
Photograph Source: Gage Skidmore – CC BY-SA 2.0
That Kamala Harris and Tim Walz could lose the presidential election in November to serial fraudster, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual abuser, and Wall Street stock jobber Donald Trump does not mean that they will, but it says a lot about the sad state of the Democratic Party that this election is close, especially as Trump’s campaign speeches sound like a variation of a gig by Cheech & Chong (“Don’s not here, man…”).
The warning bells sounded recently in Butler, Pennsylvania, when what looked like a Pittsburgh Steelers’ crowd showed up for Trump’s return engagement three months after he dodged fate at the business end of Thomas Matthew Crooks’s AR-15 assault rifle.
Although an overflow crowd at the familiar shooting gallery does not mean that Trump will win in Pennsylvania or prevail in the electoral college, the fear is that the overflowing crowd is a canary in the coal mine, suggesting that Trump’s supporters bring more passion to their candidate than do the Democrats for Harris and Walz.
Curious about the Democrats’ failings, I attended—if only virtually—several Harris and Walz rallies and events. I came away with the sinking feeling that their message has all the passion of a Madison Avenue product pitch—a bunch of key words (“fight” is a favorite) and endless clichés (“And because we love our country…”)—all of which seem like a campaign to sell the American people a used car from the 1970s, something along the lines of an AMC Gremlin.
To the Democrats it is eternally 1975, with the future riding on car manufacturing, if not WIN (Whip Inflation Now) gardens.
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The mantra of the Harris/Watz campaign is “A New Way Forward,” which is held aloft on placards at all of their rallies, although at one Walz speech a supporter holding a Colin Kaepernick (the black-balled 49ers quarterback) jersey got in the way of the message.
At least in 1884, when the Republicans ran against “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion,” it was clear that they had no time for the Democrats’ affection for moonshine, Catholicism, and former Confederates. Also clear was the response that year by the Democrats, who pronounced: “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine! The continental liar from the state of Maine!”
With the anodyne “A New Way Forward,” the Democrats are essentially offering “a campaign about nothing.”
Yes, at her rallies, Harris has set spiels about what she calls the “opportunity economy” (ad men, including Don Draper, were never very bright), and in every speech she dangles tax deductions for new parents or small-business owners, but in a country fighting three proxy wars (Gaza, Lebanon, and Ukraine) and with climate-changed hurricanes (Helene, Milton) laying waste to much of the Southeast, you might think a major party would have more to offer politically or intellectually.
Harris loves to say: “Ours is a fight for the future. Ours is a fight for the future, and ours is a fight for freedom….” but even “Keep Cool With Coolidge” had more poetry to offer than “A New Way Forward.”
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The essence of the Harris candidacy is that she is neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump.
The early days of the Harris nomination accession (democracy is too precious to leave to the voters) generated a rush of enthusiasm. Unfortunately, once it was established that the vice president was not a tired old man in a suit, her campaign began to drift.
I watched an event in Flint, Michigan, which had Magic Johnson and a local United Auto Workers shop steward as the warm-up bands. Magic was on hand as a Michigan native son and to turn out the votes of black men for Harris, but oratorically he still had a few air balls.
In many ways Magic is the embodiment of what’s wrong with the Democrats, which uses billionaires and celebrities to invoke working-class values—to sing the praises of Chevy’s Citation while tooling around LA in a Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupe (as Magic does).
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Harris spoke for 35 minutes. While throughout the scripted speech (Kamala doesn’t riff) people clapped and cheered, and occasionally chanted “U-S-A! U-S-A”, the only well-spring of enthusiasm came when she vowed to protect women’s reproductive rights and shouted “We’re Not Going Back” (which is a little harder to decipher than, say, FDR’s 1940 slogan: “Better A Third Termer than a Third Rater.”)
More telling was when the speech was over (after Kamala had led the crowd in a refrain from the amen corner: “And if we fight…we win…”), and the Flinters sat motionless in their seats.
