Item one: Yeah, the economy is important—and the border, and other things. But the most important thing doesn’t have to do with positions. |
Kamala Harris’s economic vision speech (delivered in Pittsburgh on Wednesday, a mere two days after yours truly wrote that she needed to give an economic vision speech!) was … fine. Was she offering the second coming of the New Deal? No. Her rhetoric is cautious. More cautious, as American Prospect editor David Dayen interestingly pointed out this week (because Dayen is strongly of the economic populist school), than the plan itself as described in an 82-page "fact sheet" distributed by the campaign. The plan, he wrote, is more progressive than the rhetoric. But on the stump, Harris is not suddenly going to morph into Elizabeth Warren. And today she goes to the Arizona border to try to establish more swing-voter cred. Am I loving the fact that it’s become a big Democratic applause line that she wants to sign conservative GOP Senator James Lankford’s border security bill? No, not by a long shot. On the other hand, in purely naked political terms, is it smart to go at your opponent’s strengths? Yes, it is. It’s pretty basic politics. Trump, for all his extremism, does this frequently. Think of his twisted pitch to women this week. Campaigns that successfully neutralize the other side’s advantages tend to win (George W. Bush on John Kerry’s war record). Campaigns that let disadvantages fester tend to lose (Mitt Romney not convincingly answering Barack Obama’s Bain Capital–related attacks). So Harris is cutting into Trump’s advantages on those two issues. That’s fine, especially with respect to the economy. But issues are the science of campaigning. There’s an art to campaigning too, and it’s on this front that the Harris campaign needs to keep pushing, because it’s here where her biggest advantage over Trump lies.
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In partnership with: MSI United States
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Join us on Wednesday, October 2, as investigative journalist Nina Burleigh talks with a panel of experts about the threats posed to women’s reproductive rights by Trump’s covert plan to adopt Project 2025 as his policy road map if he’s elected to a second term.
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Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark had a smart piece this week reminding us that campaigns consist of news cycles, and the point of news cycles is to win them. Remember how Harris came out of the gate like a rocket in July? That’s because she was doing everything right. She was making news and winning news cycles. The early speeches, the choice and unveiling of Tim Walz, the near-flawless convention—Harris was firing on all
cylinders. Back then, practically everything about her was new to most people. But that was bound to end. Now we’re through that discovery phase. And she’s not dominating news cycles the way she was six weeks ago. So, Last writes, the campaign needs to find ways to drive the news. It’s especially important when running against Trump, because he drives news nearly every day. Most of it is madness. But the media machine, as we have learned and relearned, has little capacity to punish madness. It rewards performance. This is what Trump has known for 40 years. The Harris campaign seemed to know this at first, but it has lost a little momentum in these recent weeks as she’s settled more into normalcy—and, I’d say, defense. The economic speech and the border appearance are essentially defense: They’re defending or inoculating her against possible Trump attacks. As I said, they’re justifiable as politics. But they’re not offense. So it’s time to play offense. This is where the art of campaigning comes in, and subconsciously taking advantage of her greatest strengths over Trump:
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She’s not mentally unfit to be the president of the United States. |
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She’s not pushing 80. |
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People seem to like her. They even seem to like, or at least not dislike, her once-infamous laugh. |
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She proved in the debate that she is smarter than he is, sharper on her feet, his mental and intellectual superior in every way. |
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She knows how to get under his skin while keeping her cool. |
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What do these factors add up to? The idea that the Harris campaign should be tossing grenades at Trump that mock and expose him and that make news. Force him to respond. Make him explain. As an analogy, think of a tennis match: One player is sitting calmly at the center of the base line firing ground strokes left and right, while the other is running side to side, panting, covering 25 feet between each shot. It’s pretty obvious who’s going to win most of the points, and the match. Here’s an example. Just yesterday, Trump spoke on Mark Robinson for the first time since the latter’s insane past comments ("I’m a Black NAZI!") became public. He was making remarks at Trump Tower. As he finished and walked toward a bank of elevators, a reporter asked him if he was "going to pull" his Robinson endorsement. Trump, who once called Robinson "Martin Luther King on steroids," paused and said: "Uh, I don’t know the
situation." Obviously, he knows the situation. The Harris campaign should be out with an ad today mocking this, tying it to other similar remarks of his, like when he pretended he didn’t know who David Duke was. But more: Harris herself should talk to reporters mocking Trump’s lame denial. It needs to be Harris herself, not Walz or Doug Emhoff. There are tons of opportunities. Trump’s liquid rhetoric is such that he constantly contradicts himself and often just makes no sense. It makes me crazy that Harris is being knocked for not having "positions." Do those critics seriously think that what Trump is saying constitutes "positions"? Remember that answer of his a few weeks ago when the woman asked him about childcare? It was embarrassing to listen to. He does that all the time. Make sure voters know it. Attack. In a mocking way. Make news. Play offense. People like me aren’t supposed to say things like this, but here it is: A lot of these swing voters, they’re not voting on issues. The economy, maybe. But generally, they vote on vibes. Who has the look of a winner? Who looks fresh and ready to tackle this big job, and who looks tired? Who appears to be having fun? That was the Harris of July and August. She had some magic. It’s hardly panic time. A raft of swing state polls came out Thursday night, and she leads in every state except Georgia, where it’s tied. She’s ahead, and he’s weak and worried and knows he might lose (and then face sentencing). He’s crumbling, psychologically. Now is the time to step on the gas.
