Category: Kamala Harris

Yes, Kamala ‘Won’ That Debate (and Why It Probably Won’t Matter in November)

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If any of your Democrat friends try to provoke you into an argument about who won Tuesday night’s debate, avoid the provocation by agreeing that Kamala “won,” and end the conversation immediately.

“Never smarten up a chump” — don’t let them in on the secret that Harris’s debate “victory” is unlikely to make any difference.

This is why Democrats were caught by surprise in 2016. They were paying attention to the media and didn’t understand that Trump voters were not deterred by any of his scandals or “gaffes.” This was a mistake that I myself made. After the “Access Hollywood” tapes went public, I declared in early October 2016 that there was no way Trump could win — how could anyone survive that? On Election Day, I went out and voted for Trump, then came home to watch the results on TV and was amazed to see state after state turn red on the map. Incredible!

Was any voter really undecided before Tuesday? I suppose that all the regular readers here had made up their mind to vote for Trump long ago. Your choice was not in the least changed, was it? Ditto all the Harris voters — they were never going to be persuaded to vote for Trump, no matter what. They’d vote for a turnip if it had a “D” next to it. Who were the “undecided” voters, and why were they undecided? I have trouble imagining such people exist, and can’t begin to explain the motives for their indecision. But if they were leaning toward voting for Trump, why would they change their minds simply because he was extra-Trumpish during the debate? The man is a known quantity, for good or ill.

Like a lot of other Trump voters, I was disappointed by his performance, but not really surprised, and certainly was not persuaded to vote for Kamala. I am against the Democratic Party, period, and my chief regret is that not every one of the 74,000,000 Trump voters are as staunchly anti-Democrat as I am. I voted for Trump despite Trump being Trump, and will do it again, and am therefore not an accurate bellwether of how an “undecided” voter might react to Trump being Trump.

My point is that I don’t think any Trump supporter should feel discouraged about the election because of Tuesday’s debate. If you have liberal friends who are whooping it up in celebration, the thing to do is to pretend you don’t notice. Don’t start any arguments, and don’t let yourself be baited into any arguments. Democrats are going to be Democrats, and why waste time arguing with fools?

Here’s Reagan Reese reporting at the Daily Caller:

Former President Donald Trump came out hot during his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, while ABC’s moderators fact-checked just one side of the stage.
Trump and Harris met for the first time in their political careers on ABC News’s debate stage in a 90 minute contest that featured no live audience, muted mics and moderators that left many conservative viewers frustrated. As ABC’s David Muir and Linsey Davis continuously corrected Trump and left Harris un-checked, the vice president baited the former president into fiery moments by teasing him about rally crowd size and his 2020 loss. . . .
Though Harris dodged questions on her numerous policy flip-flops and whether Americans are better off under her administration than Trump’s, pundits and media personalities suggested that the vice president presented herself better than her opponent. A CNN flash poll of debate watchers found that 63% said Harris had won the debate, compared to 37% for Trump. The same sample of individuals said pre-debate they were split 50-50 on who they expected to win.
Her campaign apparently thought so too, because minutes after the forum ended, they began calling for a second debate in October.
Trump, meanwhile, was noticeably louder and more aggressive than in his debate against President Joe Biden, where the Republican nominee largely stood quietly by while his opponent imploded.
“She conveyed the calm. Did she answer all the questions about the switches? No. But I thought he would’ve raised that,” former congressman Harold Ford said in Fox News’ post show.
“She came out ahead of him in my opinion, no doubt,” Brit Hume, Fox News political analyst, responded to Ford. “She was calm, she was prepared.”

So there’s the “objective” take, such as it is.



 

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Debate Night: America in the Balance

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The first presidential debate this year was such a huge Trump victory that Joe Biden dropped his re-election bid a few weeks later, resulting in Kamala Harris being anointed as the Democrat nominee. What are the chances that Kamala Harris will do better than Joe did against Trump? We’ll see. Feel free to use the comments as a sort of open thread. While I don’t expect to live-blog the debate, I will try to throw some new stuff in periodically. Maybe the topic of Haitians eating cats will come up.

UPDATE 9:13 p.m. ET: So what they decided to do was, first, ask Kamala about the Biden economic agenda. She doesn’t say anything in defense of Bidenomics, but instead talks about what various things she’s promising to do if elected. Then it’s Trump’s turn, and then they just keep going back and forth — Harris, Trump, Harris, Trump. I don’t know who’s winning this, but it’s annoying the hell out of me.

