By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, August 07, 2024
In selecting Minnesota governor Tim Walz to join her on
the presidential ticket in November, Harris has declined to make the most of
the impossibly rare chance to skip over the fractious and embittering dynamic
that typifies primary elections. By selecting Walz over Pennsylvania governor
Josh Shapiro, the Harris campaign has signaled that the lady is not for
triangulating. Rather than appealing to the middle of the electorate, this will
be an election in which both parties try to maximize turnout among their respective partisans.
Partisan Democrats insist that Harris’s pick was the path
of least resistance. Walz is inoffensive to every faction of the Democratic
Party — progressives, youth voters, minority voters, squishy moderates, and
low-information voters whose political preferences are determined by optics and
sentiment. But as Nate Silver opined shortly after Harris’s decision was
revealed, Walz’s value is not in helping deliver these voters, most of whom are
already sufficiently enthused by Harris herself. He is a pick meant to pacify
the loathsome malcontents in orbit around the Democratic Party.
“This Walz choice was designed to maintain the social
fabric of the Democratic Party,” Silver wrote, “and avoid news cycles about a disappointed
left and Democrats’ internal squabbling over the War in Gaza.” This is not a
cost-free proposition for Democrats, as former Obama official and CNN
commentator Van Jones confessed. “You also have antisemitism that has gotten
marbled into this party,” he
observed. “How much of what just happened is caving in to some of these
darker parts in the party?”
When an honest Democrat is willing to describe
anti-Jewish bigotry indelibly woven into the fabric of the party he supports,
there’s a much deeper rot spreading within the Democratic firmament. To the
extent that Walz’s elevation represents a sop to some of the most odious
elements of American society, his selection is indicative not of the Harris
campaign’s confidence but its cowardice.
So why did the Harris team pass over Shapiro?
Maybe Harris’s vetting team, led by former attorney general Eric Holder, found
some horrific skeletons in his closet — far more horrific than the opposition
research Shapiro’s opponents dug up. Regardless, we can guess that the
explanations for Harris’s choice have so far failed to satisfy Democratic
bigwigs who are telling the New York Times that they were unnerved by
the sordid, vaguely
antisemitic whisper campaign deployed against the governor. So far, the
campaign’s efforts to mollify this disquieted group are not convincing.
“Josh Shapiro was seen as not someone who could deliver
the state of Pennsylvania based on internal polling,” NBC News reporter Yamiche
Alcindor said, citing sources within Harris’s orbit. “The source also said
Harris’ team was unconvinced that any one person could guaranteed [sic]
any of the battleground states for the ticket.” There’s nothing at all
reassuring in this excuse — assuming you are willing to believe that the well-regarded governor of a state he won by 15 points just two years ago is electoral
poison in Pennsylvania. The Harris campaign is plying the notion that, with
Kamala at the top of the ticket, no one — neither Shapiro nor Walz — has the
political skillset necessary to drag her over the finish line. And they’re
saying that in her defense.
Internal polling notwithstanding, this rationale doesn’t
make a lot of sense. What does make sense is the reporting in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere indicating that
Harris felt intimidated both by Shapiro’s natural political talents and his
ambition. As NOTUS reported, Harris’s allies believe she was
“looking for ‘more of a governing partner’ than an electoral boost.” In other
words, Harris would rather leave Electoral College votes on the table than be
upstaged by a more talented subordinate. That could soon prove a fatal error.
Nor is it the only example of the Harris campaign’s
timidity. It is hard to blame the vice president for basking in the relief
enjoyed both by Democratic partisans and media professionals following Joe
Biden’s decision to bow out of the 2024 race. A more daring campaign might have
taken that opportunity to reintroduce its candidate to voters by having her sit
down for a friendly interview or two with known quantities in the media
landscape — the party’s most reliable “homers” who wouldn’t press too hard but would prime the
candidate to face sharper interlocutors later in the campaign. Instead, the
campaign made Harris into an abstraction in the effort to preserve for as long
as possible the Democratic euphoria that followed Biden’s defenestration.
