.
The question that the American people face today, is:
Are you better off now than you were four news-cycles ago?
There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.
There are substacks where tik toks happen and there are tik toks where substacks happen.
There are decades when no one quotes Lenin, and weeks when everyone does.
"While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no midwits like me quoting Lenin."
I am the walrus
You're out of your element, Donny!
He's so unhip that when you say Dylan
He thinks you're talking about Dylan Thomas
Whoever he was
I’m so unhip I get that reference
Seems like we've had far too many of the latter in recent years.
I'm old enough to remember when there was, oh damn what was it, something about some gunman? Some picture of Trump with his fist raised? I know I'm getting older, but I think something like that happened.
“… but I think something like that happened.”
That’s so passé, Marc. Get with the times!
"I think the Biden ...was right to perceive that dissent from the left hurt Clinton. Progressives need to decide if they want to win."
I think Progressives are likely to do the right thing this time, because the expectations are different.
In 2016 many people -- not only progressives -- thought that Hillary's election was assured. Trump was treated as a joke, and his campaign had serious problems at every level. Given those expectations, leftists thought that the election came down to a choice between neoliberal Hillary and yasqueen Hillary, and they pushed for the second one.
No one treats the prospect of Trump's election as a joke this time. No one thinks that the choice is between a moderate Kamala and a maximalist Kamala. People have a clearer sense of the danger, both its magnitude and its likelihood.
There will still be some stupid leftists saying stupid things here and there. But I think most progressives will show more discipline. Fear can be salutary that way.
I think it's a real worry that the left successfully pushes Kamala to adopt several hard-line policy issues. Will you declare a climate emergency, will you go further on debt cancellation, etc. Definitely agree that she's a better option than Biden and I'm in the bag for no matter what, but she's a California Democrat and her instincts could make her more predisposed to accepting logic like, "Adopt these positions to help juice young progressive turnout!"
Fingers crossed her and her team make the right moves. Our country depends on it!
The good news is that with the lack of a true primary, there's just less opportunities for the left to do this. Ideally we skip the "pander to the left during the primary" section of the election and skip right to the "pivot to the middle."
Amen!
As a Californian who has watched her stumble over many years, the problem is that her "instincts" on catering to leftists come from her sister Maya Harris, who constantly pours terrible advice into her ear. Has Kamala learned to ignore her sister over the last 4 years? I sure hope so.
That does seem to be the case.
Isn't that the sister married to the chief legal officer of Uber? A company that did a valuable service in breaking up the stagnant old taxi medallion system by selling its ride dispatching services at a loss for a long time to undercut the competition and gain market share. But that now seems to be acting more like a company in stage 2 of the monopoly game, using the dominant position it gained by selling at a loss to jack up prices on drivers who buy its dispatching services.
I'm not sure about that, I just remember it was Maya Harris who convinced Kamala to fire her excellent chief of staff in 2020 and that her big play was to attack Joe Biden over forced bussing from the 70s. Kamala can't win if she doesn't lean on "Copmala," and her sister is going to hate that.
How is Uber able to do that? Don’t people still use Lyft? I certainly do. (And they’re the ones who even invented the ordinary-person-with-a-car model! Uber started as licensed black car drivers only until Lyft forced them to pivot.)
They have a 70%+ market share so that's a lot of power, but there's also reporting saying similar about Lyft. Of course, this info is only as good as the reporting, but assuming it's not totally inaccurate they are both taking a bigger share from drivers.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lensherman/2023/12/15/ubers-ceo-hides-driver-pay-cuts-to-boost-profits/
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/technology/why-uber-lyft-drivers-have-good-reason-to-protest-pay/article_c4b0b0a6-cd2f-11ee-9865-cff988bb2b0f.html
The VC gravy train of maying $2 to make $1 is over, they need to profit. It isn't clear to me they'll jack things up to monopoly profit level prices - but the clearing price could easily be 2x current prices. On the other hand taxis have been making a comeback and people are still price sensitive and can take alternatives, so while they can extra higher premium, there is a price where it would be much too high and they start losing volume on the margin. I think we'll see them trying to hit that point of maximization.
That makes sense. A duopoly can do this too. Especially when both were just taking a loss for years trying to force the other out, and now have to deal with a non-zero interest rate world, and realize that self-driving isn’t going to come quickly and save them.
She should talk about cancelling medical debt!
Is there such a thing as federal medical care loans? The government can’t cancel private loans.
Yes you can. The way it works is that the government buys private medical debt for pennies on the dollar and then forgives it. Several states have done this. https://www.thirdway.org/memo/states-lift-the-weight-of-medical-debt-from-american-families
But they can talk about it. \S
Do these people have any leverage at all to be able to push Harris to do this?
Did they have any leverage at all to push Biden?
Well, Biden seemed to think that he'd face challengers at some point. Harris, meanwhile, seems to have everyone relevant lining up behind her quickly.
He didn’t expect challengers in 2024 but his political moves in his presidency have often seemed aimed at appeasing that flank.
>I think Progressives are likely to do the right thing this time, because the expectations are different.<
If the Twitter feed of Yglesias antagoniste Rachel Bitecofer is anything to go by, progressives are all in for Kamala already.
https://x.com/RachelBitecofer
It's extraordinary: this woman was intensely, bitterly opposed to the effort to ease Joe Biden out (and very rude to Yglesias!), like, 24 hours ago. Now you'd be forgiven for thinking she's got "Kamala for the People" tattooed, uh, somewhere. And to be clear, it's a good sign! Fundraising is apparently off the hook, too.
That's pretty much exactly what I'd expect from a loyal Democrat who doesn't really have insider info. It's not that extraordinary - if you want to beat Trump first and foremost, you have to strongly support the nominee. When it looked like that would be Biden, you support Biden. The instant it's not Biden, you support the new nominee.
Oh, sure, I'd expect nearly all the Democratic left to come around. I'm just impressed by the turn-on-a-dime rapidity of it all, and the seemingly effortless ability to stifle emotion. There's no way all her white hot, anti "new ticket" Tweets were manufactured outrage. She was mad as hell.
On a similar note, I happened to notice George Takei of Star Trek fame—and in recent years a very prominent lefty activist—deleted ten days of similarly themed tweets, and is now all in with Kamala. And again, this is a very good sign if one's desire is to see the end of Donald Trump's political career.
The belief among a lot of pro-Biden progressive people is many of the people pushing Biden off the ticket, also wanted Harris off the ticket in a total coup of the ticket 80 million people voted for. Now that Kamala is the likely nominee, they're ready to go.
In the case of Matt, they were right.
Huh? I thought I recalled Matt writing that Harris was acceptable as an alternative to an 81 year old in no condition to campaign? Maybe not maximum enthusiasm, but not “total coup” either.
I think it’s both - Matt sees a Harris ticket as second-best to a popular-governor ticket, and would take the latter if he could get it. His earlier article was to convince people that Harris was still a better choice than Biden, such that fear of her doing badly wasn’t a good enough reason for Biden to stay in the race.
That’s very different from specifically wanting to get her off the ticket in anything coup-like.
Pfft, lots of people elected democrats opted not to make the optics awkward for Harris by naming her and thus making her a target for blowback.
It’s pretty obvious now.
Based on a group chat I’m in that went full Biden dead-ender, this was indeed what they are thought. I watched it happen in real time. Every link they sent was to Threads. Seems like that is a super left wing bubble.
But not Matt since he, you know, published a long piece making the argument that we would be better with Kamala.
The pro-Biden coalition at least for a bit was AOC, Bernie, and the Clinton's vs. Pelosi, the Pod Save America types, Ezra Klein, centrist donors, but also all the leftist streamers as well. Hasan, whose by far the most prominent left-wing streamer on Twitch got frustrated and turned off AOC's explanation via IG Live why she was with Biden live on stream.
Online at least, it seemed more generational than ideological.
Among the 20/30-somethings on Twitter who are left-wing but still pro-Democratic, they've been on the dump Biden train for a while, and obviously TikTok has been anti-Biden for a bit, while places like Threads which a bit older. On a still somewhat prominent blog comment section I comment on that's full of a lot of older left-wing Democrat's, it was almost all they're trying to coup Joe, even as some of the people who posted on the blog were for him standing down.
Say Joe should stand down was smart, saying we needed an open convention or Joe Manchin still when it was obvious nobody wanted to run against Kamala was kinda silly.
There was a vocal contingent of accounts (including NHJ) trying to make the argument against Biden stepping down by indicating that was somehow racist against Black primary voters. If their actual goal was to insure Harris got the nomination by cutting off the possibility of an open convention, maybe that was some impressive nine dimensional chess. More likely stopped clocks, etc.
They like Harris more than Shapiro, et. al. It’s really that simple. Which bodes well for unity.
I’ve been amused by how quickly everyone on the left seems to have pivoted to having very positive feelings toward the criminal justice system. “Did you hear she used to be a prosecutor?!”
I mean, as long as Kamala's campaign is basically Biden's policies without the old guy, the wider Left will be on-board. If she tries to make DLC 2: Electric Boog-A-Loo, a lot of that will dissipate, but the good news is, I've seen zero evidence of that, which is y'know, why Matt is tweeting about Joe Manchin being a not bad idea.
Joe Manchin is not a good idea, either. While it’s only the left that hates him with a white-hot passion, there’s no evidence that he sets moderates’ hearts ablaze or really gets any reaction at all from “normies.” Annoying leftists is not disqualifying, but it’s not enough either.
And, Manchin’s age: 76. Until recently I would have considered it ageist to bring that up. No longer.
Don't be ridiculous. EVERYBODY knows the only true path to a guaranteed victory is Manchin-Romney.
I’m supporting Vice President Harris because I want to win, and it’s the path thereto of least resistance.
If she’d hire a few McKinsey consultants to set up DLC redux and kick a leftist in the teeth, I’d do cartwheels of joy on my way to vote for her.
You can donate 40 bucks for the Democratic Season Pass, get a unique Kamala skin, a new dance, and access to stream, but not vote in, the brokered convention live!
(comments will be disabled.)
[NOTE: comments will be differently abled. The Democratic party regrets the ableist language in our previous post. It was extremely insensitive and the Party will continue to work with and support marginalized communities.]
Having two sons who are very into Fortnite, I feel seen!
Democratic Leadership Council. The institutional form of the "New Democrats"/"Clinton Democrats" of the '90s.
Maybe the wider Left could be on board with keeping Trump out of the White House? Thats not too much to ask I hope?
It is. If Kamala goes too moderate the Left while whine, sit it out, and throw the election to Trump.
There's really not enough leftists in swing states to throw the election to Trump. A few thousand votes on the coasts aren't going to do that.
“A few thousand votes on the coasts aren't going to do that.“
As Cambridge, MA votes, so votes … Berkeley!
It happened in 2016! That is, there are certainly enough leftists in WI, PA, and MI to do it.
I haven't seen any analysis that ascribes Clinton's loss to leftists not voting in the swing states in 2016.
I think it's less important what the progressives demand than how Kamala responds. I recommend a little Southern cooking here, give them that classic Southern expression, "oh bless your heart, honey" which translates into New Yorkese as "get the f**k outta heah."
