We Suddenly Have A Real Campaign On Our Hands

Posted on by David Kurtz

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

‘We Are Not Going Back’

It was so hard to imagine an incumbent president ditching his reelection campaign as late as the July before Election Day and equally difficult to envision a smooth passing of the baton to his vice president that I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking through what a Kamala Harris candidacy would look like. As a result, I probably underestimated how Kamala Harris would personally embody the themes of her campaign in ways that are particularly effective where Biden wasn’t in drawing contrasts with Trump.

The generational difference in age was obviously going to be helpful, but the chant she led at her first campaign rally since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee for president – “We are not going back” – is more than about relative youthfulness. It harkens to the dark Trump years and even obliquely references Biden, though not in a disrespectful way, while pivoting toward the future. It’s the same powerful message from Clinton 1992 and Obama 2008. She’s not only delivering that message, but like Clinton and Obama did before her, she stands as symbol of that message:

It’s easy to see her gender and racial diversity as potent attack points for Trump, but less obvious until you see her in action how her own story embodies the central 2024 issues of immigration, abortion, and tolerance. Joe Biden prided himself on enjoying the same embodiment of working-class whites in the industrial Midwest.

It’s hard to overemphasize how much of an advantage that personal embodiment provides, not just in enhancing her credibility or in giving her relevant experience or in resonating with particular constituencies. It means her mere presence speaks to those issues. She raises those issues just by showing up, which let’s her address them without even having to talk about them. She’s already checked those boxes implicitly, and it frees her up to address other issues explicitly.

We’re still mostly flying blind on the state of the race, pending more polls conducted since Biden’s withdrawal, so today’s headline that we have a real race on our hands isn’t a reference to the horse race but to the kind of race Harris is in a position to run now. Even at 59, Harris can run a race of generational change, especially against a 78-year-old former president trying to regain his lost office. Who wants to go back to that?

2024 Ephemera

  • Historic flood of cash powers Democratic campaign efforts since Biden withdrew.
  • WSJ: “The Trump campaign filed a long-shot challenge to block Vice President Kamala Harris from campaign funds in what used to be the joint Biden-Harris war chest, in a complaint filed Tuesday with the Federal Election Commission.”
  • Schumer and Jeffries throw their support to Harris.
  • Politico: The GOP doesn’t want to talk about abortion. Harris wants to make them.

A Glimpse Of The Rancidness

House Republican leaders have reportedly urged their members to tone down the racist attacks on Kamala Harris, but since they won’t stop, you’re left to wonder if it’s a “have your cake and eat it, too” display of handwringing:

Practically Freudian

In a glorious on-air flub, Fox Business’ Larry Kudlow momentarily bungles the “E” in DEI as “exclusion”:

Biden To Give Oval Office Address

President Biden will deliver a nationally televised Oval Office address today at 8 p.m. ET, his first public remarks since ending his bid for re-election and throwing his support to Vice President Kamala Harris.

This is the fourth Oval Office address of Biden’s presidency, all within the past 14 months, and the second in 10 days.

Headline Laughs

In my next life, I want to come back devoid of skepticism. I can’t even imagine what that would be like, but it might look something like this: “Trump is back to insulting his opponents despite reported transformation”

Secret Service Wants Trump To Curtail Outdoor Rallies

In the wake of the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, the Secret Service is encouraging the Trump campaign not to hold outdoor events with large crowds.

Secret Service Director Resigns

Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned one day after she endured withering scrutiny from both parties in a House committee hearing.

Menendez Resigns

Convicted on federal bribery charges after a previous public corruption case against him ended in a hung jury, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) finally announced his resignation from the Senate, effective Aug. 20.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) promised to fill the seat quickly for the short remainder of Menendez’s term, which ends in January. It won’t be filled by Murphy’s wife, Tammy, who ran earlier this year in the Democratic primary to succeed Menendez.

One note: While Senate Democrats widely called for Menendez to leave, few Republicans senators joined the chorus because … it would have been awkward to force a convicted felon to resign when their own party’s presidential nominee is also a convicted felon. Fun times in the GOP.

