Hey, I am that 50 year old white middle-class suburban sometimes votes Democrat sometimes votes Republican voter. So basically this whole post his subtweeting me.
I actually sort of like Harris. The fact that she was a prosecutor, was one of the things I dug. She seems smart, sharp. Unfortunately, what she lacks is charisma. Or more specifically that type of charisma that is effective on TV. But even though she might not be a natural, I think she definitely has the bones to improve.
Matt is especially right about her leaning into Patriotism. What I look for in a President is that feeling that the person really loves America. And I’m a way that is greater than it’s flaws. One of the hypothetical questions I ask about a President is whether this person would sacrifice their life for our country, or at least get a fist fight for us. Now I know this can be faked, but I want to at least believe it might be true.
This is one of those reasons I didn’t vote for Trump. To me it was pretty obvious he was a narcissist that only cared about himself.
Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush St all had that. Democrats lately though are in danger of losing on an institutional level. Kamala hasn’t done anything to say that she has fallen into this trap, but by not actively cultivating American positivism she runs getting sucked into this trap.
Note: I don’t follow her very much so if someone replies with some quote or illustration of how she has done it… it wasn’t enough because it didn’t break through.
On another semi-related note. I sort of dig AOC. She has that charisma. I am really hoping that she can separate herself from the socialist label enough to be a viable candidate. She has that common sense, I lived in the real world thing about her. If she has spent 4-years in the Military after college, I’d bet pretty big on her Presidential odds. As it is now… she has that… I’m for working people thing going. Hopefully she can get that I love America thing as well.
I'd say what she lacks is the "common touch." Hillary Clinton substantially lacked it, too. So did John Kerry and Al Gore and Michael Dukakis. In my view it's not ideology as such, although it's awfully hard to radiate the common touch when you're mainly focused on prog social and process issues. But plenty of Democrats have had it. Obama to a considerable degree. Klobuchar. Barbara Mikulski. Andrew Cuomo. Bill Clinton. Joe Biden. You can imagine these people enjoying a cheeseburger and an ice cold beer as they watch Monday Night Football. Swing voters for better or worse want that quality.
I wonder if getting potential nominees season tickets to whatever NFL team makes geographic sense and making them attend all the games is a viable electoral strategy. Sitting in normal seats, of course.
I don't know if it would make them better people - there are ways that being forced to be around people different from yourself can make you more tolerant of them, but there are also ways it can make you less tolerant of them.
She’s incredibly charming when speaking off-the-cuff to small crowds. I’m sure she does great on a rope line. I think she has more trouble with more formal settings.
As I understand it, Hillary was quite good there as well. The problem is that most (all?) successful politicians are very charming or they wouldn't have made it past their first race. In a small group, you compare them to other people you know and them seem amazing. But in a political arena, you compare them to other politicians and then you start to see the differences. Its like the difference between your average person and a professional athlete in the NBA etc. The worst player in the NBA is 10 times as good as the average rec player at basketball, but they are still at the bottom of the elite pool of players.
I think that’s a fair point, but Harris at least does awesome TikTok videos that generally make her seem warm and funny. Have you seen her deplane? It’s adorable. She wears cool shoes.
She needs to sand off that self righteous edge that came out when she pledged to ban guns in the primary. That’s the kind of stuff the press swooned over, but the average voter hates.
Or when she set up that “I was that little girl” vignette with Biden in the primary. I read about a million gushing pieces in WaPo and the NYT — I learned a lot about busing — but it blew me away that Serious People thought Biden’s stance on busing forty years prior was in any way meaningful to the average primary voter. That was Harris playing to the Democratic elite, and not the cringe Arizona wine mom.
Like, I was incredibly excited for Clinton to be president, but even *I* thought she wasn’t very likable, lol. And hey, maybe it is a bit of internalized misogyny. The first time I saw her was that interview she and Bill gave in the 1992 primary about his affairs, and I remember disliking her right off the bat.
I love this post only thing I would disagree with is "10 times as good as the average rec player at basketball."
I'll never forget seeing a Division 1-A playing against very good pickup players. He was a hydrogen bomb. I can't imagine how good an NBA player would be.
I think this is generally right, but there are in fact some politicians who are the opposite: really good before a large crowd and not as good in a smaller group. They are, to some extent, just different skill sets. It's not as simple as the large-crowd skills being more advanced than the small-group skills.
I definitely agree - I've known people who could wow a crowd, but one on one seem less intelligent than the average houseplant and vice versa. Most politicians need sufficient capacity at both. At least to get elected in the beginning. I've also talk to a few people who have been around long enough that they win purely on the name brand they build 20 years ago.
On the other side, Bush Sr lacked it, as did Dole and Romney. And most of Trump's primary opponents in 2016, notably Jeb. McCain had it, as did Bush Jr.
I tend to think Bush Sr's 1988 run came at the recent apogee of GOP advantage in the Electoral College. Dukakis wasn't an ideal candidate for the national stage, but on the other hand he shouldn't have sucked quite so much, either, in terms of votes. He was a competent, obviously intelligent non-radical/non-scary Democratic of considerable stature and executive experience with a credible, center-right running mate. AND he was running against a Republican who was trying to secure a THIRD consecutive term for the GOP. Not saying Bush doesn't win that race 90/100 times. But the margin? He CRUSHED Dukakis.
Just to add, I personally prefer people who don't have it. I find it smarmy, insincere and untrustworthy. Whether that's Obama, or Bush Jr, or Reagan, or (in my own country) Blair or Cameron.
The politicians I like most are the ones who are thoughtful and not glib, who think and talk in paragraphs and not one-liners. Ed Miliband is still my favourite political leader of the last few years. In America, I really like Warren and Inslee. On a personality level, I preferred HW Bush to Clinton in 1992, and Romney to Obama, those being the two times I chose the Republican over the Democrat (though my politics are consistently pro-Democrat; the last Republican candidate I'd have voted for is Theodore Roosevelt).
But I'm absolutely aware that my personal preferences are the absolute opposite of the majority.
I have no faith that she's prepared to put in the hard work of learning a new kind of politics, and even less faith that she can exert discipline over her staff and cull the weakling/stupid/over-woke ones.
It's very worrisome. I think Biden screwed up with this VP decision and would have done far better to pick Duckworth or Whitmer.
I have a strong feeling he went with the one that could be removed from her current position without upsetting the political balance (i.e. safe blue seat).
No, it was because it was the height of the BLM protests and there was immense pressure to pick a black woman. And I do really like Biden/Harris as a team. He’s folksy, she’s glamorous. But on her own… I really wish there was a way to non-controversially swap out Buttegieg. He’s Biden’s top surrogate. The last I heard from Harris, she and Manchin were spatting because she did an interview indirectly pressuring him in WV.
Agreed on Duckworth, but I'm not sure about Whitmer - she became a focal point for the mask/lockdown debates in a way I'm not sure would have helped "let's be chill, folks" Biden win.
I think Whitmer is great, but the problem for her was that it was just too soon. She had only been in office for something like 19 months when Biden had to decide. So his data on her was very limited, and if he'd chosen her she might have been perceived at the time as too much of a lightweight.
Klobuchar would have been the ideal running mate if not for George Floyd.
Possibly true. That said, I recall hearing from friends in MI politics that Whitmer, while honored to be considered, was a little hesitant about making that leap after just 2 years as Governor. Not that she wouldn’t do it if asked, of course. (I did my undergrad at Michigan State's public policy school, so I know a good number of mostly-Democratic staffers in Lansing from our college days.) I wonder if there will be an attempt to have Harris step aside in favor of Whitmer (or Duckworth or Baldwin) if/when Biden seeks re-election in '24. (Of course that assumes in large part that Harris has the kind of self-awareness about her weaknesses that this post seems to suggest she doesn’t.)
It would be very surprising if he did that. I doubt he has the scope now to try to anoint someone else.
I could couch this in all sorts of mealy-mouthed bullshit, but I'm just going to come out and say it:
If he tried, he and anyone who supported the decision would be absolutely savaged as racist, sexist, every accusation you can think of.
Harris' supporters (who, IMO, center on the "woke neoliberal" demographic) would absolutely throw a bitch-fit rather than having to reflect on their own role and question their main representative in the Administration.
Not bashing you or your take, but the problem with this attitude right now is that it risks slipping quietly into decisions that we wish we could take back and cannot.
The Republican politicians, a majority of them, show every sign of trying to leverage power, the next time they have it, to make sure we (the electorate) can never take it from them again. A combination of gerrymandering, selective application of the Maine Rule to allocate electoral votes, and barriers to voting will make it possible for 40% of the country to rule the other 60%, and they've convinced me that's *exactly* what they intend to try to do.
I'm certainly open to seeing that diagnosis contested if you disagree, but I think it at least explains my reasoning:
It means I'm obliged to vote for the other guy/gal, every single time, regardless of how bad they are, until the Republicans get over it. Otherwise the Republic ends with a whimper.
If they consistently lose as long as they believe these things, eventually they or a new conservative party will find a way back to a position where they can capture the median voter and win elections again. It's always happened in the past.
It’s fair to criticize my position. You have a good argument. I present it though as the way it is instead of the way it should be.
I just don’t know if their are enough of voters with that attitude to make a difference.
But I do expect the Republican Party to evolve at some point.
This is why even though I’m conservative leaning, I am not bothered if Dems win. If Dems win for a while they can implement their policies. Id they are bad… then the Republican Party will evolve and take power.
Also, I think we are already seeing an evolution of the parties. If education trends with voting continue, eventually the Democratic Party will become the old Republican Party and visa versa.
For all the talk about whites and blacks in politics and culture, it’s Hispanics that will control the next 100 years.
Yea, the way through, if we fail to beat the GOP back into some sanity and they take power, is that the party alignment will evolve out from under them and break the anti-democratic walls they've erected to protect themselves.
Nothing is forever, after all.
They'll screw up quite badly, because they'll be insulated from the needs of the electorate. They'll blow off problem-solving in favor of empty rhetoric and handouts to their corporate backers, and life for normal folks will get steadily worse.
One election year, something will break; a Plains States mega-drought, a bad hurricane season devastating the Bible Belt, and they'll fail to respond effectively, and the ground will have shifted enough that the gerrymandering doesn't hold. The other side will look nothing like it does today, because it'll have spent 30 years in the wilderness trying to win over 60% of the electorate so it can win power... and it'll shatter them.
But the chances that a ton of violence and a major decline in American power and standard of living are involved approach 100%.
So I'd prefer to avoid it and just deliver them a few beatings at the polls until the elite sees the need to tack to the center and win you and folks like you over.
I'm not sure I agree that Hispanics will be the decisive vote; they're not a unified voting block and many "pass" within a few generations.
It does bring up a thought, though: a very real "worst-case scenario" is that 21st century US politics become like 20th century Latin American politics. The Democrats turn into a party of the elite, like a Latin American liberal party, and the Republicans turn into an incompetent populist party like Venezuela's PSUV. The latter win all the time but their policies suck, the former can't get past their own rhetoric and take power to enact decent policy, and eventually the whole thing burns down.
Very much this. I really appreciate your highlighting the most important rule about politics: things are always changing and subject to events. We have a bad habit of taking the present conditions and assuming they straight line into an infinite future. In 2016, the Democrats were supposed to have an Electoral College lock and the Upper Midwest "Blue Wall." Now that's flipped, yet we assume this new state of affairs to be a hard and fast rule.
So things are always changing. The key to politics is to be the master of changing events to the maximum extent possible. Matt's post today is an excellent illustration about how one might go about doing that.
Nothing is forever, even when you've cemented what looks like a pretty strong lock on minority rule. Dictatorships, too, end. And US civil society and our institutions of local and state rule mean that a herrenvolk democracy in the US is necessarily going to be quite soft; the PRC, we're not.
I recall thinking in 2012 that the GOP was basically done for my lifetime- they had doubled down on this super supply-side ideology paired with these endless attempts to roll back the New Deal and a deeply disingenuous cultivation of the Religious Right, and it was just abundantly clear that the message wasn't hitting anymore. Romney give a stump speech at my school and the flop sweat was palpable- it was just clear that the message wasn't landing anymore.
At the time, I remember thinking we were in store for a long postwar-type period of Democratic dominance, but as we've seen it's more that the GOP has radically reinvented themselves into... something... that is likely to be able to maintain electoral control without really knowing what it wants to do policy-wise. The suggestion downthread that they eventually will morph into a dysfunctional populist party is astute.
As David says, though- even if the GOP overreaches and eventually the Dems retake power despite anti-democracy institutions, there are really important questions about when that would actually happen and how much overreach would be necessary, what happens between now and then and what that overreach looks like, and also what a future Democratic party would actually do when it gets back in the driver's seat after overcoming massive anti-democracy barriers.
All of those are imponderables except the last. I sketched out two possibilities, out of hundreds of reasonably plausible alternatives.
And contemplating the last question... isn't so fun. It involves a lot of vocabulary that we haven't had to dust off in a long time, words like "proscription", "purge", "enemy of the state", "exile", "internal security forces", and "low-level insurgency".
There's no way, however committed to democracy they are, however economically progressive, that they aren't radicalized by a few decades in which democracy damned near died.
I do agree that we are forced to vote for Democrats no matter what for the foreseeable future, but that just means that which Democrat becomes even more important. Democrats need to be able to keep winning or the results won't be good.
I would love to hear Matt do a take on this whole 40% ruling 60% line of reasoning. While I despise the current GOP efforts to suppress votes, I think the potential success of this strategy and the structure of the Senate that favors rural voters is a bit overblown. I don't think there is a path to victory with 40% of the vote, but there might be with 49%. That's still pretty close to half, and the anti-majoritarian trend in the GOP is very off-putting to swing voters. If they keep doing that kind of thing I don't think they will win permanent majorities, I think they will fall further and further outside mainstream politics, at least on a national scale.
Take an example, let's say that the Democratic candidate last year won AZ and GA but not PA or WI. He'd end up with 276 electoral votes under the current systems.
But if the GA and AZ state governments had decided to apportion electoral votes in their states the way that Maine does, they wouldn't win 16+11, he'd win 8 in GA and 6 in AZ, which would give him 264 electoral votes. Trump would have won an election in which he lost the popular vote by 4 points.
If I replicate that across a wide swathe of locales that often vote blue in presidential elections but have GOP state governments, I can vastly raise the bar required to win.
PA, WI, MI, GA, AZ, NH, and possibly MN could all be rammed through like this in the coming years if the GOP wins a few gubernatorial elections.
If I run 2020 with those states all having been tweaked thusly, Biden gets 267 electoral votes and loses.
This gets worse as gerrymandering does; the more gerrymandered the districts that feed into this are, the less winning rewards Democrats.
The good news is that this strategy is even more contingent on the current party alignment than gerrymandering is, so it's hard to say it can be made permanent.
"Media charisma" perhaps? I'd say every President since 1980 has had it except for Bush Senior and Biden, and Biden's election was pretty unusual - I'd say he stepped out of the way and let Trump campaign for both of them.
I was always surprised Mike Huckabee didn't do better - I think his coalition (evangelicals) isn't the block it used to be.
A lack of authenticity is absolutely what I would describe as my biggest problem with her. I can't really tell if that's because she is actually someone who tramples people for their career or if she just doesn't have the charisma and that makes her seem inauthentic. Sometimes honest, good people just don't give off a vibe that matches their personality and you don't find that out until you get to know them better. Anyway, I'm just reserving judgement for now, but I get the same feeling from her that you do.
That's my impression of her too as a 52yo anti-partisan swing voter. I'm also not convinced she's destined to claim a future Presidential nomination unless she actually accomplishes something in her role as VP. She also strikes me as way too authoritarian for my taste.
>>>Lying is bad, morally speaking. But nobody says every single thing that they believe, and certainly nobody does so in public. <<<
Moreover, so much of what appealing to swing voters is about involves choosing certain areas of emphasis over others. Lying or truthfulness doesn’t really even come into it (at least not most of the time).
The challenge for Democrats is that they span most of a normal developed nation's political spectrum, so messaging discipline isn't likely, and "deemphasis" thus very hard.
If we could slap down most of the Twitter-sphere and the slacktivist class we might have a chance to increase the salience of economic issues over social ones, which would see us win consistently. Since it's clear the DNC doesn't even intend to try, the next few years will be rough.
Maybe they'll course-correct after 2022. Not sure Harrison is the man for the job.
I don't know that this is possible. A significant portion of the Democratic coalition is in the coalition because of social issues - just as a large part of the Republican coalition is there because of social reasons. If you rearrange the parties' priorities then you rearrange the coalitions in them and the parties change.
You're describing a realignment of the party coalitions, and those happen often enough. They always kick off with the era-appropriate equivalent of "let's try to win a few extra points in X this year" in a smoke-filled backroom somewhere.
In the short-term, it's possible to hold marginal voters in both groups for a while, and in the medium-term an economically populist and socially mushy coalition is, well, the natural party of government.
I buy that smoke-filled rooms kick off realignments sometimes. But my wild guess is they happen much more because of candidates themselves: Reagan the candidate winning the R primary and then the general pushed some realignment. Trump much moreso, and especially in his case it wasn't a backroom party deal, it was Trump himself beating the other Rs out of the way.
Actually, a thought just occurred to me. If any one individual was largely responsible for the current shape of the realignment of the party structure, it was Barack Obama.
True. "Always" was overplaying it badly. "Sometimes", maybe even "mostly" would have been correct.
That said, I am not entirely convinced by the notion that Trump was a major driver in the current realignment, I think he just happened along at the right moment and blew up all the GOP establishment efforts to change the shape of it.
The current "alignment" is very fragile; I think it's transitory.
If the GOP ditches the corporatism, and actually puts some substance behind the populism, it can win outright majorities pretty handily. If the Democrats manage to muzzle the wokeist idiots and play up their own brand of economic populism, they can too. In some ways, either side is potentially well-placed to become the natural party of government for four or five cycles, just by jettisoning some of their baggage.