I'd add that a lot of progressives thought 2020 would be easy, too. That was a reason so many Dems jumped in and why multiple top-tier Dems endorsed M4A.
More than 2016, which felt flukey, 2020 scared Dems into realizing that Trump/MAGA had a 46% floor and they couldn't just wing it. (The post-election fury at the "defund the police" slogans was part of this - they'd just won but they blamed social justice activists, who they had mostly supported, for shaving off points/seats.)
Also, not as bad but more likely to occur: What will hurt Harris on net is twitter leftists constantly talking about her being the first woman /AfroIndian president, which will feed into the "DEI Candidate" narrative.
Are you assuming persuadable swing state voters frequent leftist twitter bubbles?
I'm saying the damage of twitter leftist bubbles is that journalists are seeped in them and treat them as a great representation of what people in general want to read, so if Twitter talks a lot about it today, you can bet that in a week or two, NYT, WaPo, etc will be talking about it.
In my experience, it’s liberals that super care about representation. Leftists want policy. “I’m with her” vs “Medicare for All”
Ok, Twitter liberals then.
One can only hope, but I am _cautiously_ optimistic at best until I see more evidence of rationality and strategic thought.
Aging is monotonic, but it's not linear. It seems Biden's aging has accelerated....
And the White House is the mother of all aging accelerants. The photos of Abraham Lincoln 1860 vs. 1865 are harrowing—and still haunting after all these years.
Compare GWB and Obama before and after. It’s tough.
Or 2016 Obama with 2024 Obama. He has aged pretty damn well since leaving the office.
I think he's having a lot more fun now.
My wife made this point that I don't think sunk in enough in Democratic party circles as far as why Biden's age was a real issue; it's the universal part of life that literally everyone can relate to. Every single person has a grandparent, parent, aunt/uncle family friend who they witnessed decline in old age. They know the signs, they know that things can deteriorate faster than you think and know that even if you don't know the actual medical issue wrong (dementia vs Alzheimer's vs something else) they can tell grandpa/uncle Joe isn't the same person he was just a year ago. So every swing voter can say "don't tell me this isn't an issue, I watched my grandad go from easily being able to play with his grandkids to having difficulty moving from the kitchen to the living room in no time".
So now of course I expect wall to wall coverage in the Times/CNN/NBC News/WaPo about how Trump is too old and doesn't have the stamina for a campaign or to be President (see him falling asleep during his trial and the convention).
This is exactly right, Colin. We've all dealt with that with parents or dread it happening to ourselves and it was deeply uncomfortable to watch the nation's leader go through that.
Compared to that, Trump's conviction on business and election fraud charges is simply too abstract and too divorced from our lives.
But you're totally wrong about how the media will pivot to Trump's age (yes, I know you're being ironic). They will now pivot to Harris's raw youth and lack of experience and maturity.
Gonna guess it's going to be highlighting her failed primary bid. Specifically, bring up all the cringe inducing aspects; stuff she said about intersectionality or some such and claim this this as is as "racist" as anything Trump said. Or some version of "Whether it's Kamala's laugh or Trump sacking the Capitol Building, both sides have a problem with appealing to moderate voters who want normalcy" or something.
I'm being pretty cynical here, but I just listened to Greg Sargeant's interview with Rick Wilson. I'll state up front that I think Wilson and Lincoln Project is a bit grift(ish). Nonetheless, hearing him talk about how it was literally his job to "work the refs" so news was more favorable to GOP than it otherwise would be and also listening to him not that there are still reporters trying to claim Trump has a new "tone" after the failed assassination attempt even now 9 years later despite ample evidence to the contrary just wanted to make me bang my head against the wall and yes is bringing out this cynicism in me.
I assume you meant to say that Wilson was trying to keep the media from becoming (even) more favorable to the GOP, and not the opposite.
Actually no. To clarify, Wilson was saying how pre 2015 one of his roles was to "work the refs" in MSM. And how successful he was doing so.
He was trying to make the point that a lot of media coverage soft peddling Trump's authoritarian tendencies, or downplaying the dangers of a second term and trying to claim Trump's softening his town is all downstream from efforts by operatives like himself to weaponize MSM "both sides" framing so as to make GOP candidates seem more palatable than the really are.
Again, I find Wilson to be a bit grift(ish). Very convenient that he's putting forth an argument that lefty "resistance" people like myself are primed to want to hear. But also don't think he's completely lying about this either if that makes any sense.
Is he grift(ish)? I suspect that abandoning the side you've worked with for decades for an uncertain future in between them and their opponents is not the safest career move. It seems to be working out well for him (along with the Bulwark folks) but that was never a sure thing.
Harris is experienced and not young
Well, Dan, you have no future as a politics journalist.
I like being able to buy groceries
Indeed, Matt Yglesias's penurious existence as a Substack writer should be a warning to all aspiring political writers out there.
Very well said. I aged more in the first two years of parenthood than in the preceding 10. My loved ones aged more between 80 and 82 than 70 and 72. Onwards, at different paces.
“ I aged more in the first two years of parenthood than in the preceding 10….”
Well, sure: it’s hard enough being twelve even if you don’t have kids.
We all love you, DT, don’t ever change.
Yeah I cringed at that. Age is linear (your age increases by 1 every year), but aging is definitely nonlinear.
In defense of the original phrasing: the passage of time, as a relation on events, is definitely a linear order.
It’ll be interesting if he starts looking perkier now that he only has to be President.
I don’t know what that means, but I’m going to repeat it…often. Thanks!
Monotonic means it always goes up. Linear means it always goes up at the same rate.
Technically it means either always up or always down.
Oh great. I bet you're the type of person who tells people at parties that it so happens that the steering wheel and the brake are also accelerators. :-)
SwainPDX said he didn't know what monotonic meant. I figured it would be good to give the most accurate information. If somebody wanted to set me off at a party they should say that steel is iron with carbon in it.
...is that not what steel is?
“I don’t know what that means, but I’m going to repeat it…often.”
This is the exact reason that I subscribe to Substacks.
Senility is just a state of ....of ...uh ....of mind.
Bitcoin? Really?
If we're going to do product differentiation, how about something conservative-coded that is actually potentially a good idea?
How about a federal act to increase police pay levels, for instance?
Yeah— “Kamala Harris is a Cop” is good, “Kamala Harris loves pyramid schemes” is not.
Yeah, I suspect Matt was grasping at something and realized he had to meet a deadline to make sure this post was up on time because bitcoin would decidedly NOT be the topic I would pivot to in order to differentiate from Biden.
So much of the discourse last 2 years is about how much of polling and views on candidates is based "vibes" and I can't think of something with more hateable "vibes" than crypto/bitcoin. My twitter feed is basically half crypto spam at this point. And yes I know most people aren't on Twitter. But most voters do have pretty negative "vibes" about Wall Street and VC bros. Pivoting to being pro crypto would be the equivalent message "hey swing voters in PA, you know the "bro iest bros who ever broed" that you hate so much and post photos of Instagram on their dad's yacht? And also the "Section guy" (hat tip Josh Barro) that you found so hateable in school. We think it's a great idea if we empowered these people more and made sure they made another 20 billion dollars. Vote for me!"
I have a WhatsApp account to talk to friends and relatives in other countries. Most of the time when I get a message there it’s actually a crypto scammer adding me to a mega group.
I don't know how this would poll, and it's obviously not the most important issue but:
I would personally love it if the US could ditch SMS and embrace WhatsApp as our texting standard. Can the president do something about that?
When I was in college, I used to instant message with friends using a mixture of AOL instant messenger, ICQ, and Yahoo messenger, and I ended up installing a program on my computer (Trillian) that could do all three. Then for a few years I didn’t do instant messaging of any sort, until I started doing SMS somewhat late. It sounds like there’s back to a proliferation of messaging apps. I don’t really understand what combination of social dynamics and introduction of new features leads to proliferation and consolidation of this sort.
Damn, if conservatives don't love them some scams: Bitcoin, NFT's, money preachers, Trump....
Matt has written negatively about crypto at times, but I haven't really seem him write much that was pro govt regulations/bans on crypto, I assume because it's difficult to make those kinds of arguments from a specifically neoliberal perspective.
For orthodox neoliberals, if a bunch of people want to engage in purely voluntary market transactions to buy computers and electricity to perform expensive mathematical calculations that serve no objective real-world purpose, that’s their business.
Sure, from a bird’s-eye societal planner point of view, we could say they’re wasting electricity and other real resources to no actual gain, but using that point of view is uncomfortably close to government picking winners and losers, command economy, etc.
Could that be more about either reducing campaign contributions to Trump and/or getting more tech money for herself? It might not be politically meaningful but my sense is that a lot of crypto money is going to Trump now and maybe its more economic?
I suspect the bitcoin thing is to get Silicon Valley to stop going full Trump.
It would also not hurt for Kamala to come out and say something like "A tax on unearned capital gains is probably the stupidest idea I have heard in decades, and I would veto any such bill."
How about no tax for overtime?
From a short-term worker standpoint this sounds good for workers.
But I worry that this heavily incentivizes overtime, which I think is a bad thing, so long-term I don't like it.
Overtime is already baked in by employers and workers: either they will pay and you want to work, or not. I don't think there will be large marginal effects on hours worked at all, and if there are, that simply means that workers want the money, and who are you to say they shouldn't have the chance to earn it? It's one of the only ways for hourly workers to increase their take home in a meaningful way, and if the marginal productive value isn't already there for an employer to offer overtime in the first place, I don't see a situation where suddenly there's pressure to work extra hours.
I say all this as a guy who has at least 10 hours of OT (plus unlimited optional OT beyond that) baked into my schedule 9 months a year.
I would contrast that with tipping where the employer clearly has an incentive to reduce payroll in favor of tips because it's free money.
"...who are you to say they shouldn't have the chance to earn it?"
Why mandate premium overtime pay in the first place? Why get in the way of workers and employers freely negotiating whatever hours/compensation they want?
Because, for good reasons, we prefer employers having two 40hr/wk workers rather than one 80hr/wk worker. We’ve put a thumb on the scale to push them to opt for more workers working fewer hours. I don’t think it makes sense to then turn around and use the tax code to incentivize overtime work.
But... We already incentivize overtime work by offering a higher wage to the worker. Workers either refuse OT or they want it badly, there's not much in between, and employers generally avoid it for all kinds of reasons. I don't think my proposal shifts that dynamic except that the worker gets more money for work they are likely already doing.
The higher wage to the worker does the work, not the tax burden on the worker. You relieve the tax burden on the worker without relieving the wage burden on the employer.
First, mandating premium pay for overtime does not incentivize the use of overtime, it disincentivizes it. As an extreme example, suppose we mandated that hours worked over 40/wk be paid at 10x normal compensation. Well, at that point it should be obvious that no employer would ever agree to have a worker work more than 40 hours, right?
And I do believe that if you allow compensation through two channels, and one channel is taxed and the other is not, you should expect to see more compensation moved to the untaxed channel, by hook or by crook.
OT currently pays 1.5x. If you eliminate the tax it now pays 1.7x? (ish?)