UPDATE 9:21 p.m. ET: One-liner of the night: “Run, Spot, run!”

UPDATE 10:09 p.m. ET: Wow, this is an awful, awful TV show. I suppose Kamala Harris’s supporters think she’s winning, while Trump has to not only debate his opponent, but also the ABC “moderators” who (a) keep telling lies while “fact-checking” him, and (b) never fact-check any of Kamala’s lies. Trump supporters are probably unhappy, but I don’t imagine they think their guy is losing. Probably the net impact of this whole thing is a wash, but my hunch is that a lot of viewers just tuned out after 30 or 45 minutes of squabbling.

UPDATE 10:28 p.m. ET: Folks, I’ve had as much of this as I can stand. Maybe tomorrow, after three or four cups of coffee, I’ll do a roundup of post-debate reaction, but I’m heading to bed now. Good night!



 

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Why Would Kamala Harris Lie About Working at McDonald’s Circa 1983?

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Other than the fact that she lies about everything:

The first all-female audience ever on The Drew Barrymore Show was whooping and cheering for Kamala Harris, its guest of honor, this April when Barrymore’s sidekick, Ross Matthews, threw a softball at the vice president.
“I heard a rumor that you worked at McDonald’s?”
“I did. Yes, I did work at McDonald’s,” laughed Harris. “When I was at school … I did fries. And then I did the cashier.”
“I didn’t know that about you,” gasped Barrymore.
Neither did anyone who followed Harris’s long career in public life — that is, until she ran for president in 2019 and began to make the job a centerpiece of her biography.
Harris’s work at McDonald’s, which allegedly took place at a franchise in the California Bay Area the summer after her freshman year in college, is a recent addition to her carefully curated life story. For decades, Harris never mentioned it, not on the campaign trail nor in two books. It’s absent from a job application and résumé she submitted a year after she graduated from college. Third-party biographers did not write about it. Not until Harris ran for president in 2019 and spoke to a labor rally in Las Vegas did she mention the job, telling the crowd that she “was a student when I was working in a McDonald’s.”
McDonald’s boasts that one in eight Americans has worked at the fast food chain, and Harris, whose campaign is light on policy and heavy on image, has been using her fast food job to portray what the Washington Post, in a credulous piece this month on the Harris-McDonald’s connection, described as “her humble background.” (Harris is the daughter of an eminent cancer researcher, whom her campaign calls “a working mother,” and a tenured Stanford economist, who split when Harris and her sister were children.)
Early this month, Harris’s campaign said she used her McDonald’s wages to pay for college. “Vice President Harris is the daughter of a working mother and worked at a McDonald’s to put herself through college,” campaign spokeswoman Lauren Hitt said this month. A pro-Harris super PAC ad said she “work[ed] her way through school at McDonald’s.” And former president Bill Clinton, at the Democratic National Convention, joked that “she’ll break my record as president who has spent the most time at McDonald’s.”
At the same time, however, Harris’s image makers tweaked the story ever so slightly. According to an August 14 item in Politico, an early cut of a Harris campaign ad said she worked at McDonald’s to “pay her way” through college. Aides changed the script to reflect that “she really took the summer job just to earn a bit more spending money,” as Politico put it.
The Politico story, which was published just hours after the Washington Free Beacon reached out to the Harris campaign with a series of detailed questions about Harris’s claims regarding her job at McDonald’s, didn’t say when exactly—or where—Harris worked at the restaurant. The campaign did not respond to the Free Beacon’s inquiries.
It is possible that Harris did indeed work at McDonald’s in the early 1980s. But the absence of that detail in public records and her campaign’s coyness and refusal to provide any further details raise questions about what is now a foundational narrative.
On Monday, the New York Times reported without attribution that Harris, who was born in Oakland, Calif., and moved to Montreal with her mother and younger sister when she was 12, “return[ed] to the Bay Area for a summer during college when she worked at a McDonald’s in Alameda, a city next to Oakland.” Harris was attending college at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
If some details of the job have varied, while others are murky, that might be because there is no record of Harris mentioning the McDonald’s job before that labor rally in Las Vegas in June 2019.
The job goes unmentioned in both of her memoirs, published in July 2010 and January 2019.
The Truths We Hold, published ahead of her maiden presidential bid, does include a passage on the “many jobs” she held in college, with no reference to McDonald’s. It also devotes a chapter to the struggles of the working class and assails the service industry’s “starvation wages.” Harris’s McDonald’s job is similarly absent from her 2009 book, Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer.
Two biographies written about Harris make no mention of the job, either. . . .