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For this Inside Story, two progressive Keystone State activists, J.J. Abbott and Kadida Kenner, tell editor Michael Tomasky what’s happening on the ground in the crucial battleground state.
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Item two: John Kelly, where are you? |
The endorsement of Harris this week by General Stanley McChrystal served as a reminder that there are still a lot of these kinds of people out there who have yet to make that move. It seems obvious that these people—Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, all those national security types—don’t want Trump anywhere near the White House. That they won’t say so is embarrassing. What does someone like Rice have to lose? She’s set for life—wealthy, respected, feted like royalty everywhere she goes, where folks are polite enough not to remind her of some of her choice pre-9/11 quotes, like her apocalyptic and utterly false assertion that Saddam Hussein had or was close to having a nuclear weapon ("We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud"). Would it cost her speaking income? Seems doubtful. And even if it did, is that really more important than doing something to stop Donald Trump from handing Ukraine to Putin? I doubt her calculations are that mercenary. Most people just don’t want to go out on a limb. Bill Kristol told me recently that a lot these folks, and retired GOP pols, mostly fear the disapprobation of their social circles—everybody at the country club is for Trump, and they fear being cut out of the foursome. As in all such situations, one mover—one person willing to take the plunge and risk the ostracism—can open the floodgates. And here, I believe, that person is former Trump White House chief of staff John Kelly, for the simple reason that he is the source of what is probably the most politically damaging thing that can be said about Trump: that he called dead soldiers "suckers" and "losers." The comments were originally reported by Jeff Goldberg in The Atlantic in a September 2020 article in which he quoted sources quoting Trump speaking disparagingly of the war dead while on a visit to Arlington Cemetery with Kelly. For his part, Kelly didn’t confirm the remarks, and he stayed silent until October 2023, when he gave a written statement to CNN confirming that he’d heard Trump use these words. It was a scathing statement. But it wasn’t in front of a camera. Nothing would pack a punch like Kelly doing a television interview, or holding a press conference before the cameras, where he said all the things he wrote in that statement. That would bury Trump. Yeah, MAGA diehards would stay with him, but I think it would cost him three or four points, and given that he’s already three points behind, that would finish him. Kelly, like Rice, would seem to exist on a plane above Trump’s reproach or retribution. Maybe he really does fear for his life, I don’t know. But he has more power than any single American to deal Trump a potentially mortal blow.
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In partnership with: Americans United for Separation of Church and State
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Revisit this conversation between top legal and policy minds from Americans United for Separation of Church and State and investigative journalist Nina Burleigh about the far-reaching implications of Project 2025—the political blueprint outlined by ultraconservatives for the Trump administration.
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Before we get started on the answers to last week’s quiz, I need to correct something from the previous quiz, about horror movies. The first question in that quiz was:
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Which of the following stories or novels was not adapted into an early, pre-talkie horror film?
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A. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde B. Frankenstein C. "The Fall of the House of Usher" D. The Phantom of the Opera
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I had C as the answer. But I was wrong. Jeff R. wrote in to say that there were in fact two silent film versions of the Poe story, both from 1928. And my old friend Michael B. of dear old Morgantown wrote in to add the rather fascinating detail that one of the versions was co-written by none other than Luis Buñuel! (Yes, silent movies had scripts.) Michael also noted that Morgantown had three, not two, drive-ins! The Maple Leaf, the Westover, and the Blue Horizon. The Maple Leaf, in the moldier precincts of my memory, had danced its way down Route 119 to a different town. OK, now the record is fully corrected, I think.
Onward.
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Last week’s quiz: "Come fly with me …" A few questions on the ins and outs of commercial aviation.
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1. From a 2017 analysis, on average, how many airplanes are in the sky around the world at any given time?
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A. 5,304 B. 9,728 C. 11,116 D. 14,088
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Answer: B, 9,728. According to this. That website where you can look at all the planes in the sky right now is pretty damn cool, I must say.