You yourself have "unlimited optional OT" - mightn't you work more if you're earning 1.7x instead of 1.5x at no additional cost to your employer(beyond the normal OT stuff)?
How would that not incentivize you, the worker to work more hours?
"Shouldn't have the chance to earn it" - Total productivity (hours worked * productivity) can actually go DOWN with enough OT (not just marginal productivity, but TOTAL). I'd rather not encourage it. The fact that the employer has to pay 1.5x helps discourage it somewhat, but if we're just giving "free" money to the employee?
(I worked one job with heavy OT and I did in fact make a lot of money - I got a net pay cut when I switched to a non-OT position even though the hourly for the first 40 was much better, I definitely was ok throwing extra hours for more pay at that time in my life)
Well, obviously if I earn more per hour I can work less hours and make the same money, and this effect is stronger if people are already working OT. If someone is comfortable at 40, do you think a slight bump is enough to push them into working an unhealthy amount?
And OT is usually taxed at a higher withholding rate because to the accountants it appears to push your earnings towards the next bracket. I think the math is more like an extra .25 to .3, but I'm open to being wrong about that.
If total productivity goes down, then that seems like a natural limiter on the deleterious effects you are worried about?
Except people always seem unaware that total productivity goes down, despite the numerous studies on it.
Everyone agrees marginal productivity drops(that's obvious) but in my own industry (video games), crunch (unpaid OT!, since we made enough/full-time to be 'exempt') is always reported/framed in terms of "they did this terrible thing to employees in order to get the game out on time" but never "they did this terrible thing to employees and it went on long enough that the game was actually later/worse than it would have been"
I've seen so much of that that I'm _very_ averse to anything which encourages OT.
Some game companies have policies that explicitly limit the amount of "comp time" you'll get for working OT and I advise people to think of it as "do not work more than this - that's their way of telling you not to do more than that" (without literally forcing you to go home if an extra hour tonight really _will_ be worth it because you're fixing a key bottleneck for everyone else when they start work in the morning)
I wonder how “make tips illegal and make employers actually pay a decent salary” would go over instead, as populist rhetoric goes?
I mean, if you just wanted to pander to Matt say "California style red tape on homebuilding".
The whole “the prosecutor versus the felon” framing that we’ve been hearing a lot over the past few weeks makes me think that we’re going to get at least some “Kamala Harris is a Cop” (complimentary)-type messaging in this campaign, which makes me somewhat optimistic.
The ads are already running. And this one's a banger:
https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1814799243401699812
This one is from her 2020 primary campaign, but no reason she can’t pretty simply rinse-and-repeat.
The 2 biggest things I feel are missing/wrong in that add as a general election
1) Needs updating for his additional crimes (convicted felon!)
2) "in every possible way the anti-trump" is great in a Democratic primary, but in the general the swing voters have some things they _do_like about Trump, so try not to make them think of those things.
But overall, heck yeah.
10/10, that ad is great. It's so good I might watch it for fun after the election
But I have no idea how Harris will counter stuff like this: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1815193874366640591
She's is at a table, seemingly running a meeting, in a mask. She opens by saying "I am Kamala Harris, my pronouns are she and her, and I am a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit." Several replies point out that she's talking to a group of blind people, which reduces it's awkward weirdness by .0021%.
It reduces the awkward weirdness by 100%. It’s extremely weird to describe your location and appearance to someone that’s not blind. It’s not weird at all to do that for blind people.
This is like attacking her for doing weird hand motions while she’s speaking to deaf people.
No, as I said to Sam, this is like attacking her for signing to a deaf person about the quality of her voice. "I am Kamala Harris, my pronouns are she and her, and I am a soprano."
When was the last time you listened to a reporter on the radio and said "I wish I knew what this reporter's pronouns were" or "I wish I knew what that person was wearing"?
I don't claim to understand why anyone would want it but this is a thing blind activists have asked people to do.
It's arguably tedious and weird for a general audience but when you're speaking to a group of disability activists including blind people I don't understand why anyone would find it objectionable.
Yeah, I think it's more tedious and weird than objectionable.
Part of what's going on in the video is that Harris is performing highly-legible acts of respect and deference in order to cultivate a political constituency. If it were a different group, she might bow, shake hands, or lavish praise on one of their heroes.
But it has a normative component too. It promotes the idea that people should defer to small groups of activists who purport to represent the population that shares the relevant identity characteristic, instead of engaging in the messy and sometimes difficult process of negotiating individually across boundaries and differences with one another. That's the part likely to put off swing voters: the implication that people should take etiquette lessons from passionate, partisan advocates, whose customs and demands seem reasonable at first glance, but unfamiliar, and don't always survive scrutiny.
Sometimes that's justified, but other times it turns out to be "Latinx". Briefly describing one's appearance before speaking is not obviously a net positive contribution to a meeting or presentation: I expect a lot of people would find it a useless distraction and I'm not convinced that majorities of blind people prefer it. I'm willing to listen, but I don't think Democratic politicians trying to make inroads with activists have an especially good track record with this sort of thing.
Why is that not a totally appropriate thing to do when introducing yourself to people who can't see?
When you introduce yourself to a deaf person, do you tell them "I'm a tenor"? Is that even a good idea?
It seems categorically different to give these folks--some of whom likely used to see--a casual description of something basic like the color of an outfit vs a technical description of one's singing vocal range. Also, if people are really going to be persuaded by random clips of candidates saying weird shit, then no one is voting for Trump. The average voter will pay attention to ads, speeches, and debate performance, supplemented by their priors about the two parties. It's a toss-up.
The deaf community and the blind community on average have very different ways of understanding their disabilities. Most of the deaf community considers ALS a perfectly good communication tool and language. They wish it were more widely used so they could be more easily accomodated but they don't think that they are missing anything by not knowing someone's vocal range.
The blind community does not have that same posture and do like to be provided with all the information that a sighted person would have. That can include what the person is wearing or a description of any graphics being shown.
I work with many people with hearing and vision impairments. There is diversity of opinion in each as there is in any large group of individuals. But I am not aware of any deaf person who has been interested in knowing my vocal range. I have often been asked by someone with vision impairment to describe in detail what they are not seeing in a meeting.
I really wish that we as a society would stop vilifying folks communicating with others in the way that they wish to be communicated with. It is fine if it seems weird to someone else but it is just basic respect. What Kamala Harris is demostrating there is just a good cultural awareness and respect for what has been most consistently requested by folks who are blind.
I regret choosing that example, "I'm a tenor". I tried to think of something punchy, and I didn't think people would get so monomaniacally fixated on it that they'd miss the point. Substitute whatever you like: "I've got a Southern accent", "My voice is gravelly and rasps because I smoked for fifty years", whatever. The idea is that "I'm wearing a blue dress" isn't in even close to offering ALS "subtitles" in a setting like that. The only actual argument I've heard in favor of the practice is that it gives visually impaired participants something to hold on to or distinguish the speaker. Therefore, a deaf person might benefit in the same way from the speaker characterizing their voice.
Alternately, turn it around: the equivalent of an ALS interpreter would be to have someone providing running commentary. "Now she's frowning. She just threw her head back. She can't look the guy in the face." That would provide legitimate contextual information relevant to the proceedings (though admittedly, it would be overwhelming).
It sounds like your opinion is rooted in direct experience, and I have so many questions.
Of the people with visual impairments that you've interacted with, what percentage have expressed a preference for the specific practice of speakers briefly describing themselves?
Are you confident that the people you've interacted with are representative of the broader population (of people with visual impairments)?
What overall proportion of that population appreciate the practice, would you estimate?
Do you think there's a share of the population that's actually annoyed by the practice? What about cranky ADHD blind lady, who doesn't want a bunch of extraneous information? What about the participants that just want the meeting to be over as soon as possible so they can get back to work?
I outlined my deeper objections elsewhere in the thread (https://www.slowboring.com/p/17-thoughts-on-the-transformation/comment/62951168), and I'll try to summarize them here. Pre-emptive, presumptive, one-size-fits-all practices like this that run roughshod over individuals are usually irritating at two levels. First, at the gut level: opportunistic politicians frequently adopt synthetic rituals because activists demand them, and those rituals are often selected for their awkwardness and difference, because a politician willing to pay that cost is more valuable that one willing to do something self-evidently reasonable. Second, at a philosophical level. It conceives of the social world as a universe in which you are obliged to pay attention to self-appointed representatives of every demographic group, in order to keep up on the etiquette and manners required for interactions. The contrasting worldview involves negotiating with individuals and respecting their idiosyncracies.
It is not clear to me where this particular practice falls. I'll gladly respect any person's desire for this. If it turns out the custom has wide support and little opposition, I'll even make it a default. But the environment in which it arose is suspect: among the extremely empathetic, yes, but also political figures cultivating alliances and moral exhibitionists (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/against-land-acknowledgements-native-american/620820/).
“So, Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So, basically, that’s wrong, and it goes against everything that we stand for.”
In the way that politicians normally do— by running ads, doing media appearances, and generating “earned” coverage in ways that allow them to advance preferred narratives. Stuff like this clip is likely to be at most a very small fraction of what voters see and hear from Harris. Biden’s candidacy was doomed precisely because he couldn’t do that.
(I’m much more worried about Harris adopting an ineffective messaging strategy, in part because her 2020 campaign miscalibrated badly and alienated both progressives and moderates at the same time.)
At least she didn’t say “I’m a bi-racial Black and Indian American woman wearing a blue suit”? Honestly if I’m her I ignore it and pretend it never happened. It was 2020, brain worms were going around faster than Covid.
>But I have no idea how Harris will counter stuff like this:<
Agreed. She should quit the race now and endorse Joe Manchin.
This whips. (And seems reasonably calibrated to appeal to a median-ish voter.)
Dang! That there ad is the blueprint for an entire campaign.
I love it!!!
It's a good one, isn't it?
I knew someone would beat me to this. I've already used the "prosecutor vs felon" line with some people I know who are Kamala skeptics with effectiveness. And I say this as someone who does find merit in the "Kamala is a cop" argument used negatively.
Regarding item 2: Are you saying you have zero concerns about Biden's cognitive decline and how it affects his day-to-day job as President? It's not like being President is easy -- look back at how previous Presidents have aged even before they ran for reelection.
Read the Hur Report¹ again, where he describes the President as a "sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory". I think he should step down and that would be helpful to Kamala Harris. Seeing someone in the job is a great way to overcome concerns. She wouldn't have to PROMISE to moderate as you suggest -- she could actually implement policies that show her moderation.
¹ What a missed opportunity this was back in February to have this report. A healthier politics would have reacted to this with sober and clear analysis rather than branding it as a smear job.
For those in this comment section, here were the comments back in February about the Hur Report. Some commenters should reflect on their reactions back then with some humility: https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/we-need-to-see-more-joe-biden?r=gvwl&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=49441888
A significant part of why people didn’t take Hur seriously is that he didn’t have compelling evidence for his claim of Biden’s cognitive decline. Go back and read the transcript for Hur’s interview with Biden in October 2023 for the report. Biden comes across pretty normal.
