Month: August 2020

Steve M. compares the Democratic National Convention to an informercial and contrasts that to the coming Nuremberg rally we should expect from the Republican side, and I think that’s fair. But I think it’s important to think about why informercials and hate rallies exist despite being immensely annoying.

The television is filled with people trying to sell us crap. Most commonly, this can be done in thirty seconds, but a harder sell requires more time. I mean, people just aren’t inclined to spend $1,600 on a junk piece of exercise equipment that will clutter up their basement, so it just makes sense to spend 30 minutes to make the case. The thing is, they sell a lot of Bowflexes. They also sell a lot of Thighmasters, and I assume the OxiClean is moving like hot cakes. Informercials exist because they’re effective. The product can be good, like a George Foreman Grill, or a complete rip-off, like whatever Clint Eastwood was trying to do with that chair at the 2012 Republican National Convention.

Some people like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, but others need to be convinced. That’s what the Democratic National Convention is for, and that’s why it makes little sense to complain that there are Republicans making appearances there. For example, in November 2014, John Kasich carried 86 of Ohio’s 88 counties as he was being reelected as governor by a 64 percent to 33 percent margin. According to FiveThirtyEight’s average of polls, Joe Biden is currently leading Donald Trump by a miniscule 46.8 to 46.3 percent margin. If Biden didn’t give Kasich a prominent speaking spot at the convention, it would be political malpractice. He needs Kasich voters to put him over the top in Ohio, which is obvious when you realize that nearly two-thirds of Ohioans are Kasich voters. Call it an infomercial if you want, but it has a good chance of working.

Hate rallies rely on a different kind psychological dark art. People behave differently in large groups. There’s a certain allure to a gigantic crowd of like-minded individuals acting in concert. Size is its own kind of argument. Big crowds are important, but so are big flags, big stages, and big venues. This works for any kind of rally, whether fascist or not. But making it okay for people to openly hate is a trick that takes some work. People intuitively know this is wrong, so they need permission to go against their instincts and what they’ve been taught. Safety in crowds make it possible to let your inner racist out. If you say it on YouTube, you could be out of a job by lunchtime, but attending a rally for the president of the United States is protected behavior.

Hate rallies don’t work as informercials. The audience is atomized and passive. There’s no grandeur or awe-inspiring settings. If you want to sell hate on television, you need to do it less formally, by airing a nightly hour of Bill O’Reilly or Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingraham or Sean Hannity. This is really effective, but it doesn’t work for a political convention because racism as a hard sell is a turnoff, even to many racists. Just try to picture Hitler making the case for the Final Solution over Zoom.

The Democrats’ convention might not make a whole lot of difference either way, but they will make some sales. If they make enough sales to win Ohio, it will be a very big deal. The Republicans will try to run a Nuremberg rally through Zoom, and I don’t think it’s going to help them.

Maybe you don’t care about pristine wilderness or the health of migratory waterfowl, but you ought to care that it was 130 degrees in Death Valley on Sunday, which is “perhaps the hottest temperature ever reliably recorded in the world.” It seems like a good reason not to expand the use of fossil fuels, but what do I know?

The Trump administration finalized plans Monday to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, a move that will auction off oil and gas rights in the heart of one of the nation’s most iconic wild places. Achieving a goal Republicans have sought for 40 years, it marks a capstone for an administration that has ignored calls to reduce fossil fuel consumption in the face of climate change.

The move will allow leasing on the 1.6 million-acre coastal plain, the center of a nearly pristine wilderness home to migrating caribou and waterfowl as well as polar bears and foxes that live there year-round. It marks a major step toward reviving fossil fuel development in an area that has been untouched for three decades.

This is one of those issues that would be of pressing concern even in a presidential election between a Democrat and a normal Republican. Simply put, the GOP is terrible on environmental conservation and even worse on Climate Change. President Trump is not an outlier in these areas.

There are a lot of reasons why it’s vitally important that Joe Biden win this election, but Climate Change could be at the top of the list, despite all the other things Trump has done that merit his defeat.

I guess somebody has to be a pessimist but the CNN poll still shows Biden ahead, and it really is an outlier. It’s the only concerning data point that came out this weekend, so I think it’s premature to say that the race has narrowed since Kamala Harris was put on the Democratic ticket.

I will say that I considered her a risky choice, mainly because this country has spent four years trying to prove it’s racist as fuck, but there are other data to support the idea that Harris will help shore up Biden’s relatively weak position with black voters. It’s a bit confusing because black voters absolutely rallied behind Biden and gave him the nomination. But the American University Black Swing Voter Project found that Biden is struggling with black voters under thirty, many of whom preferred Bernie Sanders. That, along with an alarming lack of enthusiasm about voting at all, had to worry Biden’s strategists, and the hope is clearly that Harris will jack up his support across the board with the black community.

