On Thursday, ahead of a Trump news conference in New Jersey, her campaign issued an “advisory” warning: “Donald Trump To Ramble Incoherently and Spread Dangerous Lies in Public, but at Different Home.”
Wednesday Reads
Posted: August 21, 2024 Filed under: 2024 DNC, 2024 presidential Campaign, Kamala Harris 2024 | Tags: Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Doug Emhoff, fund-raising, michelle obama, Milwaukee, Stephanie Grisham, Tim Walz, TV ratings 9 CommentsGood Morning!!
I’m on the third day of a some kind of stomach thing, so this post may be brief. I’ve been sleeping a lot, and last night I dozed off and slept through most of Doug Emhoff’s speech and all of Michelle and Barack Obama’s speeches. I’ll have to try and watch them later on. I did watch the ceremonial roll call of the states, and it was a lot of fun. The DNC played “walk up” songs and the state-by-state speeches were upbeat and enthusiastic.
NBC5 Chicago: DNC roll call playlist: Full list of each state’s ‘walk-up’ songs from night 2 of DNC.
Sure, there were big speeches from The Obamas, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders at the Democratic National Convention last night. But Tuesday at the DNC in Chicago felt more like a dance party than a buttoned-up political event.
DJ Cassidy strode on stage in a bright blue double-breasted suit and spun tunes for every state during the event’s ceremonial roll call, as they nominated Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to the Democratic presidential ticket. Minnesota got “1999” by native son Prince, Kansas got “Carry on Wayward Son” by, well, Kansas. “Born in the U.S.A.” by Bruce Springsteen played as New Jersey weighed in.
See the whole list at the link. Unlike the Trump campaign, the Democrats got permission from all of the featured artists. In contrast, the Trump campaign yesterday posted a video with Trump walking from his plane to “Freedom,” by Beyonce, who gave Kamala Harris exclusive permission to use that song.
CNN with takeaways from last night’s speakers:
Barack and Michelle Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday, delivering back-to-back speeches that eviscerated Donald Trump and urged Americans to reject the Republican nominee once and for all.
The former first lady, in one of the most memorable speeches in convention history, called on Democrats to drop the “Goldilocks complex” and work hard to elect Vice President Kamala Harris.
“We cannot indulge our anxieties about whether this country will elect someone like Kamala, instead of doing everything we can to get someone like Kamala elected,” she said.
Then, the former president — in a speech that evoked memories of his emergence into the American political consciousness and his own winning campaigns — said that the “vast majority of us do not want to live in a country that’s bitter and divided.”
“We do not need four more years of bluster and bumbling and chaos. We have seen that movie before, and we all know that the sequel is usually worse,” Obama said.
Their speeches closed a night during which Democrats had sought to introduce Harris in more personal terms to Americans who are only now learning about the vice president, just a month after she ascended to the top of the party’s 2024 ticket.
Second gentleman Doug Emhoff told the story of their relationship and why his children call the vice president “Momala.” Maryland Senate candidate Angela Alsobrooks explained how Harris came to be someone she considered a friend and mentor.
CNN also summarized speeches by Republicans who now support Harris/Walz:
Throughout the night, the DNC featured former Republicans making the case for independents and Trump critics to vote for Harris.
One of the prime-time speaking slots went to Mayor John Giles of Mesa, Arizona, a self-declared lifelong Republican who said the Biden-Harris administration had delivered results for his conservative community.
“I have an urgent message for the majority of Americans who, like me, are in the political middle: John McCain’s Republican Party is gone, and we don’t owe a damn thing to what’s been left behind,” Giles said. “So let’s turn the page. Let’s put country first.”
Giles’ speech capped off a series of appearances Tuesday by Republicans, or people who’d left the party, rallying support for Harris….
Stephanie Grisham, a former Trump White House press secretary and chief of staff to former First Lady Melania Trump, described herself as a “true believer” who spent her holidays at Mar-a-Lago. But she resigned on January 6, 2021, after Trump failed to immediately move to stop his supporters from attacking the US Capitol.
Grisham used her remarks to condemn Trump’s behind closed doors, telling that audience that he mocks his supporters in private and has called them “basement dwellers.”
“He has no empathy, no morals and no fidelity to the truth,” she said.
The one sour note was Bernie Sanders, who apparently has no sense of humor and rarely if ever smiles. According to the BBC, he didn’t “feel the Bern” from the audience.
BBC: Obamas, dancing delegates and other takeaways from DNC day two.
During back-to-back speeches, Barack and Michelle Obama mixed gags with serious exhortations to Democrats to get out and vote in November – pointing out that Ms Harris was in a close race with Donald Trump.
Mr Obama characterised the Republican presidential candidate as being selfish and dangerous, quipping that he was obsessed with crowd sizes.
And Mrs Obama mocked Trump for his use of the term “black jobs” on the campaign trail. She suggested that Trump might himself be seeking one of those jobs – in a reference to her husband’s previous tenure of the White House.
By contrast, Ms Harris represented “hope”, Ms Obama said, echoing her husband’s campaign messaging from 2008.
On Bernie Sanders:
Bernie Sanders gave his own speech on Tuesday night – but the energy in the arena was described as “minimal” by the BBC’s North America correspondent, Anthony Zurcher. A murmur of people talking could be heard at the same time.
That is in contrast to the hero’s welcome that the veteran senator received in 2016, the year he challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. Then, his supporters streamed into the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia.
Eight years later, Mr Sanders could still be witnessed railing against oligarchs and corporate interests, but the atmosphere was very different.
One explanation was that the building was filled with delegates who originally supported Joe Biden – rather than the Sanders faithful. But it could also signal that the senator has no clear successor to lead the Democratic progressive left.
The TV ratings for the first night of the DNC beat out the RNC. Deadline: Democratic National Convention Draws 20 Million On First Night, Surpassing RNC Viewership.
The first night of the Democratic National Convention averaged 20 million viewers across 13 networks, surpassing the audience for the initial day of the Republican National Convention, according to Nielsen.
The numbers are for the 10 p.m. ET to 12:30 a.m ET time frame, as the proceedings went way overtime, finishing with the address by President Joe Biden.
The DNC audience was greater than the first night of the party’s convention in 2020, when it drew 19.75 million viewers. But it was down significantly from 2016, when the DNC drew 25.95 million.
The first night of the DNC on Monday drew 15.32 million 55 and over, 3.51 million in the 35-54 demo and 851,000 aged 18-34, per Nielsen.
MSNBC topped the networks, drawing 4.6 million viewers, compared to 3.2 million for CNN, 2.8 million for ABC News, 2.4 million for Fox News, 2 million for CBS News and 1.8 million for NBC News. The figures are also Nielsen via MSNBC.
Harris and Waltz in Milwaukee last night
While the convention was taking place in Chicago, Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz appeared in Milwaukee a the same venue where the RNC was held–and it was packed to the rafters with an estimated 15,000 people. Harris gave her acceptance speech to both audiences simultaneously through a TV hookup.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Kamala Harris, Tim Walz hold rousing rally at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Republican VP nominee JD Vance in Kenosha: Recap.
Vice President Kamala Harris held a rousing rally before thousands of supporters Tuesday night in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, while the second day of the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago was taking place.
Harris accepted the party’s nomination for president in Milwaukee after the roll call vote of delegates in Wisconsin’s neighboring state of Illinois at the DNC. It was the Democratic presidential nominee’s third visit to the state since she took over the top of the ticket in late July.
Meanwhile, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance traveled to Kenosha for a press conference focused on crime and public safety.
Their appearances continue to show Wisconsin’s importance in the November presidential election.
The Journal Sentinel had live coverage from both the Harris/Walz and Vance events on Tuesday. Below are all the highlights from the political events in Wisconsin today.
Since the screen just outside Fiserv Forum that was supposed to show a stream of the DNC was malfunctioning, rally goers migrated to screens in the nearby Drink Wisconsinbly bar and the screen outside the Mecca Sports Bar and Grill to watch second gentleman Doug Emhoff speak out of Chicago.
They cheered as Emhoff left the stage and former first lady Michelle Obama was announced as the next speaker.
Gloria Boileau of Milwaukee said Harris brought “electric” energy inside Fiserv Forum. She spoke excitedly about the Harris-Walz ticket.“Knowing that they are the common people that we are and they will be in the White House representing us, that was electric,” Boileau said.
Read more from Milwaukee at the link.
The AP on tonight’s speakers: Tim Walz and Bill Clinton will speak at the Democratic National Convention’s third day.
Vice presidential nominee Tim Walz and former President Bill Clinton will headline the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday, the third day of the party’s choreographed rollout of a new candidate, Kamala Harris, and her pitch to voters.
In a delicate balancing act, Harris and the parade of Democrats speaking on her behalf all week are looking to harness the exuberance that has swept over their party since President Joe Biden stepped aside while making clear to their supporters that the election will be a fierce fight and frustratingly close.
“So much is on the line in this election,” Harris said Tuesday in Milwaukee, where she spoke at a professional basketball arena in battleground Wisconsin as the convention continued 90 miles away in Chicago. “And understand, this not 2016 or 2020. The stakes are higher.”
And in Chicago hours later, former President Barack Obama offered his own caution: “Make no mistake, it will be a fight,” Obama said. For all the energy and memes and rallies that have defined the campaign since Harris became the nominee, Obama said, “this will still be a tight race in a closely divided country.” [….]
And while the theme of Tuesday was “a bold vision for America’s future,” the disparate factions of Harris’ evolving coalition demonstrated, above all, that they are connected by a deep desire to prevent a second Trump presidency.
Harris continues to raise lots of campaign cash.
Reuters: Exclusive: Harris’ election effort raises around $500 million in a month, sources say.
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’ election effort has raised around $500 million since she became the Democratic presidential candidate, sources told Reuters, an unprecedented money haul that reflects donor enthusiasm going into the Nov. 5 election.
Four sources familiar with the fundraising effort told Reuters that figure had been banked for Harris in the four weeks since she jumped into the race on July 21.
Campaign cash is critical for advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts that help bring people to the polls and persuade undecided voters to swing a candidate’s way.
Harris entered the fray after President Joe Biden stepped aside from the top of the Democratic ticket, unleashing floods of funding that had dried up in the weeks after Biden’s disastrous debate against Republican Donald Trump.