Here’s an interview Biden did with ProPublica the same week: https://www.propublica.org/article/biden-interview-unedited-september-2023 Biden gives a very solid performance that he no longer seems to be capable of doing.
There’s a large “boy who cried wolf” aspect to Biden’s decline. A significant number of people have been saying that Biden was incapable of being president since 2019, which is clearly false, but that really damaged everyone’s credibility on the issue.
I mentioned it before in another comment but see that infamous Fox News clip where they cropped out the part of the video showing Biden walking over to greet a parachuter and made it seem like he was wondering off. Like having an absurdly doctored video only hurt their argument that Biden was too old.
Also, like good bajallioneeth piece of evidence that Fox is a propaganda arm first and news second. Like you had a very real story and instead it was more important to cater to the very worst impulses of your hardcore audience.
Before he made the fateful decision to choose money and influence over being a real reporter Tucker was...a real reporter. And he made that famous (in political circles) quip that there needed to be a conservative version of New York Times...and got booed for it (probably the start of his descent into actual Fascism). This was (I think) the original intent of The Daily Caller; an attempt at being a real investigative news org that focused on left or left of center malfeasance. And it failed (At least in it original intention). In retrospect a bit of a "canary in the coal" mine as far as the right's increasingly anti-intellectual turn.
If there isn't compelling evidence in the interview, then why is the Biden administration fighting so hard to avoid releasing the recordings?
Or check out this from the WSJ today:
"Hur had a unique vantage point. Outside of Biden’s core staff and family, he was the only person to the public’s knowledge who had spent such an extended period interviewing the president, spending five hours over two days in October asking Biden detailed questions."
That's pretty wild that Hur was the only person to spend that kind of time with Biden outside his core staff and family. If he were having more significant issues, would the people needed to invoke the 25th amendment even be around him enough to know?
How often does a president spend five hours over two days with anyone who is not core staff or family? That is by no means "pretty wild". Presidents are pretty busy people and not many people outside of core staff get much face time with them.
You can assert one of two things:
Either Hur got access to him that was way more than normal and he noticed things that others didn't. Or you can say that Hur clearly didn't spend enough time with him to have valid concerns raised. But I don't see how people can make the claim that Hur didn't spend enough time with Biden to see something, but also that he spent way more time with him than almost anyone else did.
*to be clear, I'm not saying you're making that argument, but its one I've heard often.
Beyond that, if its true that his cabinet or the VP doesn't spend much time with the president, it reinforces my last question which is how effective can the 25th amendment be if the people responsible for enforcing it don't spend any time with the president? The reality is that the reporting suggests that Biden was unusually cloistered for a president.
Regardless of what Hur saw directly, heard about, etc. in relation to Biden’s mental capacity, the contents of his report and the interview transcript did not have compelling evidence to back up his claim that Biden had “diminished faculties in advancing age”. If you make an explosive claim and can’t provide strong evidence to back it up, many people are not going to believe you, regardless if your claim is true!
On top of that, Hur wrote “Biden would likely present himself to a jury ... as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Based on Biden’s own stubbornness and self-perception, I am very skeptical that he would offer that defense. Offering inflammatory speculation like that is obviously going to alienate Democrats. Not a smart choice from Hur if he wanted to be taken seriously on his claims about Biden’s capacity.
I would have a lot more faith that the transcripts don't contain that if the Biden administration would release the recordings. They thought they would be so damaging that they are going to court to stop Congress from getting access to it. I want to emphasize just how extreme that is: the president is going to court to stop audio records from being given to a house impeachment panel when they have already releases the transcript. You can argue, as they do, that since the transcript has been released there is no need for the audio. But if they have released the transcript, why should the president care about the audio being released? It's very clearly because they thought it would so damaging that even though they don't have a legal leg to stand on, they are still fighting it to drag it out past the election.
As for Biden being to stubborn to use his age as a defense, I don't buy that either. Plenty of proud people do all kinds of things to avoid being convicted of a crime. If you're a prosecutor, you can't assume the defendant won't take advantage of something that is very obvious. And if you think that Hur should not have included that, then the alternative was for him to recommend prosecution, which would have been better right?
1) Harris becoming President for the first time while also becoming the nominee for the first time in the home stretch of a campaign would also be a suboptimal governance outcome.
2) There is no realistic way of forcing Biden to step down and effort expended pursuing that is better placed trying to defeat Trump IMO.
He is just obviously too frail and cognitively impaired to serve as POTUS right now. Now, it may be electorally optimal for Democrats to ignore that reality. But I thought Matt had been promoting NOT telling helpful lies to the public, especially when they are transparent lies. Undermines voter confidence.
It is not at all obvious. And, you, unless you happen to work in his cabinet are obviously not in a position to be certain of this. It may or may not be true but it is silly to pretend like _you_ know.
Biden cannot consistently present coherent thoughts on live television. His gait, posture, and facial expressions all show us that he is frail and declining with diminished attention. The evidence of my eyes and ears tells me he is incapable of taking that 3am phone call if there's a world crisis!
Presenting coherent thoughts on television is an important part of running for president. It is a minor part of being president.
The underlying capacity to **formulate and communicate coherent thoughts** applies to both!
There’s the nontrivial possibility that Biden has a severe medical event or dies in the next few months, which would make that unavoidable.
I don’t think Biden has cognitive decline. It is energy. He doesn’t have the energy to go full tilt and I doubt most his age are able to have the energy to lead a country.
I mean I sound weird when I am tired and my friends usually find me the most sharp and articulate one in the group.
All 81 year olds have cognitive decline. It’s just a question of how much. Everybody wants to tapdance around this.
I don't know that Biden does or does not, which seems a problem. He doesn't get in front of the public much and when he does, it's not great even with a bunch of support - teleprompters everywhere.
Been saying that his sleep apnea is the variable here. The "constant" is otherwise normal mental and physical changes associated with aging (which isn't cognitive decline in the "dementia" sense that people insinuate).
Once he's out of office, I wouldn't be surprised if he starts looking more refreshed. If he had some form of dementia, then we wouldn't necessarily expect improvement.
Right - low energy can often be easy to detect in people you know well. Determining degrees of cognitive decline requires medical/psychological/neurological assessment.
This is why I keep calling out ageism - older people are often not what they appear—like any other group prone to be stereotyped, you have to actually interact with & get to know people as individuals.
It’ll be interesting to see what “retired” Biden is like in a few months.
Two things can be true. Left of center people like myself were possibly too dismissive of the Hur report and the Hur report put its thumb on the scale to make Biden seem more doddering than he really is.
To give maybe a clearer example of what I'm getting at is that Fox News clip of Biden supposedly wondering off when in fact just out of frame was a parachute jumper he was walking over to greet. It's both seems true that Biden has declined physically and mentally just in the past 6-12 months and that Fox was being extraordinarily duplicitous and making it seem like Biden was exhibiting signs of truly late stage dementia as opposed to maybe troubling initial signs of it.
People were dismissive of the Hur report partly because the Biden team and much of the Democratic leadership were lying to us about his condition.
The speed of the change from "he's fine" to "he must step aside" is proof that they all knew well before the debate. It makes me angry the way they lied to us.
Every indication is that, Biden was working closely with a very tight circle of advisors and didn't spend a ton of time outside of that. I don't think many people had first hand experience of his performance outside of that group. I'm willing to believe the debate was confirmation for people who previously only had a guess as to his true condition.
Which “they” are you talking about that both pivoted quickly and had any way of knowing before the debate? The only people who would likely have been in any position to know never pivoted.
I don't believe the stories that Biden has been hermetically sealed off from members of his staff, Democratic leaders in Congress, donors, media figures (Joe Scarborough comes to mind) and Cabinet officials, such that they all thought he was just fine up until the debate night.
The staff never pivoted. The leaders in Congress only pivoted by reading between the lines. Donors pivoted big time, but I think they were never to be trusted, and also may never have been in on things. I don’t know about Joe Scarborough.
I find it inconceivable that Garland is *so* incompetent he would appoint a Trump hatchet man for the investigation. That's always been the most damning part of the Hur investigation. He was vetted and selected by Garland.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/01/12/special-counsel-biden-classified-documents-00077734
"the Hur report put its thumb on the scale to make Biden seem more doddering than he really is"
How do you know this?
I don't that its not true, but I don't know that it is true either. Given what happened, unless you have really strong evidence of that Hur was trying to put his thumb on the scale, it seems more likely that he was documenting what he observed. If you have that evidence, can you share it with the rest of us? Otherwise it comes across as pure partisan denial of which there has been way to much about regarding Biden's age.
The entire reason for the report was to determine whether to charge Biden with willfully retaining documents and specifically determine whether there was enough evidence to charge Biden. It wasn't until the very end of the report that he actually got into whether there was evidence to actually charge. The first part of the report seemed entirely devoted to documenting Biden misspeaking or lapses in memory. https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4463408-hur-overstepped-mandate-with-gratuitous-biden-slams-say-ex-doj-dems/
Now to your point, the "critics" in this case are all former Democratic administration officials. Of course they are going to be critical of a report that makes Biden look bad. And the thing that too many left of center of people didn't acknowledge probably enough is that Hur likely didn't lie (or at least totally make up) very real lapses in memory and signs of cognitive decline. But the critics have a point. This is supposed to be a report that documents whether there is a sufficient evidence to charge the President. Going into painstaking detail as to his cognitive missteps is yes "gratuitous" and yes putting your thumb on the scale.
This isn't true, though. Part of his analysis requires him to determine if a crime was committed -- it was -- and also if he believes a prosecution would be successful. The part about how a jury would see him goes directly to the likelihood of a conviction.
Listen to more here: https://thedispatch.com/podcast/advisoryopinions/ignore-the-gaslighters-on-the-hur-report/
I'll echo what John from FL said. The report said that a crime was committed, but that a prosecution would be unsuccessful. Then it laid out why a prosecution would be unsuccessful.
There was no winning with this report - if he had simply left it as "prosecution would be unsuccessful so we're resolving this" it would have been called a coverup.
My question to you is this -
If you were Hur's shoes where you interview the president about a criminal matter and you see things that gravely concern you about his capacity to the extent that you think a jury wouldn't find him guilty because of that. Would you stay quiet about it, or would you announce it to the public? Would you be satisfied if someone did that and it was Donald Trump instead of Biden? Or twist it a bit more - if you are investigating Trump and find strong evidence that he committed a crime with Epstein, but that evidence was compromised and can't be used, or that the statute of limitations has clearly expired - would you report that out, or would you consider it outside the bounds of your investigation and so not report it even though its in the clear public interest to make it public?
My strong sense at this point is Hur pulled his punches in describing Biden. The Pod Save America crew describe seeing Biden in person on two occasions as being completely lost and incoherent. Like he didn't know where he was lost and incoherent.
Hur did a Comey
I think the thing to pay attention to now is how they deploy Biden on the campaign trail. If he gives interviews where he bungles names, trails off and calls Harris “VP Trump”, he risks dragging her down.
If he’s nowhere to be found the Trump campaign will say he’s incapacitated. Really any candidate will have to thread this needle with Biden, but especially Harris.