Far be it from me to commit a logical fallacy — the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because you can’t prove that Harris worked at McDonald’s, that’s not proof that she didn’t work at McDonald’s.

It is certainly curious — and probably not a coincidence — that the first time we know of Harris mentioning this alleged McDonald’s job is at a union rally during her first (and failed) presidential campaign. Whether she did or didn’t work at McDonald’s, this claim would help her seem as if she could relate to the plight of workers. But why not mention it in any of her previous campaigns, for California attorney general or U.S. Senate? Why wait until 2019? It’s sort of like Christine Blasey Ford waiting more than 30 years to mention the alleged sexual assault committed against her when she was a prep school girl. “Question the timing.”

How long before questions about Kamala Harris’s alleged employment at McDonald’s rate a “Republicans pounce” headline from the media?



 

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Hurricane-Force Media Hype

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CNN (I watch, so you don’t have to) is still hyping polls that show Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump on the eve of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and, if all you knew about the election is what you get from the “mainstream” media, you would believe she’s cruising to certain victory. Dig this feature in the U.K. Guardian:

Tens of thousands of Democrats are expected to descend on Chicago this week for their party’s convention, bubbling with a feeling few had anticipated: pure, unconfined joy.
At the end of their four-day fete, when the red, white and blue balloons tumble from the rafters of the United Center, Kamala Harris will have become the first woman of color to accept a major party’s presidential nomination in American history. The moment will cap a frenzied few weeks for Democrats, following the vice-president’s sudden ascent to the top of the ticket in a development that has transformed the race for the White House and galvanized a party once resigned to a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
“It’s a remarkable turn of events,” said Howard Dean, a former Democratic National Committee chairman and former Vermont governor. “The Democrats have now been resurrected.”
In less than a month since Biden’s monumental decision to abandon his re-election bid, Harris has united most Democrats and restored the party’s dominance among young voters and people of color. While the race remains nail-bitingly close, analysts recently adjusted their outlook in a trio of Sun belt states that had appeared to be slipping away from Democrats, possibly opening an alternative path to victory.
Harris’s crowds have been large and electric — a development that appears to irk her rival, still struggling to find a mocking nickname. Fundraising has poured in at a record clip. Celebrities, artists and fashion designers are eager to help. Online, young people continue to churn out memes and flattering content.
Party officials say the Harris-inspired vibe shift is trickling down ballot and translating into on-the-ground organizing.
“You can see the giant crowd packing the rallies,” said Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic party. “But what you can’t see in those images is the fact that thousands of the people who go to those rallies are signing up for volunteer shifts and then going out and knocking on the doors of potential swing voters who may not know much about Vice-President Harris or Governor Walz.” . . .

You can read the rest of that, if you’re not already sick to your stomach from such nausea-inducing treacle. One thing the “mainstream” media carefully avoid reporting are the facts about Chicago, a Democrat-controlled hellhole where 25 people have already been murdered this month. The Chicago homicide total so far this year is already 386, and another 1,634 people have been shot but survived their wounds.

Meanwhile, more than 74 million Americans voted for Trump in 2020 and an even larger number will vote for Trump again this year, and what about them? What about their opinions? What do those many millions of American voters think of the way Democrats switched candidates in mid-campaign? You’re never going to see questions like that asked on CNN, nor will they ever remind their audience of why Kamala Harris quit the Democratic primary campaign in December 2019 before a single vote was cast. The woman is an unlikeable airhead, and the only reason she became vice president is because that was the price James Clyburn demanded from Biden in return for delivering the South Carolina primary, at a time when Joe was desperate to stop Bernie Sanders.

If you’re one of those 74 million Trump voters, my advice is: Relax.

Do not let yourself become discouraged by the intensity of the pro-Harris hype coming from the media. Ultimately, this make-believe game cannot succeed, and the American people will see through the media-generated mirage of “joy” around the Harris-Walz ticket. We’re now 79 days away from November 5. You can survive the hurricane of hype that long.