I think economic leftist politics are believed to be much more popular than they actually are in reality. Its not that there aren't specific policies that won't garner appeal, but the reality is 60%+ of Americans are doing pretty well economically. They will be very (little c) conservative about making changes that would rock or overturn their boat. Something like the CTC or even the ACA at this point are popular because they make a change around the edges, but don't fundamentally rework the system.
This is one of the most complicated parts of modern political life. In the good old days you could easily say or, better, imply different things to different people. That’s a lot harder now but certainly not impossible, especially to politicians with world class skills.
And we’ve got a passionate part of our coalition that views that very action, speaking in different ways to different audiences, as a cardinal sin, a form of betrayal.
Agree 100%. Looking at political/campaign rhetoric in these terms strikes me as naive, and I see the fact that so many people do this now as one of the major problems with politics and governance today. Matt’s “popularism” seems like a much better, much more realistic approach than expecting politicians to be avatars of truth/honesty/whatever.
“I think successful politicians manage to work themselves to a point where they are beyond these kinds of petty questions of sincerity“ is the peak of this blog. This is why Matt makes the big bucks
Today's essay was another excellent public service. As you note, you have signed yourself up for the emotional labor of arguing with your allies. Thank you.
Woo first! Anyhow, I can tell you why I, personally, dislike her.
I don’t think she has any scruples. I consider her an authoritarian in waiting, who has explicitly proposed completely ignoring the constitution (see her proposal to have the executive branch legislate on guns if Congress didn’t give her what she looked for - no matter the fact that I am against guns, unconstitutional power grabs are a problem) a tendency that’s especially dangerous when we consider how censorship (in the form of ginning up spurious violations against facebook and other companies whose moderation has displeased us) has become normalized in Democratic party discourse.
It ain’t cause she’s a woman, or cause of her race - it’s that she’s never shown any principle greater than her ambition.
Isn't claiming that she would take a controversial approach to get rid of guns a way to demonstrate that she *does* have a principle far greater than her ambition? Ambition tells you to tone down that rhetoric, but anti-gun principles tell you not to.
Indeed - to be frank, the political elites must resist degrading the process, no matter what the base wants. It’s terrible when Trump does it - it’d be even worse when someone competent and “reasonable” does it.
To be clear, my concern is not just with Kamala, but with Joe too. However he has seemed less gung-ho on throwing out democracy.
>>it’s that she’s never shown any principle greater than her ambition.<<
I hope you're right because I want her to win if she's the nominee. I will take naked ambition over blind adherence to ideology any day in our death match against a Republican party spinning into insanity. Just win, baby.
Exactly! I don’t like where she positioned herself in the primary, but I think she’d have no problem switching it up. Sinema used to be a member of the Green Party and now she’s a conservative Democrat. Principled stances are hugely overrated in politics. We want leaders who respond to pressure.
Ratcheting up the pressure is up to us. It’s another input. We can care more. We can organize more.
The worst thing I can say about Joe Manchin is that he seems to be immune to pressure. I think he actually sincerely believes in the filibuster. I’d **love** for him to be as slippery as Sinema.
This *may* be true but then I see the Republican party as a whole scurrying away from the winnable center as fast as they can. The saving grace for them would be for the Democrats, seeing that juicy target theirs for the taking, instead scurrying off to the left as fast as they can. Many Democrats, or the activist Left, want exactly that, and the big battle is between the ambitious vs the principled, or, if you'd rather, the pragmatists versus the ideologues.
"it’s that she’s never shown any principle greater than her ambition." well put. This is what I was trying to get at in my comment, but you did it much more efficiently!
I am gay so I should have been offended but my favorite Obama pander was when they asked him how his religion informed his opposition to gay marriage and he said "God is in the mix."
1) Clearly I was unclear - what I meant was, she will never, ever, try to be really popular or try to appeal to swing voters as she is temperamentally unsuited to it and probably doesn't understand why she needs to do it. 2) See 3 above. 3) My reading is that she barely won her most significant race - against a Republican - in *California*. Her presidential primary performance was a farrago of own goals (busing, anyone?). 4) Indeed, not.
"she will never, ever, try to be really popular or try to appeal to swing voters as she is temperamentally unsuited to it"
That's a sort of principle or scruple though. If you liked her, you could express that as standing by her principles and not giving them up purely to win elections and obtain power.
I can spin "X is not a good politician" into "X is moral", "X has scruples", "X is honest", or one of seven hundred other things. They still mean that X is a bad politician.
Not pretending this makes her a good politician. The real question is more whether she's doing this on purpose - if she's sacrificing her political career because she's not prepared to lie that America is good because she thinks that it's a profoundly racist country that needs to make major changes, then that's admirable, if politically ineffective, if she's saying the things she says because they are popular with the activist class in the Democratic Party (not the far-left) and she wants to build up her personal power and the KHive, then she's just a bad politican.
I suspect that Harris is smart enough to realize that if she's the nominee and loses in the general (especially to Trump!) among the collateral damage will be the idea that a woman can be elected President. That would be so devastating to the nation that I presume she would think long and hard about how to actually win, even if it means appealing to Matt's dreaded median voter.
It might be uncharitable, but it's obviously the latter.
Look at the history of the positions she's taken, the things she's done in office, and the public stances she now holds.
This is the California equivalent of retail politics, I get that... but she's not a good politician in any other context, and she should have stayed there.
The busing fiasco - a tempest in a teapot but very illustrative. The zigs and zags of her career including what seems to be some really questionable prosecutorial conduct.
I think that the implicit reason that Matt thinks she should do this *now* is because you're right, if she tries to do this in June of 2028, people will say, "wait, this isn't who you are, this is obviously insincere."
But seven years is a long time, and if she starts building this track record now, a lot of people won't be interested in teaching back a decade and saying, "oh, but in 2019, Harris said..."
The difficulty for an VP, especially one seen as the heir apparent, is separating from the President. This case is easier, though, because she wouldn't be separating herself from Biden, but rather echoing him in his "Middle America" attitudes.
What comes to mind first is the way that she created and then backed off the "busing" controversy in the primaries, complete with the "I was that girl" t-shirts. It's not so much the thing itself, it just that it made me certain that she would say and do anything to satisfy her ambition. She used to be a cop, now she's an "equity" symbol.
Can you walk me through how the busing controversy and t-shirt = unscrupulous?
To explain why I'm asking: I basically saw Harris as a regular but not-particularly-inspiring center-left type before she was selected as VP, but I thought the same about Biden before Obama selected him as VP. And so far I like Biden fine, so I'm pretty open-minded about Harris.
I'm looking for the definable standard that is being used to single Harris out for dishonesty beyond what is seen from other serious primary candidates from both parties (Romney, Cruz, Rubio, Warren, Buttigieg, Booker, etc).
I wouldn't say the busing or Medicare for All controversy indicates she is unscrupulous, rather it indicates her instincts guide her to try to land a "zinger" or killer argument rather than winning the campaign. The issue with her busing argument was even if it was correct it landed her in a political no-man's land and she ended up having to backtrack anyways.
Sure. Here’s how I look at it. Harris’ purpose in jumping on Biden about busing was clearly to imply that Biden is racist. That this was not spontaneous is shown by the t-shirts which exploit a mendacious narrative about her experience being “bused”. In no serious definition of the word was she “bused.” She rode to school on a bus. There is a difference, and I think she knew it all along.
This incident made me believe she is unscrupulous because it showed:
- She is willing to make odious personal charges without actually standing up to them, or justifying them.
- She is willing to encourage divisiveness within her own party to further her personal interest and ambition.
- She is willing to carefully plan this kind of attack based not on the usual sort of prevarications that politicians do, but on a dishonest concocted narrative. She did this in cold blood and with malice aforethought.
Her personal history tends to magnify this impression for me. She had this mutually self-interested relationship with Willie Brown, who launched her career. Then she was a crime hawk who did some truly repellent and unscrupulous things when she was a prosecutor. Then she did some race stuff while seeking to look like a moderate candidate in the primaries. Now she’s an icon of multiculturalism and representation and an ambassador of “equity.” I can’t see continuity here, except that explained by pure ambition combined with bad political instincts.
Cruz and Rubio have done the kind of things that Harris did, and they are equally disgusting. Romney, Booker, Warren, and Buttegieg never did anything like the three things I described above, that Harris did. They are ambitious, but they have scruples.
Interesting. I saw that as her trying to take a shot at Biden for not doing enough for black people during his long career, which I think is a fair argument in a Dem primary. I also think her shot missed, making it a political failure.
It seems clear as day that Romney, for instance, has done similar things hundreds of times. The big difference here that seems to set you off is that Harris was making an antiracist argument (and Castro was making a pro-immigrant argument). That the argument was a political failure may be a sign that they are bad future candidates, but they don't make them unusually "unscrupulous" by the standards of primary presidential candidates.
It is true that I am deeply out of sympathy with anti-racism, but I hadn’t formulated that (or even had heard the word) at that time. What struck me then was: why would any Democrat ever seek to exploit one of the party’s worst policy failures, which incited tremendous social conflict and severely worsened the residential and school segregation that we are living with today? Why would Harris try to spin Biden’s navigation of this rolling disaster in 1970 to insinuate that it meant that he was against black people in 2020? It seemed so out of left field: it could only be explained for me the desire to get some identity points in pursuit of her self-aggrandizement.
It is interesting that you describe Castro’s open immigration proposals as “pro-immigrant.” I consider myself pro-immigrant and pro-immigration, but I believe it should be controlled, recognizing the interests of the native population, and that the law should be enforced. In this I am in company with the great majority of Americans. It doesn’t make me (or us) anti-immigrant. My beef with Castro was his loony proposals – he really seemed to care more about his idea of creating settlements of poor Mexican people in United States territory than about the well-being of the Americans he was seeking to lead.
Serious question, are there male politicians you would call unscrupulous? Not someone like McConnell. Maybe another Democratic primary candidate?
I do appreciate your post, because I do see a lot of visceral reaction to Harris, and it’s helpful to see where that comes from. But I also think it’s weird to use ambitious as a pejorative. She ran for President. Of course she’s ambitious! So was everyone else who ran.
As for Willie Brown, fine, it’s a bit gross. He’s a scumbag and he was twice her age. But it was also a long time ago. She has a wonderful husband now.
I now really dislike Julian Castro because he knifed Beto, and did it over a toxically unpopular position of decriminalizing illegal entry. And then he basically accused Biden of being senile. I also kind of hold that against Corey Booker.
But Harris’s whole “I was that little girl” really bothered me, and then I got over it. Not sure why.
“Ambition” has different shades of meaning. As a personal quality, ambition is admirable in man or woman. But in a political context, it means that someone is more interested in gaining power than in serving their country. Julius Caesar was ambitious in this sense, and it’s what got him killed.
I don’t think any of the Democratic primary candidates struck me as unscrupulous in the way that Harris does. To me, both Beto and Booker were lightweights in that they didn’t seem to be able to show what they were going to do for the country, more than they obviously wanted the country to do for them. But I don’t think either of them was unscrupulous. I didn’t follow Castro, because I thought he was so much in outer space on immigration issues that he wasn’t worth bothering with. But what you’re describing sounds like Harris with busing, and that’s unscrupulous. Are you thinking of anyone else in particular?
On the other hand, since January 6, I’d judge that a majority of the Republican caucus (mostly male) is both (politically) ambitious and exceedingly unscrupulous. Starting with Cruz and Rubio. Repulsive people, both of them. Mitch is very scrupulous, but also very evil, with a certain dark splendor, like Satan.
The whole waffling on Medicare-for-all demonstrated at a minimum that she is incredibly bad at hiding the fact that politicians take strategic positions. What should have been an internal debate instead played out in the open and that ended up being very damaging to her candidacy.
We know that white women can win Midwestern Congressional elections. We know Barrack Obama could win Midwestern swing states in presidential elections. It does not follow that a biracial woman from California can win Midwestern swing states in a Presidential election. The gist of MY’s analysis is “don’t be too weird.” Embrace hokey patriotism and saccharine optimism to act normal. That’s fine advice. It worked for Obama. However, Obama was male and lived in the Midwest. He chose Chicago when most people with his credentials wind up on the coasts. This made him seem normal enough to win an election in held when the economy seemed to be imploding.
Harris can’t change her race and can’t take back the 25 years she spent as a California politician, and a gender change would be unlikely to improve her political prospects. She checks too many “not like us” boxes to play well in Wisconsin.
The best metric of her fitness for the nomination is her approval ratings. Democrats were idiots to ignore Hillary’s wretched numbers. I hope they don’t make that mistake twice.
ps— it will be really interesting to see how Abrams performs relative to Warnock. That will give us some data on the electability of women of color in tough states. I suspect they will both lose. A lot of suburban whites will go R if the party puts two blacks at the top of the ticket. Electing a black senator in the Deep South is inclusive and historic. Having a black senator and a black governor triggers a they’re taking over” vibe.
It might be harder for “a biracial woman from California” to win swing states but there’s no need to embrace this defeatism. She could be doing a lot more to change her approval ratings and viability. Maybe there’s a ceiling! But there’s only one way to find out. Otherwise what’s the point?
My defeatism stems from the fact that I don't think she has the ability or discipline to actually do this, and will instead wallow in "I earned it" and "they're prejudiced" type spin for the entirety of the next four years. God knows the people she's surrounded herself with are already getting on with that line of messaging.
Frankly, the single best thing Biden can do for the country is try to name a successor OTHER THAN HARRIS. Preferably female, preferably an excellent retail politician. Duckworth or Baldwin would both be decent choices, though neither wants the job. Whitmer, depending on how the next year goes, would be another.
I admire the hell out of Duckworth and she's a hero, and I hate to say this, but I'm afraid voters would probably shy away from someone with her battle injuries. We celebrate sacrifice in the abstract but are probably too squeamish if it were put in front of us every day.
She polled as the most admired woman in America for something like 20 years in a row. It wasn't until the Benghazi hearings led to the email scandal that her numbers started taking a hit.
I believe that in 1994 she both was widely hated (with underwater approval ratings) *and* was the most admired woman in America. "Most admired" doesn't require even 35% of people to list you first, but winning an election does.
Great example is 1974. Richard Nixon was forced to resign in disgrace. His approval # were below 30% all year. He was the 7th most admired person in the country that year.
She was always someone people liked better as a bureaucrat than a politician. I remember thinking how bad ass she was as Secretary of State. Didn’t need to like her.
I think a stint as a VP would of been a good route to take.
My whole issue with Hillary was that she was related to Bill.
I’ve sworn to never vote for another Presidents family member ever again. Bush, Clinton, Obama… I refuse to perpetuate any family Dynasties.
Biden's favorables crashed after he started running for president too, though not as low as Clinton's. In our polarized environment, anyone is going to become less popular when they're running.
>>Democrats were idiots to ignore Hillary’s wretched numbers.<<
I think that's undoubtedly true (especially in retrospect). But it underlines the questionability of abandoning smoke-filled rooms: primary voters aren't political operatives. The "Democrats" who anointed Clinton in 2016 were mostly regular folks. It's true HRC enjoyed widespread Democratic Party *establishment* support, too. But I wonder what avenues/methods exist at this stage for institutional Democrats to deal with a similar situation; IOW, if it's late 2027 and it's clear that Vice President Harris is a badly flawed general election candidate, what strategies would DNC leadership have at its disposal to oppose her path to the nomination? Vice presidents are pretty powerful, and I'm skeptical we'd see significant numbers of "professional" Democrats willing to openly cross her.
Relatedly: although it's obviously too early to speculate with any degree of confidence, I believe ONE potential "fix" for Kamala Harris would simply be for her to ascend to the presidency. I fully expect Joe Biden to run again in 2024, and I'd like to think he'd be favored. But would he really serve an entire second term? Maybe he will! But one could imagine President Biden stepping aside in, say, early 2027 (by which point he'd have had his 84th birthday, I think). All bets would be off if Kamala Harris were the incumbent president in 2028, running to secure her own mandate.
IIRC Clinton's numbers were indeed pretty solid during her SecState tenure, and for a while thereafter. But they were beginning to decline well before the arrival of 2016. Benghazi had something to do with that. So did the email scandalette. Political attacks work!
By the second half of 2015, it should have been obvious she was a risky bet for Democrats. I don't in the least exempt myself from this myopia: I was (and remain) an admirer of Hillary Clinton, and I didn't see it coming, either. But a lot of people were warning (in the final approaches to the primary season) that her numbers stank.
One element that might have contributed to the failure to see the impending disaster was Trump's early breakout: many (probably the vast majority if we're being honest) politically active liberals simply couldn't conceive a candidate with Trump's attributes could win the White House. This, I think in retrospect, had the effect of reducing in the minds of many Democrats the salience of electability and candidate quality in the nominee*. I hope Democrats never make that mistake again: the reality (at least for the foreseeable future) is that having either a "D" or (especially) "R" next to one's name on the presidential ballot puts one within spitting distance of an Electoral College majority. The Republicans could nominate the ISIS Caliph in 2024 and still have a fair shot at victory.
*One of the purported advantages of the primary system is that the general election nominee by definition is a person who has already received millions and million of votes. For obvious reasons this, in isolation, is helpful for the November election. But an increasingly clear disadvantage -- especially in our current era of sharp partisanship -- is that these millions and millions of primary voters don't necessarily know what they're doing in terms of strategic political calculus.
I think they were also in the throes of recoiling at what a horror show of a person Trump is, and assumed that they could cut into him by showing everyone that he is a horror show. But in retrospect we know that being a dumpster fire is very on-brand for Trump, and dwelling on that lets him elide the incredibly unpopular party that he is running on.