More slip ups are (probably) needed before Republican’s 25th amendment attacks can damage Harris, but the “Biden’s decline is a cover up” narrative is out there and it will continue to be a liability as long as he remains President.
“He needs all his focus to run the country” works! Would probably keep him from giving a long speech at the convention, I guess.
I think what Biden is demostrating is that with the very slight cognitive decline that comes with aging, Biden is having some difficulty in fluidly vocalizing his thoughts. That isn't surprising given his history with a speech impediment. I have occassional ephasia as a result of my dsylexia when I am stressed. I suspect that will be worse when I am Biden's age. But there isn't any sign that he doesn't understand what is going on or can't make good choices. Stumbling over your words is bad as a candidate but less impactful as a president.
A lot of policy wonks get this part wrong. A President is not some symbolic head like the King/Queen of England whose job is to smile and wave at the peasants. While you may have a team of people working for you and executing different roles, you still have an obligation to go out and defend their work and policies successfully. Why would I give credit to someone for signing some bill passed by the Congress if the outcomes and the execution is lacking?
100% agree. If he resigned now she still has time to go around looking presidential. Then the question of "can a black woman do this job" is already answered and she goes into the election with the power of incumbency.
One thought is that the political left in the US has been pushing itself into irrelevancy for a while. The influence and cache they had over discourse has greatly atrophied since 2016 and 2020. They cannot really influence narratives like they used too.
It really is night and day from 4 years ago. My friends no longer walk on egg shells. People will admit that crime is bad and stuff.
The culture that the left created, and the media’s 101 self-inflicted wounds, are a big part of why Trump is still competitive. More Democrats/people on the left should’ve stepped up and offered wisdom, but there was a real climate of fear. Strange, unfortunate time.
“You are bigot because you don’t instantly accept this radical and strange position you just learned about! Fealty now or you are a fascist!”
I am glad that culture is dying.
Yeah, it's a bit remarkable how much lower the volume from the left has been. Not sure if that is because they realized their brand was poison or just got tired or what. Or maybe it's just harder to act like you are being persecuted when it's your side in the oval office.
Leftist here. Hello. I was very left-loud during BBB/IRA. I felt very sad about the failure on CTC, child care, and pre-K, but otherwise pleasantly surprised by the legislative achievements. Once the Republicans took the house, legislation was over. Now, I’m loud but the focus is defensive; we need to beat Trump, so I sound mostly like the rest of the Democratic coalition. I would have loved to primary Biden if possible, but it would have lost and been a disaster for a) the left’s reputation in Dem coalition and b) chance of beating Trump this year. AOC/Bernie have done a great job of balancing a) wielding influence, b) maintaining influence, and c) being responsible to important goals larger than factional struggle.
Obviously some leftists disagree and think I’m complicit in genocide, co-opted, etc., but I honestly think that the left you describe as lower-volume is that way out of a mix of being pleased by parts of the last 4 years and a responsible approach to the needs of the moment.
Thank you for your pragmatism. If winning isn't your first priority, it doesn't matter what the second is. Hopefully there are lots of pragmatic leftists like you out there. Once Trump is gone feel free to say whatever you want at any volume.
At the same time, I’m interested to hear what part of the left brand you see as poisonous.
Open borders (a position I believe in almost as strongly as other core values like freedom of speech, btw) is clearly bad politics.
But i don’t believe there’s clear evidence of Bernie-leftism being poisonous. Maybe Bernie would gave beat Trump in 2020, maybe he wouldn’t have, but the fact that a politics so far from 40+ years of the mainstream seems like a potential national winner suggests to me that economic leftism is not politically poisonous.
It's hard to say about Bernie leftism, his principles were all about economics. He wants to limit immigration to keep wages high and never got into the race stuff, so maybe his brand is fine (although he's certainly not my cup of tea). The poisonous part was the race and gender politics. Combined with the border that's what's really killing the party with voters right now and the biggest group they are losing ground with is Hispanics.
I've been surprised by the number of people rushing to endorse Kamala today without a contest.
A year go, if I had described a Trump vs Kamala contest, every left-leaning person I know would moan, curse, or cry.
They had little confidence she could win.
If you had asked Trump around the same time who he wanted to compete again, pretty sure he would have said: Kamala.
Since then, Biden's age caught up with him, and he imploded during the debate. But after dropping out, we're now in the same terrible spot we dreaded a year ago.
Why is everyone so happy?
I agree we're in a better spot after Joe's departure, but it still feels like a very bad spot, and people aren't realizing it because we're one step better than we were 2 days ago.
Did Kamala improve as a candidate since the 2020 Democratic primaries, when she dropped out before 15 other candidates, the day after after Steve Bullock (who is that?)
Too many people seem fully ready to back a candidate that couldn't crack the top 15 in the Democratic primary.
Everyone should just cool it and look at the talent out there.
The problem IMO isn’t so much the people “rushing to endorse” as the fact that none of the strong alternatives indicated a desire to run.
Whitmer, Shapiro, etc are making the calculation that it’s better to take a dive and run for 2028. I think it’s a mistake, but it’s given Harris-skeptics nobody to rally around.
I think "taking a dive" is an ungenerous reading of the situation. Consider that at this point in the cycle, a typical governor running for president has been taking a crash course in foreign policy for over a year, been getting security briefings from the current administration since they sewed up the nomination, and has a built a team of trusted advisors mixed in with members of the party than have been playing at the federal level for decades. And still governors who ascend to the presidency seem to step on a lot more rakes than other presidents. Whitmer, Shapiro, et al don't have that policy support system, and probably don't think they can spin something up to get prepared in time. Winning the election is critical, but it's also important to govern well once you do.
There's probably something interesting to be written about how the old saw "Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line," has been completely flipped since Trump arrived on the scene, though.
I agree, feels like it’s just so late in the game that the safest bet just seems like everyone rallying around Kamala and hoping her team are all Slow Boring subscribers.
I previously thought that the odds of an open convention would be a bit higher than most did, probably because I found Ezra's argument for them compelling. But once I saw everyone line up behind Harris, I realized that I should have known that it would be unlikely for the same reason Biden faced only token primary challengers: there's a bit of an inverse collective action problem that if one person takes that chance, and it fails, they could risk being a pariah in their own party.
She's the obvious Schelling point. If she didn't quickly gain overwhelming support, that's a clear signal that something is gravely wrong.
I’ve been trying to imagine what framing someone would need to use. Like Buttigieg coming forward and saying, “I am a faithful servant of the Biden-Harris administration and would be happy to support Harris as the nominee. But I am also willing to humbly put my name forward, should the delegates decide that another option is needed.”
It would be good for someone to do that in case of another moment that looks like the debate. But I don’t think a governor can while still supporting their constituents.
It’s a hard needle to imagine threading.
Today's Democrats are the risk-adverse party. So rushing to endorse the VP who has a 50% chance of beating Trump is better than waiting to see a bunch of Democrats launch last minute campaigns and beat up on each other for a month, then end up with a possibly wounded and inexperienced candidate to go up against the Orange Menace.
Seems like a no brainer.
Do we know they don’t want to do it, or is it posturing?
Did anyone think that Gavin would really never take on Biden, as he said, or was he just waiting for a large enough crowd to beg him?
Shapiro is one of the frontrunners for VP so I think he is being sincere. If he joins the ticket and they win he has the inside track on running for the big job in 4-8 years; if they lose he can win reelection in 2026 and run in 2028 as planned.
I think this is exactly right. I think at this point in the race, Trump is likely to win no matter what, but the Democratic VP gets a good profile-building opportunity over the next 4 months to make sure they can crush Vance in 28.
Wouldn't be so confident in Trump's odds at this point. His campaign has been setting this thing up as a referendum on age and now he'll have to sleep in the bed he made
I thought you were going to say “wouldn’t be so confident it isn’t Trump again in 28”
Maybe. Odds are definitely higher now that Biden has stepped down. If I was Whitmer or Shapiro and I had privately been talking with Biden ahead of time, I still would have declined to be the presidential nominee, and accepted the VP nomination myself.
At this point, the sheer unlikelihood of prevailing against Kamala Harris has to be playing a major role. Unless the VP stumbles badly in the very near future, it's hard to see what a Newsom or Beshear or Pritzker would gain from almost certain defeat.
On top of which -- and I say this as someone who is very cognizant of the points made in the top level comment -- I think this may actually be an instance in which a necessarily heavily bruising primary might actually be bad for overall party enthusiasm. Normally I'm skeptical of that kind of argumentation -- primaries are *supposed* to be bruising -- but I think this might be a special case where any kind of credible run at the current VP (and rebuttals thereto) would necessarily have to be especially ugly, and we only have so many news cycles left before the election. Given that Harris is so heavily favored to win, the intra-factional contest seems like it's likely to be more acutely negative-sum than usual without the attendant tradeoffs (i.e., selecting a candidate from a wide field to cater to voters and several months to let gaffe-memories fade) that would justify it.
Ed.: Ninja'd by Guy downthread.
Good point. Primaries these days are typically wrapped up by early March or so. The most prominent recent examples of primaries that went very late both involved Hillary Clinton (2008, 2016). The first of these didn't harm the Democratic nominee—conditions were simply overwhelmingly favorable that year for an Obama win.
But it's hard to deny that in 2016, the highly vituperative Democratic primary didn't hurt the ticket. It was nasty—and hard feelings helped fuel defections to third parties that cycle—with disastrous results.
And again, if Harris is facing robust, substantive competition over the next few weeks from Democratic rivals, the start of her general election campaign will effectively be delayed until almost Labor Day. That seems very risky.
I mean ... since Ezra's article seemed to really kick think whole thing off, I'm just going to be sympathetic to his point that a true contested convention would *dominate* the news cycles with Dem issues. That's not nothing and I think the winner emerges way more powerful. A soft baton pass to Harris feels like the worst of all outcomes.
I don't think all news is good news here. There'd be a ton of news cycles but it would be "X isn't able to unite the party" or "Y has too many defects to be the obvious nominee." I think you have a lot of bad outcomes (the civil war gets won only barely) and the only better outcome (some amazing candidate, significantly better than Harris, swoops in and somehow unites everyone and isn't scathed by fighting) is pretty unlikely.
By endorsing Harris, I think Biden's taken Ezra's version of an open convention off the table.
Yes, Democrats already burned up whatever “get your shit together” allowance we had, and then some. We don’t have time for chaos. It’s one shot left here.
Personally I'm not so quick to think that Whitmer or Shapiro would be a better candidate. They have never actually ran for president before so they have very little name recognition and there's not much time before the election to explain themselves to voters. In my mind it's actually a much bigger risk than Harris, who has already run a campaign, even if that campaign didn't go the distance. Biden also ran a campaign that didn't go the distance, and then ran another one that did.
I actually think Klobuchar would be the safest bet this cycle, but given that most Harris-skeptical types are calling for Whitmer, Shapiro, or Newsome (ugh), there's just no way to consolidate around any other candidate. Harris gets it by default. We could do worse.
All those willing to take a dive and wait for 2028 better know their brands will take a hit for the cowardice.