Harris raised $200 million in the first week of her campaign while she quickly wrapped up support to become the party’s nominee.
Harris’ team raised $310 million in July, bringing the total amount of money raised by her and Biden before he dropped out to more than $1 billion, the most rapid crossing of that fundraising threshold in history, according to the campaign.
Trump’s campaign said it raised $138.7 million in July and had cash on hand of $327 million. The former president’s campaign outraised Biden in the second quarter.
Harris is also working to mobilize supporters to volunteer for the campaign. ABC News: Harris-Walz team has largest mobilization week of campaign cycle.
The Harris-Walz campaign effort to calcify the renewed enthusiasm from their party at the top of the ticket is seeing their biggest week of mobilization of the entire election cycle as the party’s national convention charges on in Chicago.
Ahead of the convention, the campaign launched what they characterize as a “weekend of action,” where over 10,000 volunteers barnstormed battlegrounds, making near 900,000 calls and knocking on more than 100,000 doors, contacting in sum over a million voters, per details first shared with ABC News. The campaign says that they were able to recruit over 24,000 volunteers.
Yet the most ambitious investments in organization will come at the latter half of the week — with the campaign hosting its largest telephone banking night of the cycle Wednesday, planning to launch 4,000 volunteers to work the lines.
On Thursday, the campaign will host 500 watch parties across the country in every state as Harris delivers her formal acceptance speech as the party’s newly minted nominee, a process that has come together in the short span of a month.
The campaign also held volunteer trainings and launched organizing resources on Monday and Tuesday….
These efforts are part of the campaign’s new efforts to mine the honeymoon buzz around Harris and Gov. Tim Walz, moving on turning any energy into action; mission critical with what continues to be a dead-heat race between Harris and former President Donald Trump several major battleground polls. This also comes as several grassroots voter groups host large-scale virtual telethons of sorts drawing big celebrity names to recruit volunteers and entice hefty donations, often netting millions of dollars each call.
More reads to check out, links only:
NOTUS on whining journalists: Accessibility and Access: Reporters Have Complaints About the DNC.
Meredith Shiner at The New Republic: Beware the Pundit-Brained Version of the Democratic Convention.
The Independent: How Kamala Harris became Donald Trump’s supertroll and found his weak spot.
The New Republic: Trump’s Latest Scheme to Beat Harris May Have Crossed Legal Lines.
Stephen Robinson at Public Notice: Trump sets the stage for another coup attempt.
The Hill: Republicans worry Trump blowing their chances for Senate majority.
Center for Politics: North Carolina Moves to Toss-up, Setting Up November Battle for Magnificent Seven Swing States.
The Daily Beast: Trump Surprised by Who Hurt His Feelings the Most at the DNC.
AP: Voters in Arizona and Montana can decide on constitutional right to abortion.
Have a great day everyone!!
Lazy Caturday Reads: Campaign News and Cats Stealing Food
Posted: August 17, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris 2024 | Tags: Chicago, debates, Democratic National Convention 1968, Democratic National Convention 2024, Economic policy, medal of honor, political snark, polls, Veterans of Foreign Wars 6 Comments
Alexandre-Francois Desportes, Still Life with Cat, 1705
Happy Caturday!!
Some folks in the media are trying to convince us that the excitement generated by the Harris-Walz campaign is fizzling out. I don’t think so. Harris gave a speech on her economic policies yesterday, tomorrow they will take a bus tour of Pennsylvania beginning in Pittsburgh, and on Monday the Democratic National Convention will begin in Chicago. So there is lots happening. Harris is also moving up in the polls. Here’s the latest on the campaign.
Mediaite: Polls Find Kamala Harris Taking Lead From Trump in States He Was Running Away with Just Weeks Ago.
New surveys from The New York Times/Siena College show Vice President Kamala Harris has put four Sun Belt states in contention, taking the lead in two.
Harris has edged ahead of Donald Trump in Arizona and North Carolina and tightened the margin in Nevada and Georgia compared to when President Joe Biden was still running for reelection. The polls, conducted August 8-15, show Harris and Trump averaging a tie of 48% across the four states.
According to Times/Siena data taken when Biden was still running, Trump was leading the president 50% to 41% in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada. North Carolina was not included in those surveys, but Trump won the state in both 2016 and 2020. Harris has closed some of these gaps with the vice president pulling 50% to Trump’s 45% in Arizona and 49% compared to Trump’s 47% in North Carolina.
In Georgia, Trump still holds the lead with 50% compared to Harris’s 46% and in Nevada he leads by one point, pulling 48% compared to Harris’s 47%. The margin of error for the Times poll is 4.4% for Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada and 4.2% for North Carolina results….
Harris has also grown in favorability, according to the new data with 48% saying they have a very or somewhat favorable opinion of the vice president. In a February survey, Harris’s unfavorable score was ahead by 19% while now she’s running even. Trump has remained unchanged in this department, pulling a 48% favorable rating compared to 50% unfavorable.
Voters who were polled were also asked who could “unify” the country as president and 46% backed Harris compared to 42% who backed Trump.
Sahil Kapur of NBC News on Harris’s economic speech in Raleigh, North Carolina yesterday afternoon: Harris pitches plans to tackle food, housing, medicine and child care costs in N.C. speech.
At a campaign speech Friday in North Carolina, Vice President Kamala Harris promised to “make it a top priority to bring down costs” if elected president and touted her new plans to tackle food and housing costs, slash prescription drug prices and expand the child tax credit.
Harris said the Biden administration has made progress, given the Covid economy it inherited from former President Donald Trump, but that it isn’t enough as “many Americans don’t yet feel that progress in their daily lives.”
Still Life with Cat and a Mackerel, by Giovanni Rivalta, 1760
“Costs are still too high. And on a deeper level, for too many people, no matter how much they work, it feels so hard to just be able to get ahead,” she told the crowd. “As president, I will take on the high costs that matter most to most Americans, like the cost of food. We all know that prices went up during the pandemic, when the supply chains shut down and failed, but our supply chains have now improved and prices are still too high.”
The Harris campaign outlined her proposals prior to the speech. She said she’d work with Congress to impose a “federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries,” setting rules “to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers” to boost their profits. She would also seek new powers for the Federal Trade Commission and state prosecutors to slap “strict new penalties on companies that break the rules,” her campaign said….
Harris noted in her Raleigh remarks: “Look, I know most businesses are creating jobs, contributing to our economy and playing by the rules, but some are not, and that’s just not right, and we need to take action when that is the case.”
She touted her plans to create a tax break for homebuilders who construct starter homes for first-time buyers and said she will provide a $25,000 subsidy for first-time homeowners buying a house. She vowed to cut “needless bureaucracy and unnecessary regulatory red tape” as part of that and said she’ll promote “innovative technologies while protecting consumers.” She vowed to set “a stable business environment with consistent and transparent rules of the road.”
The vice president pitched her plan to expand the child tax credit and offer “$6,000 in tax relief to families during the first year of a child’s life.” She said she’ll seek to extend Medicare’s $35-per-month insulin out-of-pocket cap to everyone and expand the administration’s Medicare drug price negotiation program.
Read more at NBC News.
And from CNN: Harris has a plan to fix one of America’s biggest economic problems. Here’s what it means for you.
Americans across the political spectrum can agree on this: Rent is expensive, and buying a home can feel nearly impossible.
America’s housing affordability crisis has a number of origins, but it largely stems from two key factors that you learned in Econ 101: supply and demand. The supply of homes on the market is extraordinarily low, as sellers hang onto their houses, waiting on the sidelines out of fear that historically high mortgage rates will make their next place to live too expensive. Demand exploded during the pandemic and it never slowed down, despite high prices and rates.
Although there are signs that the worst of the housing affordability nightmare may be over, the market remains tight. That’s why housing a top issue for voters in the 2024 presidential election.
Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday unveiled her plan to help make homes more affordable. Although analysts cheered some of her plans to assist buyers, some feared that parts of Harris’ plan may exacerbate the problems in the market.
The plan, which builds on proposals that President Joe Biden has already announced, promises:
- Up to $25,000 in down-payment support for first-time homebuyers.
- To provide a $10,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers.
- Tax incentives for builders that build starter homes sold to first-time buyers.
- An expansion of a tax incentive for building affordable rental housing.
- A new $40 billion innovation fund to spur innovative housing construction.
- To repurpose some federal land for affordable housing.
- A ban on algorithm-driven price-setting tools for landlords to set rents.
- To remove tax benefits for investors who buy large numbers of single-family rental homes.
Adding more homes to the market through incentives would certainly help, multiple economists agreed. Adding housing to the market will increase inventory and should help drive prices down. But capping rent was met with skepticism.
“What I’ve seen is three parts substance and one part symbolism,” said Joe Brusuelas, principal and chief economist at RSM US, “The substance is increasing or focusing on supply conditions via the financial channel. It’s a good, solid proposal that’s forward-looking and can actually be accomplished. The symbolism is more organized around price caps on rents.”
Read more analysis at the CNN link.
Still life with Cat. Sebastiano Lazzari, 1728
Oldsters like me remember the last time the Democrats met in Chicago in the chaotic year 1968. What will happen this time?
David Smith at The Guardian: ‘The world is watching’: 1968 protests set stage for Democratic convention.
Sean Wilentz was in the convention hall when someone handed out copies of a news wire report. “I remember the first line,” he says. “It said, ‘The lid blew off of this convention city tonight.’” The article went on to describe chaos and bloodshed in Chicago as police clashed with protesters against the Vietnam war.
Just 17 at the time, Wilentz and a couple of friends raced to the scene in downtown Chicago. “It was horrible. The cops were angry and didn’t like the kids and the kids were angry and didn’t like the cops. I saw a motorcycle cop go on a sidewalk and pin a kid against the wall. I was very scared.”
More than half a century has passed since a police riot scarred the Democratic national convention of 1968. On Monday Democrats return to Chicago with a spring in their step as they prepare to anoint Kamala Harris their presidential candidate. Yet some comparisons with the events of 56 years ago are irresistible.
Just as in 1968, a would-be assassin has sought to change the course of political history. Just as in 1968, an incumbent president has stepped aside and a vice-president will gain the Democratic nomination without winning a single primary vote. And just as in 1968, protesters will gather to demonstrate their anger over US involvement in an unpopular war.