No one stretched to shake her hand, and no one climbed on the stage, as happens at a Bruce Springsteen concert. Instead, as the camera panned the crowd, it sat there impassively, as if some “live audience” from a game show that later that afternoon might wander over to the studio for Jeopardy!.
For her part, after speaking, Harris tried to animate the crowd. She pointed to some friends in the audience (it’s a Hillary thing to build rapport, even if you don’t know a soul there), and line danced a few steps, but nothing moved the frozen audience, as if their piece-work contracts including clapping during the speech but not afterwards.
Can the Democrats really win without buzz?
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I caught up with Governor Tim Walz in York, Pennsylvania, where if he had his druthers, he might well have said, “Can we just skip this speech and go somewhere for a beer?
Instead, he soldiered on for a half hour about how recently he and J.D. Vance had had a “civil if spirited” debate and how as governor of Lake Woebegone (“…where all the politicians are below average…”), he had learned to “reach across the aisle” to solve the community’s problems.
His homilies—about teaching, coaching, his union card, and his mother’s social security check—are heartfelt, but they don’t address the political problem that Walz will not deliver any states to Harris’ electoral college column that she would not have won without him.
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One of the ironies of the Walz campaign is that he has almost no support in what should be his natural constituency: what Springsteen calls “my hometown”.
A gun-owning, school teaching, Friday Nights Lights football coach from the Great Plains (he was born in Nebraska) ought to appeal to at least some of the MAGA base, where issues such as crop insurance, job training, solar energy, and $35 insulin resonate.
For reasons that would a require full psychiatric examination on about half the country, the MAGA base—many from rural counties where Walz has spent most of his life—more closely identifies with a high-rise, golf-playing New Yorker with gold fixtures on his toilets.
Walz also served in the National Guard and deployed overseas, yet it is the draft-dodging Trump (who called the war dead “suckers”) who resonates more with veterans.
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Logically, Walz is an heir, in some capacity, to the likes of Wisconsin Senator Robert M. La Follette, one of the founders of Progressive Party, or maybe Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president, Henry Wallace, but both of them, intellectually, approached government as something more than a Boy Scout jamboree.
In voting for candidates for their top jobs, Americans often pass on nice guys. In 1844, they passed on the eloquent Henry Clay in favor of the duplicitous and wily James K. Polk (“Reannexation of Texas and Reoccupation of Oregon”). In 1868, the winning slogan for Ulysses S. Grant was: “Vote as you shot.”
In 1876, voters (perhaps fraudulently) chose Rutherford B. Hayes over “Honest” Sam Tilden, so that later someone could quip of Hayes: “He did such a good job I almost wish he had been elected.”
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Another irony of the 2024 election, perhaps fatal to Democratic chances, is that while the Republicans want to be National Socialists the Democrats seem to want to be Republicans.
In York, Waltz gave a shoutout to Ronald Reagan (not to Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, or Grover Cleveland), just the way Kamala Harris’s idea of a celebrity endorsement is one from Dick and Liz Cheney.
Listening to Harris and Walz gave me little idea (other than $25K for first-time home buyers) of their vision of a Democratic future, other than that they believe in the compassion of the community and in political fairness. That’s not nothing, but in Flint the message still kept the voters glued to their seats.
Otherwise Harris and Walz are silent on international justice for Gaza, the finer points of climate change, the meaning of the national debt, the casino wheels at the Federal Reserve, the hired hands on the Supreme Court, Trump’s bestie Vladimir Putin, the threat (or not) posed by the Chinese, the American future in NATO, or how to amend the Affordable Care Act to support the homeless.
Trump is corrupt, immoral, deceitful, paranoid, and a pathological liar, but keep in mind he’s also the reincarnation of William McKinley, who in 1896, also with tariffs as his only only platform, ran on “Patriotism, Protection, and Prosperity,” which defeated the eloquence and moral decency of another Nebraskan, William Jennings Bryan.
Not even with his “No Cross of Gold, No Crown of Thorns” slogan could Byran take downMcKinley’s plutocracy.