Everything’s Fiiine

Sunday was the warmest day ever recorded by humans, according to the European climate service Copernicus.

In slightly (but only slightly) more positive news, greenhouse gas emissions may have peaked.

Nature Doing Its Thing

A hydrothermal eruption in Yellowstone National Park damaged a boardwalk and sent tourists scrambling but there were no reported injuries:

Here’s an aerial shot of the aftermath. The otherworldly clear blue pool at the bottom center of the photo is what the larger pool above it, now gray and opaque, looked like before the explosion:

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Can You Help With This?

Posted on by Josh Marshall

I want to send a huge thank you to the 1601 TPM Readers who have given so far to this year’s annual TPM Journalism Fund drive. We are currently at just over $212,000 and we really want to get to the halfway point of $250,000 toward our goal of $500,000 by the end of the first week of the drive. So if you’ve been considering contributing, can you take a moment and make it today? It is, I believe, a great and important cause, keeping TPM here, vital and robust for the future. If you’re ready, just click right here. We thank you, our whole team.

Expectations Setting

Posted on by Josh Marshall

I wanted to do a short post on expectations setting now that we’ve absorbed the stunning and sometimes euphoric news of the last 48 hours. What will the polls say about this new race? What are Harris’s chances of winning? As my colleague David Kurtz has rightly stated, we’re truly flying blind here. There are so many unprecedented variables we can’t be certain about anything. My own best guess is that we should be not so much expecting but prepared to see Harris roughly where Joe Biden was before the late June debate. That speculation is based mostly on the fact that the polls have been primarily driven by the size of the Republican and Democratic voting blocks with a large percentage of voters supporting third party candidates.

Continue reading “Expectations Setting” → 

A Reader’s Guide To MAGA’s Racist And Misogynistic Attacks On Kamala Harris

Posted on by David Kurtz

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

Throw Everything Against The Wall And See What Sticks

The initial round of GOP attacks on presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris have so far been scattershot, inconsistent, self-contradictory, and often comical. But we’ve seen it all before, and we know how this works.

The volume and intensity of the attacks – deeply suffused with misogyny and racism – represent 1,000 trial balloons. Some will pop on their own and others will get shot down immediately, but eventually a few will get through the blitz of counterattacks. Those few will offer a clue as to what “works,” and they’ll form the basis for additional rounds of attacks playing off of the same theme or underlying premise, however false it may be.

Repeated often enough, the attacks will slowly accrete into a “thing” that unsophisticated editors and reporters notice. They start asking questions about it. Their questions may seem benign and the early round of stories often tepid (I promise you that before the week is out a reporter is going to grab ahold of the attacks on Harris as a “DEI hire” and use them as a peg to write more generally about DEI), but gradually the “thing” becomes a narrative.

The narrative, with more repetition, begins to be a problem. Maybe the campaign or the candidate says something in frustration and presto you have a pissing match for reporters to cover. Or perhaps the candidate is caught off-guard and gives a casual or ill-thought-out response. There’s blood in the water. Now it’s gone from a problem to baggage that the candidate has to do something about.

What began as toxic, racist, misogynistic drivel is a now a trap that has ensnared the candidate. At each step of the way, the audience for the lie, mistruth, or innuendo has broadened. Each subsequent iteration repeats the attack again to everyone who already heard it before. What started as scattershot attacks has now become a sustained drumbeat that sneakily enters the public consciousness almost undetected.

What I’m describing – a stripped-down description of swift-boating as it has existed in the 20 years since John Kerry was filleted by it – is not easy to combat or to counter. Calling out the lies, or the racism, or the misogyny, while better than whitewashing it, isn’t sufficient, especially in a world where the bigotry is the point and legions of Trump supporters are lapping it up.

The urge to rebut each attack whack-a-mole style may be well-intentioned, but it’s a fool’s errand. Taking on the task of confronting an endless supply of baseless attacks is to let your opponent run you in circles. Distinguishing who the audience is for the attacks – the MAGA base? mainstream reporters? swing voters? all of the above? – can sometimes help focus the counterattacks, but we’re beyond the point where the people left in the Republican Party are capable of being shamed by the nature or subtext of rancid attacks exploiting race and gender bias.