I feel very confident in saying that if there's a challenge to Harris for the nomination, it will come from the Left. I.e., someone even less able to appeal to Matt's swing voter.
I don’t think Katie Porter would be willing to buck the Dem Establishment like that. Warren is her mentor. Porter is young, if she has presidential ambitions, she has plenty of time.
Wouldn't it be totally possible for incumbent-due-to-Biden's-resignation President Harris to just be disliked and lose in 2028, the same as if she became the nominee as VP?
Obama's middle name was "Hussein". He grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii. Even his first name is, for lack of a more PC term, very "foreign" sounding. If he had never existed we'd probably be hearing that such a person could never win the Presidency. Even Trump, on paper, seems like an impossible win for the R primary: a former Dem and NYC elite / Hollywood reality show talking head.
But they each tapped into something with swing voters, they stood for something swing voters cared about (in very different ways) and they became popular enough on their own terms that their demographic background became among the least of their problems
The statements from the top of your comment aren't unchanging facts; they weren't uncovered during repeatable experiments in a physics or chemistry lab. I don't see any structural reason why Kamala Harris can't become a brand that's not tied down or reduced to Progressive SF politics. That said - like most others, the evidence suggests to me that she will not develop a brand apart from SF Progressive politics.
I think this is an apt description of Harris' problems. Most "swing voters" don't really pay attention to politics, and most seem to vote with their guts. Hillary and Trump are good examples of this. The former, by the time of the 2016 election, was seen as a corrupt establishment hypocrite who wore suffragette white while married to an alleged rapist, and the latter was a racist narcissistic misogynist who refused to stop saying stupid shit.
Hillary suffered from the inherent incumbent party problem that plagues all candidates after eight years of power. Additionally, voters' gut feelings about her swayed many to pull the lever for Trump out of cynicism. Trump's faults hurt him in 2020 because many suburban voters who would typically support things like tax cuts learned to hate his guts during his chaotic administration.
If Harris is viewed as a west coast liberal Democrat, that's bad for swing voters' gut feelings, and I don't think she'll be a successful presidential candidate regardless of what she says or does.
Hard to think of a worse 1 line bio for swing voters in middle America to hear than "SF / CA liberal". Being from far away Alaska or Hawaii would be better
Speaking of Georgia, keep in mind that there is a very decent chance that the R nominee will be Vernon Jones, not Brian Kemp. I think that would change your calculations regarding race.
Here's a take for ya: There is the option of dropping Harris from the ticket, of course, in 2024. Not likely, no, but politics ain't beanbag. And there's a certain non-woke Black dude who might be running New York City by then. If his Twitter feed's anything to go by, Eric Adams seems ready for the big leagues.
I follow another off-topic forum that has a politics sub-forum dominated by the left (ranging from Woke to genuinely Communist), and watching the heart attacks Adams provokes among the woke faction is enough to convince me he's onto something.
They're having to consistently demonize positions he doesn't hold just to paper over the contradictions in their worldview.
Not terribly sure that Yang was aiming for something all that different, though I have my doubts that he'd have achieved it.
Adams is basically an old-fashioned machine politician. That may work if he can use the machine to beat some discipline into the various party stakeholders screwing things up; bludgeon the NIMBY lobby, stop spending education funds on pointless boondoggles, shrink the union cut of infrastructure projects, hammer a few bus-only thoroughfares through over the objection of drivers.
It would work very well indeed if he can then use the power of the unified party machine to browbeat a few outside power centers into line, most especially the NYPD.
I'm cautiously optimistic that he'll be better than most of the others had the potential to be.
I'm a Garcia fan, and as BP Adams has been extremely unimpressive/unresponsive (granted that is a completely useless office and it should be abolished). But I really like the scenario you lay out here and hope it comes to pass in some fashion.
A lot depends on whether he decides to do it or not.
The mayor has the power to jam up the workings to the extent that the various bits of the machine decide it's easier to submit to being greased to run a bit more smoothly than to piss him off.
The last several mayors, De Blasio most especially, have lacked the spine to try.
I don't think Garcia, as well-meaning and reasonable-sounding as she was, would have had it either, and Wiley was a dumpster fire.
Garcia is a competent manager who has run some big agencies (DEP, DSNY) pretty well. I think she would have tried, and maybe succeeded. Totally agree about Wiley. I could go on for hours/many lines of text about the disaster that the current administration has been, its incompetence and arrogance, its nonexistent attention span, and its inability to do politics, but I will spare everyone. I do hope Adams is ready to step up, and that he hires some competent people.
I think we're seeing here that the Slow Boring subscriber base is just as unrepresentative of the American electorate as the Very Online wokesters are. Lots of libertarian-ish distaste here for Harris's past tough-on-crime stances, when those are in fact the strongest parts of her electoral profile. IRL there are close to zero libertarian swing voters (or voters of any kind, really).
I hope Harris and her team listen to this post, but I don't have high hopes. After a certain point in their careers people tend to just get set in their ways. Think of all the coaches in pro sports who achieve success with a particular style with predictable strengths and weaknesses. How many of them plateau there, and how many are able to evolve? I'd say it's like a 10-to-1 ratio. Coaches who are creative and able to make adjustments are *usually* creative and able to make adjustments from the beginning.
Do we know who Harris's political brain is? Who is her Ted Kaufman, and what do we know about him/her? If that person is capable of shifting gears, then Harris will be too. If not, she won't.
Based on some googling, I think Harris's political brain might be a person named Rohini Kosoglu. I don't know anything about her but since Matt has so much pull within the White House these days he should get the message to her.
Kind of off the main point of this thread, but distaste for tough-on-crime rhetoric doesn't track as libertarian at all. It's true that libertarians are generally opposed to police power for anti-statist reasons, but this just happens to be one area where their policy preferences somewhat line up with leftist social justice concerns. BLM is in favor of defunding the police, but that doesn't make them libertarians.
I am aware that there are non-libertarian opponents of criminal law enforcement, but the sentiments in this thread that I was referring to appear to be more of the libertarian variety.
I'm not sure about this claim. I think, at least compared to other groups of over-educated left-of-center political enthusiasts, Matt's readership is pretty concerned about violent crime, especially its impact on the poor and working class. I'm pro-Adams, and even was supportive of picking Harris as VP, but she is plainly not a positive VORPolitician, notwithstanding her prosecutorial bona fides. [at risk of making this comment even lamer, explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_over_replacement_player ]
I think this is both rather cynical and more or less correct. One way or another the Republicans are likely to nominate a (semi-)lunatic, therefore the rep you want is 'the sensible one', which is how Biden won. And rightly or wrongly, a large and critical group of Americans define 'sensible' as 'centrist, annoying left and right'. The increasing focus on identity issues in the Democratic activist base means that as a black woman Harris has a lot of room to annoy left. Especially if she's up in 2024, against Trump...
I feel attacked, while at the same time I know you’re right. I feel devastatingly sad, as one does when faced with a truth they have not seen, nor do they want to. The word “pandering” makes me a little bit nauseous. It carries with it a sense of deceit and insincerity. I want the leaders of this great country to be above it. But reality bites.
The hardest pill to swallow is the phrase “The greatest country in the world.” A clip from the TV series “Newsroom” plays in my mind every time I hear it, yet I know that the vast majority of my peers have never seen it, nor would they agree. America is not the greatest country in the world. But that would definitely not sit well with an even more vast majority of not only my peers, but the citizens of this country.
In order to create great change, one must be in a position to make that change possible. Having the opportunity to orchestrate great things brings with it the responsibility of retaining that position. I want to say, “But at what cost?” The answer is, unfortunately, at a greater cost than it should be… the cost of changing the rhetoric. Pandering. Definitely a punch to the gut for me this morning.
I hear you, but I would mainly counsel you to be less sad about it. No one remembers or cares what grubby things FDR said to get elected or what grimy compromises he made to get legislation passed. We remember that he passed the Social Security Act that has had a tremendous positive impact on people's lives. The problem is that we don't spend enough time being happy about this sort of thing, and we spend too much time outraged about the everyday minutiae of politics.
What actually matters in politics are things like laws, judges, interest rates, and wars. Which means winning elections matters more than almost anything, not just practically but morally. It's tough, but less tough if we keep those laws, judges, interest rates, and wars front and center in our minds.
Not to be contentious, but did you really “counsel me not to be sad.”?? Are you serious? That is unbelievably condescending. I have as much right — and justification to be sad as you do to your Patriotism. “Everyday minutiae”? The automatic assumption and dismissal of what I am sad about? As if you actually know what makes me sad?
I am well read regarding what needs to be “front and center,” which is ALSO subjective. What “laws” and “judges”? Do you have any inkling as to which I am referring to that make me sad?
Excuse me for expressing my take on this matter whilst agreeing with the author. Your counsel is dismissed.
I thought what you are referring to that makes you sad is political pandering, because that's what you wrote in your comment.
I was really speaking more in the spirit of general advice offered toward myself as much as anyone. I think you may be reading something into my words that isn't there.
Thank you for the clarification. I am definitely not a fan of pandering. Verbiage matters within discourse, though. Four years of Trump sloughed off layers of tough skin…
Honestly, I've never understood why American liberals have such an issue with “The greatest country in the world.” It is a very defensible claim.
14 Countries have a population over 100 million. China, India, US, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, Mexico, Japan, Ethiopia, Philippines, Egypt.
We're the global leader in culture & business. We provide much of the infrastructure that allows trade & migration. We have extremely high HDI. We lead the world in scientific research. Migration patterns support it. US has very low emigration and is the most popular spot for immigrants in the world.
Aaron Sorkin's speech is quite silly as is most of his political writing.
I'm not especially invested in the argument over the U.S.'s "greatest country in the world" standing, but the reason this sort of logic doesn't really get to the heart of liberal unease is that the "greatest country in the world" claim is not offered as bland statement of fact. That is, when, say, Laura Ingraham says that the U.S. is number one, she is very much not saying, "Well, we suck on health care and child poverty and incarceration rates, but we're killing it on patents and movie box office, so by my estimation the U.S. maintains a healthy 3.2% lead in nation rankings over our closest competitor, Belgium, with ancient Hibernia a distant number three."
What she is actually saying is something closer to: "America, fuck yeah, suck it you bedwetting haters, if you don't like it, get out." So there's more of an affective thing going on here.
If you want to argue that we should care less about what Laura Ingraham thinks and also that liberals should be less affectively gloomy about the U.S., then I can probably get on board. Speaking as a liberal, my affect toward the U.S. is pretty overweighted on Trump right now, and could probably stand a correction.
I think “America, Fuck Yeah” is a much stronger message than “America? Fuck, no.”
I think the left is really entrenched in a narrative that the US is a priori bad and a lot of politics is downstream of that axiom. That’s why Twitter thinks the US did the least of any developed country to help its citizens during the pandemic, when in fact, we did the most. It’s both inaccurate and terrible political messaging.
What bothers me about Ingraham is that she all but says only white people are real Americans.
I think "the left" is less entrenched in the belief that America is bad than is popularly believed. Twitter may be extremely entrenched in that belief, but that's Twitter. My guess is that most middle-of-the-road liberals think America is flawed but pretty great, which isn't much good as a political slogan and still leaves one open to attacks on patriotism grounds.
I think this is a really interesting question, and I would love to see polling data about this.
My intuition is that you are right, but my anecdata is that this very question came up among a largish group of my Midwest-lefty friends and I was really surprised at how scathing everyone was about their overall opinion of US global influence. It wasn’t even at the point of tepid support- a lot of them literally thought that the world would be a much better place if the US just went away.
Yeah, that’s probably true. I always say Twitter isn’t real life and tweak politicos and pundits for forgetting that, but I forget it too.
One thing that struck me in 2016 is that I thought both Trump and Bernie were pretty unpatriotic for presidential candidates. Like MAGA — I think America is great right now! Or was prior to 2016. It kinda made me wonder if patriotism isn’t a thing anymore. I’m much more on board with Biden-style patriotism.
Btw, when I say the left, I mean leftists, not liberals. I’m a squashy liberal, and yes, I think America is flawed, but I also very cornily “America is a shining city on a hill.” People die trying to get here, and I almost feel it’s disrespectful to shrug off what a huge advantage people have being born here versus almost anywhere else in the world.
What is more telling is within the Democratic coalition the more sucesfful and affluent you are the more likely you are to take issue with the claim.
Which leads me to belief a lot of complaints about "greatest country in the world" are similar to complaints about the US not following the World Cup as much as other countries: cosmopolitan identity politics.
There's another nuance to this though. Conservatives definitely own the patriotism brand. But conservatives also often seem to really hate America. That is, they hate government, hate the blue states, think the country is in decline, think the country is decadent and going to hell, etc. There's a strong analog with some lefty thinking, but of course with a lot of the issue positions reversed.
But of course conservatives thread the needle by reorienting their patriotism toward a "real America" (and a fantasy Constitution), reserving their disdain for "un-America." And likewise conservative politicians can get away with saying bad things about America all the time, as long as they don't say bad things about "real America." Whereas the reverse is very much not true for liberal politicians.
Which is all to say, I don't think I agree that this is cosmopolitan identity politics. I think both sides register quite a lot of disgust for the aspects of America that they reject, but the manifestations are different.
The reference to Newsroom reminds me that, contra online leftists who believe that The West Wing’s main appeal was its embrace of bipartisan compromise, the shows actual main appeal was how President Bartlet refuses to triangulate and say things he doesn’t mean. It’s a seductive fantasy!
I try to think about what I *would* say is the greatest country in the world and I just draw a blank. Like if it’s Sweden or whatever how come Sweden doesn’t have more influence? I think it’s basically a meaningless question, which makes “the United States” as good an answer as any.
It's the greatest country in the world for Americans. Just like my family (warts and all) is the greatest family in the world for my family members. There is nothing wrong or anti-progressive about saying or believing any of that.
Not all Americans. None of us can speak for all Americans. But it is absolutely not great for all Americans. I also think my family is the greatest in the world. But my kids beg to differ (teenagers and new adults always think they can do things better than their parents).
Since it's so very subjective I don't know why you'd worry over it at all. How could you prove that it is or isn't the greatest? What country is great for every single citizen? For some people it's associated with a very positive or sacrifice and service, it's not all jingoism
Because it is subjective I worry. The point of this piece is to point out that Kamala’s rhetoric is worrying, and that she needs to change it to pander. That her not doing so is cause to worry. I am flabbergasted by the gaslighting here.
How is it gaslighting? It is true that America has done both great and terrible things, and most Americans prefer to hear about the great things. I think people greatly underestimate the importance of triggering identities in politics, and “we are awesome Americans!” is a much more empowering/vote-getting identity than “we are crappy Americans”!
A politician’s job is different from a historian’s.
That is not relevant to what I said. It is the greatest country for Americans in the aggregate, and therefore Harris, and all progressive politicians, should say so.
Some Americans surely dislike America for one reason or another, some more meritorious than others, but some people in every country dislike their own country.
I’m curious as to the source of its greatness in the “aggregate.” I tend to agree, to some extent, but I also know that there are so many more perspectives than mine, and the political climate is obviously deeply divided. Is that divide directly related to the concept that America is great for the individual? Possibly. But I’ve seen it very well stated here that we absolutely DO all want to live in an America we can all be proud of. We are all Americans. I don’t see any reason why she couldn’t change her verbiage to be more inclusive in order to gather more central/undecided support. This whole thing has made me do some re-thinking. It is absolutely pandering to say America is “The Greatest.” But “This Great Country — OUR Country!” might go a long way.
The point is that your country doesn't need to earn your love, any more than your kids need to earn your love in order to be (to you) the greatest kids ever. Your kids are great because they're your kids. Your country is great because it's your community, it's special to you, and you love it just the way it is -- even as you want it to improve, just as you want your kids to improve. The whole concept of comparing the US to other countries on this or that metric is beside the point.
I think everyone deserves to believe their country is the greatest country in the world, regardless of facts. It doesn't preclude acknowledging flaws, but it does demonstrate how one is committed to their community, which is most important for the leader.
It's a bit like your parents. If I asked you if your mom or dad were the greatest mom or dad in the world, you'd say yes right?
I tend to over-intellectualize everything so I’d probably give an annoying nuanced answer like I did above. But I agree with the point you’re actually making.
While I would love to say my parents were the greatest in the world, I cannot. And therein lies the problem. It is about the collective experience. While some people’s experience can be great, others’ can be equally horrific and abusive.
That's true. Some people's experiences can be horrific, while others can be great. No one can truly measure if a country is great or not, but people feel their leader should not just be an analyzer of problems, but a national cheerleader who believes in the potential of the country.
I think pro-America talk is not so much about what is actually great and not-great about America, but a statement that the speaker is faithful to and loves the community that he or she expects to lead. And every politician just needs to be good at that - otherwise, who needs them?
That is so very true, and the more I look back on it the more I realize it. My favorite parts (like most other viewers I suspect) is when Bartlett or a member of his staff would verbally tear apart a wrongheaded opponent of the president, and these days when I read https://www.reddit.com/r/thatHappened/ It makes me cringe how much some of those stories sound like the West Wing.
Am I the only center-left person who hated the West Wing when it aired? It was so smarmy and full of itself. I see socialists on Twitter dragging West Wing to own the moderate libs, and I’m like yeah, it was a silly show!
It was definitely smarmy and full of itself, but when that inspirational music started playing I got sucked in, yah know? Honestly Aaron Sorkin is like Nicolas Sparks or whoever wrote Twilight novels: He writes guilty pleasures. The problem is that people treat West Wing as actually informative of politics.
Off Topic but West Wing was a pretty terrible drama with excellent dialogue.
One limitation to it as a drama.
Did anyone in the Bartlett White Hose have a different motivation beyond selfless public service in support of the public good (defined in the show as Sorkinism)? Very rarely. In real offices you have your timemarkers, people who just want to climb the ladder, people who dislike the boss, the reformers who disagree on the mission agenda. None of that exists in that WH.