 

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BREAKING NEWS: Washington Post Columnist Understands Economics!

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The Pulitzer Prize committee hasn’t solicited any suggestions from me, but maybe they should consider Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post for a special award, because I can’t remember the last time anyone at the Post exhibited any real comprehension of how markets work.

In case you missed it — because, really, who cares? — this past week, Kamala Harris rolled out “her” economic policy agenda. The scare-quotes around “her” are necessary because Kamala has never in her life had an original idea, and “her” economic plan is no exception to that rule. Central to this economic plan is an idea stolen from Elizabeth Warren, a federal ban on “price gouging.” Like every other Elizabeth Warren idea, this is a very bad idea, as Matt Margolis explains:

The proposal, of course, is Soviet-style price controls branded as a federal ban on price-gouging. The proposal tries to kill two birds with one stone by simultaneously deflecting blame for inflation onto corporate greed — rather than the economic policies of the Biden-Harris administration — and convincing the public that she has the solution to fix it.

“If you like your bread lines, you can keep your bread lines.”

Rampell’s column in the Post rips Kamala to tatters:

“Price gouging” is the focus of Vice President Kamala Harris’s economic agenda, her presidential campaign says. She’ll crack down on “excessive prices” and “excessive corporate profits,” particularly for groceries.
So what level counts as “excessive,” you might ask? TBD, but Harris will ban it.
That’s the thing about price gouging: As has been said of hardcore pornography, you know it when you see it.
It’s not hard to figure out where this proposal came from. Voters want to blame someone for high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate greed. Harris has chosen the latter.
In a news release Wednesday, her campaign said the first 100 days of her presidency would include the “first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries — setting clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries.”
What are these “clear rules of the road” or the thresholds that determine when a price or profit level becomes “excessive”? The memo doesn’t say, and the campaign did not answer questions I sent seeking clarification. . . .
It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is. It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food. Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would. The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.
At best, this would lead to shortages, black markets and hoarding, among other distortions seen previous times countries tried to limit price growth by fiat. (There’s a reason narrower “price gouging” laws that exist in some U.S. states are rarely invoked.) At worst, it might accidentally raise prices. . . .

You can read the rest, and frankly, now I’m worried about Catherine Rampell’s safety. Telling the truth about how bad Democratic policies are? Is that even allowed? Isn’t it racist to say Kamala would wreck the economy worse than it’s been wrecked already? It’s probably just a matter of time before Rampell is the target of an exposé by Taylor Lorenz.



 

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Why Do Republicans Hate ‘Joy’?

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One of the most familiar (and most annoying) games played by what Andrew Breitbart dubbed the Democrat-Media Complex is to engage in some kind of deliberate provocation, then to react with feigned shock and outrage when Republicans react to the aforesaid provocation. Republicans “pounce” or “seize” or “attack,” the headlines tell us, intending to shift our gaze away from whatever it is that Democrats have said or done, and toward the (allegedly unjustified) Republican reaction.

Consider, for example, the way the media purposefully repeat verbatim the talking points handed to them by Democrats. They know that we see what they’re doing, and they don’t care, because if we dare complain about the (allegedly objective) news media engaging in blatant partisan propaganda, then our complaints become the story.

At Harris Rally in Philadelphia,
the Return of “Joy”
— Mother Jones, August 6

‘Bringing back the joy’:
Walz’s first day keeps
Democrats’ buzz going
— Washington Post, August 6

Harris, Walz and Democrats’ Joyful Campaign
— New York Times, August 7

Harris and Walz seize on joyful message
in contrast to darker Trump themes
— Washington Post, August 8

Harris Used to Worry About Laughing.
Now Joy Is Fueling Her Campaign.
— New York Times, August 9

Harris and Walz reintroduce joy
to Democrats their first week
on the campaign trail
— NPR, August 11

Et cetera, et cetera. You see what they’re doing, right? And you know why they’re doing it — it’s all about hyping up this bizarre and unprecedented candidate-switch by Democrats as something to celebrate. Never before in modern American history has a major party forced its own incumbent president to quit his re-election campaign after he’s been nominated as the candidate in his own party primary and then, by a “virtual roll call,” appoint the vice president as the candidate instead. Barely six weeks ago — up until Joe Biden’s June 27 debate performance — the media were unanimously assuring us that Biden was sharp as a tack, full of vigorous youthful energy, and anyone who suggested otherwise was denounced as some kind of far-right conspiracy theorist. Quite suddenly, however, the same media were declaring that Biden must quit the race, and when he finally did, they praised his “selfless” courage in doing so.