I don’t have the answers to this problem. What I can tell you is that in the relatively short 15 years I’ve been doing this job, the information environment has been radically transformed. What defined TPM in the early days was calling out these kinds of attacks for what they were, but that was back when Republican electeds were trying to soft-pedal this stuff into the mainstream and would awkwardly retreat when called out on it. Starting in 2010, with the Tea Party backlash to President Obama, that began to change. By the time we got to Trump circa 2016, any pretense of soft-pedaling it, let alone shame, was long gone.

In general, mainstream outlets have gotten much better at being direct and not euphemistic about these kinds of attacks, but not all of them have. At the same time, Republicans have trained reporters so well that they now often anticipate and air the Republican attacks before they’re even made. Not the public service journalism we’re looking for.

One advantage TPM has that makes exercising good news judgment in these scenarios a little less daunting is that we serve a specific, defined, sophisticated audience. We know who our readers are. We can flag new lines of attack in their nascent stages, usually without acute concern that we’re fanning the flames. We can broadly reference the nature and subtext of the attacks without getting tied in knots over it because we share a common understanding and language with our audience.

But that isn’t true for every outlet. So while the first 48 hours of Harris’ candidacy have featured an almost cartoonish response from MAGA world, there’s a method to the madness. The effect over time is to work the refs – mainstream news outlets – and wait for them to break down and for the attacks to break through to a wider audience. One way to combat the effort is be a sophisticated news consumer who is aware of it and sees it for what it is.

Quote Of The Day

Before I was elected as vice president, before I was elected a United States senator, I was the elected attorney general of California. And before that I was a courtroom prosecutor. In those roles I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.

Vice President Kamala Harris, in her first meeting with campaign staffers in Wilmington, Delaware

Are We Taking The Right Lessons From 2016?

A gentle reminder that Hillary Clinton decisively won the popular vote in 2016. Any analysis that traces her failure to win the Electoral College vote back to her gender is really missing the broader point. We’ve shown we’re capable of electing a woman president.

A Reminder Of The Stakes

MAGA Republicans continue to look for every chance to turn our cold civil war into a hot one:

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Harris’ Nomination Looks Like ‘A Foregone Conclusion’

Posted on by Hunter Walker

What if the Democrats held an “open” convention and nobody came? That certainly looks like the spectacle we are about to see as Vice President Kamala Harris continues to accumulate endorsements from prominent elected officials and delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

Continue reading “Harris’ Nomination Looks Like ‘A Foregone Conclusion’” → 

The Curious Lure of Writerly Anti-Politics

Posted on by Josh Marshall

We’re now a day out from President Biden’s semi-expected but still shocking decision to depart the presidential race and the rapid ascension of Vice President Kamala Harris as presumptive nominee. We don’t know what the first polls will tell us. We should be prepared for them, at least at first, not to be dramatically different from Biden’s in the weeks leading up to the big and now genuinely historic debate. That’s not pessimism about Harris’ campaign. It’s a recognition that the best argument for the switch is not that she would instantly transform the campaign but be better able to make the case against Donald Trump over the next three months. But now the great majority of Democrats are treating her ascension with something approaching euphoria.

That’s both a measure of her as a candidate and an end to the protracted agony of the last three weeks. But already we’re hearing that this rush of support for Harris is yet another bad thing. Democrats have only just changed the last terrible thing pundits said they were doing only to be told that their solution is also a disaster in the making or at least a mistake. I don’t want to pick on anyone but this piece by Graeme Wood seems to capture this whole new storyline. In a way the argument is just a continuation of the Thunderdome craze of the last six months: a contested convention, blitz primaries, and the like. The new terrible mistake is rallying around Kamala Harris too quickly. Because this just compounds what Wood and seemingly many other pundits and columnists feel is the belief that “Democratic politics felt like a game rigged by insiders to favor a candidate of their choice, and to isolate that candidate from the risk associated with campaigning.”

Continue reading “The Curious Lure of Writerly Anti-Politics” →