Hmmm, you're right. Now that I think about it, even the Republican opponents, who were supposed to be the bad guys, were usually motivated by ideology over selfish personal gain. I dunno, I loved the Newsroom as well, Aaron Sorkin can't really write human beings because he's too pompous and idealistic, but dang if I don't love indulging in his fantasies.
So much to agree with. But again, to categorically say it is the greatest without evaluating that statement is flawed. Necessary in the case of a sitting President/Vice President, but still flawed. And it begs the question — does influence make something great?
That the size and number of citizens of a nation determines its ability to be functional is silly. That we cannot look at what is working on other nations, regardless of their size, and evaluate what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong and adapt is silly. Please find a less derisive word. It’s… silly not to.
It is much harder to build social solidarity as population size increases. It is much harder to build social solidarity as geographic size increases. It is much harder to build social solidarity as the culture becomes more diverse.
US has all 3. Comparing ourseleves to mini-states that are the size of our metro areas is, well, silly.
See I look at this though and say the cost of changing rhetoric is... literally nothing? Hell yes I'll use jingoistic slogans if it means I have a greater chance of passing policies that I think will improve people's lives (and maybe even help America live up to that aspirational rhetoric.)
My point was that the cost (moral and personal truth to self and immediate constituents) of casting aside your own beliefs to pander is worth the benefit. Basically saying exactly what you just said. Except to some people, that cost is not “literally nothing.” She got to one of the most powerful positions in the world by being true to her beliefs — and doing so loudly and proudly. She does need to change that, but the cost to her is not determined by the ideology that you don’t see it as a cost.
I definitely *don't* think America is the greatest country in the world (the greatest countries in the world are Japan, France and Mexico) but I don't mind hokey US patriotism at all.
Being conspicuously cosmopolitan (in *any* country) is also a kind of identity politics. It is at worst a way of saying "people like me are better than these rubes." Patriotic rhetoric, at its best, is a way of saying "I want this country we are making together be as good as it can be."
Maybe the three most admirable things this country ever did were the Civil War / reconstruction, the FDR presidency and the civil rights movement and the mainstream of all three was awash in patriotic rhetoric. America's symbols are powerful, you can't just give up on them.
Yup, I love your point that being conspicuously cosmopolitan is a form of identity politics. It is also a form of favoring a very specific personality trait most people don't have by definition: extremely high openness to experience relative to the average person.
so I just posted about how my comment derailed completely, but if I HAD posted about pro-America vs. against-America, this says exactly what I would have tried to convey.
I think people give legislators a lot of space for being impure, due to the need to court votes, among both voters and other legislators. There are things in her record as a prosecutor that make me worry about her character.
I don’t have time to demonstrate at the moment, may come back later, but she did things that I might overlook from a former Mississippi AG. But California? She didn’t do those things because they were politically necessary or even advantageous. It feels to me like she did those things because that’s who she is. And I hate it, I really do. I’ll be looking for a different candidate.
And yes, for Pete’s sake, get away from Twitter. That goes for every candidate and journalist (sorry Matt!).
I assume you mean some of her "tough on crime" stances which definitely worried me. Although it's possible she's become convinced those things aren't correct any more.
Going onto the national stage as a prosecutor is tough, because there are inevitably both cases you were too lenient on, and cases you were too tough on. I really liked Klobuchar, but I knew that would drag her down.
IMO, Harris has a perfectly fine record as a prosecutor. As she steps away from Joe Biden, I think “Kamala The Cop” will play great.
As you reference in the opening sentence I am deeply, deeply worried about her chances if she's the nominee. Perhaps even more worrying to me is I don't think the current iteration of the Democratic Party would even dare to challenge her for the nomination if Biden retires.
Of the most-likely GOP candidates I think she loses to every single one. A large part of this is not her fault: our country is polarized, EC puts Dems at disadvantage, a significant number of voters that are openly/closeted racists and sexists, etc., etc. All those aside, she seems to have a real issue connecting on the stump, especially with more moderate voters who would (obviously) be needed to carry her over the finish line.
To summarize: I do like Kamala the person and the public official - but I am DEEPLY worried about Kamala's chances as the anointed candidate.
If I was the Biden and/or DNC team I'd have Kamala on a tour of the rural parts of this country 75% of the time. If she could build up trust and become a familiar face in the rural areas of the country (thus tying her name to broadband expansion, farm bills, etc.) then I think she could turn the ship around in no time. But as of right now? Democrats seem doomed if she's top of ticket.
Just my two-cents, and looking forward to hearing where I'm way wrong :)
To get swing voters (largely suburban), she needs to separate herself from her staff’s woke BS. And she needs to do that now, not two weeks before the primary season starts. How likely is that? is the question.
The thing I worry about is that she and her staff may believe that they are already taking Matt's advice by not being as critical of America or as woke vanguard-y as some of their peers and cohorts would like them to be.
From my conversations with friends who are conservatives (mostly Never Trumper types) I think it is likely too late for Harris with a large segment of them. The right-wing media has been pushing a narrative of "Harris is really in charge and Biden is doing nothing" and it's working from what I can tell. Is it based in reality? Hell no. Does that matter? Hell no.
Also new voters - of which there are millions every cycle. Not many people are born D or R, and many if not most will change allegiance at some point even if they don't remain a swing
Huh really? I thought there was lots of poli sci evidence that ppl born into D families are hugely likely to be D for life and vice versa. And I thought allegiance switching was pretty rare. Your comment just challenges what I thought I knew about this so now I’m curious.
Interesting - so I haven't seen research, so take my response for what it's worth. I'm informed by 2 things:
A) Personal experience - Perhaps I'm farther from the mainstream than I realize, but most people I know, grew up with or are family with have switched voting preference and partisan lean over their lives. But I live in a Romney-2-Biden neighborhood in a swing district in a swing state with lots of cross-pressured voters. If I lived in Alabma I might have a different pesonal impression.
B) More convincingly - all the voting data I see implies major levels of vote switching each election cycle. We regularly see states that swing up to 10% each 4 year cycle, which implies a minimum net of 5% of voters switching (I know new voters, deaths and 3rd parties complicate this, but bear with me). But even within a state where the net vote didn't move, they'll be entire counties that will swing 5-10% in opposing directions to each other. And within those counties, individual districts will swing in opposing directions.
All of those opposing shifts cancelling each other imply much larger levels of vote switching than the top-line net numbers imply.
But Millenials shifted 6% towards Trump, Gen X 3% towards Trump, Boomers 1% towards Biden and the Oldest 3% towards Biden.
Rural voters 7% further towards Trump, Urban 13% to Trump, Suburban 9% to Biden.
Hispanics moved 17% to Trump!
And remember, all these specific numbers are net. 17% towards trump is a minimum of be 8.5% switching Hillary-Trump. But it could be 11% Hillary-Trump and 2.5% the other way. Or bigger, who knows.
To me there's no way realistic these numbers can all add up without a significant amount of vote switching just in this one cycle, in an election where the same guy was on the ballet as the last time.
More to the point, exit polls, including 2020, have been measuring about 10% of voters who switched their party vote cycle to cycle.
>>>From my conversations with friends who are conservatives (mostly Never Trumper types) I think it is likely too late for Harris with a large segment of them)<<<
That seems consonant with most recent analysis of partisanship in America. The "there are no swing voters" meme that got going a decade or so ago was overdone, to be sure. Nonetheless a pretty large percentage of voters these days (>85%?) usually won't even consider voting for the party they don't normally favor.*
So, no matter which Democratic politician we're talking about, I'd guess on average the vast bulk of conservatives wouldn't vote for her.
*Clearly one exception has to be Massachusetts functional Democrats who vote for Charlie Baker.
Yes, voters get the difference between a governor who doesn't answer to anyone else (besides voters) and senators/reps, who empower out-of-state actors in the party. Baker and Hogan would certainly have a better chance of getting into the Senate than other MA/MD Republicans, but would be very very likely to lose. See also Romney in 1994 vs 2002.
Yeah, this rings true. Sara Longwell has done focus groups with Republicans in Arizona. They all like Kyrsten Sinema a lot more than Mark Kelly, but when asked if they would vote for her they say absolutely not.
But it may be based in reality. One of her most important roles, as I understand it, is (informally) as “ambassador to the left” and (publicly) as the advocate of “equity” as left-defined. I think she has a lot of influence in certain areas (such as housing policy) because Biden has given it to her. The implications of this are enough to kill her with suburban voters, moderate Democrats as well as perhaps momentarily persuadable Republicans. As you say, it probably already has, while also (re-) trashing the Democratic Party brand, for losses down the road.
Well, if that's the case, she's doing a below-average job as the far-left seems to absolutely despise her. But, the far-left is nearly impossible to please - especially on the federal level.
But, to be clear, I don't think the far-left is driven by reason. Not sure what she could do to please them tbh
The crazy thing about Lefties who hate Kamala is she is one of them. She was consistently one of the most liberal Senators by vote score. https://voteview.com/congress/senate
Which goes to show Lefties are just like everyone else: they vote on identity. Because she doesn't rail again capitalism like Bernie or drap herself in the professorial culture like Warren they don't care for her despite the fact she's clearly one of them.
Unfortunately for Harris most moderates accurately perceive Harris's ideology which leaves her in a tough spot.
Can't say I'm an expert, but my gut tells me that there could be a pretty large zone of people who aren't hating her forever for having been a cop, and who are liking her now because of the "first black asian woman etc. etc." factor and because she is going around talking about "equity" (in an Orwellian sense).
Judging by this, they’re doubling down, not separating: “ Sabrina Singh, deputy press secretary to the vice president, told CNN in a statement that Harris’ focus remains on her work.
“The Vice President and her office are focused on the Biden-Harris Administration’s agenda to build an economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down, to making sure racial equity is at the core of everything the Administration does, to combatting the existential threat of climate change, and to continue protecting the American people from the Covid-19 pandemic,” Singh said.” From https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/02/politics/kamala-harris-office-dynamics/index.html
Sincere question: how does "making sure racial equity is at the core of everything the Administration does" poll in general and across the American electorate? Similarly, how does "combatting the existential threat of climate change" poll? Do people outside the DC bubble resonate with "build an economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down". Wouldn't it be better to say something like "good jobs for everyone"? This sounds like bad marketing copy, not like political slogans, which is what it should be.
Climate change is becoming a more popular topic (especially this year), but she needs to pair with “lead the world in new energy technologies to reduce carbon emissions and pollution”
In theory I’m very supportive of racial equity, but everyone has a different definition of equity, and the one suggested in the video above is “problematic” to me, “Marxist” to some otherwise persuadable voters. And it doesn’t seem wise to make it the “core of everything.” So I do think that statement does more harm than good, even if I fall on the amenable end of the spectrum myself!
Regardless of what you think of racial equity and equality, that video is fundamentally about didactically explaining to people what words mean.
Not saying it’s not important, or that it’s wrong, or anything like that. I’m just saying that Explaining what words mean is basically a bad look in politics.
Agree, especially rural areas where she can literally show them the benefits of a competent federal government. But it's not happening, not sure how much longer I can wait
Your comment makes me realize something disturbing, which is that we Democrats are developing our own version of the GOP’s “it’s death to criticize Trump” thing, only ours isn’t built on a single personality like theirs is. Instead, ours is built on the fear that if we criticize candidates who have certain identities (race, sex, etc.), that we’ll be attacked as racist, sexist, etc. That’s not a good formula for cutting ourselves loose from subpar candidates.
I think this is right where I am too. I like her fine, but I'm a hardcore Dem, like I'm literally the target audience Matt identifies. The electoral college is BAD for her.
And to your first point, can you imagine a primary against her in this iteration of the Democratic party? I'd expect a shit show of Dem identity politics infighting
Counterpoint: I'm never going to pull the lever for anything that doesn't have a D after the name, no matter how ugly that thing might be, and I still don't like her.
I don't hate her, certainly, but I'm unsure that she was in any way important to the 2020 results, I have no confidence in her policy decisions or her political instincts, and I deeply fear she's going to screw up the 2024 or '28 campaign in pretty much every way possible.
I'm not entirely certain she can pull off a damned *popular vote* victory, she's that tone-deaf and has that little control over her staff.
For what it's worth: there's totally a large probability this piece gets in front of the Vice President's eyeballs (and definitely her staff's). From what I hear Matt Y is a very regular read in (very) high Democratic Party circles.
Fascinating and convincing analysis but... (pause for a Jon Snow flashback) - I think this next bit is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG:
"And on some level, I don’t think there’s any problem with Harris that can’t be solved by her wanting to solve problems.".
Her campaign was a train wreck of muddled messaging and confused staffers and we are getting similar stories out of the White House. I think this is who she is and she either can't or won't change.
Agree, the persistent stories of bad staffing and management that have followed Harris are the biggest red flag.
The advice MY makes in the post is so obviously right that you have to wonder why she hasn't already been doing it. It's probably because she's got bad staff with a bunker mentality who are reinforcing her worst instincts instead of helping her act like she is in the incredibly strong position that she's actually in. Ultimately though if she's repeatedly picking bad staff, that's on her
A consistent finding is that Left of Center types are more pessimistic. It is important to not let that bias you. We didn't nominate a Palin who doesn't have the smarts to pivot or a Cruz who is just unwilling to do so.
We nominated a skilled Pol. Hopefully she'll make the necessary transition.
These are among the articles I was thinking of when I said, a few moments ago:
"My defeatism stems from the fact that I don't think she has the ability or discipline to actually do this, and will instead wallow in "I earned it" and "they're prejudiced" type spin for the entirety of the next four years. God knows the people she's surrounded herself with are already getting on with that line of messaging."
It's not that this can't be fixed, is that she does not see the need.
Hey, I am that 50 year old white middle-class suburban sometimes votes Democrat sometimes votes Republican voter. So basically this whole post his subtweeting me.
I actually sort of like Harris. The fact that she was a prosecutor, was one of the things I dug. She seems smart, sharp. Unfortunately, what she lacks is charisma. Or more specifically that type of charisma that is effective on TV. But even though she might not be a natural, I think she definitely has the bones to improve.
Matt is especially right about her leaning into Patriotism. What I look for in a President is that feeling that the person really loves America. And I’m a way that is greater than it’s flaws. One of the hypothetical questions I ask about a President is whether this person would sacrifice their life for our country, or at least get a fist fight for us. Now I know this can be faked, but I want to at least believe it might be true.
This is one of those reasons I didn’t vote for Trump. To me it was pretty obvious he was a narcissist that only cared about himself.
Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush St all had that. Democrats lately though are in danger of losing on an institutional level. Kamala hasn’t done anything to say that she has fallen into this trap, but by not actively cultivating American positivism she runs getting sucked into this trap.
Note: I don’t follow her very much so if someone replies with some quote or illustration of how she has done it… it wasn’t enough because it didn’t break through.
On another semi-related note. I sort of dig AOC. She has that charisma. I am really hoping that she can separate herself from the socialist label enough to be a viable candidate. She has that common sense, I lived in the real world thing about her. If she has spent 4-years in the Military after college, I’d bet pretty big on her Presidential odds. As it is now… she has that… I’m for working people thing going. Hopefully she can get that I love America thing as well.
>>>Unfortunately, what she lacks is charisma.<<<
I'd say what she lacks is the "common touch." Hillary Clinton substantially lacked it, too. So did John Kerry and Al Gore and Michael Dukakis. In my view it's not ideology as such, although it's awfully hard to radiate the common touch when you're mainly focused on prog social and process issues. But plenty of Democrats have had it. Obama to a considerable degree. Klobuchar. Barbara Mikulski. Andrew Cuomo. Bill Clinton. Joe Biden. You can imagine these people enjoying a cheeseburger and an ice cold beer as they watch Monday Night Football. Swing voters for better or worse want that quality.
I wonder if getting potential nominees season tickets to whatever NFL team makes geographic sense and making them attend all the games is a viable electoral strategy. Sitting in normal seats, of course.
(I mean because it would make them better people, not as a publicity stunt)
I don't know if it would make them better people - there are ways that being forced to be around people different from yourself can make you more tolerant of them, but there are also ways it can make you less tolerant of them.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_yiQXPOO1Yo
lol
She’s incredibly charming when speaking off-the-cuff to small crowds. I’m sure she does great on a rope line. I think she has more trouble with more formal settings.
As I understand it, Hillary was quite good there as well. The problem is that most (all?) successful politicians are very charming or they wouldn't have made it past their first race. In a small group, you compare them to other people you know and them seem amazing. But in a political arena, you compare them to other politicians and then you start to see the differences. Its like the difference between your average person and a professional athlete in the NBA etc. The worst player in the NBA is 10 times as good as the average rec player at basketball, but they are still at the bottom of the elite pool of players.
I think that’s a fair point, but Harris at least does awesome TikTok videos that generally make her seem warm and funny. Have you seen her deplane? It’s adorable. She wears cool shoes.
She needs to sand off that self righteous edge that came out when she pledged to ban guns in the primary. That’s the kind of stuff the press swooned over, but the average voter hates.
Or when she set up that “I was that little girl” vignette with Biden in the primary. I read about a million gushing pieces in WaPo and the NYT — I learned a lot about busing — but it blew me away that Serious People thought Biden’s stance on busing forty years prior was in any way meaningful to the average primary voter. That was Harris playing to the Democratic elite, and not the cringe Arizona wine mom.
Like, I was incredibly excited for Clinton to be president, but even *I* thought she wasn’t very likable, lol. And hey, maybe it is a bit of internalized misogyny. The first time I saw her was that interview she and Bill gave in the 1992 primary about his affairs, and I remember disliking her right off the bat.
I love this post only thing I would disagree with is "10 times as good as the average rec player at basketball."