Democrats are praying that the similarities end there. When the teargas cleared in Chicago, Hubert Humphrey, a self-styled “happy warrior”, emerged as the standard-bearer of a bitterly divided party. He went on to lose the election to Richard Nixon who, like fellow Republican Donald Trump, pushed a “law and order” message to exploit white voters’ fears and prejudices.
Of course there’s really no comparison between this year and the horrifying violence of 1968–riots in many cities, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the war in Vietnam and the antiwar protests all over the country. Back to the Guardian article:
Much has changed since Trump secured the Republican nomination at the party’s own convention in Milwaukee last month. With 81-year-old Joe Biden fading in opinion polls, the Democratic campaign had come to resemble a death march. But his decision to quit the race and throw his weight behind Harris triggered an explosion of relief, self-belief and surging enthusiasm.
Next week’s Democratic convention will put the capstone on the dramatic turnaround. Harris and running mate Tim Walz, who have been drawing huge crowds at rallies and millions of dollars in donations, will be formally nominated and deliver the most important speeches of their careers – probably resulting in a further polling bump.
Still Life with Soup, Fernando Botero, 1972
But the carefully stage-managed event – also featuring Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and A-list celebrities – could yet go off script. Thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters are expected to gather outside to demand that the US end military aid to Israel amid the ongoing war in Gaza, where the death toll has surpassed 40,000, according to the healthy ministry there.
The March on the DNC, a coalition of more than 200 organisations from all over the US, plans to hold demonstrations on Monday and Thursday, the days when Biden and Harris are due to speak. Its website brands the president “Genocide Joe Biden” and warns: “Democratic party leadership switching out their presidential nominee does not wash the blood of over 50,000 Palestinians off their hands.”
Although a sprawling security plan has been drawn up by federal, state and city governments, some activists have vowed a replay of 1968, when years of unrest over the American misadventure in Vietnam came to a head in Chicago. Then, as now, students took up the anti-war cause with campus protests, including at Columbia University in New York, where Hamilton Hall was occupied in both 1968 and 2024.
Read the rest at The Guardian.
ABC News: As Chicago braces for Democratic National Convention, concerns over safety mount.
With more than 50,000 people estimated to descend on Chicago next week for the Democratic National Convention, the city said it is prepared to make sure the week is a success, not just for visitors, but for city residents themselves.
“Our plan is to make sure we keep everyone within the city safe. We want this to be successful,” Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling told an audience at the City Club of Chicago.
While thousands of protestors are expected in Chicago, Snelling said the city is better prepared than it was in 2020, when street protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis led to arsons, looting, and rioting downtown.
Officers and police leadership have been engaged in extra training for more than a year to prepare for civil disobedience, he said. Hundreds of extra law enforcement from across the state will also be on hand, not just to strengthen security around the United Center on Chicago’s west side, but also to make sure 50 neighborhoods in the city are protected.
“We have a city to protect. The Chicago Police Department will be in every single neighborhood protecting the neighborhoods so we will not deplete resources from our neighborhoods,” he said….
Meanwhile, activists have been battling the city of Chicago in federal court over permitting rights. The Coalition to March on the DNC, which represents 200 social justice organizations from throughout the Midwest, filed for permits in 2023, however, they sued the city for violating its First Amendment right to protest.
While permits for the coalition are approved, the organization said the city, citing safety reasons, is unfairly restricting them by preventing the organization from constructing stages, connecting sound equipment and having portable toilets at Union Park.
During an emergency hearing on Friday, however, the city agreed to allow for the stage and speaker system for both rallies. U.S. District Judge Andrea Wood also ruled last week that activists must follow a protest route outlined by the city which is shorter and a further distance from the United Center.
More details on the planned protests at ABC.
Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin, Still Life with Cat and Fish, 1631
Dakinikat wrote about Trump’s so-called “news conference” yesterday, but I just want to touch on it briefly. I actually watched it, and it was a disaster. Trump read from sheets of paper in a monotone, interspersed with his usual insane diatribes like the one about birds being massacred by wind turbines, angry denunciations of Harris, Walz, Biden, and his many other “enemies”–and of course a few of his “sir stories.” This went on for close to an hour, and then he took about 5 questions. Why any reporter would show up for his dog and pony shows is a mystery.
But one of his remarks was particularly egregious. As Daknikat wrote, he denigrated the Medal of Honor that is awarded to military service members “who have distinguished themselves with acts of valor.” Here Some military organizations have responded.
From Military Times: Trump belittles Medal of Honor award in campaign speech.
Former President Donald Trump on Thursday said the Presidential Medal of Freedom is a “better” award than the Defense Department’s Medal of Honor because service members have to sacrifice their lives or health to receive the military’s highest honor, the latest in a series of controversial campaign comments from the Republican presidential candidate….
Trump…compared the civilian medal to the Medal of Honor, the highest military award for battlefield valor, which has been awarded to just 3,517 troops out of the 41 million who have served their nation.
“It’s the equivalent of the congressional Medal of Honor,” Trump said of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “But the civilian version, it’s actually much better because everyone that gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they’re soldiers.”
“They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead,” he said….
According to Defense Department rules, the Medal of Honor is awarded to servicemembers who distinguish themselves “through conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty.”
That list includes Sgt. 1st Class Alwyn Cashe, awarded the honor in posthumously in 2021. Cashe died from burn wounds suffered in 2005 attempting to save six fellow soldiers trapped in a burning vehicle following a roadside bomb attack in Iraq.
Army Sgt. 1st Class Leroy Petry received the honor in 2011 for valor in Afghanistan. He lost his hand in a enemy grenade blast after picking up the explosive and hurling it away from two fellow soldiers, saving their lives.
Individuals recognized for honor often have to wait years for military reviews and reports to validate their bravery. Since the start of the Vietnam War, 264 individuals have received the honor for battlefield valor. Only 60 are still living.
From The Veterans of Foreign Wars: VFW Admonishes Former President for Medal of Honor Remarks.
“On Thursday, former President Donald Trump spoke at an event where he made some flippant remarks about the Medal of Honor and the heroes who have received it. In the video that has circulated online and in the media, the former president was recognizing Miriam Adelson in the audience who he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom during his time in office. As he described the medal as the civilian version of the Medal of Honor, he went on to opine that the Medal of Freedom was “much better” than the military’s top award, because those awarded the latter are, in his words, “ … either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead.” He continued by comparing Miriam to MoH recipients saying, “She gets it and she’s a healthy beautiful woman. They are rated equal.”
These asinine comments not only diminish the significance of our nation’s highest award for valor, but also crassly characterizes the sacrifices of those who have risked their lives above and beyond the call of duty.
When a candidate to serve as our military’s commander-in-chief so brazenly dismisses the valor and reverence symbolized by the Medal of Honor and those who have earned it, I must question whether they would discharge their responsibilities to our men and women in uniform with the seriousness and discernment necessary for such a powerful position. It is even more disappointing when these comments come from a man who already served in this noble office and should frankly already know better….
We would like to remind Mr. Trump that the 12 times he had the honor of awarding the Medal of Honor as president of the United States, those were heroes not of his own choosing. He bestowed those medals on behalf of Congress, representing all Americans of a grateful nation. We hold the donation of their lives in service to our country in the highest esteem, and so should he.”
Trump is such an asshole.
Supposedly, Harris and Trump agreed to a debate schedule that was released yesterday, but Paige Oamek of The New Republic writes that Trump is still wavering: Trump Is Pissed at Harris for Trapping Him in Two Debates.
Is Donald Trump really trying to get out of debating Kamala Harris again? Or is it the opposite?
On Thursday, it seemed like the dust had finally settled. “The debate about debates is over,” said Michael Tyler, the Harris campaign communications director, in a statement. “Donald Trump’s campaign accepted our proposal for three debates—two presidential and a vice presidential debate.”
“Assuming Donald Trump actually shows up on September 10 to debate Vice President Harris, then Governor Walz will see JD Vance on October 1 and the American people will have another opportunity to see the vice president and Donald Trump on the debate stage in October,” the Harris campaign continued.
But now, Trump’s team claims that the Democrat lied when she said the two sides reached a debate agreement. At the moment, there is only one confirmed debate between the presidential nominees, to be held September 10 by ABC News.
Nevertheless, the Trump campaign’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Daily Caller Friday that Trump will be doing three debates and Vance will be doing two.
Huh? Apparently, Trump is still claiming there will be a debate on Fox News.
“Let’s be clear: President Trump will be on the debate stage THREE times with Fox News, ABC, and NBC/Telemundo. Likewise, Senator Vance will show up to debate Tim Walz on TWO occasions, on September 18 with CNN and October 1 with CBS. If Harris and Walz don’t show up, an empty podium can stand in their place, proving to the American people just how weak they are,” Leavitt told the Caller.
Trump had waffled for months on whether he would debate Harris, finally announcing he wanted to debate her three times on ABC, CBS, and Fox News. Harris accepted the invitations for the ABC and CBS debates but not for the one hosted by the Trump-adoring Fox.
Vance, confusingly, proposed two vice presidential debates as opposed to the traditional one. One of his proposed dates is the same day Trump is due to be sentenced for his hush-money trial.
Okay, well, I guess they will work it out eventually. Frankly I don’t care if there are debates or not.
It’s no use crying over spilt milk, by Frank Paton, 1880
The Harris campaign has got Trump’s number. I just love the way they are trolling him and getting under his skin. Irie Sentner of Politico has a piece about it: ‘When they go low, we go with the flow’: Dems ramp up attacks on Trump.
If Democrats in 2016 rallied around Michelle Obama’s mantra that “when they go low, we go high,” today they’re burying that ambition under a hill of insults, memes and snark.
In recent weeks, they’ve taken to the cable circuit to call former President Donald Trump and his running mate Sen. JD Vance “creepy” and “weird.” During his first speech as a vice presidential candidate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz referenced a false viral meme about Vance having intimate relations with a couch. And in a stream of official communications, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has taken on a voice less Oval Office than extremely online provocateur.
The jabs attack a former president who has exhibited almost no boundaries in hurling his own, crude insults at Harris. Trump has questioned her racial identity and her intelligence, calling her “low IQ” and “dumb.”