The problem with this strategy is that the euphoria is
illusory. It is predicated on little more than the fact that Harris is not a
decrepit white male, and eventually, Harris will have to meet the expectations
that are being set for her. Voters will be in for a rude awakening when they
are exposed to an unfiltered and unmoderated version of the vice president.
Unreality is a hard thing to maintain.
What’s more, Harris is not even making the most of the
unreality that presently surrounds her. At the moment, it is abundantly clear
that the political press is willing to let the vice president get away with almost anything.
Sure, maybe she once supported doing away with the private health-insurance
industry, but she doesn’t anymore. What more do you need to know? Likewise,
Harris no longer supports a fracking ban or a Soviet-style federal jobs
guarantee. Her staff said so! Indeed, she’s suddenly become an advocate for
enhanced border security and increased funding for local police forces.
Adopting this new persona has been easy for Harris, in part because those whose
whole role in professional life is to be skeptical of politicians collectively
suspended their disbelief.
But the Harris campaign has done little to reinforce the
narrative it is retailing. Neither Harris nor her subordinates have articulated
a conversion story, much less a convincing one, to explain her metamorphosis.
She’s simply deemed herself a born-again moderate, and the press has played
along. And with the Walz pick, Harris’s campaign seems to have bought into its
own hype. It has convinced that it needs a progressive — “folksy”
and “Midwestern nice” though he may be (emphasis on the “may”) — to round out the ticket for
disaffected progressives. But while Harris is a cypher, every indication from
her career in public life is that she, too, is also a committed progressive. As
a result, Democrats are now saddled with a presidential ticket top-heavy with
progressivism.
For over two weeks, the GOP has been on the back foot.
The Trump campaign was derailed by Biden’s withdrawal from the race, and it has
struggled to break into the Harris-dominated news cycle in a positive way.
Walz’s selection provides Republicans with the opportunity to get their
bearings by returning to the tested attacks on progressivism’s excesses, which
failed to generate traction during the connubial phase of Harris’s rollout.
Walz backed programs designed to provide illegal immigrants with drivers’ licenses. He
issued an executive order giving minors access to irreversible
chemical and surgical treatments for gender dysphoria. He signed a law that
makes it harder for black and other “disproportionately represented” children
to be taken into foster care based on activists’ claims that the evidence of child abuse must
be higher for minority children than it is for their white neighbors. As Jim Geraghty detailed, Walz’s administration of
Minnesota’s executive branch was plagued by accusations of malfeasance and
staggering incompetence. His state’s Covid-era restrictions on social and
economic activity were among the nation’s most draconian, and, in that period,
his administration caved to a grotesque fashion which prescribed rationing
society’s benefits based on race. And by his own admission, his handling of
the 2020 riots, which exploded under his watch and were loosed upon the world
as a result of his conspicuous inaction, was an “abject failure.”
Harris’s team may be calculating that this is a
worthwhile tradeoff. The alternative was a candidate who would rile up the
anti-Israel mobs, which might make the party look bad. But that strategy is
predicated on the assumption that New Kamala can neutralize the allegation that this is an
ideologically extreme presidential ticket. That’s a flawed assumption. Harris
has not succeeded in reinventing and reintroducing herself to voters. She
hasn’t even really tried. Americans are about to be confronted with the most
left-wing presidential ticket since 1984, and “vibes” alone won’t dispel that
charge.
Oh, and one more thing, Democrats: The mobs are still
coming for you in the fall. They always were, not because they’re anti-Israel
or anti-war, but because they are pro-war and anti-American. They cannot be appeased. And now that you’ve
given them an inch, they know that you can be made to bend to their demands.
ADDENDUM: Last night, in all their wisdom,
Missouri’s primary voters went to the ballot box to rid America of some blights
on public life. Representative Cori Bush, one of the newer members of the Squad
who convinced herself that her Show Me State constituents’ biggest concern in
life was advancing the interests of Middle Eastern terrorist groups, lost to St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell. Likewise,
Valentina Gomez, an internet sensation running on the GOP line for secretary of
state whose pitch to voters consisted of burning
books and admonishing Missourians against being “weak and gay,” came in sixth place in her primary. The
results are a heartening reminder that the collective wisdom of an informed
electorate can be a reliable thing . . . at least, sometimes.
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