I'll never forget seeing a Division 1-A playing against very good pickup players. He was a hydrogen bomb. I can't imagine how good an NBA player would be.
I think this is generally right, but there are in fact some politicians who are the opposite: really good before a large crowd and not as good in a smaller group. They are, to some extent, just different skill sets. It's not as simple as the large-crowd skills being more advanced than the small-group skills.
I definitely agree - I've known people who could wow a crowd, but one on one seem less intelligent than the average houseplant and vice versa. Most politicians need sufficient capacity at both. At least to get elected in the beginning. I've also talk to a few people who have been around long enough that they win purely on the name brand they build 20 years ago.
On the other side, Bush Sr lacked it, as did Dole and Romney. And most of Trump's primary opponents in 2016, notably Jeb. McCain had it, as did Bush Jr.
Bush Sr had the WW2 combat pilot thing. And that carry’s a lot of weight.
I tend to think Bush Sr's 1988 run came at the recent apogee of GOP advantage in the Electoral College. Dukakis wasn't an ideal candidate for the national stage, but on the other hand he shouldn't have sucked quite so much, either, in terms of votes. He was a competent, obviously intelligent non-radical/non-scary Democratic of considerable stature and executive experience with a credible, center-right running mate. AND he was running against a Republican who was trying to secure a THIRD consecutive term for the GOP. Not saying Bush doesn't win that race 90/100 times. But the margin? He CRUSHED Dukakis.
Just to add, I personally prefer people who don't have it. I find it smarmy, insincere and untrustworthy. Whether that's Obama, or Bush Jr, or Reagan, or (in my own country) Blair or Cameron.
The politicians I like most are the ones who are thoughtful and not glib, who think and talk in paragraphs and not one-liners. Ed Miliband is still my favourite political leader of the last few years. In America, I really like Warren and Inslee. On a personality level, I preferred HW Bush to Clinton in 1992, and Romney to Obama, those being the two times I chose the Republican over the Democrat (though my politics are consistently pro-Democrat; the last Republican candidate I'd have voted for is Theodore Roosevelt).
But I'm absolutely aware that my personal preferences are the absolute opposite of the majority.
Yes, as an early Inslee fan, I can assure you, you want the opposite of what the average voter wants.
Yeah. I'm a nerd, I want my politicians to be nerds.
Different phrase for what I am describing. But yes, exactly.
I have no faith that she's prepared to put in the hard work of learning a new kind of politics, and even less faith that she can exert discipline over her staff and cull the weakling/stupid/over-woke ones.
It's very worrisome. I think Biden screwed up with this VP decision and would have done far better to pick Duckworth or Whitmer.
I have a strong feeling he went with the one that could be removed from her current position without upsetting the political balance (i.e. safe blue seat).
No, it was because it was the height of the BLM protests and there was immense pressure to pick a black woman. And I do really like Biden/Harris as a team. He’s folksy, she’s glamorous. But on her own… I really wish there was a way to non-controversially swap out Buttegieg. He’s Biden’s top surrogate. The last I heard from Harris, she and Manchin were spatting because she did an interview indirectly pressuring him in WV.
Agreed that Baldwin was out on those grounds, but... Duckworth or Whitmer would have been fine under that metric.
Agreed on Duckworth, but I'm not sure about Whitmer - she became a focal point for the mask/lockdown debates in a way I'm not sure would have helped "let's be chill, folks" Biden win.
I think Whitmer is great, but the problem for her was that it was just too soon. She had only been in office for something like 19 months when Biden had to decide. So his data on her was very limited, and if he'd chosen her she might have been perceived at the time as too much of a lightweight.
Klobuchar would have been the ideal running mate if not for George Floyd.
Possibly true. That said, I recall hearing from friends in MI politics that Whitmer, while honored to be considered, was a little hesitant about making that leap after just 2 years as Governor. Not that she wouldn’t do it if asked, of course. (I did my undergrad at Michigan State's public policy school, so I know a good number of mostly-Democratic staffers in Lansing from our college days.) I wonder if there will be an attempt to have Harris step aside in favor of Whitmer (or Duckworth or Baldwin) if/when Biden seeks re-election in '24. (Of course that assumes in large part that Harris has the kind of self-awareness about her weaknesses that this post seems to suggest she doesn’t.)
It would be very surprising if he did that. I doubt he has the scope now to try to anoint someone else.
I could couch this in all sorts of mealy-mouthed bullshit, but I'm just going to come out and say it:
If he tried, he and anyone who supported the decision would be absolutely savaged as racist, sexist, every accusation you can think of.
Harris' supporters (who, IMO, center on the "woke neoliberal" demographic) would absolutely throw a bitch-fit rather than having to reflect on their own role and question their main representative in the Administration.
This is why ultimately Biden is going to run again.
Not bashing you or your take, but the problem with this attitude right now is that it risks slipping quietly into decisions that we wish we could take back and cannot.
The Republican politicians, a majority of them, show every sign of trying to leverage power, the next time they have it, to make sure we (the electorate) can never take it from them again. A combination of gerrymandering, selective application of the Maine Rule to allocate electoral votes, and barriers to voting will make it possible for 40% of the country to rule the other 60%, and they've convinced me that's *exactly* what they intend to try to do.
I'm certainly open to seeing that diagnosis contested if you disagree, but I think it at least explains my reasoning:
It means I'm obliged to vote for the other guy/gal, every single time, regardless of how bad they are, until the Republicans get over it. Otherwise the Republic ends with a whimper.
If they consistently lose as long as they believe these things, eventually they or a new conservative party will find a way back to a position where they can capture the median voter and win elections again. It's always happened in the past.
It’s fair to criticize my position. You have a good argument. I present it though as the way it is instead of the way it should be.
I just don’t know if their are enough of voters with that attitude to make a difference.
But I do expect the Republican Party to evolve at some point.
This is why even though I’m conservative leaning, I am not bothered if Dems win. If Dems win for a while they can implement their policies. Id they are bad… then the Republican Party will evolve and take power.
Also, I think we are already seeing an evolution of the parties. If education trends with voting continue, eventually the Democratic Party will become the old Republican Party and visa versa.
For all the talk about whites and blacks in politics and culture, it’s Hispanics that will control the next 100 years.
Yea, the way through, if we fail to beat the GOP back into some sanity and they take power, is that the party alignment will evolve out from under them and break the anti-democratic walls they've erected to protect themselves.
Nothing is forever, after all.
They'll screw up quite badly, because they'll be insulated from the needs of the electorate. They'll blow off problem-solving in favor of empty rhetoric and handouts to their corporate backers, and life for normal folks will get steadily worse.
One election year, something will break; a Plains States mega-drought, a bad hurricane season devastating the Bible Belt, and they'll fail to respond effectively, and the ground will have shifted enough that the gerrymandering doesn't hold. The other side will look nothing like it does today, because it'll have spent 30 years in the wilderness trying to win over 60% of the electorate so it can win power... and it'll shatter them.
But the chances that a ton of violence and a major decline in American power and standard of living are involved approach 100%.
So I'd prefer to avoid it and just deliver them a few beatings at the polls until the elite sees the need to tack to the center and win you and folks like you over.
I'm not sure I agree that Hispanics will be the decisive vote; they're not a unified voting block and many "pass" within a few generations.
It does bring up a thought, though: a very real "worst-case scenario" is that 21st century US politics become like 20th century Latin American politics. The Democrats turn into a party of the elite, like a Latin American liberal party, and the Republicans turn into an incompetent populist party like Venezuela's PSUV. The latter win all the time but their policies suck, the former can't get past their own rhetoric and take power to enact decent policy, and eventually the whole thing burns down.
Very much this. I really appreciate your highlighting the most important rule about politics: things are always changing and subject to events. We have a bad habit of taking the present conditions and assuming they straight line into an infinite future. In 2016, the Democrats were supposed to have an Electoral College lock and the Upper Midwest "Blue Wall." Now that's flipped, yet we assume this new state of affairs to be a hard and fast rule.
So things are always changing. The key to politics is to be the master of changing events to the maximum extent possible. Matt's post today is an excellent illustration about how one might go about doing that.
Yep.
Nothing is forever, even when you've cemented what looks like a pretty strong lock on minority rule. Dictatorships, too, end. And US civil society and our institutions of local and state rule mean that a herrenvolk democracy in the US is necessarily going to be quite soft; the PRC, we're not.
I recall thinking in 2012 that the GOP was basically done for my lifetime- they had doubled down on this super supply-side ideology paired with these endless attempts to roll back the New Deal and a deeply disingenuous cultivation of the Religious Right, and it was just abundantly clear that the message wasn't hitting anymore. Romney give a stump speech at my school and the flop sweat was palpable- it was just clear that the message wasn't landing anymore.
At the time, I remember thinking we were in store for a long postwar-type period of Democratic dominance, but as we've seen it's more that the GOP has radically reinvented themselves into... something... that is likely to be able to maintain electoral control without really knowing what it wants to do policy-wise. The suggestion downthread that they eventually will morph into a dysfunctional populist party is astute.
As David says, though- even if the GOP overreaches and eventually the Dems retake power despite anti-democracy institutions, there are really important questions about when that would actually happen and how much overreach would be necessary, what happens between now and then and what that overreach looks like, and also what a future Democratic party would actually do when it gets back in the driver's seat after overcoming massive anti-democracy barriers.
All of those are imponderables except the last. I sketched out two possibilities, out of hundreds of reasonably plausible alternatives.
And contemplating the last question... isn't so fun. It involves a lot of vocabulary that we haven't had to dust off in a long time, words like "proscription", "purge", "enemy of the state", "exile", "internal security forces", and "low-level insurgency".
There's no way, however committed to democracy they are, however economically progressive, that they aren't radicalized by a few decades in which democracy damned near died.
I do agree that we are forced to vote for Democrats no matter what for the foreseeable future, but that just means that which Democrat becomes even more important. Democrats need to be able to keep winning or the results won't be good.
I would love to hear Matt do a take on this whole 40% ruling 60% line of reasoning. While I despise the current GOP efforts to suppress votes, I think the potential success of this strategy and the structure of the Senate that favors rural voters is a bit overblown. I don't think there is a path to victory with 40% of the vote, but there might be with 49%. That's still pretty close to half, and the anti-majoritarian trend in the GOP is very off-putting to swing voters. If they keep doing that kind of thing I don't think they will win permanent majorities, I think they will fall further and further outside mainstream politics, at least on a national scale.
Take an example, let's say that the Democratic candidate last year won AZ and GA but not PA or WI. He'd end up with 276 electoral votes under the current systems.
But if the GA and AZ state governments had decided to apportion electoral votes in their states the way that Maine does, they wouldn't win 16+11, he'd win 8 in GA and 6 in AZ, which would give him 264 electoral votes. Trump would have won an election in which he lost the popular vote by 4 points.
If I replicate that across a wide swathe of locales that often vote blue in presidential elections but have GOP state governments, I can vastly raise the bar required to win.
PA, WI, MI, GA, AZ, NH, and possibly MN could all be rammed through like this in the coming years if the GOP wins a few gubernatorial elections.
If I run 2020 with those states all having been tweaked thusly, Biden gets 267 electoral votes and loses.
This gets worse as gerrymandering does; the more gerrymandered the districts that feed into this are, the less winning rewards Democrats.
The good news is that this strategy is even more contingent on the current party alignment than gerrymandering is, so it's hard to say it can be made permanent.
"Media charisma" perhaps? I'd say every President since 1980 has had it except for Bush Senior and Biden, and Biden's election was pretty unusual - I'd say he stepped out of the way and let Trump campaign for both of them.
I was always surprised Mike Huckabee didn't do better - I think his coalition (evangelicals) isn't the block it used to be.
I 2nd your thoughts on AOC
A lack of authenticity is absolutely what I would describe as my biggest problem with her. I can't really tell if that's because she is actually someone who tramples people for their career or if she just doesn't have the charisma and that makes her seem inauthentic. Sometimes honest, good people just don't give off a vibe that matches their personality and you don't find that out until you get to know them better. Anyway, I'm just reserving judgement for now, but I get the same feeling from her that you do.
That's my impression of her too as a 52yo anti-partisan swing voter. I'm also not convinced she's destined to claim a future Presidential nomination unless she actually accomplishes something in her role as VP. She also strikes me as way too authoritarian for my taste.
>>>Lying is bad, morally speaking. But nobody says every single thing that they believe, and certainly nobody does so in public. <<<
Moreover, so much of what appealing to swing voters is about involves choosing certain areas of emphasis over others. Lying or truthfulness doesn’t really even come into it (at least not most of the time).
The challenge for Democrats is that they span most of a normal developed nation's political spectrum, so messaging discipline isn't likely, and "deemphasis" thus very hard.
If we could slap down most of the Twitter-sphere and the slacktivist class we might have a chance to increase the salience of economic issues over social ones, which would see us win consistently. Since it's clear the DNC doesn't even intend to try, the next few years will be rough.
Maybe they'll course-correct after 2022. Not sure Harrison is the man for the job.
I don't know that this is possible. A significant portion of the Democratic coalition is in the coalition because of social issues - just as a large part of the Republican coalition is there because of social reasons. If you rearrange the parties' priorities then you rearrange the coalitions in them and the parties change.
You're describing a realignment of the party coalitions, and those happen often enough. They always kick off with the era-appropriate equivalent of "let's try to win a few extra points in X this year" in a smoke-filled backroom somewhere.
In the short-term, it's possible to hold marginal voters in both groups for a while, and in the medium-term an economically populist and socially mushy coalition is, well, the natural party of government.
I buy that smoke-filled rooms kick off realignments sometimes. But my wild guess is they happen much more because of candidates themselves: Reagan the candidate winning the R primary and then the general pushed some realignment. Trump much moreso, and especially in his case it wasn't a backroom party deal, it was Trump himself beating the other Rs out of the way.
Actually, a thought just occurred to me. If any one individual was largely responsible for the current shape of the realignment of the party structure, it was Barack Obama.
True. "Always" was overplaying it badly. "Sometimes", maybe even "mostly" would have been correct.
That said, I am not entirely convinced by the notion that Trump was a major driver in the current realignment, I think he just happened along at the right moment and blew up all the GOP establishment efforts to change the shape of it.
The current "alignment" is very fragile; I think it's transitory.
If the GOP ditches the corporatism, and actually puts some substance behind the populism, it can win outright majorities pretty handily. If the Democrats manage to muzzle the wokeist idiots and play up their own brand of economic populism, they can too. In some ways, either side is potentially well-placed to become the natural party of government for four or five cycles, just by jettisoning some of their baggage.
We'll see if someone actually grasps this.
I think economic leftist politics are believed to be much more popular than they actually are in reality. Its not that there aren't specific policies that won't garner appeal, but the reality is 60%+ of Americans are doing pretty well economically. They will be very (little c) conservative about making changes that would rock or overturn their boat. Something like the CTC or even the ACA at this point are popular because they make a change around the edges, but don't fundamentally rework the system.
This is one of the most complicated parts of modern political life. In the good old days you could easily say or, better, imply different things to different people. That’s a lot harder now but certainly not impossible, especially to politicians with world class skills.
And we’ve got a passionate part of our coalition that views that very action, speaking in different ways to different audiences, as a cardinal sin, a form of betrayal.
Agree 100%. Looking at political/campaign rhetoric in these terms strikes me as naive, and I see the fact that so many people do this now as one of the major problems with politics and governance today. Matt’s “popularism” seems like a much better, much more realistic approach than expecting politicians to be avatars of truth/honesty/whatever.
“I think successful politicians manage to work themselves to a point where they are beyond these kinds of petty questions of sincerity“ is the peak of this blog. This is why Matt makes the big bucks
Today's essay was another excellent public service. As you note, you have signed yourself up for the emotional labor of arguing with your allies. Thank you.
Woo first! Anyhow, I can tell you why I, personally, dislike her.
I don’t think she has any scruples. I consider her an authoritarian in waiting, who has explicitly proposed completely ignoring the constitution (see her proposal to have the executive branch legislate on guns if Congress didn’t give her what she looked for - no matter the fact that I am against guns, unconstitutional power grabs are a problem) a tendency that’s especially dangerous when we consider how censorship (in the form of ginning up spurious violations against facebook and other companies whose moderation has displeased us) has become normalized in Democratic party discourse.
It ain’t cause she’s a woman, or cause of her race - it’s that she’s never shown any principle greater than her ambition.
Isn't claiming that she would take a controversial approach to get rid of guns a way to demonstrate that she *does* have a principle far greater than her ambition? Ambition tells you to tone down that rhetoric, but anti-gun principles tell you not to.
Think of all the Republican politicians who have amped up that rhetoric, and been successful for it. It gets the butts in the seats if nothing else.
Indeed - to be frank, the political elites must resist degrading the process, no matter what the base wants. It’s terrible when Trump does it - it’d be even worse when someone competent and “reasonable” does it.
To be clear, my concern is not just with Kamala, but with Joe too. However he has seemed less gung-ho on throwing out democracy.
>>it’s that she’s never shown any principle greater than her ambition.<<
I hope you're right because I want her to win if she's the nominee. I will take naked ambition over blind adherence to ideology any day in our death match against a Republican party spinning into insanity. Just win, baby.
Exactly! I don’t like where she positioned herself in the primary, but I think she’d have no problem switching it up. Sinema used to be a member of the Green Party and now she’s a conservative Democrat. Principled stances are hugely overrated in politics. We want leaders who respond to pressure.
Eh - we want them to respond to our pressure but not their pressure. Those other people are terrible!
Ratcheting up the pressure is up to us. It’s another input. We can care more. We can organize more.
The worst thing I can say about Joe Manchin is that he seems to be immune to pressure. I think he actually sincerely believes in the filibuster. I’d **love** for him to be as slippery as Sinema.
Most Republicans are ambitious and unscrupulous just like she is.