As I say, all this is without historical precedent, which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s illegal or even wrong, but shouldn’t Democratic primary voters feel they’ve been cheated in this transaction? If Biden would have had the decency to announce a year ago that he would not seek reelection, there could have been an open primary, giving Democats a chance to choose their own chandidate. Instead, they got Kamala Harris dumped in their lap, and told they had no choice in the matter, and their reaction to this crude swindle? JOY! JOY! JOY! Or so the media wish us to believe.

Evidently, Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) believe that Kamala can surf her way to the White House on a tidal wave of bullshit. As previously noted (“Issues? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Issues!” July 29), the media coverage is all about the “energy” and “momentum” of the Harris campaign, and as to her position on issues — well, who needs “positions” or “issues,” when they’ve got so much joy?

Journalists are actively defending Harris from any consideration of issues. Ed Morrissey smacks around a writer for The Atlantic:

What does Harris have? She’s been vice president for almost four years. Her party anointed her as the nominee three weeks ago. Kamala Harris ran on a progressive platform in California for the Senate and in 2019 for the presidential nomination, so she’s had years to develop her positions on all of the issues in play. Is she such an empty suit that she couldn’t put together a platform within the first couple of days of the campaign? If so, why did Democrats rush to anoint her?
Why aren’t reporters asking these questions, rather than just observing the “seizing”? Because the answer to why Harris is hard to pin down isn’t Republicans who pounce — it’s reporters and media outlets who refuse to do their jobs. 
That’s why mainstream media never tires of reporting the “seizing” and the “pouncing” when it comes to Republican criticism of Democrats. Republicans are doing the job the media refuses to do, and the media is embarrassed by it. There isn’t a single word in [David] Graham’s essay that pins the issue of “ambiguity” on the media that has cooperated in her strategy of silence. We know, for instance, that the pool reporters on her campaign have agreed to off-the-record bull sessions with Harris in order for them to report on the campaign messaging without fingerprints, thanks to a Politico newsletter item last week.
Want to know why no one knows Kamala’s politics of the moment? Maybe it’s because the people whose job it is to report it aren’t asking. The American establishment media have allowed Harris to run as the anointed presidential nominee of a major party for three weeks now without a platform, without a press conference, and without even an interview in which she could be pressed to answer this question.
And the biggest criticism Graham can muster for this sorry state of affairs is … to smirk at Republicans for pointing it out and slough it off as “seizing,” the hoariest cliché in political reporting.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.) No policies. No issues. Just nothing but “joy.” And, the media will surely ask, why do you hate joy?



 

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Fictitious Candidate Kamala Harris and Her Imaginary ‘Presidential Campaign’

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Why is Kamala Harris now the Democratic presidential candidate? Perhaps you’ve forgotten, so let me remind you. After the June 27 debate debacle for Joe Biden, it took about three weeks for the party bosses to convince Joe he had to go, and why? Because his meltdown was so bad as to make it impossible for Democrats to have any hope of recapturing the House of Representatives, and put Chuck Schumer’s Senate majority in jeopardy. This prospect of down-ticket damage was the real reason that Joe got kicked off the ticket and replaced with Kamala who, in the 19 days since being anointed as Biden’s replacement, has yet to conduct a press conference or to do a major media interview — not even with such friendly outlets as CNN and MSNBC. It seems apparent that the game plan for Team Harris is to keep playing hide-the-candidate at least until the end of the convention next week, in order to minimize any risk that she’ll say something besides what’s written on the teleprompter.

Meanwhile, I sit here with my office TV tuned to CNN, which is endlessly hyping up Harris as enormously popular, her campaign “surging” with grassroots excitement. This cannot last, I keep telling myself. Sooner or later, the media-generated protective bubble around Kamala is going to be pierced, America will discover that she’s a complete airhead, and her (suspiciously high) poll numbers will collapse. Or maybe I’m wrong.