There hasn’t been a ton of polling taken since the Harris pick and now we’re headed into the convention season, so we may never get a good idea of how she impacted the election at the outset. My suspicion is that it’s largely a wash. It will modestly increase the racial polarization of the election, which generally works in Republicans’ favor, especially in some key Senate races and some reach-pickups for the Dems in the House. But, overall, there may not be much impact in terms of overall votes. Harris could help carry Biden over the top in key states like Michigan and Wisconsin where black turnout can be decisive.

The tiebreaker is really in the suburbs. If Harris is well-received there, she’ll probably be a net-plus for Biden. It’s not how I would have looked to reshape the electorate for maximum safety and advantage, but there were plusses and minuses to every person Biden seriously considered, and Harris is probably a better choice than most of them. My problem isn’t pessimism in general, but rather a wariness with betting on the decency of the American electorate. I also see polarization as the enemy, because it fixes Trump’s floor at a pretty high level and it’s really important that we see his floor drop out.

I think people probably put too much thought into the veep choice anyway, as this is going to be mainly a referendum on Trump, and people don’t much care about Mike Pence. They probably don’t much care who’s running with Biden either.

What they do care about is that the country is a complete mess, and that’s why Trump is in very big trouble.

One of the significant features of the presidential race right now is that an average of polls shows the challenger, Joe Biden, running above fifty percent. As Harry Enten of CNN points out, this is highly unusual.

For now though, we can say Biden’s doing better than any challenger heading into the major party conventions since scientific polling began.

In the 13 previous elections in which an incumbent was running for another term, no challenger has ever been at or above 50% in the polls at this point in the campaign. The closest were Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Thomas Dewey in 1948. Carter was at about 49%, while Dewey came in at between 48% and 49%.

Most challengers were not even near that mark. The average opponent to the incumbent comes in at a mere 38% since 1940. Biden is nearly 15 points higher than that at this time.

To give but one example, the CBS News Battleground Tracker has Biden ahead 52 percent to 42 percent, with a small 2.5 percent margin of error. That still leaves 6 percent either undecided or committed to a third party candidate. There isn’t much evidence of hidden Trump support this time around, and going back several weeks now, Biden has held a significant advantage with voters who are either undecided or dislike both candidates. In the latest PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll, Biden’s lead with the haters stands at 52-33. On the whole, it seems like the former vice-president has a strong edge when we look for areas of potential growth, including, to my surprise, with black voters under thirty who, prior to the selection of Kamala Harris as Biden’s running mate, were showing a shocking level of apathy about voting at all and some seriously tepid levels of support for the Democratic Party.

If you’ve noticed some implausible-seeming survey numbers for Trump among black voters, this is probably why, and it’s unlikely to materialize for him. Much more likely, Biden will get well north of ninety percent of their votes, and turnout could be close to Obama-level numbers.

Having said all this, FiveThirtyEight currently gives Trump a 27 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, which really demonstrates the advantages of incumbency and the conservative bias inherent in how we choose our president. We probably shouldn’t expect much of a convention bounce for Biden this week, both because it won’t be a typical convention and because convention bounces have become increasingly less pronounced in recent cycles. This will also work against Trump when the time comes for him to do whatever he’s going to do from the White House lawn.

I don’t think we should expect a whole lot of movement in the race from where it stands right now, but unforeseen events can always have an influence. The undecideds will eventually decide, which will probably improve Biden’s polling lead. Trump will continue to cheat and looks to suppress the vote, which will have some success.

If the election were decided by popular vote and no significant shenanigans were involved, this election would already be over. Unfortunately, it takes more than that to knock out a Republican president.

I do not care what Omarosa has to say about anything, and I also don’t care that the presence of a strong black woman on the Democratic ticket is bound to cause Donald Trump to say some really racist shit. The issue has never been Trump’s racism, which few now truly deny. The issue is that Trump has revealed that this kind of racism is still an extremely potent force in American politics. The issue is that it might not actually hurt Trump’s chances if he makes really blatant racist comments. For him, it’s quite possible that the more explicitly racist he is, the better his chances.

His theory all along has been to polarize the electorate by getting as many white people as possible to vote for him based on his obvious preference for white people. It’s something I predicted would happen long before I ever contemplated that Donald Trump might be a serious candidate for president. It’s hard to believe that I wrote The GOP is Moving in the Wrong Direction over seven years ago, but it shows that I saw where things were headed.