And the posture is not entirely new for Democrats, who began sharpening their edges after Trump won in 2016 — and “we go high” didn’t work. But less than three months before the election, it marks an all-out abandonment of the old rules of political politesse.
“We saw what happened when we let them define us. Now, we define their messaging about us,” said Democratic strategist Antjuan Seawright. “We went from ‘when they go low, we go high,’ to ‘when they go low, we go with the flow.’ That’s what’s happening.” [….]
As Trump adheres to his standard campaign playbook — including name calling and attacks on the vice president’s race and gender — Harris has rarely responded directly. When asked about a litany of criticisms Trump made about her at a news conference last week, Harris told reporters: “I was too busy talking to voters, I didn’t hear them.”
Read more examples of Democratic snark at the Politico link.
Those are my recommended reads for today. What’s on your mind?
Wednesday Reads: Presidential Campaign News
Posted: August 14, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris 2024 | Tags: Democratic National Convention, economic policies, Milwaukee, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tim Walz 11 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
Strawberry Moon, by Christi Belcourt
The presidential campaign is really heating up now. The Democratic National Convention is next week in Chicago, but Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Waltz aren’t sitting on their hands in the meantime. Harris will give a speech on her economic policies in North Carolina on Friday.
CBS News: Kamala Harris to release her first major economic plan as a presidential candidate.
Vice President Kamala Harris is set to deliver a speech Friday to roll out her economic portfolio in Raleigh, North Carolina, marking the first time Harris has released a major policy initiative since President Biden dropped out of the race last month.
Harris is expected to announce that she will make tackling inflation a “Day One” priority, as well as outline a plan to lower costs for middle class families, take on corporate-price gouging and an overall focus on lowering costs for Americans, according to details shared by Harris-Walz campaign officials.
According to the most recent CBS News poll, only 9% of registered voters rated the condition of the national economy as ‘very good’ with the economy and inflation ranking as the top issue of concern consistently across 2024 polls. Inflation has cooled since its peak in June 2022, but many voters are still feeling the financial strains. Prices are still 20% higher overall than prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Friday’s economic policy remarks come after Harris pledged to eliminate taxes on tips and raise the minimum wage during her rally in Las Vegas on Saturday, her only two economic policy proposals so far.
“When I am president, we will continue our fight for working families including to raise the minimum wage and eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers,” Harris said while speaking to rally attendees that included Nevada Culinary union members.
A Harris-Walz campaign official added that her pledge would require legislation.
More on the speech from Reuters: Harris to target price gouging in first policy speech in North Carolina.
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris will make her first policy-centered speech as Democratic presidential candidate on Friday, taking aim at price gouging, in a sign her whirlwind campaign could rattle big companies and corporate executives.
Harris will travel to Raleigh, in North Carolina, a state Democrats hope to flip this election, to outline her plan “to lower costs for middle-class families and take on corporate price-gouging,” her campaign said on Tuesday.
Harris canceled an event in North Carolina last week because of Tropical Storm Debby. Focusing her first major policy speech on the economy, and locating it in North Carolina shows how her campaign has revived Democrats’ hopes of flipping a state they have only won twice in the last half-century.
With less than three months before the Nov. 5 electionwhen she takes on Republican Donald Trump, Harris has drawn new enthusiasm and dollars to the ticket after President Joe Biden stepped aside, and seen polls swing in her favor in some states.
Her campaign sees states like Pennsylvania as a must-win, but North Carolina is more of a reach. Biden lost the state to Trump by a 1.3% margin – just 74,000 votes, but his prospects there were dim before he stepped down on July 21.
Harris’ speech will be closely watched to see how her style or substance differs from Biden, whose economic policies received low marks from voters angry about the cost of housing, medicine, groceries and gasoline.
On Saturday, Harris announced her support for eliminating taxes on tips, a position similar to Trump’s. Harris will hold a White House event with Biden on Thursday that is expected to focus on healthcare costs.
The Park, by Gustav Klimt
Biden has blamed corporate greed for still-elevated prices, accusing companies of boosting profits by shrinking portion sizes and by failing to pass on falling costs to consumers.
Big consumer goods companies have hiked prices in recent quarters, and food prices have risen 25% between 2019 and 2023.
Harris policed “corporate greed and price gouging” when she was California’s attorney general from 2011 through 2016, challenging pharmaceutical, oil, electronics and cosmetics companies, a campaign official said.
Harris “knows costs are too high and will make tackling inflation a ‘Day One’ priority,” added the official who declined to be identified speaking about the event beforehand.
Over the weekend Harris and Walz will hold a bus tour in Pennsylvania.
90.5 Pittsburgh: Harris, Walz to launch campaign bus tour in Pittsburgh this weekend.
As Democrats prepare for their national convention next week in Chicago, presidential nominee Kamala Harris and running mate Tim Walz will kick off a bus tour Sunday in Pittsburgh.
The Harris campaign has released few details about the event or the tour itself, but it says it will make multiple stops in Pennsylvania throughout the day. Those will include visits to canvassing kick-offs and other retail events that will set the stage for Harris and Walz formally accepting their party’s nomination in Chicago later next week.
Harris announced that Walz was her pick in a boisterous Philadelphia rally just over a week ago. The candidates will be accompanied by their spouses on the bus tour, marking the first time the two couples have made a joint campaign appearance.
The news is further proof, if any were necessary, of Pennsylvania’s crucial role in the 2024 election….
Harris has been a frequent visit to the state since before she became the party’s nominee: Including official visits made in her capacity as vice president, the bus tour will mark her eighth visit to Pennsylvania this year. And Harris clearly hopes to continue building the momentum that has energized Democrats since she replaced President Joe Biden as the party’s nominee earlier this summer.
The DNC begins on Monday and on Tuesday, Harris and Walz will hold a rally in Milwaukee.
Radiant Pines, by Mary Bea
WTMJ Milwaukee: VP Kamala Harris, Gov. Tim Walz plan Tuesday rally in Milwaukee, report says.
MILWAUKEE — Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz are planning a rally in Milwaukee for next Tuesday during the Democratic National Convention, according to a report in the New York Times.
The Harris campaign is planning to speak at Fiserv Forum, though an agreement has not yet been formalized with the venue, the Times reports.
Tuesday will be Day 2 of the Democratic National Convention, which is taking place in Chicago from Monday, August 19 through Thursday, August 22.
Barack Obama is scheduled as the featured speaker in Chicago on Tuesday, the Times says, which means the Harris-Walz rally would likely take place before that.
The Times based its report on four anonymous sources who were “briefed on the discussions” regarding the Milwaukee stop.
Fiserv Forum, of course, is where former President Donald Trump accepted the GOP’s nomination for president just last month.
Uh oh. Trump will be watching in order to compare crowd sizes.
Some new on the DNC schedule from The Independent, via Yahoo News: DNC schedule: When Kamala Harris, Tim Walz and more will speak.
The Democratic National Convention (DNC) gets underway on Monday August 19 in Chicago, Illinois, with some political heavyweights slated to headline the four-day gathering.
While the DNC is first and foremost a presidential nominating convention, Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz are already officially on the Democratic party’s ticket after a five-day round of online voting from delegates wrapped on August 5.
The historic virtual roll call results saw Harris become the first Black woman and first Asian-American person to become the presidential nominee for a major political party, securing 99 per cent support from more than 4,500 delegates.
As many as 50,000 visitors are now expected to descend on the Steven Spielberg-coordinated convention at the Windy City’s United Center between Monday and Thursday next week, including 5,000 delegates from all 50 states and territories, plus 15,000 members of the media and tens of thousands of guests.
A broad schedule for the event has now been released.
Featured speakers will include Joe Biden, Barak Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and more. Read all the details at the link above.
One more article on Kamala Harris’s campaign by David R. Lurie at Public Notice: Kamala Harris’s joyful realism. It’s a refreshing change from American Carnage.
The prevailing “take” on the Kamala Harris campaign is that it is “joyous about the joy,” a description that is at once obviously correct and incomplete.
It is only really possible to appreciate being joyful after one has suffered and acknowledged pain and loss. While Vice President Harris’s campaign certainly exudes joy, it is a happiness that arises from a forthright recognition of grave losses the nation suffered during and as a result of Donald Trump’s presidency, together with an abiding optimism that we are on a path toward recovery.
Only a few weeks into the rebooted presidential race, the contrast between the Harris and Trump campaigns is stark. Trump’s campaign is increasingly portrayed as dark, even dystopian, in contrast to the sunniness of Harris and Walz.
Crows, by Amano Kinihiro, 1929
Yet the description of Trump as dour is as incomplete as the account of Harris as a ray of sunshine. It misses the abiding attraction many Americans have to Trump’s reactionary vision, a vision grounded on resolute denial of essential facts regarding traumatic events the nation has suffered largely as a result of actions by Trump and his allies.
The surprising outpouring of joy that permeates the nascent Harris campaign reflects a belated recognition of the progress America has made over the past several years in overcoming the grave losses and damage to the nation’s social fabric we suffered during Trump’s presidency. It also reflects a sober but nonetheless optimistic recognition that, with sufficient effort, we can avoid going backwards….
At the outset of this presidency, Trump portrayed a fictional America consumed by chaos, disorder and “carnage,” and in dire need of a savior — him.
What followed, however, was actual chaos and carnage. Trump’s chaotic and disordered governance culminated in his administration’s nihilistic mismanagement of an historic health crisis that resulted in several million wholly avoidable deaths, while Trump’s assiduous efforts to inflame political and cultural divisions culminated in a literal attack on democracy itself after he lost the 2020 election.
Trump would have had little chance of convincing even his most fanatical fans, let alone other Americans, to return him to the White House had he acknowledged the disastrous nature of his prior term as president. Accordingly, Trump and his GOP followers have devoted the better part of the last four years to creating an elaborate and nearly entirely fictional account of his four years in office.
Trump has demanded his followers forget that he turned a public health emergency that should have brought the nation together into a vehicle for politicizing medical science and increasing social divisions, resulting in more avoidable deaths among Trump’s own Republican followers than in other communities. In recent months, Trump’s campaign even begun inviting voters to remember how much “better” things were under his watch four years ago at the chillingly chaotic height of the pandemic.
According to Trump’s alternative history, the president who culpably mismanaged the pandemic was not him, but Biden, who purportedly used the excuse of a nonexistent health emergency to transform the nation into a virtual police state.