No, they won't. Voters don't even know who they are right now.
Right. Most voters are not that plugged into the rising stars of either party, unless they happen to live in the state where that particular rising star currently works. The Democrats do not need a month or so hitting each other over the head with hammers before the election. If Nikki Haley can stump for Trump without the media questioning it, the Democrats do not owe anyone an explanation for lining up behind their candidate, especially after everyone in the media and half the party spent the past month or so trying to badger Biden off the ticket. This was the most obvious outcome, if all those people got what they wanted. They got what they wanted. And given the speed with which the endorsements came in from almost all possible alternatives, I would say this was in the works for a while, and would not be surprised if Biden himself had not spent some time greasing those particular wheels. Now if they can pick a VP option that is more interesting than Tim Kaine, they will mostly stick the landing.
It would have been better to have had a proper primaries in their proper time. But it's now time for the candidate to focus on the general elections, adopt a moderate posture, and fight for swing voters. An internal competition would force Harris (and other competitors) to focus on intra-party concerns and adopt a liberal posture that is close to where the party delegates are. In all likelihood, Harris would win anyway, but would be in a substantially weaker position to win the general elections.
Letting the nomination simply fall to Harris as the default without even an appearance of a process is the worst thing they can do to appeal to swing voters.
I get this idea, but I think this is not true. Swing voters are swing 'cuz they don't pay attention. They'll go by vibe, not by an analysis of process.
Exactly: We shouldn't conflate "Shit that Ross Douthat might not like" with "Shit that people whose favorite passtime is watching Dancing with the Stars might not like."
Yep, this seems right to me. My in-laws aren't exactly swing voters (they were lifelong Republicans until Trump, now they seem pretty committed to the Democrats), but to them it's just natural that if the nominee isn't Biden, it should be Harris. I don't think they really know who the serious contenders would be if it wasn't Harris. And my MIL loves Dancing with the Stars.
"but to them it's just natural that if the nominee isn't Biden, it should be Harris"
Exactly. Most people hated the choice between Trump and Biden, and they will now assume the nominee is going to be Kamala. They will watch a debate here, a speech there, and then decide whether they find Kamala more appealing than Trump. It would be better for the country if she were in fact charismatic and warm and well-spoken, but maybe she'll pull it off anyway.
I can't entirely take credit for this idea as I saw it on reddit last night, but basically, if you asked a random man on the street what is supposed to happen now, he'd probably answer "The VP takes over". The average person has no strong normative feelings about how the parties pick their nominees.
The "vibe" on Kamala though is that she's there because of the kind of demographic box checking that swing voters hate. She has to make a plausible showing at being the strongest candidate. Riding with her on "vibes" is absolutely a recipe for losing.
She was elected by 81 million Americans. If Americans were sufficiently disdainful of her candidacy, they could've stuck with Trump and his VP, Mike Pence (a much better VP than Vance will ever make).
I don't think that's how they'll see it? The process was:
1. Biden won the primaries.
2. Biden stepped down and handed the mantle to his VP...which is a thing presidents do.
That was the process.
"Biden steps down and endorses Josh Shapiro" would, I think, have an appearance of "no process".
I don't think Biden could plausibly endorse someone other than Kamala. I do think it's important that the party create the space for at least 1 or 2 of the serious challengers to make a case at the convention. Rushing to keep Whitmer/Shapiro/whoever from putting themselves in contention is a massive failure.
The only way I see it is someone saying they are putting their name forward as an option just to ensure the delegates have a choice, but not as a real run. I can imagine Buttigieg doing it appropriately humbly. I can’t really imagine anyone else doing it.
I think he totally could have endorsed someone else if he wanted to. Doing so would not have created as much immediate unity as endorsing Harris has, but it was certainly plausible. Whether or not that's wise is up for fair debate, of course.
I doubt they'll care after Labor Day when the general election campaign is in full swing. Too much of a process issue, which is not what voters care about.
By definition swing voters don’t care enough to take part in party primaries, so how mad are they going to be that one wasn’t held?
The people who are currently big mad about the perceived situation where Dem/Admin elites hid Biden's lack of capacity from the public while killing a serious primary are people they need to vote for Kamala if she's going to win.
Do we need both of them to vote for Kamala? If one voted for Trump and the other voted or Kamala, could she still win? \S
To be fair, I think one of them was already a Republican, and the other one was a New York Times columnist. So that is probably 2 in the bag for Trump.
I disagree. Swing voters don’t really give a shit about primaries.
I'd like for Democrats to avoid the appearance of a total, blatant "coronation" if possible. Not sure what that would look like (I doubt Democrats do, either: it's been nearly sixty years since that party has had a competitive convention!).
Maybe Dean Phillips throws his hat in ring? Or Joementum (Manchin, that is)? And so Harris gets it on the second ballot?
But realistically, a consensus "pass the torch" dynamic may be best. Because if Kamala Harris has to vigorously campaign against other Democrats for the nomination, the general election effort to beat Trump will get off to a very late start. That's just reality. And that sounds dangerous. So, I'm candidly hoping for a muddle: something pretty close to Harris closing out the field early, but just the patina of an open convention so as not to feed the MAGA coronation narrative.
By the bye: I really think the Vance pick could come back to bite Trump on his ample posterior. Not the pick I'd have made unless I'm truly waltzing to 270 electoral votes, which seems unlikely now.
"But realistically, a consensus "pass the torch" dynamic may be best."
Yup. She may not be the maximum value, but she's the clear coordination point.
You exist as the Schelling point of all that is and came before you
My past selves and my future selves agree on very few things, but they were able to coordinate on meeting at my present self. Without even communicating!
One of the things that gets me about the GOP peacocking at the convention (go back and read some of the reporting about Convension goers basically acting like it's a coronation) is that it's not like the polls shifted all that much since the debate. In fact, it's actually pretty astonishing how consistent they've been. They clearly shifted enough to get Biden's attention. And given the shift was the result of a problem he clearly demonstrated he can't address, I understand why it may have been the final nail that persuaded him to step aside. But it remains the case the shift was quite modest.
Democrats have been consistently overperforming polling since 2021. The party is now made up increasingly of people more likely to vote. Also, polling misses are historically pretty random. There's a belief out there that because Trump outperformed his polls in 2016 and 2020 it's a guarantee that he will outperform his polls by 3-4% in 2024. When in reality flipping a coin and having it be heads twice in a row is a completely normal thing to happen. I've noted this before, but I think we actually still underestimate how much Covid upended life in 2020-2021. And one of those places I suspect is polling. I saw it noted before that one of the reasons that polling likely overestimated Biden support in 2020 is that Democrats and left leaning voters were more likely to actually be sheltering in place, staying home and trying to adhere to Covid restrictions. This actually seems pretty plausible to me as to one of the reasons polling overrated Biden's support.
My point isn't that Trump is still the favorite right now. Harris has a lot of work to do including trying to distance herself from 2020 primary Harris. Election held today Trump likely wins. It's more that we might be in luck that GOP actually started to believe their own hype and think their basically guaranteed to have a 1984-esque Reagan landslide. Like even if election was held today, it seems likely it would still come down to like 80,000 votes across three swing states again.
We have a long way to go and Harris may totally flame out.
But I have a feeling like the Democrats just pulled a Captain Kirk faces the kobayashi maru test and the Republicans are reeling as a result.
Yeah. I'm optimistic. I mean, there's a case for pessimism in that Trump should be behind Harris by fifteen points given the fact that he's a 78 year-old convicted felon who tried to overthrow the government and who was found liable for rape.
But pessimism gets us nowhere. And again, this thing should be winnable.
Neither Joe Manchin nor Dean Phillips will make things go to a 2nd ballot.
Hell, Joe Manchin trying to run will unite every non-Joe Manchin part of the party to support Kamala more.
True. Probably not feasible, even if a heavyweight like Whitmer or Shapiro entered. Kamala Harris will be the nominee. And I expect a good one. In the off chance I'm wrong, Democrats cold (incredibly) get yet another bite at the nomination apple, because the convention's not for another four weeks.
Depends - are they still going to do the virtual nomination in early August? Seems silly at this point, but they were awfully determined.
They don’t need to for Ohio. But I hear that California and Washington have deadlines during the convention, so they have to be very confident they can get it wrapped up at the beginning of the convention.
I was wondering about that myself. Hence my (typo-marred) "could get" above. Maybe it will be official before Chicago starts. But I personally don't see the need for that, and it might generate "the fix is in" accusations that even a lot of apolitical normies might hear about.
I thought that was the point of the exercise...
You need somebody who would get Kamala under 50% to force a 2nd ballot - Manchin would not be competition to Kamala anywhere outside of this comment section and Ruy Texeria's Substack.
I mean, actual centrist Democrat's are mostly fine because actual centrists who want to hippy punch for legitimate ideological reasons are slowly disappearing, but centrist commenters who if they had to be given a choice, prefer Donald Trump over many Democrat's on immigration, tax, Title IX, and other cultural policies, not so much.
2020 was a bad time for a former prosecutor to be running for president. Times are different now and she has gained the experience of almost four years of working with the president.
Most normal people - people who don't read SB - have no idea who Whitmer, Shapiro, Beshear, et al are. The mainly know Newsom for the French Laundry debacle. In terms of sheer name recognition, never mind getting out the word about policies and skills, there isn't a lot of time.
Kamala dropped out because there was no runway to the nomination, instead of running pointlessly to get 9% in New Hampshire like Elizabeth Warren. Or y'know, Joe Biden dropping out after Iowa instead of continuing to run and getting 3% in New Hampshire in 2008.
I feel like this point is often missed. You run to win, and you make strategic decisions that you hope maximize your chances to win, rather than maximize your expected value of vote percent or duration in the race.
First prize is you win, second prize is a set of steak knives, third prize is you're fired.
You also run to get the VP nod or build a brand or advance an agenda (Nader, maybe Bernie)
I thought second prize was a book tour.
And Joe Biden struts into South Carolina, points to Sanders’ silliness and calls it malarkey and the rest is history.
Right - Kamala didn't have lane, so she backed out before wasting time and money and now she's the nominee and Steve Bullock's greatest accomplishment since then was losing a Montana Senate race by slightly fewer points than generic Democrat.
This is probably the best and shortest defense of Kamala's 2020 campaign I've ever seen.
Bennet or Bust!
I wonder if it’s because actually dropping everything and mounting a campaign to run for President in four weeks is kind of insane, vs. talking about it in an online forum, which is so easy? This is like fantasy politics league. In the real world, they would have had to have done this a year ago. I do wish people could have had the sense to push harder against Biden running for re-election; unfortunately his legislative successes made it harder to argue against his impulse to act like he had defeated father time. But as for the various candidates that have been named, the last thing they want to do is endanger party unity in a likely losing fight that is impossible to organize in such a tight time frame.
I suspect one of the issues is that Biden's cognitive and physical decline is probably recent. So in July, 2023 he was probably still as mentally sharp as July, 2020 and still seemed as physically capable as well.
The US seems like an outlier with our absurdly long election cycle. Marathons are boring to watch. It's time to watch the 100m.
