What a difference a month makes. Like a lot of people, by the time the Republican National Convention was over, I was thoroughly depressed. When Joe Biden was running, he rightly pointed out the risk to democracy if his opponent were elected. Unfortunately, the Republicans said the same thing if the Democrats won.
Even as I heard the calls for Joe Biden to step aside, I couldn’t imagine how that would work out. Kamala Harris’ polling numbers weren’t much better than Joe’s. The pundits also noted that she never got any footing in the 2020 Democratic campaign season, which was true.
Do you know who else ran not one but two dismal Presidential campaigns? Joe Biden, who dropped out of the 2008 campaign after faring poorly in Iowa. Of course, Barack Obama then picked him as his running mate.
So, I am cautiously optimistic. In retrospect, I should have KNOWN that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz would be the Presidential/Veep candidates for the Democrats. I jest. But it feels so right.
The Republicans are currently on the defensive. A disoriented djt insists that the attendance at his “rally” on Jan. 6, 2021, before the storming of the Capitol, was larger than the quarter million on August 28, 1963, when MLK Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. He has fantasized that Joe Biden might somehow snatch back the nomination. People around him say he’s been knocked off his bearings.
Uh-uh
Harris/Walz has pivoted to We’re Not Going Back. Some have criticized it as unduly negative, but I think it’s wonderful. It’s oblique. Go back to what? The time before Roe v. Wade? Before Jan. 6? It’s a counterweight to Make America Great Again, Again.
Now, the GOP candidate is considered ‘Too Old’ by a majority. “Mental Fitness Increasingly Worry Voters.” Like Biden, he can’t pivot to become younger, and touting his alleged prowess in basic cognitive tests isn’t helping. I only wish the press had been harsher on djt earlier, because he’s been saying crazy stuff for quite a while.
Also, several pundits have noted that the “weird” labeling is particularly effective. If one attacks djt on policy, he’ll say his position was misrepresented. But if one points out his mixing up California politician Willie Brown with another black man, and you say, “That’s weird,” you don’t have to ask if he’s losing it. After Hillary Clinton used “deplorable” to describe MAGA fans, they embraced it, but weird is a different thing.
I should write about tech bro JD Vance and how Silicon Valley owns him, but nah.
DEI
When Harris got down to her Veep candidates, you knew there would be a white man. That DEI! If you’re gonna have a black South Asian woman, you gotta have a white guy. Walz seems to be the least likely candidate. Gov. Roy Cooper (NC) looks like how a president would have been portrayed in many 1980s disaster films. Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania, looks like a policy wonk. US Senator Mark Kelly (AZ) looks like, well, an astronaut. Then there were the forty-somethings, Gov. Andy Beshear (KY) and US DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
MN governor Tim Walz is the least telegenic, but he has a Midwestern genuineness and a great biography, which people are attracted to. “He tossed off multiple zingers about how ‘creepy and weird as hell’ the Republican ticket. Coach Walz’s sudden rise in the Democratic Party was no accident. And according to the satirical Borowitz Report, “in an extraordinary show of support from the furry mammals, America’s cats gave a full-throated endorsement to…Walz.”
Interestingly, according to an article published in the National Library of Medicine in 2023, “We vote for the person, not the policies: a systematic review on how personality traits influence voting behaviour.” The GOP candidates and most of their proxies are not very nice people. Their “stolen valor” attack on Walz is overblown, e.g., and is funny coming from the campaign of Captain Bone Spurs.
RFK, Jr.
When Biden was still poised to be the Democratic candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. seemed to have the chance to be at least a spoiler. His stock is down now, and John Oliver’s skewering on Last Week Tonight didn’t help.
Worse, from Behan Communications: “Since ‘weird’ seems to be the word of the moment, we thought we’d hop right in with some news about… [the] presidential candidate of the Comic Relief Party.
“Where to begin? With his admission that he dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park 10 years ago? Or that he once had a freezer full of roadkill meat? Or that doctors told him he has a dead worm in his brain? Or that he somehow believes, according to testimony he gave this week in an Albany, N.Y., courtroom, that an intent to move somewhere is ‘the only requirement for residency?'” He has been “disqualified from the New York ballot over his false residence claim.” It’s likely to affect other states where he used that bogus address.