Read the rest at Public Notice. It’s good.
Old man Trump has been forced to get off the golf course and make a speech on the economy (supposedly) in North Carolina today. The story includes some Harris news. ABC News: Trump to deliver remarks on economy as he returns to campaign trail in North Carolina.
Former President Donald Trump is set to deliver remarks on the economy in North Carolina on Wednesday as the campaign works to reset his campaign against Vice President Kamala Harris.
“The election’s coming up, and the people want to hear about the economy,” Trump said during an interview with Elon Musk on X Monday, directly blaming the Biden-Harris administration for what polls show is Americans’ pessimism about the economy.
The economy has been one of the Trump campaign’s central election issues this cycle — the former president often spending a considerable amount of time discussing inflation, gas prices and the job market.
Forest Spectrum, by June Hess
“I just ask this: Are you better off now, or were you better off when I was president?” Trump said Monday night as he was wrapping up his conversation with Musk.
Last week, Trump blamed the Biden-Harris administration for the recent stock market sell-off and called it a “Kamala crash” — making unfounded claims that the downswing happened because people have “no confidence” in Harris, while experts pointed to concerns about the health of the U.S. economy and that the Federal Reserve’s long wait to cut interest rates as among key reasons for the downturn.
Though the stock market has since bounced back, Trump has seized on economic worries, claiming without evidence or elaboration that if Harris wins in November, there could be a “Great Depression” on par with that of 1929 — an unfunded attack he previously used against President Joe Biden.
On the campaign trail, Trump, even as he rails against the economy under the Biden administration, has announced sparse details on specific economic policy proposals for his possible second administration, often offering his signature “Trump tax cuts,” “Trump tariffs” and “drill, baby, drill” — a boost for the oil and gas industry — as solutions to most economic problems.
I highly doubt that Trump is capable of making a serious economic speech. Let’s see if he can avoid bringing up Hannibal Lector.
This is interesting from Newsweek: Trump Campaign Forced To Pay North Carolina City $82K in Advance for Rally.
Former President Donald Trump‘s campaign was forced to pay more than $82,000 in advance for this week’s rally in Asheville, North Carolina.
Trump is set to take the stage at Asheville’s Thomas Wolfe Auditorium on Wednesday after paying $82,247.60 to the city for a “last-minute” rally, according to Blue Ridge Public Radio (BPR). The campaign, struggling to effectively blunt the momentum of Vice President Kamala Harris, reportedly first contacted the city about the rally on August 8.
City of Asheville spokesperson Kim Miller told BPR that $22,500 of the amount paid is a two-day rental fee for the auditorium, while “the remainder of the funds go to cover additional costs such as house support, production staff, production equipment rental, and exterior items like queue stanchions and port-a-loos.”
While the campaign paid in advance due to Asheville’s policy for short-notice bookings, Trump has a long history of failing to pay cities for billed rally fees, leaving the White House in January 2021 with at least $850,000 in unpaid rally debt. Most of the bills are still unpaid, including more than $500,000 owed to the city of El Paso, Texas….
The Trump campaign booked the smaller of two venues at the same complex in downtown Asheville for Wednesday’s rally. The Thomas Wolfe Auditorium has a capacity of just 2,431 people, while a larger arena next door that is not hosting Trump has a capacity of 7,200.
Of course Trump will claim there was a massive crowd, but it sounds like they didn’t think he could attract 7,000 people.
Bird Floral, by Jo Scott
AP: Donald Trump is going to North Carolina for an economic speech. Can he stick to a clear message?
ASHEVILLE, N.C. (AP) — Donald Trump will have another opportunity Wednesday to recalibrate his presidential comeback bid, this time with a rally and speech in North Carolina that his campaign is billing as a significant economic address.
Set in a Democratic city surrounded by staunchly Republican mountain counties, the event carries both national and local implications for the former president.
Republicans are looking for Trump to focus from the scattershot arguments and attacks he has made on Vice President Kamala Harris since Democrats elevated her as their presidential nominee. Twice in the past week, Trump has fumbled such opportunities, first in an hourlong news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, then in a 2 1/2-hour conversation on the social media platform X with CEO Elon Musk.
The latest attempt comes in the state that delivered Trump his closest statewide margin of victory four years ago and that is once again expected to be a battleground in 2024. Trump won North Carolina over Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 by less than 1.4 percentage points — about 74,500 votes — and he can’t afford to have the state’s 16 electoral votes shift to Democrats for the first time since Barack Obama prevailed here in 2008….
The question for the campaign is whether Trump can stick to a tight frame on the economy, especially to saddle Harris with the fallout of inflation, rather than default to his usual stemwinding and grievances. The speech comes the same day that the Labor Department reported that year-over-year inflation reached its lowest level in more than three years in July, a potential boon for Harris.
Anybody want to bet on Trump sticking to the prepared remarks?
That’s the campaign news. There’s lots happening, and the convention should be a lot of fun. Following politics is finally fun again!
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: August 10, 2024 Filed under: "presidential immunity", 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris 2024 | Tags: childless cat ladies, Culinary union Nevada, Jack Smith, Judge Tanya Chutkan, McDonalds, Nate Holden, Project 2025 training videos, swing state polls, Tim Walz, Trump lies, Trump press conference, UAW, Willie Brown 5 Comments
Happy Caturday!!
Last night, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz held their biggest rally yet in Glendale, Arizona, a Phoenix suburb. The crowd numbered around 15,000 people. Once again, the atmosphere was joyful and enthusiastic, with the crowd cheering lustily. Later last night, Trump spoke to a much smaller crowd, in a large venue with hundreds of empty seats. There was no joy at his sad rally.
The Guardian: Harris and Walz whip up crowd at packed Phoenix rally – but ‘we are the underdog.’
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz rallied a packed arena outside Phoenix, Arizona, on Friday – drawing perhaps the largest Democratic crowd of the election cycle this year.
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, her running mate and the local leaders who joined them on stage whipped up the crowd, discussing immigration, abortion rights and Indigenous sovereignty.
Noting the Indigenous leaders in the room, Harris also said: “I will always honor tribal sovereignty and respect tribal self-determination.” Indigenous voters are credited with helping deliver Arizona to Joe Biden in 2020; the state is home to 22 federally recognized tribes.
At one point during her speech, Harris was interrupted by protesters chanting “free, free Palestine” and other messages in support of Gaza. She stopped her speech to address the protesters.
“We’re here to fight for our democracy, which includes respecting the voices that I think we are hearing from. Let me just speak to that for a moment and then I’ll get back to the business at hand,” she said. “I have been clear: now is the time to get a ceasefire deal and get the hostage deal done. Now is the time. And the president and I are working around the clock every day to get that ceasefire deal done and bring the hostages home.” Her statement represented a noticeable change in tone from her approach to Gaza protesters in Detroit on Thursday.
Harris and Walz took the stage at the Desert Diamond Arena, a venue that can hold 20,000 people. Although official estimates are not yet available, the Harris campaign confirmed that more than 15,000 people attended the Phoenix rally. On stage, in front of attendees waving signs that read “Coach!”, Walz said the rally “might be the largest political gathering in the history of Arizona”.
“It’s not as if anybody cares about crowd sizes or anything,” he added.
Other Harris campaign events this week that have drawn crowds of up to 15,000, invoking the ire of Donald Trump, who claims to have “spoken to the biggest crowds”.
The Harris-Walz rally represents a renewed push to put the Sun belt back on the map for Harris’s still young campaign. Before Friday night, the state appeared to be leaning red, with Trump leading Harris by single digits in recent polls. But by the evening of the rally, Harris and Trump appeared neck and neck in the state, with polling from FiveThirtyEight showing Harris’ 44.4% closely following Trump’s 44.8%.
Polls on Friday morning showed Harris narrowly leading Trump nationwide.
Harris also addressed immigration in her Arizona speech. AP: Kamala Harris makes an immigration pitch in Arizona as she fights to gain ground in the Sun Belt.
Vice President Kamala Harris drew on her prosecutorial background to make her first expansive pitch on immigration to border-state voters as she and her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, attracted thousands to a campaign rally in Arizona during their tour of battleground states.
Harris, the former attorney general of California, reminded the crowd that she, as a law enforcement official, targeted transnational gangs, drug cartels and smugglers.
Trump won’t be happy with the latest polls of swing states. Also from The Guardian: New poll shows Harris four points ahead of Trump in three key swing states.
“I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won,” Harris said in front of a crowd of more than 15,000 in Glendale, a suburb of Phoenix. “So I know what I’m talking about.”
Harris promoted a border security bill that a bipartisan group of senators negotiated earlier this year, which Republican lawmakers ultimately opposed en masse at Republican nominee Donald Trump’s behest.
“Donald Trump does not want to fix this problem,” Harris said. “Be clear about that: He has no interest or desire to actually fix the problem. He talks a big game about border security, but he does not walk the walk.”
Trump won’t be happy with the latest swing state polls.
The Guardian: New poll shows Harris four points ahead of Trump in three key swing states.
A major new poll puts Kamala Harris ahead of Donald Trump in three key swing states, signaling a dramatic reversal in momentum for the Democratic party with three months to go until the election.
The vice-president leads the ex-president by four percentage points in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, 50% to 46%, among almost 2,000 likely voters in each state, according to new surveys by the New York Times and Siena College.
The polls were conducted between 5 and 9 August, in the week that Harris named midwesterner Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and a former high school teacher, as her running mate for November’s Democratic ticket.
It provides the clearest indication from crucial battleground states since Joe Biden pulled out of the race and endorsed Harris amid mounting concerns about the 82-year-old’s cognitive wellbeing and fitness to govern for a second term. The results come after months of polling that showed Biden either tied with or slightly behind Trump.
Harris is viewed as more intelligent, more honest and more temperamentally fit to run the country than Trump, according to the registered voters polled.
The findings, published on Saturday by the Times, will boost the Democrats, as Harris and Walz continue crisscrossing the country on their first week on the campaign trail together, holding a slew of events in swing states that are likely to decide the outcome of the election….
While only a snapshot, Democrats will probably be heartened to see that 60% of the surveyed independent voters, who always play a major role in deciding the outcome of the race, said they are satisfied with the choice of presidential candidates, compared with 45% in May.