She's had a flood of endorsements and no one has stepped up to oppose her. Gotta accept that reality
I agree with your point, but there wasn’t time to do a bake-off and get a popular governor the national exposure needed. It would have had to have been someone everyone already knew (Michelle Obama, Mark Cuban, George Clooney, etc.). There also is the deadline to get candidates nominated so they can be on all 50 ballots. I think by waiting until now, Biden ensured that Harris was the only feasible option.
My hope for the Harris candidacy is (1) that she stays true to herself rather than let progressives pull her to the left or moderates pull her to the right, and (2) she plays to her strength and prosecutes the hell out of Trump. Four months of putting him on the stand would make Trump crack, and it will be beautiful when it happens.
Also, please get rid of Biden’s campaign staff or at least the leadership. Bring in some killers from the Obama days. The Biden campaign lost all credibility for hiding the truth from the American people. We need vision, execution, and discipline.
It's really really bad if no one is willing to stand up and present a serious challenge. I feel like people don't seem to get that the "coronation" problem is a huge issue for the Dems. A huge part of the reason people are mad right now is that Biden got handed the nom without contest in the first place. It's a huge reason for the whole 2015 debacle that started this all. Even assuming Kamala is the nominee, having it look like this is being handed to her by similar "her turn" dynamics as Hilary is a major unforced error if the goal is to win the election. Kamala really really would benefit from a serious challenge. The party needs the drama and the media focus of a contested primary with a legitimately uncertain outcome. The Dems are losing to Trump right now, giving up the chance at a high drama nomination is to abandon a huge chunk of the potential upside of replacing Biden and that upside is what they need to make this competitive.
>A huge part of the reason people are mad right now is that Biden got handed the nom without contest in the first place.<
Who's mad? Democrats seem elated at this turn of events, and Republicans are always mad.
And Harris does not nearly have the amount of baggage Clinton had. I mean, was anyone mad when Obama got the nomination for his second term? Should someone have stepped up and challenged him at the convention? A lot of people already did not like Clinton (even if their reasons were not always on point), and she did seem to strong arm her way to the top, which left a bunch of Democrats disgruntled. Republicans would love someone to contest Harris, which will inevitably send a portion of potential Dem voters off into the wilderness grousing about the unfairness of it all. No one wants that, at least not anyone with a real interest in keeping Trump out of the White House.
I just am not aware of any evidence that a contested primary of an incumbent helps rally support of the incumbent’s party, which seems to be the implication of what you’re saying.
MY has already done a piece on how that read of the primary couldn't be further from the truth.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-parties-cant-decide
And please don't needlessly conspiracize. It just gives cover to actual wrongdoing if you assume everything is bad and corrupt based on literally zero evidence.
FWIW Bullock might have been my favorite candidate in 2020, and if I could snap my fingers and make him president, I’d be pretty happy.
Kamala clearly did some deft maneuvering, locking down enough endorsements right off the bat that anyone who even wanted to challenge her would face an incredibly uphill battle. And none of them seem very interested. No one else polls THAT much better than her anyway.
Everyone's happy because we got a new candidate that has a chance at winning. And we didn't have to go through some bruising primary where everyone is catering to a different set of uncompromising assholes.
Starting veteran QB went down. Time to see if the prospect behind him has what it takes. Next Dem up.
Re #11 -- it seems like a lot of progressives really believe the notion that marginal voters are basically socialists. So while it was good for Trump to move left, it would also be good for Harris to move left.
They totally believe that. As one of many examples see this thread on r/WorkReform claiming that if Kamala Harris ran on Medicare For All she'd sweep 40 states.
30,000 upvotes and counting.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WorkReform/s/8YbactdMna
One thing I've learned in the last few years is that the worst and most racist Republican complaint about black voters (they only vote Democrat to get welfare!) appears to actually be true of Zoomer progressives.
Definitely for the regressive policies like college debt bailouts.
Based on what evidence you may ask? Well "everyone knows it" of course. All of the elections and polls that show otherwise? Rigged.
They may not be socialists in the standard of Bernie Sanders but they are not exactly happy with center left or center right "neoliberal" politics. Perhaps I overestimate the sense of dissatisfaction among some working class voters but I do think in economic terms, the views of the people on this thread are in the minority of what many voters think(at least in terms of economics). Vance was picked for a reason. Swing voters are not exactly the same as independents, moderates or generally undecided. Some people are saying they swing because they're not engaged or don't know that much. That's partially true, they swing but they also only vote when it's candidate who's transformational or is promising something radically different than the norm.
The problem for progressives is that while majorities of voters reliably poll in favor of many left-wing policy *outcomes* (Free healthcare for all, yay!), such support typically melts through the floor when you actually start trying to articulate a specific program (and especially how to pay for such a program) to accomplish those outcomes.
So, I'm not particularly talking so much about that as much as Free Trade, more libertarian economic policies. I'm saying what's going on is rejection of triangulation and reaganomics. I agree a lot of people don't want to pay for healthcare but they are also are pissed off about immigration, globalization and are for the Trump tariffs even if it costs them more. I think the problem is the positive framing of issues, that I like this idea more, rather than I hate this less. I sited Sanders more because of his anti-billionaire economic populism which appeals to a lot of voters. But you're right about outcomes but not agreeing about process but voters tend to vote on outcomes not processes. So, when you get into the details people tend to change their minds but they tend to vote on the outcome they want and saying there's no way within current processes only makes a not so small subset angrier, and makes them less encouraged to vote for any centrist. Many of them would also take exception to Yimbyism and take a very Malthusian view of economic growth. So for me it's a bit more complicated since a lot of people then sit out or get more extreme rather than tack to the center in terms of economics in voting patterns. In traditional economics there are winners and losers., many of the slow boring peeps are the winners and many of the swing voters are the losers.
Re. Point 6, I am interested to see if any of these hundreds of journalists looking at octogenarian performance in high office are now going to turn their attention to the new oldest man ever to stand. Many of the worries about Biden apply to Trump. The fact thar he is more energetically incoherent than Biden should not be the end of the matter.
In particular I'm surprised national journalists aren't showing more (selfish) interest in the self-control and mental ability of the vengeful, bitter, old maniac who's on course to take office with a fresh total immunity card. Maybe he's just about sane enough this year & next not to have critics arrested. But by 2028?
I've heard this said a lot but this is irrelevant to Trump. Expectations are all that matters here and Trump has behaved exactly to expectations. Biden obviously did not. That's the end of this one.
Some amount of progressives whinging about Harris saying moderate things may support her moderate credentials. They would try to curse her but bless her instead.
I for one am outraged that Harris is in a traditional marriage with a member of the opposite sex! Uh, gender! Uh, not really “opposite ,” because there’s no binary! The point is, this is a slap in the face to all of my LGBTQ allies!
Wouldn't hurt her for some NoI asshole to attack her for marrying a Jew
The Gaza people definitely know that Doug Emhoff is Jewish; they've been blaming him for Biden's support for Israel.
[He's Reformed, his kids, ie Kamala's stepkids, do not identify as Jewish, since they aren't religious Jews and their mother isn't]
[deleted, after João pointed out that the linked article was retracted. Thanks, João!]
Traditional my left foot. No kids!
(Her childlessness is already being attacked by MAGA.)
Ugh, really? Well, that isn't going to do a lot to lure females back to the Republican party. And this attack is particularly painful to women who are unable to have children.
>>Ugh, really? <<
Yep. And think about it, a minute, it's not the slightest bit hard to believe. This is from the party home to folks who have criticized JD Vance's choice of spouse.
"This is from the party home to folks who have criticized JD Vance's choice of spouse."
"We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies." Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa.
Yeah, I have just been trying to keep those sorts at arms length.
>>Republicans are going to pivot to “if he’s too old to run for re-election, he’s too old to serve and should resign,” which is honestly silly.<<
It's only "silly" in political terms if it doesn't work. And it may not! But it's exactly the kind of line of attack (among others) I'd be urging the Trump campaign to make if I were advising them. That, and, "Does Kamala Harris think it's a good idea for Biden to have the launch codes given his cognitive problems?" And Trump and his surrogates will use much less polite language than I just did.
But not to spoil the mood: I'm feeling elated this morning, as I know many of you are. Let's win this thing!
If they keep talking about Biden and most people think Harris isn’t Biden’s keeper (he’s her boss after all) then that seems fine. It’s energy they can’t use attacking her, and it draws a contrast, and looks spiteful.
I’m with you. I get that being president and running for president is hard, but we now have this awkward situation where the incumbency advantage is almost reversed…consider the benefits to handing the keys to West Wing to Kamala Harris…watching her BE president would be a big part of her campaign strategy; watching her stand behind the seal giving speeches and press conferences, watching her meeting with world leaders in the Oval, watching her doing barrel rolls in Air Force One. Anybody on the Left would benefit from that gravity.
Did Nixon permanently taint the idea of a presidential resignation?
Rather than Bitcoin, I think she could take a different approach to the FTC than Lina Khan and also have fewer regulations on AI. Also, she could signal she'll be tougher on the border and emphasize high-skilled immigration a lot more and make sure the tax code incentivizes R&D. That should be enough to win back over some of the Silicon Valley holdouts who lean Democrat and send a broader signal to the business community. Being tougher on crypto isn't an issue in the grand scheme of things and is probably the right thing to do anyway.
I think Lina Khan is really bad, but the AI regulations are extremely misrepresented by lots of people.
I know it's a slightly different set of people, but you can't at the same time say "This will be humanity's biggest invention since fire" (CEO of Google) or "The bad case — and I think this is important to say — is, like, lights out for all of us," (CEO of OpenAI) and also that you deserve to have 0 regulation or reporting requirements. The Wiener bill basically asks that you notify the government if you are training a massive model (but very few others) and that developers are held liable for issues with the software but only if they are running it themselves.
Here's a summary: https://thezvi.substack.com/i/141607504/so-what-would-this-law-actually-do
The CEO of Anthropic thinks AI will be at human level within a year, but possible 2-3. Seems like some light touch regulation would be fine.
I couldn't be happier with Lina. The US had gotten way too afraid to actually break up monopolies. When Amazon forcing multiple entire publishers to sell all of their books at a loss on Amazon because they could fuck the publishers over worse, something has gone deeply deeply wrong.
Thank you for sharing and promoting this. There’s a ludicrous amount of misinformation out there about AI regs.
Fewer regs on AI would be an awful, ridiculous stance, motivated almost entirely by gaslighting from the accelerationist Twitter crew. Please see: any of Zvi’s coverage of the White House E.O.
Vance is pro-Khan though so I'm not sure that moderating on the ftc matters too much
I actually think Lina Khan has been great! Most Americans agree that big business has gotten incredibly anti-competitive (it has), and aggressively going after businesses that have terrible practices that most Americans hates would absolutely be great for Kamala’s chances. Highlighting the FTC‘s lawsuit against Ticketmaster, and price gouging by pharmaceutical companies is a slam dunk.