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2. Roughly how many flights take off in the United States every day, according to the Federal Aviation Administration?
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A. 22,000 B. 28,000 C. 33,000 D. 45,000
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Answer: D, 45,000. Carrying 29 million people, sez the FAA, meaning that one in 11 Americans is on an airplane at any given time?? No, I guess that total would include foreigners. But it’s still a lot.
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3. According to the travel website Far & Wide, how many of the world’s Top Ten Worst Airports are in the United States?
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Answer: Astonishingly enough, A, 0. Honest. Here’s the list. The worst, surprisingly, is in Kuwait. With all those petrodollars?
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4. If you’re flying from JFK in New York to Shanghai, as your plane takes off and reaches cruising altitude, which direction does it head? (Possibly confusing hint: It stays pretty much on that heading for a long time, until it does the opposite.)
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A. North B. South C. East D. West
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Answer: A, North. A plane heading from New York to Shanghai heads north, or just slightly north-northwest, over the Catskills and then Canada and the Hudson Bay, almost over the North Pole, after which it heads south, down over Russia and China (hence the hint). In other words, it doesn’t fly over the Atlantic or Pacific at all, which is pretty interesting. But that is the science of great circle routes, which is really cool and which you can read about here. And
here is an interactive map where you can map your own great circle routes.
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5. When a plane flying the great circle route from Washington-Dulles to Warsaw traverses the U.K., where does it cross?
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A. It doesn’t—it flies above the English Channel between the U.K. and France. B. It just skirts Cornwall and the south. C. It flies almost directly above Liverpool. D. It goes roughly above Inverness, Scotland.
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Answer: D, Inverness, which is north of Warsaw. You wouldn’t think that would make sense, but it does when you remember that any map you’re looking at is a flat piece of paper, while the earth itself is a sphere, and the shortest distance between two points on a sphere is not the same as the shortest distance between two points on a flat surface.
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6. Where is the world’s shortest commercial flight, and how long does it last?
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A. From the lower peninsula to the upper peninsula in Michigan, 12 minutes B. From Cerro Sombrero, Chile, to Cullen, Argentina, in the Tierra del Fuego, 10 minutes C. From Mbabane, Eswatini, to Lobamba, Eswatini, six minutes D. From Westray to Papa Westray, Scottish Orkney Islands, just under two minutes
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TNR Travel: Final days to join us in Cuba |
Join a special group of readers and supporters on a lovingly designed, all-inclusive tour of one of the most amazing places in the world. Drawing on The New Republic’s special contacts among local historians, artists, and chefs, we’ve created a first-class experience that will immerse you in Cuba’s colorful and unique history, politics, and culture.
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This week’s quiz: "You say it’s your birthday …" A slightly different format this week: questions about six famous people born on September 27.
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1. This American Founding Father (b. 1722) was an unsuccessful businessman, including his stint as a purveyor of malt, before entering politics full-time.
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A. John Adams B. Thomas Yuengling C. Josiah Bartlett D. Samuel Adams
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2. Hiram Revels (b. 1827) attained renown as what?
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A. The first African American member of Congress, from Mississippi B. The inventor of the bicycle C. The editor and publisher of Revels’ Ordinary Almanack, in which James Fenimore Cooper’s stories were serialized D. The supervisor of the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge
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3. Actress Jayne Meadows (b. 1919) was married to what mid–twentieth century television host?
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A. Jack Paar B. Art Linkletter C. Steve Allen D. Joey Bishop
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4. This 1970s rock guitarist (b. 1943) now takes care of business by hosting a show on SiriusXM’s Beatles channel with his son Tal.
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A. Randy Bachman B. Dave Mason C. Danny Kortchmar D. Chris Spedding
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5. This ex-NBA star (b. 1965), on a very high-profile stage, recently invoked November 5 in saying: "That night, we can—in the words of the great Steph Curry—we can tell Donald Trump, ‘Night, night.’"
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A. David Robinson B. John Stockton C. Tim Hardaway D. Steve Kerr
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6. This actress (b. 2002) had a starring role in the recent entry in the Scream franchise; she’s played Wednesday Addams and opposite the Foo Fighters in a film; right now, you can see her in Tim Burton’s worldwide smash Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
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A. Zendaya B. Jenna Ortega C. Sabrina Carpenter D. Millie Bobby Brown
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Others born on this day: Cosimo de’ Medici (1389), Louis XIII (1601), Thomas Nast (1840), Mike Schmidt (1949), and Gwyneth Paltrow (1972). But I couldn’t think of good questions about any of those people. Answers next week. Feedback to fightingwords@tnr.com. —Michael Tomasky, editor
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