The swing appears to be largely driven by evolving voter perceptions of Harris, who has been praised for her positivity and future-focused stump speeches on the campaign trail. In Pennsylvania, where Biden beat Trump by just more than 80,000 votes four years ago, her favorability rating has surged by 10 points since last month among registered voters, according to Times/Siena polling.
Harris will need to win Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan – crucial battleground states that Biden clinched in 2020 – if the Democrats are to regain the White House.
There’s also good news out of Nevada. The Nevada Independent: New Nevada poll sees Harris with biggest lead over Trump yet.
A new poll of likely Nevada voters found Vice President Kamala Harris with a nearly 6 percentage point lead over former President Donald Trump — the largest lead for a Democrat in any presidential poll of Nevadans this cycle.
While Nevada polls have been relatively scarce since Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, the vice president appears to have closed the gap that existed between Trump and Biden, who had not led Trump in a single public poll taken in the state since October 2023.
A Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll of Nevada in late July found Harris with a 2 percentage point lead in the head-to-head matchup — Democrats’ first leading poll of the cycle — and the Cook Political Report moved Nevada back into the “toss-up” category Thursday after previously categorizing it as “lean Republican.”
This latest poll, conducted by Decipher Ai’s David Wolfson, a pollster and Columbia University lecturer, sampled 991 likely voters across Nevada from Aug. 3-5 in a SMS/text-to-web poll on the presidential and House races. The statewide margin of error is 3 percentage points and between 6 percentage points and 7 percentage points for House races….
On the presidential ballot, Harris garnered 49.2 percent support while Trump received 43.6 percent. Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. received only 3.9 percent of the vote. Kennedy’s vote share is lower than the 8 percentage points to 10 percentage points he had been receiving, on average, when Biden was on the ballot. In an interview, Johnston said Kennedy’s polling fade reflects what typically happens to third-party candidates as the election nears.
Harris’ lead in this poll may be an outlier, but it mimics Biden’s position at this point in the cycle in 2020 when FiveThirtyEight polling averages showed he led in Nevada by about 6 percentage points. Biden ultimately won the state by about 2.4 percentage points.
Harris has received some major endorsements. From CNN:
Harris gains major endorsements: The nation’s oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), has endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket. It is the first time LULAC has endorsed a presidential. candidate in its almost 100-year history. Culinary and bartenders unions in Las Vegas also endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket Friday.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) also endorsed Harris this week.
In her speech last night, Harris told the crowd that she worked at McDonalds one summer. The Independent: Kamala Harris could make history as the first president to work at McDonald’s.
More than 13 percent of Americans, or roughly 41 million people, have worked at a McDonald’s restaurant at some point in their lives. That includes Kamala Harris, who worked at a restaurant for a summer while she was in college.
Harris mentioned her brief stint on the fryer when she joined the picket line with fast food workers in Las Vegas in 2019 and during an appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show in April. (Her order? “Quarter pounder with cheese and fries,” and barbecue sauce for dipping if she gets McNuggets).
Now, the Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign is nodding to her summer job to highlight her upbringing and a platform to boost American workers that stands in stark contrast to her Republican rival Donald Trump, who “has no plan to help the middle class — just more tax cuts for billionaires,” according to a recent ad.
McDonald’s is all over influential Americans’ resumes (former House Speaker Paul Ryan and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have also worked in McDonald’s restaurants), but service worker labor unions and fast food employees have been leading nationwide efforts to improve working conditions for lower-wage workers, including calls to boost the federal hourly minimum wage to at least $15.
They could soon have a powerful advocate in one of their former coworkers.
Harris — who has earned endorsements from several influential unions, including Service Employees International Union, which supported the nationwide Fight for $15 campaign — stood with striking McDonald’s workers and protesters as she was launching her first presidential campaign.
“If we want to talk about these golden arches being a symbol of the best of America, well, the arches are falling short,” she said from Las Vegas in June 2019. “We have got to recognize that working people deserve livable wages.”
“I did the french fries and I did the ice cream,” she told workers.
“There was not a family relying on me to pay the rent, put food on the table and keep the bills paid by the end of the month,” she added. “But the reality of McDonald’s is that a majority of the folk who are working there today are relying on that income to sustain a household and a family.”
Harris also made a point of stopping “lock him up” chants from the crowd. Ryan J. Reilly at NBC News: Harris shutting down ‘lock him up’ chants shields Trump’s federal Jan. 6 case from even more delays.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ efforts to shut down “lock him up” chants targeting Donald Trump at Harris-Walz rallies this week may be an effort to avoid engaging in the type of rhetoric seen at Trump rallies in 2016.
But there’s also a very practical reason for Harris to avoid showing any support for that type of language: Any comments or signs of approval she makes could further delay or complicate the pending federal criminal charges Trump is facing. That includes the Jan. 6 and 2020 election interference case brought by special counsel Jack Smith.
If Harris wins the election in November, Trump’s Jan. 6 case — though weakened by the Supreme Court — will continue to move toward trial. As sitting vice president in the administration that appointed the attorney general with oversight of the case, any comments Harris makes related to the trial could be fodder for the former president’s lawyers to argue in court that her comments interfered with Trump’s due process rights. That includes any suggestion that locking up Trump would be an explicit goal (as Trump repeatedly said about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign).
When a “lock him up” chant broke out at a Harris rally in Wisconsin this week, she said to supporters, “We’re gonna let the courts handle that,” and used a similar line when the same chant broke out at another rally. “Our job is to beat him in November,” she said.
Harris, a former prosecutor herself, has been cautious in her references to the array of civil and criminal cases that Trump has faced in recent years. Harris is aware of the impact she could have on Trump’s pending federal cases and has surrounded herself with Justice Department veterans — including her brother-in-law, Tony West, a former top DOJ official, and former Attorney General Eric Holder, who vetted her vice presidential candidates.
This is important, because Trump’s DC case on January 6 and election subversion is active again and back in the capable hands of Judge Tanya Chutkan.
Joyce Vance wrote yesterday at Civil Discourse: Jack Smith Asks for More Time.
Late today, lawyers in the Special Counsel’s office and lawyers for Donald Trump filed the joint status report that wasn’t due until tomorrow in the Trump election interference case in the District of Columbia. The Special Counsel advised the court that it “continues to assess the new precedent” laid down by the Supreme Court creating the doctrine of presidential immunity and went on to ask the court for an additional three weeks to file “an informed proposal regarding the schedule for pretrial proceedings moving forward.” Trump’s lawyers didn’t oppose Jack Smith’s request. Now the timeline is up to Judge Chutkan.
What does that mean, and why is the government asking for more delay in the case? Those are legitimate questions, but I would not be quick to criticize the Justice Department here.
Part of the answer comes in the pleading itself, where Smith relates that under the relevant portion of the special counsel regulations, he is required to consult with other components in DOJ before moving forward: “A Special Counsel shall comply with the rules, regulations, procedures, practices and policies of the Department of Justice. He or she shall consult with appropriate offices within the Department for guidance with respect to established practices, policies and procedures of the Department, including ethics and security regulations and procedures. Should the Special Counsel conclude that the extraordinary circumstances of any particular decision would render compliance with required review and approval procedures by the designated Departmental component inappropriate, he or she may consult directly with the Attorney General.”
Here, the parties’ task is to provide the court with a schedule for moving forward, but it’s deciding what events belong on that schedule that is problematic. Smith has an indictment that consists of four counts, 45 pages of allegations, and a mountain of evidence.
Click the link to read the rest.
In Trump news, people are still talking about the former “president’s” so called “press conference.”
Tom Nichols at The Atlantic: The Truth About Trump’s Press Conference. His obvious emotional instability is frightening, not funny.
Donald Trump’s public events are a challenge for anyone who writes about him. His rallies and press conferences are rich sources of material, fountains of molten weirdness that blurp up stuff that would sink the career of any other politician. By the time they’re over, all of the attendees are covered in gloppy nonsense.
And then, once everyone cleans up and shakes the debris off their phones and laptops, so much of what Trump said seems too bonkers to have come from a former president and the nominee of a major party that journalists are left trying to piece together a story as if Trump were a normal person. This is what The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has described as the “bias toward coherence,” and it leads to careful circumlocutions instead of stunned headlines.
Consider Trump’s press conference yesterday in Florida. Trump has been lying low since President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, at least in terms of public appearances. But Vice President Kamala Harris, the new Democratic nominee, and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, are gaining a lot of great press, and so Trump decided it was time to emerge from his sanctuary.
Trump, predictably, did an afternoon concert of his greatest hits, including “Doctors and Mothers Are Murdering Babies After They’re Born,” “Putin and Xi Love Me and I Love Them,” and “Gas Used to Be a Buck-Eighty-Something a Gallon.” But the new material was pretty shocking.
Trump not only declared that mothers are killing babies in the delivery room—he’s been saying that for years—but added the incomprehensible claim that liberals, conservatives, and independents alike are very happy that abortion has been returned to the states. (When asked how he would vote in Florida’s abortion referendum, he dodged the question, which suggests that maybe not everyone is happy.)
He said (again) that the convicted January 6 insurrectionists have been treated horribly, but this time he added that no one died during the assault on the Capitol. (In fact, four people died that day.) He made his usual assertion that Russia would never have invaded Ukraine if he’d been in office, but this time he added how much he looked forward to getting along with the Iranians, despite also bragging about how he tanked the nuclear deal with them.
He claimed that Harris was sliding in the polls, a standard Trump trope in talking about his opponents, but he added that he was getting crowd sizes up to 30 times hers at his rallies. Harris recently spoke to approximately 15,000 people in Detroit; 30 times that would be nearly half a million people, so Trump is now saying that he’s having rallies that are five times bigger than the average crowd at a Super Bowl—bigger, even, than Woodstock—and somehow fitting them all into arenas with seats to spare….
“Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Trump said. And then, referring to the crowd that gathered at his behest on January 6, he compared it to the 1963 March on Washington: “If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours: same real estate, same everything, same number of people.”
The March on Washington drew a quarter million people, almost six times the number that showed up during the attack on the Capitol. Trump agreed that official estimates said his crowd was smaller than King’s. He pressed on anyway: “But when you look at the exact same picture and everything is the same—because it was the fountains, the whole thing all the way back to go from Lincoln to Washington—and you look at it, and you look at the picture of my crowd … we actually had more people.”