This *may* be true but then I see the Republican party as a whole scurrying away from the winnable center as fast as they can. The saving grace for them would be for the Democrats, seeing that juicy target theirs for the taking, instead scurrying off to the left as fast as they can. Many Democrats, or the activist Left, want exactly that, and the big battle is between the ambitious vs the principled, or, if you'd rather, the pragmatists versus the ideologues.
Can’t I oppose latent authoritarianism in everyone? Or only in the people whom I especially disagree with?
Of course! It’s a free country.
"it’s that she’s never shown any principle greater than her ambition." well put. This is what I was trying to get at in my comment, but you did it much more efficiently!
To be fair - I was first when I started writing it. I’m almost never up this early anyhow :)
I am gay so I should have been offended but my favorite Obama pander was when they asked him how his religion informed his opposition to gay marriage and he said "God is in the mix."
1) She will never, ever do this.
2) She couldn't get away with it because of her past public statements
3) She has terrible political instincts and it shows.
4) She is a completely unscrupulous and it shows.
Cue up someone else. Almost any other Democrat.
If she was completely unscrupulous, then she would do this. The fact she won't do it is a signal that she does, in fact, have scruples.
So where do you see her lack of scruples?
https://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/joe-biden-beau-2016-214459
Authenticity isn't authentic
1) If she is sufficiently ambitious she may will do so, and she may well have no choice.
2) Oh, c’mon. Politicians are often compared to slippery eels for a reason.
3) As Matt points out, Harris has won some tough contests that indeed required sound political instincts.
4) Apparently you’re not a fan?
1) Clearly I was unclear - what I meant was, she will never, ever, try to be really popular or try to appeal to swing voters as she is temperamentally unsuited to it and probably doesn't understand why she needs to do it. 2) See 3 above. 3) My reading is that she barely won her most significant race - against a Republican - in *California*. Her presidential primary performance was a farrago of own goals (busing, anyone?). 4) Indeed, not.
"she will never, ever, try to be really popular or try to appeal to swing voters as she is temperamentally unsuited to it"
That's a sort of principle or scruple though. If you liked her, you could express that as standing by her principles and not giving them up purely to win elections and obtain power.
I can spin "X is not a good politician" into "X is moral", "X has scruples", "X is honest", or one of seven hundred other things. They still mean that X is a bad politician.
Not pretending this makes her a good politician. The real question is more whether she's doing this on purpose - if she's sacrificing her political career because she's not prepared to lie that America is good because she thinks that it's a profoundly racist country that needs to make major changes, then that's admirable, if politically ineffective, if she's saying the things she says because they are popular with the activist class in the Democratic Party (not the far-left) and she wants to build up her personal power and the KHive, then she's just a bad politican.
I suspect that Harris is smart enough to realize that if she's the nominee and loses in the general (especially to Trump!) among the collateral damage will be the idea that a woman can be elected President. That would be so devastating to the nation that I presume she would think long and hard about how to actually win, even if it means appealing to Matt's dreaded median voter.
It might be uncharitable, but it's obviously the latter.
Look at the history of the positions she's taken, the things she's done in office, and the public stances she now holds.
This is the California equivalent of retail politics, I get that... but she's not a good politician in any other context, and she should have stayed there.
It would be tough to argue that Harris is standing by any principles.
Where do you see her lack of scruples/principles?
The busing fiasco - a tempest in a teapot but very illustrative. The zigs and zags of her career including what seems to be some really questionable prosecutorial conduct.
I think that the implicit reason that Matt thinks she should do this *now* is because you're right, if she tries to do this in June of 2028, people will say, "wait, this isn't who you are, this is obviously insincere."
But seven years is a long time, and if she starts building this track record now, a lot of people won't be interested in teaching back a decade and saying, "oh, but in 2019, Harris said..."
The difficulty for an VP, especially one seen as the heir apparent, is separating from the President. This case is easier, though, because she wouldn't be separating herself from Biden, but rather echoing him in his "Middle America" attitudes.
But if she somehow does do this that will say a LOT about MattY's influence among Democratic Party elites!
What evidence do you have to allege unscrupulous?
What comes to mind first is the way that she created and then backed off the "busing" controversy in the primaries, complete with the "I was that girl" t-shirts. It's not so much the thing itself, it just that it made me certain that she would say and do anything to satisfy her ambition. She used to be a cop, now she's an "equity" symbol.
Can you walk me through how the busing controversy and t-shirt = unscrupulous?
To explain why I'm asking: I basically saw Harris as a regular but not-particularly-inspiring center-left type before she was selected as VP, but I thought the same about Biden before Obama selected him as VP. And so far I like Biden fine, so I'm pretty open-minded about Harris.
I'm looking for the definable standard that is being used to single Harris out for dishonesty beyond what is seen from other serious primary candidates from both parties (Romney, Cruz, Rubio, Warren, Buttigieg, Booker, etc).
I wouldn't say the busing or Medicare for All controversy indicates she is unscrupulous, rather it indicates her instincts guide her to try to land a "zinger" or killer argument rather than winning the campaign. The issue with her busing argument was even if it was correct it landed her in a political no-man's land and she ended up having to backtrack anyways.
Sure. Here’s how I look at it. Harris’ purpose in jumping on Biden about busing was clearly to imply that Biden is racist. That this was not spontaneous is shown by the t-shirts which exploit a mendacious narrative about her experience being “bused”. In no serious definition of the word was she “bused.” She rode to school on a bus. There is a difference, and I think she knew it all along.
This incident made me believe she is unscrupulous because it showed:
- She is willing to make odious personal charges without actually standing up to them, or justifying them.
- She is willing to encourage divisiveness within her own party to further her personal interest and ambition.
- She is willing to carefully plan this kind of attack based not on the usual sort of prevarications that politicians do, but on a dishonest concocted narrative. She did this in cold blood and with malice aforethought.
Her personal history tends to magnify this impression for me. She had this mutually self-interested relationship with Willie Brown, who launched her career. Then she was a crime hawk who did some truly repellent and unscrupulous things when she was a prosecutor. Then she did some race stuff while seeking to look like a moderate candidate in the primaries. Now she’s an icon of multiculturalism and representation and an ambassador of “equity.” I can’t see continuity here, except that explained by pure ambition combined with bad political instincts.
Cruz and Rubio have done the kind of things that Harris did, and they are equally disgusting. Romney, Booker, Warren, and Buttegieg never did anything like the three things I described above, that Harris did. They are ambitious, but they have scruples.
Interesting. I saw that as her trying to take a shot at Biden for not doing enough for black people during his long career, which I think is a fair argument in a Dem primary. I also think her shot missed, making it a political failure.
It seems clear as day that Romney, for instance, has done similar things hundreds of times. The big difference here that seems to set you off is that Harris was making an antiracist argument (and Castro was making a pro-immigrant argument). That the argument was a political failure may be a sign that they are bad future candidates, but they don't make them unusually "unscrupulous" by the standards of primary presidential candidates.
It is true that I am deeply out of sympathy with anti-racism, but I hadn’t formulated that (or even had heard the word) at that time. What struck me then was: why would any Democrat ever seek to exploit one of the party’s worst policy failures, which incited tremendous social conflict and severely worsened the residential and school segregation that we are living with today? Why would Harris try to spin Biden’s navigation of this rolling disaster in 1970 to insinuate that it meant that he was against black people in 2020? It seemed so out of left field: it could only be explained for me the desire to get some identity points in pursuit of her self-aggrandizement.
It is interesting that you describe Castro’s open immigration proposals as “pro-immigrant.” I consider myself pro-immigrant and pro-immigration, but I believe it should be controlled, recognizing the interests of the native population, and that the law should be enforced. In this I am in company with the great majority of Americans. It doesn’t make me (or us) anti-immigrant. My beef with Castro was his loony proposals – he really seemed to care more about his idea of creating settlements of poor Mexican people in United States territory than about the well-being of the Americans he was seeking to lead.
Serious question, are there male politicians you would call unscrupulous? Not someone like McConnell. Maybe another Democratic primary candidate?
I do appreciate your post, because I do see a lot of visceral reaction to Harris, and it’s helpful to see where that comes from. But I also think it’s weird to use ambitious as a pejorative. She ran for President. Of course she’s ambitious! So was everyone else who ran.
As for Willie Brown, fine, it’s a bit gross. He’s a scumbag and he was twice her age. But it was also a long time ago. She has a wonderful husband now.
I now really dislike Julian Castro because he knifed Beto, and did it over a toxically unpopular position of decriminalizing illegal entry. And then he basically accused Biden of being senile. I also kind of hold that against Corey Booker.
But Harris’s whole “I was that little girl” really bothered me, and then I got over it. Not sure why.
“Ambition” has different shades of meaning. As a personal quality, ambition is admirable in man or woman. But in a political context, it means that someone is more interested in gaining power than in serving their country. Julius Caesar was ambitious in this sense, and it’s what got him killed.
I don’t think any of the Democratic primary candidates struck me as unscrupulous in the way that Harris does. To me, both Beto and Booker were lightweights in that they didn’t seem to be able to show what they were going to do for the country, more than they obviously wanted the country to do for them. But I don’t think either of them was unscrupulous. I didn’t follow Castro, because I thought he was so much in outer space on immigration issues that he wasn’t worth bothering with. But what you’re describing sounds like Harris with busing, and that’s unscrupulous. Are you thinking of anyone else in particular?
On the other hand, since January 6, I’d judge that a majority of the Republican caucus (mostly male) is both (politically) ambitious and exceedingly unscrupulous. Starting with Cruz and Rubio. Repulsive people, both of them. Mitch is very scrupulous, but also very evil, with a certain dark splendor, like Satan.
The whole waffling on Medicare-for-all demonstrated at a minimum that she is incredibly bad at hiding the fact that politicians take strategic positions. What should have been an internal debate instead played out in the open and that ended up being very damaging to her candidacy.
That's a political critique, not a ethical one, so "unscrupulous" wouldn't be the right term.
I agree (to an extent) to staments 2-4, but do you really think she'll never, ever run for POTUS?
No, but she will never, ever take Matt's advice and try to be really, really popular.
Ahh I see, I misunderstood your comment on first glance.
We know that white women can win Midwestern Congressional elections. We know Barrack Obama could win Midwestern swing states in presidential elections. It does not follow that a biracial woman from California can win Midwestern swing states in a Presidential election. The gist of MY’s analysis is “don’t be too weird.” Embrace hokey patriotism and saccharine optimism to act normal. That’s fine advice. It worked for Obama. However, Obama was male and lived in the Midwest. He chose Chicago when most people with his credentials wind up on the coasts. This made him seem normal enough to win an election in held when the economy seemed to be imploding.
Harris can’t change her race and can’t take back the 25 years she spent as a California politician, and a gender change would be unlikely to improve her political prospects. She checks too many “not like us” boxes to play well in Wisconsin.
The best metric of her fitness for the nomination is her approval ratings. Democrats were idiots to ignore Hillary’s wretched numbers. I hope they don’t make that mistake twice.
ps— it will be really interesting to see how Abrams performs relative to Warnock. That will give us some data on the electability of women of color in tough states. I suspect they will both lose. A lot of suburban whites will go R if the party puts two blacks at the top of the ticket. Electing a black senator in the Deep South is inclusive and historic. Having a black senator and a black governor triggers a they’re taking over” vibe.
It might be harder for “a biracial woman from California” to win swing states but there’s no need to embrace this defeatism. She could be doing a lot more to change her approval ratings and viability. Maybe there’s a ceiling! But there’s only one way to find out. Otherwise what’s the point?
My defeatism stems from the fact that I don't think she has the ability or discipline to actually do this, and will instead wallow in "I earned it" and "they're prejudiced" type spin for the entirety of the next four years. God knows the people she's surrounded herself with are already getting on with that line of messaging.
Frankly, the single best thing Biden can do for the country is try to name a successor OTHER THAN HARRIS. Preferably female, preferably an excellent retail politician. Duckworth or Baldwin would both be decent choices, though neither wants the job. Whitmer, depending on how the next year goes, would be another.
"[Candidates like] especially Amy Klobuchar do extremely well relative to the fundamentals in the sociologically similar state of Minnesota."
Hmm that senior senator from MN who outperforms fundamentals more than anyone should consider running for president.
Only if she stops torturing the help.
I admire the hell out of Duckworth and she's a hero, and I hate to say this, but I'm afraid voters would probably shy away from someone with her battle injuries. We celebrate sacrifice in the abstract but are probably too squeamish if it were put in front of us every day.
No data for this; just a feeling.
Really? I consider myself pretty judgmental, and I think she’s amazing. She had a baby at 52!!
I was all for her being VP, but her interviews after Harris was picked indicated maybe she’s not as sharp a politician as I thought.
there’s no harm in he trying to be popular, I just wonder whether her numbers will move.
Hillary didn't have terrible approval numbers when elite Democrats were making that decision, ie in 2014 or so. She was popular as Secretary of State.
She polled as the most admired woman in America for something like 20 years in a row. It wasn't until the Benghazi hearings led to the email scandal that her numbers started taking a hit.
I believe that in 1994 she both was widely hated (with underwater approval ratings) *and* was the most admired woman in America. "Most admired" doesn't require even 35% of people to list you first, but winning an election does.
Great example is 1974. Richard Nixon was forced to resign in disgrace. His approval # were below 30% all year. He was the 7th most admired person in the country that year.
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/12/30/archives/mostadmired-list-headed-by-kissinger.html
She was always someone people liked better as a bureaucrat than a politician. I remember thinking how bad ass she was as Secretary of State. Didn’t need to like her.
I think a stint as a VP would of been a good route to take.
My whole issue with Hillary was that she was related to Bill.
I’ve sworn to never vote for another Presidents family member ever again. Bush, Clinton, Obama… I refuse to perpetuate any family Dynasties.
That is a highly under-recognized reason for why so many swing voters rejected Clinton: their dislike of the fact that she was an ex-president's wife.
true enough, but she had them by the time the primary began
But most elite Democrats were tied into endorsements by then and so couldn't run against her.
That's true. That's also an error Democrats would be well-advised to refrain from repeating in 2028.
Biden's favorables crashed after he started running for president too, though not as low as Clinton's. In our polarized environment, anyone is going to become less popular when they're running.
>>Democrats were idiots to ignore Hillary’s wretched numbers.<<
I think that's undoubtedly true (especially in retrospect). But it underlines the questionability of abandoning smoke-filled rooms: primary voters aren't political operatives. The "Democrats" who anointed Clinton in 2016 were mostly regular folks. It's true HRC enjoyed widespread Democratic Party *establishment* support, too. But I wonder what avenues/methods exist at this stage for institutional Democrats to deal with a similar situation; IOW, if it's late 2027 and it's clear that Vice President Harris is a badly flawed general election candidate, what strategies would DNC leadership have at its disposal to oppose her path to the nomination? Vice presidents are pretty powerful, and I'm skeptical we'd see significant numbers of "professional" Democrats willing to openly cross her.
Relatedly: although it's obviously too early to speculate with any degree of confidence, I believe ONE potential "fix" for Kamala Harris would simply be for her to ascend to the presidency. I fully expect Joe Biden to run again in 2024, and I'd like to think he'd be favored. But would he really serve an entire second term? Maybe he will! But one could imagine President Biden stepping aside in, say, early 2027 (by which point he'd have had his 84th birthday, I think). All bets would be off if Kamala Harris were the incumbent president in 2028, running to secure her own mandate.
I don't think it was obvious ahead of the election that Clinton would have "wretched numbers". Her early 2015 favorability was higher than a lot of other potential candidates, including Biden's (https://news.gallup.com/poll/181949/clinton-favorability-familiarity-bests-2016-contenders.aspx).
IIRC Clinton's numbers were indeed pretty solid during her SecState tenure, and for a while thereafter. But they were beginning to decline well before the arrival of 2016. Benghazi had something to do with that. So did the email scandalette. Political attacks work!
By the second half of 2015, it should have been obvious she was a risky bet for Democrats. I don't in the least exempt myself from this myopia: I was (and remain) an admirer of Hillary Clinton, and I didn't see it coming, either. But a lot of people were warning (in the final approaches to the primary season) that her numbers stank.
One element that might have contributed to the failure to see the impending disaster was Trump's early breakout: many (probably the vast majority if we're being honest) politically active liberals simply couldn't conceive a candidate with Trump's attributes could win the White House. This, I think in retrospect, had the effect of reducing in the minds of many Democrats the salience of electability and candidate quality in the nominee*. I hope Democrats never make that mistake again: the reality (at least for the foreseeable future) is that having either a "D" or (especially) "R" next to one's name on the presidential ballot puts one within spitting distance of an Electoral College majority. The Republicans could nominate the ISIS Caliph in 2024 and still have a fair shot at victory.
*One of the purported advantages of the primary system is that the general election nominee by definition is a person who has already received millions and million of votes. For obvious reasons this, in isolation, is helpful for the November election. But an increasingly clear disadvantage -- especially in our current era of sharp partisanship -- is that these millions and millions of primary voters don't necessarily know what they're doing in terms of strategic political calculus.
I think they were also in the throes of recoiling at what a horror show of a person Trump is, and assumed that they could cut into him by showing everyone that he is a horror show. But in retrospect we know that being a dumpster fire is very on-brand for Trump, and dwelling on that lets him elide the incredibly unpopular party that he is running on.
I feel very confident in saying that if there's a challenge to Harris for the nomination, it will come from the Left. I.e., someone even less able to appeal to Matt's swing voter.
I don’t think Katie Porter would be willing to buck the Dem Establishment like that. Warren is her mentor. Porter is young, if she has presidential ambitions, she has plenty of time.
Wouldn't it be totally possible for incumbent-due-to-Biden's-resignation President Harris to just be disliked and lose in 2028, the same as if she became the nominee as VP?