At the time, I was responding to a piece by Benjy Sarlin on the Republicans’ refusal to work with President Obama on comprehensive immigration reform despite the fact that the Republican National Committee’s post-2012 autopsy report on Mitt Romney’s loss emphasized the need to do better with Latinos.

What Mr. Sarlin doesn’t broach is the subject of how conservatives might be able to grab a higher percentage of whites and how they might go about driving up white turnout. The most obvious way is to pursue an us vs. them approach that alternatively praises whites as the true, patriotic Americans, and that demonizes non-whites as a drain on the nation’s resources. This is basically the exact strategy pursued by McCain and especially Romney. It’s what Palin was all about, and it’s what that 47% speech was all about.

An added element was introduced by Barack Obama, whose controversial pastor and Kenyan ancestry opened up avenues for both veiled and nakedly racist appeals to the white voter. A white Democratic nominee would be less of an easy target for talk about secret Islamic sympathies and fraudulent birth certificates, but that would only make other racially polarizing arguments more necessary.

The problem is that these attacks have already been made, and they failed in even near-optimal circumstances. Accusing the Democrats of socialism, which is a race-neutral way of accusing the party of being beholden to the racial underclasses, has been proven insufficient. The only hope for a racial-polarization strategy is to get the races to segregate their votes much more thoroughly, and that requires that more and more whites come to conclude that the Democratic Party is the party for blacks, Asians, and Latinos.

That is, indeed, how the party is perceived in the Deep South, but it would be criminal to expand those racial attitudes to the country at large.

The Republicans are coalescing around a strategy that will, by necessity, be more overtly racist than anything we’ve seen since segregation was outlawed.

Seen in this light, Donald Trump wasn’t an aberration but more like the logical person to fill a vaccuum that the rejection of immigration reform had created. Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio represented a path that had already been rejected not just by the Republican base, but by the congressional Republicans and their leadership.

I clearly saw Trump as the fulfillment of this shift in the GOP when I wrote Trump and the Missing White Voters in December 2015. And I immediately tagged the strategy as successful in my Avoiding the Political Southification of the North piece that I wrote two days after the 2016 election. I never saw Trump as an essential feature of Trumpism, although he certainly brings his own unique flavor to things.

The Conservative Movement is fairly racist by nature, but it’s political necessity that has brought out the worst in them since 2013. They could have tacked to the middle on a host of issues, but conservatives didn’t want to budge. The fact that immigration was their biggest stumbling block is instructive, especially because we’ve seen a lot of their core beliefs fall by the wayside during Trump’s presidency. It turns out that everything was negotiable except the browning of America. The free traders and internationalists are shocked at what’s become of their old party, and the pro-military folks are appalled that Trump won’t defend our troops against Russian bounties. But this was all kind of inevitable in a way, once the party decided that it would rather polarize the white vote than reach out to non-whites. It’s a time-limited strategy, as eventually demographics will overwhelm them, but it barely worked four years ago. It could work again, but it will be much harder with a pandemic and a bad economy weighing Trump down.

It’s just sickening that it strategy still has a rational basis, even if it never had even the smallest moral one.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of Wilderstein, the Hudson Valley home of FDR cousin Daisy Suckley. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 9×9 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

Since last time I have started painting the siding and what will be the shadowed portions of the building. These are preliminary colors and will change before I am done.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

On this day four years ago, Roger Stone was exchanging direct messages with Guccifer 2.0, a fictitious composite character invented by Russian military intelligence to deflect blame for the hack of the Democrats’ national headquarters. It was the same day the New York Times reported that “a corrupt network… was used to loot Ukrainian assets and influence elections during the administration of… former President Viktor F. Yanukovych,” and that $12.7 million had been illegally paid to Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort. After the Times article was published, Manafort was quickly fired but Trump never truly broke with him.

The first weeks of August were highly consequential in 2016. Only later would it be obvious that Roger Stone’s sudden predictions that WikiLeaks would win the election for Trump were more than just bluster. On August 2, while Manafort was meeting with a Russian intelligence officer at the Grand Havana cigar club in Manhattan to discuss election data, Roger Stone was receiving information from Julian Assange through Jerome Corsi.

I don’t mention all of this to rehash the Russia investigation all over again, but to remind people to be vigilant while I’m on vacation next week. Pay attention to what you hear from Trump and his surrogates, because they may just tip their hand. The attack on the postal service is going on in plain sight and was covered extensively on MSNBC on Thursday evening. Nancy LeTourneau recently covered the most recent revelations of Russian interference in this election cycle, including the statement from Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, a member of the Intelligence Committee, that the current efforts “make Moscow’s past interference and nefarious actions look like child’s play.”