Nichols goes on to recount Trump’s story about going down in a helicopter with San Francisco’s Willie Brown (Brown says this never happened.) and also the media’s attempts to make sense of Trump’s rambling rants. He concludes:
The Republican nominee, the man who could return to office and regain the sole authority to use American nuclear weapons, is a serial liar and can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy.
Donald Trump is not well. He is not stable. There’s something deeply wrong with him.
Any of those would have been important—and accurate—headlines.
Politico has finally located the man who actually was in that helicopter with Trump years ago: The other Black politician who says he was with Trump in that near-fatal chopper crash.
The man who almost crashed in a helicopter with Donald Trump told POLITICO Trump confused him with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown — despite the former president’s repeated insistence it was Brown.
It was Nate Holden, a former city councilmember and state senator from Los Angeles, who said in an exclusive interview late Friday that he remembers the near-death experience well. He and others believe it happened sometime in 1990.
“Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco,” Holden said. “I’m a tall Black guy living in Los Angeles.”
“I guess we all look alike,” Holden told POLITICO, letting out a loud laugh.
Holden, who is 95 years old, was in touch with Trump and his team during the 1990s when the flamboyant Manhattan developer was trying to build on the site of the historic Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Holden represented the district at the time and supported the project.\
In the interview, Holden said he was watching Trump’s press conference on Thursday when the former president claimed that Brown was aboard during the white-knuckle helicopter ride.
In fact, Holden says he met Trump at Trump Tower, en route to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where they were going to tour the developer’s brand new Taj Mahal casino. In the lobby at Trump Tower, Holden says he was greeted by several people as “senator,” salutations that miffed the host.
“He said, ‘You know I own this building but nobody seems to know who I am,’” Holden remembered the mogul saying.
Finally, I want to highlight this piece in Propublica by Andy Kroll and Nick Surgey: Inside Project 2025’s Secret Training Videos.
Project 2025, the controversial playbook and policy agenda for a right-wing presidential administration, has lost its director and faced scathing criticism from both Democratic groups and former President Donald Trump. But Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could battle against the so-called deep state government bureaucracy on behalf of a future Trump administration remains on track.
One centerpiece of that program is dozens of never-before-published videos created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy. The vast majority of these videos — 23 in all, totaling more than 14 hours of content — were provided to ProPublica and Documented by a person who had access to them.
The Project 2025 videos coach future appointees on everything from the nuts and bolts of governing to how to outwit bureaucrats. There are strategies for avoiding embarrassing Freedom of Information Act disclosures and ensuring that conservative policies aren’t struck down by “left-wing judges.” Some of the content is routine advice that any incoming political appointee might be told. Other segments of the training offer guidance on radically changing how the federal government works and what it does.
In one video, Bethany Kozma, a conservative activist and former deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Trump administration, downplays the seriousness of climate change and says the movement to combat it is really part of a ploy to “control people.”
“If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere,” Kozma says.
In the same video, Kozma calls the idea of gender fluidity “evil.” Another speaker, Katie Sullivan, who was an acting assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice under Trump, takes aim at executive actions by the administration of President Joe Biden that created gender adviser positions throughout the federal government. The goal, Biden wrote in one order, was to “advance equal rights and opportunities, regardless of gender or gender identity.”
Sullivan says, “That position has to be eradicated, as well as all the task forces, the removal of all the equity plans from all the websites, and a complete rework of the language in internal and external policy documents and grant applications.”
Head over to ProPublica to read the whole thing.
That’s it for me. What’s on your mind today?
Wednesday Reads: Remember When Following Politics Was Fun?
Posted: August 7, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris 2024 | Tags: Bringing back the joy, Harris-Walz rally in Philadelphia, J.D. Vance, Tim Walz 8 Comments
Joie de Vivre (Antipolis), Pablo Picasso, 1946.
Good Morning!!
I hope you were able to watch the Harris-Walz rally in Philadelphia last night. It was so positive and uplifting. One famous quote that emerged from the event was vice presidential candidate Tim Walsh saying to Kamala Harris, “Thank you for bringing back the joy.” Harris, Walz, and the huge audience were joyful, enthusiastic, and loud. It has been a very long time since this country has seen a rally like this.
Serena Lin at Mother Jones: At Harris Rally in Philadelphia, the Return of “Joy.”
On Tuesday evening, Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) began his speech by turning back to his new running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris, and said, “Thank you for bringing back the joy.”
At the rally in Philadelphia, there was a Democratic excitement that was palpable. Despite the potential for disarray from President Joe Biden dropping out of the race, the party quickly assembled behind a candidate. One could see the common stereotypes of the Democratic voter outside the Liacouras Center at Temple University—even in shirt selection: a sea of union apparel appeared (most notably, dozens of people donning bright purple SEIU shirts); a few “Kamala is brat” ones; many women calling out Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) for his comments about “childless cat ladies.”
Most everyone I spoke with was very happy that Biden had dropped out. In fact, thrilled. But that did mean, for many, much more than standing the Democratic party as a whole with an easier candidate to back. Harris was still introducing herself to them as a candidate in 2024.
Michael Parella, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, saw Harris as a dramatic improvement over Biden, whose candidacy felt like a “losing ballot.” Parella had been a Harris supporter in 2020, when she was a contender in a crowded primary candidate. Now, he said, “the crowd is standing behind her.” [….]
Many of the young attendees with whom I spoke were excited by Walz’s selection. Makayla Speers, a student from Delaware, said that she felt Harris’ choice of Walz over Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was an indication that she’s listening to young voters—and that Harris may take more action regarding Israel’s war in Gaza. (As I previously reported, some critics knocked Shapiro for his comments on student protesters.)
Shapiro, who was reportedly the other finalist in the veepstakes, side-stepped the elephant in the room when he spoke, promising to help Harris win Pennsylvania. And Walz and Harris, who both have described Shapiro as a friend, took care to thank him in their remarks.
Salon’s Amanda Marcotte attended both the sad JD Vance appearance (for some reason, he is following Harris around the country) and the huge Harris-Walz rally. Here’s her report: “Bringing back the joy”: Kamala Harris’ rally blows away JD Vance’s weird appearance across town.
He’s so weird! He’s so weird!” the crowd chanted in a sing-song, taunting voice that echoed across Temple University’s packed basketball stadium Tuesday evening. Gov. Josh Shapiro, D-Penn., was the first person to mention Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, to the crowd that had packed the overflowing Philadelphia rally for Vice President Kamala Harris, as she introduced her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn. The spontaneous chant cracked Shapiro up, causing him to pause momentarily before laying back into the authoritarian threat posed by Donald Trump’s “weird” and beardy running mate.
The chanters didn’t know the half of it. Hours earlier, I had been at a South Philly venue where Vance spoke briefly to about 200 supporters and a group of bored journalists. Vance’s event was small, mean, and yes, weird, featuring the unjustified sarcasm of the candidate and a desperate feeling reminiscent of the mood at a strip mall shot bar at 2 AM on “ladies’ night.”
Meanwhile, the Harris/Walz rally felt like a rousing speech by Coach Eric Taylor of “Friday Night Lights” combined with the front row at Coachella. The cheers were so loud that I regretted not bringing my earplugs. The mood was jubilant, even though folks had to wait hours in the heat and humidity to even get into the place. The campaign claimed over 12,000 people showed up, which is not an exaggeration. Even as Harris and Walz gave the final speeches of the evening, the line to get into the overflow room — just to watch the event on TV — went on for multiple city blocks.
Rythme, Joie de vivre, Robert Delaunay, 1930.
“Thank you for bringing back the joy,” Walz said, to a thunderous reception. A simple line, but it brought the house down because of the plain-spoken truth Walz has swiftly become famous for. “Joy” was the word of the night. People in the stands practically vibrated with it. In the air was a visceral hope that this campaign would be the end of the long national nightmare that is Trump and the MAGA movement….
The crowd was so exuberant that Harris and Walz could have done shadow puppets and the place would have erupted. Even before they spoke, DJ Diamond Kuts had the crowd repurposing classic hip-hop lyrics into political chants, with the funniest being “move, Trump, get out the way” rather than the expletive used in the original Ludacris tune. But both brought their A-game. Harris drew ecstatic applause with her promises to end Trump’s criminal career. Walz has honed “Minnesota nice” into a deadly rhetorical weapon, both making his desire to help people sincerely felt while also making “weird” burn like Dorothy Parker’s ghost had insulted you.
Vance’s speech, on the other hand, wasn’t just underwhelming but a little uncanny. Despite using room dividers to shrink the space, the campaign could not hide that the crowd felt like a medium-sized wedding, albeit a pathetic one where no one cares for the couple. Vance, perhaps recognizing charisma isn’t his strong suit, spoke briefly before bringing up a series of local citizens ready to blame Mexicans for their familial tragedies of drug addiction. He spoke for a couple more minutes, before taking the reporters’ questions about cat ladies.
Even in his short speech, it seemed Vance — like the Trump campaign overall — is still struggling to accept that they are running against Harris and not President Joe Biden. It felt like the speechwriter had typed Ctrl-F “Biden” and replaced every instance with “Harris,” whether it made sense or not. Vance accused Harris of hiding from the press with a “basement campaign.” Never mind that Harris is now the young and spry candidate who can keep up with an aggressive schedule, while Trump is the tired old man who can barely campaign between naps.
Read the whole thing at Salon.
At The Daily Beast, Josh Fiallo noted an embarrassing “signage gaffe” at the Vance “rally.”: J.D. Vance’s Backdrop Makes It Look Like He’s Campaigning for ‘Kamala.’
J.D. Vance delivered a rally speech Tuesday in Pennsylvania with a backdrop that made it appear he was campaigning for his arch nemesis, Kamala Harris.
The unfortunate signage appeared to stem from the event’s advance team not accounting for its crowd blocking half of a gigantic poster that sat directly behind Vance, which appeared to read in full, “KAMALA CHAOS.”
For those watching on Fox News and other broadcasts, however, the only words clearly visible—in white text on a blue background, in all caps—was simply “Kamala.”
The apparent gaffe quickly went viral on X, where many joked that Harris’ VP choice in Tim Walz, which was announced just prior to Vance’s rally speech, had convinced Trump’s running mate to switch teams….