Obama's middle name was "Hussein". He grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii. Even his first name is, for lack of a more PC term, very "foreign" sounding. If he had never existed we'd probably be hearing that such a person could never win the Presidency. Even Trump, on paper, seems like an impossible win for the R primary: a former Dem and NYC elite / Hollywood reality show talking head.
But they each tapped into something with swing voters, they stood for something swing voters cared about (in very different ways) and they became popular enough on their own terms that their demographic background became among the least of their problems
The statements from the top of your comment aren't unchanging facts; they weren't uncovered during repeatable experiments in a physics or chemistry lab. I don't see any structural reason why Kamala Harris can't become a brand that's not tied down or reduced to Progressive SF politics. That said - like most others, the evidence suggests to me that she will not develop a brand apart from SF Progressive politics.
I think this is an apt description of Harris' problems. Most "swing voters" don't really pay attention to politics, and most seem to vote with their guts. Hillary and Trump are good examples of this. The former, by the time of the 2016 election, was seen as a corrupt establishment hypocrite who wore suffragette white while married to an alleged rapist, and the latter was a racist narcissistic misogynist who refused to stop saying stupid shit.
Hillary suffered from the inherent incumbent party problem that plagues all candidates after eight years of power. Additionally, voters' gut feelings about her swayed many to pull the lever for Trump out of cynicism. Trump's faults hurt him in 2020 because many suburban voters who would typically support things like tax cuts learned to hate his guts during his chaotic administration.
If Harris is viewed as a west coast liberal Democrat, that's bad for swing voters' gut feelings, and I don't think she'll be a successful presidential candidate regardless of what she says or does.
Hard to think of a worse 1 line bio for swing voters in middle America to hear than "SF / CA liberal". Being from far away Alaska or Hawaii would be better
Speaking of Georgia, keep in mind that there is a very decent chance that the R nominee will be Vernon Jones, not Brian Kemp. I think that would change your calculations regarding race.
Oh wow, I hadn't realized that there's a good chance that *both* the Republican and Democrat in *both* the Governor and Senate race might be Black!
pffft!
I think Abrams will win. She came very close in 2018, and she’s built a great party machine to help her in 2022.
Warnock had baggage Abrams didn’t have. We forget that now because he won. But Abrams is very sensible. Democrats **love** her.
Here's a take for ya: There is the option of dropping Harris from the ticket, of course, in 2024. Not likely, no, but politics ain't beanbag. And there's a certain non-woke Black dude who might be running New York City by then. If his Twitter feed's anything to go by, Eric Adams seems ready for the big leagues.
I follow another off-topic forum that has a politics sub-forum dominated by the left (ranging from Woke to genuinely Communist), and watching the heart attacks Adams provokes among the woke faction is enough to convince me he's onto something.
They're having to consistently demonize positions he doesn't hold just to paper over the contradictions in their worldview.
warned this would happen when they trained all their fire on Yang *rolls eyes*
Not terribly sure that Yang was aiming for something all that different, though I have my doubts that he'd have achieved it.
Adams is basically an old-fashioned machine politician. That may work if he can use the machine to beat some discipline into the various party stakeholders screwing things up; bludgeon the NIMBY lobby, stop spending education funds on pointless boondoggles, shrink the union cut of infrastructure projects, hammer a few bus-only thoroughfares through over the objection of drivers.
It would work very well indeed if he can then use the power of the unified party machine to browbeat a few outside power centers into line, most especially the NYPD.
I'm cautiously optimistic that he'll be better than most of the others had the potential to be.
I'm a Garcia fan, and as BP Adams has been extremely unimpressive/unresponsive (granted that is a completely useless office and it should be abolished). But I really like the scenario you lay out here and hope it comes to pass in some fashion.
A lot depends on whether he decides to do it or not.
The mayor has the power to jam up the workings to the extent that the various bits of the machine decide it's easier to submit to being greased to run a bit more smoothly than to piss him off.
The last several mayors, De Blasio most especially, have lacked the spine to try.
I don't think Garcia, as well-meaning and reasonable-sounding as she was, would have had it either, and Wiley was a dumpster fire.
Garcia is a competent manager who has run some big agencies (DEP, DSNY) pretty well. I think she would have tried, and maybe succeeded. Totally agree about Wiley. I could go on for hours/many lines of text about the disaster that the current administration has been, its incompetence and arrogance, its nonexistent attention span, and its inability to do politics, but I will spare everyone. I do hope Adams is ready to step up, and that he hires some competent people.
So this other off-topic forum is pretty much like yesterday's post ... but just everyday? That sounds terrible.
Yesterday's post from Matt? Didn't seem particularly woke...
I don't follow.
Didn’t you have ~50 comments arguing with the communist in yesterday’s post or is this the two David R. thing again?
Ahhh right.
Yea, sort of. Though most of that forum is less ridiculous than that dude, at least.
Dear God, he's still at it. Just started replying to more of my comments.
Substack needs an "ignore" button.
Good luck.
But ...
https://xkcd.com/386/
It is astounding how low his engagement is on Twitter. A virtue, I suppose, but remarkable all the same.
I think we're seeing here that the Slow Boring subscriber base is just as unrepresentative of the American electorate as the Very Online wokesters are. Lots of libertarian-ish distaste here for Harris's past tough-on-crime stances, when those are in fact the strongest parts of her electoral profile. IRL there are close to zero libertarian swing voters (or voters of any kind, really).
I hope Harris and her team listen to this post, but I don't have high hopes. After a certain point in their careers people tend to just get set in their ways. Think of all the coaches in pro sports who achieve success with a particular style with predictable strengths and weaknesses. How many of them plateau there, and how many are able to evolve? I'd say it's like a 10-to-1 ratio. Coaches who are creative and able to make adjustments are *usually* creative and able to make adjustments from the beginning.
Do we know who Harris's political brain is? Who is her Ted Kaufman, and what do we know about him/her? If that person is capable of shifting gears, then Harris will be too. If not, she won't.
Based on some googling, I think Harris's political brain might be a person named Rohini Kosoglu. I don't know anything about her but since Matt has so much pull within the White House these days he should get the message to her.
Kind of off the main point of this thread, but distaste for tough-on-crime rhetoric doesn't track as libertarian at all. It's true that libertarians are generally opposed to police power for anti-statist reasons, but this just happens to be one area where their policy preferences somewhat line up with leftist social justice concerns. BLM is in favor of defunding the police, but that doesn't make them libertarians.
I am aware that there are non-libertarian opponents of criminal law enforcement, but the sentiments in this thread that I was referring to appear to be more of the libertarian variety.
I'm not sure about this claim. I think, at least compared to other groups of over-educated left-of-center political enthusiasts, Matt's readership is pretty concerned about violent crime, especially its impact on the poor and working class. I'm pro-Adams, and even was supportive of picking Harris as VP, but she is plainly not a positive VORPolitician, notwithstanding her prosecutorial bona fides. [at risk of making this comment even lamer, explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_over_replacement_player ]
I think this is both rather cynical and more or less correct. One way or another the Republicans are likely to nominate a (semi-)lunatic, therefore the rep you want is 'the sensible one', which is how Biden won. And rightly or wrongly, a large and critical group of Americans define 'sensible' as 'centrist, annoying left and right'. The increasing focus on identity issues in the Democratic activist base means that as a black woman Harris has a lot of room to annoy left. Especially if she's up in 2024, against Trump...
I feel attacked, while at the same time I know you’re right. I feel devastatingly sad, as one does when faced with a truth they have not seen, nor do they want to. The word “pandering” makes me a little bit nauseous. It carries with it a sense of deceit and insincerity. I want the leaders of this great country to be above it. But reality bites.
The hardest pill to swallow is the phrase “The greatest country in the world.” A clip from the TV series “Newsroom” plays in my mind every time I hear it, yet I know that the vast majority of my peers have never seen it, nor would they agree. America is not the greatest country in the world. But that would definitely not sit well with an even more vast majority of not only my peers, but the citizens of this country.
In order to create great change, one must be in a position to make that change possible. Having the opportunity to orchestrate great things brings with it the responsibility of retaining that position. I want to say, “But at what cost?” The answer is, unfortunately, at a greater cost than it should be… the cost of changing the rhetoric. Pandering. Definitely a punch to the gut for me this morning.
Oof!
I hear you, but I would mainly counsel you to be less sad about it. No one remembers or cares what grubby things FDR said to get elected or what grimy compromises he made to get legislation passed. We remember that he passed the Social Security Act that has had a tremendous positive impact on people's lives. The problem is that we don't spend enough time being happy about this sort of thing, and we spend too much time outraged about the everyday minutiae of politics.
What actually matters in politics are things like laws, judges, interest rates, and wars. Which means winning elections matters more than almost anything, not just practically but morally. It's tough, but less tough if we keep those laws, judges, interest rates, and wars front and center in our minds.
I wish I could "like" this 1000 times!
Not to be contentious, but did you really “counsel me not to be sad.”?? Are you serious? That is unbelievably condescending. I have as much right — and justification to be sad as you do to your Patriotism. “Everyday minutiae”? The automatic assumption and dismissal of what I am sad about? As if you actually know what makes me sad?
I am well read regarding what needs to be “front and center,” which is ALSO subjective. What “laws” and “judges”? Do you have any inkling as to which I am referring to that make me sad?
Excuse me for expressing my take on this matter whilst agreeing with the author. Your counsel is dismissed.
I thought what you are referring to that makes you sad is political pandering, because that's what you wrote in your comment.
I was really speaking more in the spirit of general advice offered toward myself as much as anyone. I think you may be reading something into my words that isn't there.
Thank you for the clarification. I am definitely not a fan of pandering. Verbiage matters within discourse, though. Four years of Trump sloughed off layers of tough skin…
Honestly, I've never understood why American liberals have such an issue with “The greatest country in the world.” It is a very defensible claim.
14 Countries have a population over 100 million. China, India, US, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, Mexico, Japan, Ethiopia, Philippines, Egypt.
We're the global leader in culture & business. We provide much of the infrastructure that allows trade & migration. We have extremely high HDI. We lead the world in scientific research. Migration patterns support it. US has very low emigration and is the most popular spot for immigrants in the world.
Aaron Sorkin's speech is quite silly as is most of his political writing.
I'm not especially invested in the argument over the U.S.'s "greatest country in the world" standing, but the reason this sort of logic doesn't really get to the heart of liberal unease is that the "greatest country in the world" claim is not offered as bland statement of fact. That is, when, say, Laura Ingraham says that the U.S. is number one, she is very much not saying, "Well, we suck on health care and child poverty and incarceration rates, but we're killing it on patents and movie box office, so by my estimation the U.S. maintains a healthy 3.2% lead in nation rankings over our closest competitor, Belgium, with ancient Hibernia a distant number three."
What she is actually saying is something closer to: "America, fuck yeah, suck it you bedwetting haters, if you don't like it, get out." So there's more of an affective thing going on here.
If you want to argue that we should care less about what Laura Ingraham thinks and also that liberals should be less affectively gloomy about the U.S., then I can probably get on board. Speaking as a liberal, my affect toward the U.S. is pretty overweighted on Trump right now, and could probably stand a correction.
I think “America, Fuck Yeah” is a much stronger message than “America? Fuck, no.”
I think the left is really entrenched in a narrative that the US is a priori bad and a lot of politics is downstream of that axiom. That’s why Twitter thinks the US did the least of any developed country to help its citizens during the pandemic, when in fact, we did the most. It’s both inaccurate and terrible political messaging.
What bothers me about Ingraham is that she all but says only white people are real Americans.
I think "the left" is less entrenched in the belief that America is bad than is popularly believed. Twitter may be extremely entrenched in that belief, but that's Twitter. My guess is that most middle-of-the-road liberals think America is flawed but pretty great, which isn't much good as a political slogan and still leaves one open to attacks on patriotism grounds.
I think this is a really interesting question, and I would love to see polling data about this.
My intuition is that you are right, but my anecdata is that this very question came up among a largish group of my Midwest-lefty friends and I was really surprised at how scathing everyone was about their overall opinion of US global influence. It wasn’t even at the point of tepid support- a lot of them literally thought that the world would be a much better place if the US just went away.
I thought it was totally bonkers.
“Flawed But Pretty Great” would be a badass slogan!
Yeah, that’s probably true. I always say Twitter isn’t real life and tweak politicos and pundits for forgetting that, but I forget it too.
One thing that struck me in 2016 is that I thought both Trump and Bernie were pretty unpatriotic for presidential candidates. Like MAGA — I think America is great right now! Or was prior to 2016. It kinda made me wonder if patriotism isn’t a thing anymore. I’m much more on board with Biden-style patriotism.
Btw, when I say the left, I mean leftists, not liberals. I’m a squashy liberal, and yes, I think America is flawed, but I also very cornily “America is a shining city on a hill.” People die trying to get here, and I almost feel it’s disrespectful to shrug off what a huge advantage people have being born here versus almost anywhere else in the world.
The patriotism gap pre-dates Trump. https://www.vox.com/2015/2/25/8102197/liberals-proud-america
What is more telling is within the Democratic coalition the more sucesfful and affluent you are the more likely you are to take issue with the claim.
Which leads me to belief a lot of complaints about "greatest country in the world" are similar to complaints about the US not following the World Cup as much as other countries: cosmopolitan identity politics.
There's another nuance to this though. Conservatives definitely own the patriotism brand. But conservatives also often seem to really hate America. That is, they hate government, hate the blue states, think the country is in decline, think the country is decadent and going to hell, etc. There's a strong analog with some lefty thinking, but of course with a lot of the issue positions reversed.
But of course conservatives thread the needle by reorienting their patriotism toward a "real America" (and a fantasy Constitution), reserving their disdain for "un-America." And likewise conservative politicians can get away with saying bad things about America all the time, as long as they don't say bad things about "real America." Whereas the reverse is very much not true for liberal politicians.
Which is all to say, I don't think I agree that this is cosmopolitan identity politics. I think both sides register quite a lot of disgust for the aspects of America that they reject, but the manifestations are different.
The reference to Newsroom reminds me that, contra online leftists who believe that The West Wing’s main appeal was its embrace of bipartisan compromise, the shows actual main appeal was how President Bartlet refuses to triangulate and say things he doesn’t mean. It’s a seductive fantasy!
I try to think about what I *would* say is the greatest country in the world and I just draw a blank. Like if it’s Sweden or whatever how come Sweden doesn’t have more influence? I think it’s basically a meaningless question, which makes “the United States” as good an answer as any.
It's the greatest country in the world for Americans. Just like my family (warts and all) is the greatest family in the world for my family members. There is nothing wrong or anti-progressive about saying or believing any of that.
Not all Americans. None of us can speak for all Americans. But it is absolutely not great for all Americans. I also think my family is the greatest in the world. But my kids beg to differ (teenagers and new adults always think they can do things better than their parents).
Since it's so very subjective I don't know why you'd worry over it at all. How could you prove that it is or isn't the greatest? What country is great for every single citizen? For some people it's associated with a very positive or sacrifice and service, it's not all jingoism
Because it is subjective I worry. The point of this piece is to point out that Kamala’s rhetoric is worrying, and that she needs to change it to pander. That her not doing so is cause to worry. I am flabbergasted by the gaslighting here.
How is it gaslighting? It is true that America has done both great and terrible things, and most Americans prefer to hear about the great things. I think people greatly underestimate the importance of triggering identities in politics, and “we are awesome Americans!” is a much more empowering/vote-getting identity than “we are crappy Americans”!
A politician’s job is different from a historian’s.
That is not relevant to what I said. It is the greatest country for Americans in the aggregate, and therefore Harris, and all progressive politicians, should say so.
Some Americans surely dislike America for one reason or another, some more meritorious than others, but some people in every country dislike their own country.
I’m curious as to the source of its greatness in the “aggregate.” I tend to agree, to some extent, but I also know that there are so many more perspectives than mine, and the political climate is obviously deeply divided. Is that divide directly related to the concept that America is great for the individual? Possibly. But I’ve seen it very well stated here that we absolutely DO all want to live in an America we can all be proud of. We are all Americans. I don’t see any reason why she couldn’t change her verbiage to be more inclusive in order to gather more central/undecided support. This whole thing has made me do some re-thinking. It is absolutely pandering to say America is “The Greatest.” But “This Great Country — OUR Country!” might go a long way.
The point is that your country doesn't need to earn your love, any more than your kids need to earn your love in order to be (to you) the greatest kids ever. Your kids are great because they're your kids. Your country is great because it's your community, it's special to you, and you love it just the way it is -- even as you want it to improve, just as you want your kids to improve. The whole concept of comparing the US to other countries on this or that metric is beside the point.
I think everyone deserves to believe their country is the greatest country in the world, regardless of facts. It doesn't preclude acknowledging flaws, but it does demonstrate how one is committed to their community, which is most important for the leader.
It's a bit like your parents. If I asked you if your mom or dad were the greatest mom or dad in the world, you'd say yes right?
I tend to over-intellectualize everything so I’d probably give an annoying nuanced answer like I did above. But I agree with the point you’re actually making.
While I would love to say my parents were the greatest in the world, I cannot. And therein lies the problem. It is about the collective experience. While some people’s experience can be great, others’ can be equally horrific and abusive.
That's true. Some people's experiences can be horrific, while others can be great. No one can truly measure if a country is great or not, but people feel their leader should not just be an analyzer of problems, but a national cheerleader who believes in the potential of the country.
I think pro-America talk is not so much about what is actually great and not-great about America, but a statement that the speaker is faithful to and loves the community that he or she expects to lead. And every politician just needs to be good at that - otherwise, who needs them?
Potential being a key word. Well put.
West Wing was, truly, a seductive fantasy.