The reason why conservatives allow Republican's to get away with saying moderate things is because, especially with Trump, they know he'll actually let them do what they actually want outside of like two things. He can say moderate things about abortion all day, then sign a 12-week national ban without an issue. Same thing w/ stuff like not mentioning deregulation and such, because the very rich people trust the GOP to put into office the kind of people in the EPA who will allow more dumping of chemicals in water or whatever.
OTOH, with the Democratic Party, there is no trust from the progressive side, because there are still plenty of moderates, including hey, yourself that tell candidates to not only speak moderately, but govern moderately. So, of course, large groups want said candidates to say what they stand for, so they're on the hook for it, because there is zero trust Democrat's won't throw them under the bus the first time they get a mildly bad poll.
In short, yes, the left knows the GOP are lying about being moderate. We also know a lot of Democrat's aren't lying about being moderate.
The actual messages you put forth as examples to Kamala to use are y'know, fine, and nobody will care about them outside of some people on Twitter with 646 followers, but of course, the one actual policy you picked is silly.
Now, I know the comeback will be, 'a more moderate candidate' will do better, but an interesting thing is in actual polling, people like Manchin don't do all that much better. The actual percentage of people willing to vote for a center-left candidate is somewhere between 44% and 54%, and a lot of that is far more determined by vibes, charisma, ads, opponents, and background than actual policy.
There is no world where you nominate Joe McModerate and get Reagan-style landslides with large majorities who will then do...not much.
Again, Gretchen Whitmer is ideologically to the left of Joe Biden, but did much better than he did.
Also, the fact you're so on board for a chaotic convention despite the fact actual politicians of every ideological stripe have gotten behind Kamala shows perhaps you need to decide if you want to win, because a convention where both sides attacked each other, and the nominee was either scene as a sellout to Wall Street and tech bros or a leftist radical wouldn't be actually better, but there's a 10% chance you might get somebody who might punch the hippies as much as you want.
It's Kamala or Chaos.
I also find it amusing the guy who was all on board for SBF before he was exposed as a massive fraud thinks the one random issue, which I'm sure was just random, was too kneel to the techbros and regulate a scam less, because some billionaire a-holes are unhappy about it (and I know, this comment section things words are violence only when it's talking about rich people with centrist views).
Or, maybe your wish for a non-Kamala candidacy is you're just worried there will be less people in a Kamala Harris administration who will care about what you write on Substack.
The reality is, the Coconut Train is leaving the station - get on-board or become the next Mark Penn or Dick Morris, talking to a less and less important sliver of the party base by the day. I still enjoy your writing, but the last day or so of flailing about for any chance of your preferred centrist candidate has been highly annoying.
It seems to me to be a core falsehood of the progressive movement that centrist Democrats are the bottleneck on advancing left-wing policy. Obama and Pelosi pushed the ACA against the advice of their political advisers, and duly got a shellacking in the midterms after enacting it. They were willing to pay the political price to deliver a huge progressive win. Biden spent ~2 years wrangling the biggest climate bill in history through Congress and likewise invested huge efforts delivering student loan forgiveness, even as it undermined his credibility on combating inflation.
All of this was possible because centrist democrats won in red states, and you'd get more progressive policy if you made it more of a priority to help the John Tester types to do that.
Yes exactly
Except Matt, most of the stuff listed you either think should've never been happened or even been further curtailed, along with more factional attacking of the Left.
Matt thinks the IRA and ACA should have been curtailed or never happened? Are we reading the same Matt?
Student loan forgiveness I'll give you that, but that's only because he thinks the money is better spent elsewhere (and given the current fiscal situation, should be backed by tax increases). Not because he's ideologically opposed to government spending money to help people. Remember, he supported student loan forgiveness back when it looked like it would be the only way to get stimulus through.
I like to think that Biden spent ~2 years wrangling the biggest climate bill in history through Congress because of like, you know, the climate change problem.
Does that conflict with Binya's comment? He saw it as a big problem, and so he was willing to push for a big policy, even if that meant sacrificing some other priorities that might've been easier politically.
My point was this wasn't, or at least shouldn't be viewed as a "left wing policy," contra Binya. I know the right wing is perfectly happy to do jack about what is clearly a huge problem, but a lot of us who don't call themselves progressives or on the left wing care a great deal and are proud of Biden for getting this done.
Ah, yes, that's fair.
But of course, the modern Democratic Party basically spans the entire range from what used to be the center-right (Obamacare is, after all, Romneycare), all the way to self-professed Socialists. We desperately need a proportional representation system so that we can do what the French did, and come together in coalition to fight fascism, but then also have distinct identities for various factions and a clear result in terms of which of those factions has more support from the public.
Democrats have only controlled the House of Representatives for 8 of the past 30 years and wonder why they don't get any new laws.
Except Matt has stated multiples times the Democratic Party should be more of a bottleneck on said policies. In Matt's perfect world, there would've been basically no student loan forgiveness, a likely smaller IRA, and COVID bill, and more rightward movement on various social issues. I'm old enough to remember immediately post-Dobbs that Matt was saying Democrat's should be OK w/ endorsing some abortion restrictions.
I have no actual problems with the centrist Democrat's who win and run in red states (Sinema & Manchin excepted, and even Manchin was mostly fine until the last year or so), I do have issues with centrist pundits who think we need to go even more to the right, largely due to to their own personal views.
But, people like Matt, James Carville, and others like him are prominent in the media, which is why progressives find the need to make sure candidates won't throw them under the bus, and decide not to pass said policies, because it might costs them 0.8 points with non-college educated white men in Michigan or whatever.
"0.8 points with non-college educated white men in Michigan or whatever" has been the difference between winning and losing the last 2 elections! To Donald freaking Trump. This stuff matters.
Except I disagree on the stuff that has caused those losses.
Again, Gretchen Whitmer is to the left of Biden & Hillary on everything, is a woman, and so on, and she ran over the GOP. Now, yes, part of that is state vs federal, bad GOP candidates, and so on, but it also shows that you don't need to be Joe Manchin or Krysten Sinema to win anywhere that's not a D+10 state.
Biden is a weak candidate who got crushed in primaries in 1988 and 2008. In 2020, well past his prime, he faced progressive opponents who supported toxic positions like decriminalising the border, handing him the nomination. *Then* it was decided the VP had to be a woman of colour, even though there were no outstanding candidates, passing over candidates with stronger resumes, most notably Whitmer. Seems to me like another instance of the progressive faction refusing to take responsibility for the consequences of its actions.
AOC didn't force Biden's hand on Kamala - Jim Clyburn did. Go blame moderate black Democrat's on this one.
I think I would distinguish here between what people believe themselves and what they suggest be done to win elections. I don’t know who is personally moderate. I also have not been convinced that progressives have both a route to power and a way to govern effectively. So convince us, as opposed to talking about people’s hidden moderation. Try to persuade us on SB to join the “revolution” if you can.
The demographics of this comment section show a material and cultural reason why many of them will never be won over. Like, I'll be blunt - I want many commenters here to be materially worse-off in that I want them to have higher taxes, and I think it's culturally OK that they lose more power than they currently have.
It's fine to be opposed to that, but be honest about it. I frankly find the people who say they oppose what I'm for because they oppose it personally more honest than some paragraph about how pipefitters in rural Wisconsin would react to it.
I'll state my honest opinions on stuff as long as I find Matt's writing entertaining enough to give him $5/month and people can like it or not - when it comes to actual wide-scale change, in the short-term, it's far more likely to come from suburban women of all income levels continuing to shift left on things as the GOP gets more overt in it's nastiness than winning over centrist dudes who think all asylum seekers should be assumed are lying or are freaked out about transgender teens.
"The demographics of this comment section"
You sound like people who think the Jews are behind everything.
But you should forget about the biggest, horrible-ist bad actor in the world (this comment section) for just a section and actually think more about what real voters, including pipe-fitters in WI, want. It's not progressivism!
And if your cope is suburban moms, then your cope is pretty damn similar to your imagined enemies.
I don’t think Jesse is in any way antisemitic. His “demographic” comment refers to us SB people being complacent, upper middle class white bros who do not empathize sufficiently with poor people and people of color.
Yes, Jesse has a weird hangup about the composition of this comment section that's been going on for at least many months, but probably much longer.
You honestly think suburban moms will lead the revolution? I agree that they will definitely support Democrats over abortion rights and dislike Trump. It is by no means clear to me that they will go to the barricades over asylum seekers and transgender teens. How many suburban moms have you met?
Sort of agree. I am an urban mom, but know enough suburban moms. On certain issues, they are a force, and transgender teens is definitely one of those because enough of them have or know transgender teens, and they are very fearful about where things are going in certain areas of the country. Fearful enough to nudge them into politics, or at least switching over to the Democratic party and voting.
I support higher taxes on myself, but we also have a deficit and we're not in a recession where we'd _need_ to do deficit spending, and interest rates aren't low where deficits are "free" so I'd support higher taxes on myself to bring that down so we have more wiggle room the next time we need it.
To the extent that middle-aged well-off white people like me lose cultural power, I do want to point out that there's no guarantee the cultural power goes to where you want it either, it might end up more on Trump's side.
Mother of G-d, you’re as fucking insufferable as Ken (the southern one, not the northern one).
To be fair, Jesse expands on his ideas, he doesn’t just throw snark bombs. But I see no reason he has to be as snide as he is.
“Suburban women of all income levels” made me chuckle a bit. What was it W said—the haves and the have-mores?
This friend speaks my mind. I might just eke my way into the realm of people whose taxes would be raised, but probably not.
We simply have fundamental disagreement about how left economic policy actually plays out, and most likely a lot of disagreement about the premises, execution, and results of the progressive social program. But I have very little to lose from the likely centrified results (higher taxes, less "power" whatever that signifies??).
I simply think it's a lot of bad ideas bundled together in a weird self reinforcing, thought-negating paradigm that ends up with it's proponents self-immolating in circular autos-de-fe.
Is there a way to encourage progressives to be constructive? It seems for years now they have put faction over party or country with little pushback; which suggests action needs to be taken to change their incentive structure.
Postmodern critical nihilism is all about deconstruction never building.
Academics listening to Mid 20th century French philosophers was a mistake.
And Doomism is their religion.
Make them live in the world they say they want.
I usually start by asking them to draw a flow chart of their desired program.
Wherever there's a left wing protest, hand out leaflets explaining how zero sum competitions like presidential elections work.
Is Biden really heroic? If Kamala wins, he'll surely be remembered that way, but there is a very possible future where she doesn't. I think then history remembers Biden as a man who sank his party's prospects with his stubbornness and pride, and then at the last possible second turned cowardly and let someone else take the fall for him.
If she loses, I think people will look back and say that the Biden team and Democrats should’ve faced reality and had an open primary. If she wins, we either get the statesman story, or a story about powerful Dems pushing him out by telling him that the entire party was about to insist that he leave.
She might lose! But I don't think anybody thinks her chances are _worse_ than his, and his current chances are still probably north of 10% so he's definitely giving something up, and I, at least, will remember this as a _good_ thing he did.
I think, win or lose, he'll be seen as having done the right thing. Your hypothetical would be true if it was just about polling numbers. In this case, his age forced the change. We'll probably memory hole his initial stubbornness because it was less than a month and happened before the convention.