“Kamala Harris has been such a disastrous vice president of this country that everywhere she goes, chaos and uncertainty follow,” he said, leaning into what his backdrop’s full text read.
It appears the Trump campaign may be attempting to link Harris to the word “chaos” in the same way Democrats, starting with Walz himself, began characterizing Trump, Vance, and the MAGA movement as “weird.
WHYY, a local NPR station in Philadelphia, reported that Vance’s rally had about 200 attendees, which included local Republican leadership from around Philadelphia.
This man is definitely not ready for prime time.
Joie de Vivre, Max Ernst, 1936.
More on the Harris-Walz rally from Lauren Gambino and Melissa Hellmann at The Guardian: Kamala Harris introduces running mate Tim Walz at raucous Philadelphia rally.
Kamala Harris introduced her running mate, Tim Walz, as “the kind of vice-president America deserves” at a raucous rally in Philadelphia that showcased Democratic unity and enthusiasm for the party’s presidential ticket ahead of the November election.
Casting their campaign as a “fight for the future”, Harris and Walz were repeatedly interrupted by applause and cheering as they addressed thousands of battleground-state voters wearing bracelets that twinkled red, white and blue at Temple University’s Liacouras Center – a crowd Harris’s team said was its largest to date.
“Thank you for bringing back the joy,” a beaming Walz told Harris after she debuted the little-known Minnesota governor as a former social studies teacher, high school football coach and a national guard veteran.
“We’ve got 91 days,” he declared. “My God, that’s easy. We’ll sleep when we’re dead.” [Walz is a Warren Zevon fan!] [….]
Arriving on stage to Beyoncé’s Freedom, the newly minted Democratic ticket rode a weeks-long wave of momentum from an unusually exuberant party happy to be looking forward.
“He’s the kind of person who makes people feel like they belong and then inspires them to dream big,” Harris said. “That’s the kind of vice-president he will be. And that’s the kind of president America deserves.”
Walz shared more of his biography, casting himself as a politician who learned to “compromise without compromising my values” and a midwesterner who lives by the “golden rule” when it comes to personal choice: “Mind your own damn business.” Drawing a personal connection to one of the most searing issues of the election cycle, Walz said he and his wife had two children through in vitro fertilization (IVF) after years of struggling with infertility. “When we welcomed our daughter into the world, we named her Hope,” he said.
Then he turned to his Republican opponents, who he has branded “weird” in a line of attack that has resonated widely, especially among Democrats. “These guys are creepy and, yes, just weird as hell,” he said, setting off a new round of whoops and cheers.
Noah Berlansky at Public Notice: Kamala Harris’s inspired choice. Democrats often use their running mate to pivot to the center. But not this time.
Kamala Harris’s choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her runningmate is, in some respects, a standard, safe choice. Like most of her potential picks, Walz is a white man. He’s a popular Democratic governor with deep roots in the party. He’s by no means an odd or risky selection.
And yet, at the same time, Harris’s choice of Walz is unusual, exciting, and even inspirational. Over the last forty years, Democrats have generally used the VP pick to try to cater to centrist swing voters. Some of Harris’s leading choices, like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, were in that mode.
Instead, Harris chose Walz — a candidate who has a good deal of potential bipartisan appeal, but who is also well-positioned to excite Democrats, and particularly progressives. As such, Walz’s rise is a promising indication that Harris plans to continue and expand upon the approach of President Biden, who’s embraced progressive ideas and legislation as a way to unify and inspire Democratic voters.
Au Temps d’Harmonie (La Joie de Vivre – Dimanche au Bord de la Mer), Paul Signac, 1895-96.
It’s easy to make the case for Walz as a safe, sturdy, and conventional pick for VP. He served in the National Guard for 24 years; he’s now the vice presidential candidate with the longest military career.
In 1996 he left the military to to work as a high school history teacher in Mankato, Minnesota. He ran for Congress in 2006, a strong year for Democrats, and defeated six-term Republican Gil Gutknecht. He held the rural district through 2010 and 2014 — two red wave years — and even held on in 2016, when Trump won the district by 15 points. In 2018, he ran for governor and won. He won a second term in 2022.
This is an impressive record, and one that seems almost custom-made for a vice presidential resume.
Walz’s military record should appeal to at least some conservative voters, who tend to value military service in candidates. His strong record in a rural Trump district also testifies to his ability to reach out to red voters….
On the other hand, Walz’s experience as a teacher should play well with educators — a core Democratic constituency — and with teacher’s unions. He’s also shown himself to be exceptionally skilled at attacking Republicans. After he called Republicans “weird” on MSNBC, Democrats as a whole seized on the word to define the abortion-hating, single-women hating, book-hating weirdos in the GOP.
Walz’s conventional qualifications and strengths have made him acceptable within, and popular with, the mainstream of the Democratic Party, as evidenced by the wave of enthusiasm from mainstream party leaders.
There’s much more at the the link.
More background on Tim Walz, links only:
Steven Greenhouse at Slate: Why Harris’ VP Choice Is Good News for Workers.
Julia Metraux at Mother Jones: Tim Walz Is Leading the Way on Long Covid Funding.
Miranda Nazzaro at The Hill: Why Trump supporters are calling Walz ‘Tampon Tim.’
Erin Reid at Erin in the Morning: Tim Walz Took Historic Action To Protect Trans People, Now He’s The Dem VP Choice.
Time: What to Know About Tim Walz’s Relationship With China.
Animals 24-7: Demo VP nominee Tim Walz hunts, but loves cats & is hated by gun lobby.
Distractify: Tim Walz Advocates for Rescuing Pets — Let’s Meet His Adorable Animals.
So what’s happening with stodgy old Grandpa Trump? Not much. He’s only making one appearance this week–in Montana–and it’s not a campaign event. He’s really freaking out about Kamala Harris and all the excitement around her candidacy.
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo: Kamala Goes Electric and Trump Melts Down.
Last Thursday the Harris campaign began offering tickets for a campaign rally in Detroit the following Wednesday (tomorrow, August 7th). Over the first 24 hours they received 47,000 requests for tickets. 47,000. That spurred a multi-day search for a Detroit area venue that could handle the demand to see the Vice President. As Donald Trump never grasped, there’s no straight-line connection between rally attendance and votes. But at that scale they signal enthusiasm and energy that neither campaign (Trump or Biden) has seen at any time in this cycle. They demonstrate a purchase into the larger popular culture that President Biden never had and Donald Trump, for all his greater currency on social media, doesn’t either.
The joy of life, by Henri Matisse, 1906
It’s that disconnect between the attention currency of the two campaigns that is driving Trump’s current meltdown likely much more than the polls which have shown Harris go from one or two points behind two weeks ago to two to three points ahead today. Trump’s approach to a political campaign is to grab hold of media dominance, dominate the attention economy and then try to maintain the initiative of the campaign from there. Media dominance doesn’t always work for him. As often as not, once he’s holding the national attention, he’s offending people and losing support. But without that, as a campaigner, he’s lost. He tried to get that back with his Black/Indian tirade at the NABJ conference. And it worked, until it didn’t, which was quickly. 36 hours later the attention had shifted back to Harris.
I don’t entirely understand it yet. But Harris’s campaign is reaching out beyond the ordinary political ecosystem, even the expanded one we know from the final months or a general election and into the broader popular culture. Some of that is energizing an array of celebrities, music artists and influencers who are adding excitement and attention to the campaign. But it’s not only that, not even primarily that. That’s more consequence than cause. Her campaign, at least for the moment, is operating in a much larger cultural space than conventional politics. Trump’s political magic has always been his ability to access a larger cultural space, even if it’s often negative attention. But Harris’s campaign is accessing something much larger. For the moment he cannot keep up.
Kelly Rissman at The Independent: Republicans worry Trump is having a ‘public nervous breakdown.’
Republicans are concerned that party leader Donald Trump is having a “public nervous breakdown” after he made a series of offensive outbursts about Vice President Kamala Harris as he slips behind her in the polls.
The former president has made a number of insulting personal attacks against his Democratic rival since she moved to the top of the ticket. Last week, Trump questioned Harris’s racial identity at the National Association of Black Journalists conference. Over the weekend, he accused Harris of having a “low IQ.”
New polls indicate Trump is slipping behind the vice president in the popular vote and races are tightening in battleground states.
“This is what you would call a public nervous breakdown,” Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and former Trump state department appointee, told Politico.
“This is a guy who cut through the Republican primary like a knife through butter. This is a guy who pummeled a semi-conscious president in a debate and literally out of a race. And now this is a guy who cannot come to grips with a competitive presidential race that would require discipline and effective messaging,” Bartlett continued. “And we’re seeing a candidate and a campaign absolutely meltdown.”
Chair of the Vermont Republican Party, Paul Dame, predicted that Trump allies will start to wane in their defense of the former president.
“I think we’re starting to see the old Trump that a lot of Republicans got tired of in 2020, got tired of defending him,” Dame told USA Today. “If the next three months is defined by more examples like this I think he’s going to see some of that soft centrist support deteriorate.
Read the rest at The Independent.
Griffith, Arthur R.; Joie de vivre, 1904-1992
One more sign of panic from The Guardian: Project 2025 leader’s book with JD Vance introduction delayed until after election.
A JD Vance-introduced book by a leader of Project 2025, the vast and controversial hardline rightwing plan for a second Trump administration, will be delayed until after the 2024 election.
“There’s a time for writing, reading, and book tours – and a time to put down the books and go fight like hell to take back our country,” the book’s author, Kevin Roberts, told RealClearPolitics, which first reported the news.
“That’s why I’ve chosen to move my book’s publication and promotion to after the election.”
Roberts is president of the Heritage Foundation, a hard-right Washington thinktank. His book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, was due to be published in September. It will now come out on 12 November, a week after Donald Trump and Kamala Harris square off on election day.
As Project 2025 has attracted sustained fire from Democrats, over its 900-plus pages of plans for far-reaching government reform including attacks on reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, labor rights and other progressive priorities, so Roberts’s book quickly became a magnet for controversy of its own.
Trump and his campaign have sought to distance themselves from Project 2025 – efforts undermined when it became known Vance, the hardline populist Ohio senator Trump picked as his running mate, had written an introduction to Roberts’s book.
Those are my recommended reads for today. What’s on your mind?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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