That is so very true, and the more I look back on it the more I realize it. My favorite parts (like most other viewers I suspect) is when Bartlett or a member of his staff would verbally tear apart a wrongheaded opponent of the president, and these days when I read https://www.reddit.com/r/thatHappened/ It makes me cringe how much some of those stories sound like the West Wing.
Am I the only center-left person who hated the West Wing when it aired? It was so smarmy and full of itself. I see socialists on Twitter dragging West Wing to own the moderate libs, and I’m like yeah, it was a silly show!
It was definitely smarmy and full of itself, but when that inspirational music started playing I got sucked in, yah know? Honestly Aaron Sorkin is like Nicolas Sparks or whoever wrote Twilight novels: He writes guilty pleasures. The problem is that people treat West Wing as actually informative of politics.
Off Topic but West Wing was a pretty terrible drama with excellent dialogue.
One limitation to it as a drama.
Did anyone in the Bartlett White Hose have a different motivation beyond selfless public service in support of the public good (defined in the show as Sorkinism)? Very rarely. In real offices you have your timemarkers, people who just want to climb the ladder, people who dislike the boss, the reformers who disagree on the mission agenda. None of that exists in that WH.
Hmmm, you're right. Now that I think about it, even the Republican opponents, who were supposed to be the bad guys, were usually motivated by ideology over selfish personal gain. I dunno, I loved the Newsroom as well, Aaron Sorkin can't really write human beings because he's too pompous and idealistic, but dang if I don't love indulging in his fantasies.
Newsroom was pretty great when it first came out. And Sorkin’s dialogue can be amazing, but absolutely unrealistic.
So much to agree with. But again, to categorically say it is the greatest without evaluating that statement is flawed. Necessary in the case of a sitting President/Vice President, but still flawed. And it begs the question — does influence make something great?
Just to be blunt comparing a homogenous nation of under 10 million people (Norway, Sweden, Finland) to a global capital of commerce is quite silly.
Imagine if we took the NY/SF/LA/Boston metropolitan areas and made it a country. It would be comically wealthy.
That the size and number of citizens of a nation determines its ability to be functional is silly. That we cannot look at what is working on other nations, regardless of their size, and evaluate what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong and adapt is silly. Please find a less derisive word. It’s… silly not to.
It is much harder to build social solidarity as population size increases. It is much harder to build social solidarity as geographic size increases. It is much harder to build social solidarity as the culture becomes more diverse.
US has all 3. Comparing ourseleves to mini-states that are the size of our metro areas is, well, silly.
Harder. That’s defeatist.
See I look at this though and say the cost of changing rhetoric is... literally nothing? Hell yes I'll use jingoistic slogans if it means I have a greater chance of passing policies that I think will improve people's lives (and maybe even help America live up to that aspirational rhetoric.)
My point was that the cost (moral and personal truth to self and immediate constituents) of casting aside your own beliefs to pander is worth the benefit. Basically saying exactly what you just said. Except to some people, that cost is not “literally nothing.” She got to one of the most powerful positions in the world by being true to her beliefs — and doing so loudly and proudly. She does need to change that, but the cost to her is not determined by the ideology that you don’t see it as a cost.
I definitely *don't* think America is the greatest country in the world (the greatest countries in the world are Japan, France and Mexico) but I don't mind hokey US patriotism at all.
Being conspicuously cosmopolitan (in *any* country) is also a kind of identity politics. It is at worst a way of saying "people like me are better than these rubes." Patriotic rhetoric, at its best, is a way of saying "I want this country we are making together be as good as it can be."
Maybe the three most admirable things this country ever did were the Civil War / reconstruction, the FDR presidency and the civil rights movement and the mainstream of all three was awash in patriotic rhetoric. America's symbols are powerful, you can't just give up on them.
Yup, I love your point that being conspicuously cosmopolitan is a form of identity politics. It is also a form of favoring a very specific personality trait most people don't have by definition: extremely high openness to experience relative to the average person.
So the greatest countries in the world are 1) exceptionally ethnically homogeneous 2) very ethnically homogeneous and 3) full of corruption and crime?
I don't make the rules
And I don’t mind hokey patriotism. I mind pandering. But like I said, reality bites.
so I just posted about how my comment derailed completely, but if I HAD posted about pro-America vs. against-America, this says exactly what I would have tried to convey.
I didn’t post about that, lol, but thank you! 😀
Well this derailed…
I think people give legislators a lot of space for being impure, due to the need to court votes, among both voters and other legislators. There are things in her record as a prosecutor that make me worry about her character.
I don’t have time to demonstrate at the moment, may come back later, but she did things that I might overlook from a former Mississippi AG. But California? She didn’t do those things because they were politically necessary or even advantageous. It feels to me like she did those things because that’s who she is. And I hate it, I really do. I’ll be looking for a different candidate.
And yes, for Pete’s sake, get away from Twitter. That goes for every candidate and journalist (sorry Matt!).
I assume you mean some of her "tough on crime" stances which definitely worried me. Although it's possible she's become convinced those things aren't correct any more.
Things like the Larsen case, in particular. But there are several examples, and what appears to be a clear pattern:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/596758/
And I’m pretty far from woke. These are cases that could have been handled differently and defended anywhere in the country. Certainly in California.
Going onto the national stage as a prosecutor is tough, because there are inevitably both cases you were too lenient on, and cases you were too tough on. I really liked Klobuchar, but I knew that would drag her down.
IMO, Harris has a perfectly fine record as a prosecutor. As she steps away from Joe Biden, I think “Kamala The Cop” will play great.
She can’t be Kamala the Cop while also being (or having been) Queen of Representation and Ambassador of Equity.
Well, I share Matt’s hope that she can change her message. She’s got some time.
As a swing voter, that’s the stuff that makes me open to her. But I am not sure of the specifics of her record.
I would not be ok with unfairness.
A phenomenal article as always, Matt.
As you reference in the opening sentence I am deeply, deeply worried about her chances if she's the nominee. Perhaps even more worrying to me is I don't think the current iteration of the Democratic Party would even dare to challenge her for the nomination if Biden retires.
Of the most-likely GOP candidates I think she loses to every single one. A large part of this is not her fault: our country is polarized, EC puts Dems at disadvantage, a significant number of voters that are openly/closeted racists and sexists, etc., etc. All those aside, she seems to have a real issue connecting on the stump, especially with more moderate voters who would (obviously) be needed to carry her over the finish line.
To summarize: I do like Kamala the person and the public official - but I am DEEPLY worried about Kamala's chances as the anointed candidate.
If I was the Biden and/or DNC team I'd have Kamala on a tour of the rural parts of this country 75% of the time. If she could build up trust and become a familiar face in the rural areas of the country (thus tying her name to broadband expansion, farm bills, etc.) then I think she could turn the ship around in no time. But as of right now? Democrats seem doomed if she's top of ticket.
Just my two-cents, and looking forward to hearing where I'm way wrong :)
To get swing voters (largely suburban), she needs to separate herself from her staff’s woke BS. And she needs to do that now, not two weeks before the primary season starts. How likely is that? is the question.
The thing I worry about is that she and her staff may believe that they are already taking Matt's advice by not being as critical of America or as woke vanguard-y as some of their peers and cohorts would like them to be.
They are trying to thread the needle, but she needs bold.
The echoes between Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton are striking.
Yep.
From my conversations with friends who are conservatives (mostly Never Trumper types) I think it is likely too late for Harris with a large segment of them. The right-wing media has been pushing a narrative of "Harris is really in charge and Biden is doing nothing" and it's working from what I can tell. Is it based in reality? Hell no. Does that matter? Hell no.
But does that matter? You don't need to win conservatives - just swing voters.
Also new voters - of which there are millions every cycle. Not many people are born D or R, and many if not most will change allegiance at some point even if they don't remain a swing
Huh really? I thought there was lots of poli sci evidence that ppl born into D families are hugely likely to be D for life and vice versa. And I thought allegiance switching was pretty rare. Your comment just challenges what I thought I knew about this so now I’m curious.
Interesting - so I haven't seen research, so take my response for what it's worth. I'm informed by 2 things:
A) Personal experience - Perhaps I'm farther from the mainstream than I realize, but most people I know, grew up with or are family with have switched voting preference and partisan lean over their lives. But I live in a Romney-2-Biden neighborhood in a swing district in a swing state with lots of cross-pressured voters. If I lived in Alabma I might have a different pesonal impression.
B) More convincingly - all the voting data I see implies major levels of vote switching each election cycle. We regularly see states that swing up to 10% each 4 year cycle, which implies a minimum net of 5% of voters switching (I know new voters, deaths and 3rd parties complicate this, but bear with me). But even within a state where the net vote didn't move, they'll be entire counties that will swing 5-10% in opposing directions to each other. And within those counties, individual districts will swing in opposing directions.
All of those opposing shifts cancelling each other imply much larger levels of vote switching than the top-line net numbers imply.
I come to the same conclusion looking at demographic shifts. Look at Pew Research's excellent panel data on voting results: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-bidens-2020-victory/
The total swing of the electorate was 2.3%.
But Millenials shifted 6% towards Trump, Gen X 3% towards Trump, Boomers 1% towards Biden and the Oldest 3% towards Biden.
Rural voters 7% further towards Trump, Urban 13% to Trump, Suburban 9% to Biden.
Hispanics moved 17% to Trump!
And remember, all these specific numbers are net. 17% towards trump is a minimum of be 8.5% switching Hillary-Trump. But it could be 11% Hillary-Trump and 2.5% the other way. Or bigger, who knows.
To me there's no way realistic these numbers can all add up without a significant amount of vote switching just in this one cycle, in an election where the same guy was on the ballet as the last time.
More to the point, exit polls, including 2020, have been measuring about 10% of voters who switched their party vote cycle to cycle.
I think conservatives are indicative of at least some swing voters. Their burning hatred of Clinton translated to dislike for swing voters.
>>>From my conversations with friends who are conservatives (mostly Never Trumper types) I think it is likely too late for Harris with a large segment of them)<<<
That seems consonant with most recent analysis of partisanship in America. The "there are no swing voters" meme that got going a decade or so ago was overdone, to be sure. Nonetheless a pretty large percentage of voters these days (>85%?) usually won't even consider voting for the party they don't normally favor.*
So, no matter which Democratic politician we're talking about, I'd guess on average the vast bulk of conservatives wouldn't vote for her.
*Clearly one exception has to be Massachusetts functional Democrats who vote for Charlie Baker.
Plenty of exceptions among governors--Larry Hogan, Phil Scott, John Bel Edwards, Laura Kelly. Governors are weird.
Yes, voters get the difference between a governor who doesn't answer to anyone else (besides voters) and senators/reps, who empower out-of-state actors in the party. Baker and Hogan would certainly have a better chance of getting into the Senate than other MA/MD Republicans, but would be very very likely to lose. See also Romney in 1994 vs 2002.
Yeah, this rings true. Sara Longwell has done focus groups with Republicans in Arizona. They all like Kyrsten Sinema a lot more than Mark Kelly, but when asked if they would vote for her they say absolutely not.
Huh. Mark Kelly is much, much more popular than Sinema with Democrats. Probably because he’s kept his head down.
Testor is best example for a Dem. Even more impressive he does it in Senate races.
But it may be based in reality. One of her most important roles, as I understand it, is (informally) as “ambassador to the left” and (publicly) as the advocate of “equity” as left-defined. I think she has a lot of influence in certain areas (such as housing policy) because Biden has given it to her. The implications of this are enough to kill her with suburban voters, moderate Democrats as well as perhaps momentarily persuadable Republicans. As you say, it probably already has, while also (re-) trashing the Democratic Party brand, for losses down the road.
Well, if that's the case, she's doing a below-average job as the far-left seems to absolutely despise her. But, the far-left is nearly impossible to please - especially on the federal level.
But, to be clear, I don't think the far-left is driven by reason. Not sure what she could do to please them tbh
The crazy thing about Lefties who hate Kamala is she is one of them. She was consistently one of the most liberal Senators by vote score. https://voteview.com/congress/senate
Which goes to show Lefties are just like everyone else: they vote on identity. Because she doesn't rail again capitalism like Bernie or drap herself in the professorial culture like Warren they don't care for her despite the fact she's clearly one of them.
Unfortunately for Harris most moderates accurately perceive Harris's ideology which leaves her in a tough spot.
Can't say I'm an expert, but my gut tells me that there could be a pretty large zone of people who aren't hating her forever for having been a cop, and who are liking her now because of the "first black asian woman etc. etc." factor and because she is going around talking about "equity" (in an Orwellian sense).
Judging by this, they’re doubling down, not separating: “ Sabrina Singh, deputy press secretary to the vice president, told CNN in a statement that Harris’ focus remains on her work.
“The Vice President and her office are focused on the Biden-Harris Administration’s agenda to build an economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down, to making sure racial equity is at the core of everything the Administration does, to combatting the existential threat of climate change, and to continue protecting the American people from the Covid-19 pandemic,” Singh said.” From https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/02/politics/kamala-harris-office-dynamics/index.html
2/4 focus areas are awfully woke-ish.
Sincere question: how does "making sure racial equity is at the core of everything the Administration does" poll in general and across the American electorate? Similarly, how does "combatting the existential threat of climate change" poll? Do people outside the DC bubble resonate with "build an economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down". Wouldn't it be better to say something like "good jobs for everyone"? This sounds like bad marketing copy, not like political slogans, which is what it should be.
It absolutely doesn’t poll at all.
Climate change is becoming a more popular topic (especially this year), but she needs to pair with “lead the world in new energy technologies to reduce carbon emissions and pollution”
I mean nothing there is bad.... its just so... predictable.
At this point, her best chance is for Biden to resign for some reason, let her run as an incumbent.
In theory I’m very supportive of racial equity, but everyone has a different definition of equity, and the one suggested in the video above is “problematic” to me, “Marxist” to some otherwise persuadable voters. And it doesn’t seem wise to make it the “core of everything.” So I do think that statement does more harm than good, even if I fall on the amenable end of the spectrum myself!
Regardless of what you think of racial equity and equality, that video is fundamentally about didactically explaining to people what words mean.
Not saying it’s not important, or that it’s wrong, or anything like that. I’m just saying that Explaining what words mean is basically a bad look in politics.
I don’t think it’s impossible. I’d do it by placing her in more situations where it’s more important for her to listen than to talk.
Agree, especially rural areas where she can literally show them the benefits of a competent federal government. But it's not happening, not sure how much longer I can wait
Your comment makes me realize something disturbing, which is that we Democrats are developing our own version of the GOP’s “it’s death to criticize Trump” thing, only ours isn’t built on a single personality like theirs is. Instead, ours is built on the fear that if we criticize candidates who have certain identities (race, sex, etc.), that we’ll be attacked as racist, sexist, etc. That’s not a good formula for cutting ourselves loose from subpar candidates.
I think this is right where I am too. I like her fine, but I'm a hardcore Dem, like I'm literally the target audience Matt identifies. The electoral college is BAD for her.
And to your first point, can you imagine a primary against her in this iteration of the Democratic party? I'd expect a shit show of Dem identity politics infighting
Counterpoint: I'm never going to pull the lever for anything that doesn't have a D after the name, no matter how ugly that thing might be, and I still don't like her.
I don't hate her, certainly, but I'm unsure that she was in any way important to the 2020 results, I have no confidence in her policy decisions or her political instincts, and I deeply fear she's going to screw up the 2024 or '28 campaign in pretty much every way possible.
I'm not entirely certain she can pull off a damned *popular vote* victory, she's that tone-deaf and has that little control over her staff.
For what it's worth: there's totally a large probability this piece gets in front of the Vice President's eyeballs (and definitely her staff's). From what I hear Matt Y is a very regular read in (very) high Democratic Party circles.
It's true that Biden reads this. He comments as "Bob Saget"
There is no way that Biden knows how to post comments on substack. He strikes me as the password post-it on the monitor type.
The "Email login link" option is actually just for him.
How about my comments? Are those highly prized as well?
Heard he's waiting for your input to decide on some future appointees to the EPA.
Do they listen?
The more important question (even if they do indeed "listen") is: do they follow his advice?
He's got ears in the Speaker's office too! https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1420474202096873482
Fascinating and convincing analysis but... (pause for a Jon Snow flashback) - I think this next bit is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG:
"And on some level, I don’t think there’s any problem with Harris that can’t be solved by her wanting to solve problems.".
Her campaign was a train wreck of muddled messaging and confused staffers and we are getting similar stories out of the White House. I think this is who she is and she either can't or won't change.
Campaign
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/29/us/politics/kamala-harris-2020.html
Now
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/02/politics/kamala-harris-office-dynamics/index.html
Agree, the persistent stories of bad staffing and management that have followed Harris are the biggest red flag.
The advice MY makes in the post is so obviously right that you have to wonder why she hasn't already been doing it. It's probably because she's got bad staff with a bunker mentality who are reinforcing her worst instincts instead of helping her act like she is in the incredibly strong position that she's actually in. Ultimately though if she's repeatedly picking bad staff, that's on her
Biden's campaigns in 1988 and 2008 sucked too.
I'm not saying she will be successful, just that it's possible to get better at presidential politics.
Great point. She has the skills to improve.
A consistent finding is that Left of Center types are more pessimistic. It is important to not let that bias you. We didn't nominate a Palin who doesn't have the smarts to pivot or a Cruz who is just unwilling to do so.
We nominated a skilled Pol. Hopefully she'll make the necessary transition.
Has Biden ever been subject to it? He seemed to get better only when he was taking out of electoral politics and put in the Vice Presidency.
These are among the articles I was thinking of when I said, a few moments ago:
"My defeatism stems from the fact that I don't think she has the ability or discipline to actually do this, and will instead wallow in "I earned it" and "they're prejudiced" type spin for the entirety of the next four years. God knows the people she's surrounded herself with are already getting on with that line of messaging."
It's not that this can't be fixed, is that she does not see the need.