Maybe this whole thing is a scripted simulation. Maybe Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) think they can repeat the Biden basement campaign scenario of 2020, absent the excuse of a pandemic. Maybe there will never be any press conferences, no media interviews in which Kamala has to face questions that aren’t submitted in advance, so that she can rehearse her answers ahead of time. Could she actually win the White House with such a fake campaign? I doubt it, but the point is Kamala’s job as “candidate” doesn’t require her to win. All she has to do to “succeed,” by the standards of those who installed her as Biden’s replacement, is to avoid the kind of catastrophe that would drag down the Democrats in their House and Senate campaigns.

There are plenty of ambitious Democrats — governors and senators, especially — with their hungry eyes fixed on 2028, and having Harris actually win the White House this year would be bad for them. But they don’t want the kind of meltdown they were facing with feeble-minded Joe at the top of the ticket, so now they’ve got Kamala as a sort of puppet whose job is to not lose so bad that it hurts Democrats in the down-ballot races. Kamala is a fake candidate in a make-believe campaign.



 

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Republicans Dodged a Bullet Today — and Van Jones Tells the Truth About Why!

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Folks, if Donald Trump wins in November, today will be remembered as the day that the 2024 election shifted decisively in his favor. While vice-presidential picks rarely affect the outcome of an election (Thomas Eagleton being perhaps the most egregious exception to that rule), Kamala Harris could have made the Electoral College (EC) arithmetic very difficult for Trump if she had chosen Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate. Pennsylvania has 19 EC votes (tied with Illinois as the fifth-largest state) and Shapiro is so popular in the state, it would have made it effectively impossible for Trump to compete there. But snubbing Shapiro, Harris automatically puts those 19 EC votes in play. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz adds no such obvious advantage for the Democrats; in theory, his Midwestern appeal might help Harris in Wisconsin (10 EC votes) and Michigan (15 EC votes), but that’s not nearly as clear-cut as what the Shapiro/Pennsylvania play would have added.

And, of course, there’s the Jewish thing. A week or so ago, when the “short list” of VP contenders was much longer, my brother Kirby more or less predicted that Harris would not pick Shapiro, simply because such a choice would alienate the anti-Semitic segment of the Democratic Party’s coalition. I thought North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper might have a shot but, again, Kirby correctly predicted that wouldn’t happen, because Harris looks likely to lose, and Cooper doesn’t want that stain on his resumé. When the name of Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly was floated as one of the finalists, I was skeptical — really, a bald 60-year-old? — but then Walz was mentioned, and I was like, are you kidding me with this?

However much Harris might want to pander to the pro-Hamas college kids, and the “uncommitted” voters in Dearborn, surely, I thought, the advantages of picking Shapiro were obvious enough.

Hello, Jewish money? Not to play into any stereotypes here, but the Democratic Party collects many millions of dollars in contributions from Jewish donors every year, and with the current situation in the Middle East, one might think that Harris would wish to reassure those donors that the party was still pro-Israel. Because guess what? Trump was arguably the most pro-Israel president ever, and there’s no guarantee that all that money’s going to keep going to Democrats if Democrats are going to be sucking up to the anti-Jewish mobs we’ve seen at Columbia, Harvard and other elite universities. As much as losing Pennsylvania in one election would hurt Democrats, how much worse would they be hurt by alienating Jews permanently? So I was honestly startled this morning when it was announced that Harris had picked Walz and, of all people, CNN’s Van Jones shared my feelings:

Look, Josh Shapiro is a class act from beginning to end. He’s a rising star in this party. He’s done an extraordinary job. . . .
Republicans, they were chewing their fingernails down to the knuckle because they were afraid of a Josh Shapiro, they were afraid of a Mark Kelly, they’re not as afraid of [Walz] . . . [H]ere’s the challenge you’ve got in this party, and you know, people don’t want to talk about it — we got to talk about it.
On the one hand, you have a lot of young people who are concerned about Gaza. You have a lot of Muslims and Arabs and others, they have not felt seen by the Biden administration. You started hearing that genocide joke, that was building that was building and so those folks needed to have a candidate that they could feel comfortable with. This helps him in that regard. But you also have anti-Semitism that has gotten marbled into this party. You can be for the Palestinians without being an anti-Jewish bigot. But there are some anti-Jewish bigots out there and there’s some disquiet now and there has to be. How much of what just happened is caving into some of these darker parts in the party? So that’s going to have to get worked out. It’s going to have to get talked through.

Republicans are, of course, worried about the election, but we now have a lot less to worry about, thanks to Harris picking Walz.



 

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