There are many ways to cheat and play dirty at politics, and no one can anticipate or uncover everything. All I know is that four years ago at this time, the polls looked pretty good and it was hard to imagine that Donald Trump was headed to victory. But Trump, Stone and Manafort were working overtime to change that, and they were ultimately successful.

In some ways, I feel like this is a dangerous time to take a vacation because it seems like we let our guard down once before and paid dearly for it. Both Manafort and Stone were convicted of crimes, and Trump is not interested in sharing their fate, especially because no one will be there to intervene on his behalf and spring him from jail or commute his sentence.

So, please, while I’m gone, keep your eyeballs peeled for foul play. The fate of the election could be decided in mid-August, and we don’t want to learn about it a year or two from now.

Hi photo lovers.

It’s that time again. I really haven’t been out the way I normally would be, so fresh images are a bit harder to come by. One of my daughters decided to plant sunflowers on what had been a couple rock gardens that really should have been flowerbeds. So she did the labor of removing rocks, etc., and planting a bunch of sunflowers. They grew. The weather’s been a bit odd, so the sunflowers definitely struggled. One of my dogs pulls out sunflower plants and tries to eat them – then she remembers that they don’t really taste that great. And my dogs generally like to trample over them. So a subset survived. One of the plants that got trampled over, and survived, is my featured photo. I noticed that the stem was definitely bent, but that it had not been uprooted. So I decided to leave it as is and see what happened. The plant grew, and then after a bit shot upward. It so far has yielded a flower and has at least one more that looks set to bloom. That is one resilient plant, and I am glad it produced a flower at all.

I am still using my same equipment, and am no professional. If you are an avid photographer, regardless of your skills and professional experience, you are in good company here. Booman Tribune was blessed with very talented photographers in the past. At Progress Pond, we seem to have a few talented photographers now, a few of whom seem to be lurking I suppose.

I have been using an LG v40 ThinQ for almost two years. It seems to serve me well, for now, but I know that the lives of these devices are limited. Most of my family seems to be gravitating toward iPhones, so I suspect I may eventually have to succumb and go to the Dark Side of The Force. In a recessionary environment, my default is to avoid major purchases for as long as possible. So, unless something really goes wrong with my current phone, I’ll stick to the status quo for as long as possible. Keep in mind that my last Samsung kept going for over four years (the last year was a bit touch and go). Once I do have to make a new smart phone purchase, the camera feature is the one I consider most important. So any advice on such matters is always appreciated. Occasionally I get to use my old 35 mm, but one of my daughters seems to have commandeered it. So it goes.

This series of posts is in honor of a number of our ancestors. At one point, there were some seriously great photographers who graced Booman Tribune with their work. They are all now long gone. I am the one who carries the torch. I keep this going because I know that one day I too will be gone, and I really want the work that was started long ago to continue, rather than fade away with me. If I see that I am able to incite a few others to fill posts like these with photos, then I will be truly grateful. In the meantime, enjoy the photos, and I am sure between Booman and myself we can pass along quite a bit of knowledge about the photo flog series from its inception back during the Booman Tribune days.

Since this post usually runs only a day, I will likely keep it up for a while. Please share your work. I am convinced that us amateurs are extremely talented. You will get nothing but love and support here. I mean that. Also, when I say that you don’t have to be a photography pro, I mean that as well. I am an amateur. This is my hobby. This is my passion. I keep these posts going only because they are a passion. If they were not, I would have given up a long time ago. My preference is to never give up.

Peace.

John Harris of Politico wants to emphasize that Joe Biden is “epically bland,” but he has a strange way of making his case. He begins his argument by acknowledging that an informal 2019 survey of “about 15 campaign journalists,” who he assures us “are all smart and well-connected,” found zero predictions that Biden would win the nomination. Instead, they went for Beto O’Rourke or Kamala Harris on the theory that people are always looking for someone Kennedyesque.

Harris acknowledges that this highlights “the frequency with which the political-media class fails to perceive powerful currents in the electorate,” as if that’s by itself an adequate explanation. But being horribly wrong is the disease. What we want to know is how they got the disease, or why they were horribly wrong. This isn’t a case where they simply missed some “powerful currents.”

On April 12, 2019, before Biden had even formally announced his candidacy, I projected that he and Bernie Sanders would be the likely finalists of a nominating process that then involved nearly 30 names. I didn’t rely on my perception of the candidates’ ability to emulate John F. Kennedy’s youthful energy and sex appeal. I also didn’t rely on some lazy idea that the electorate always goes for someone whose qualities (i.e., steadiness) offset the flaws of the incumbent (i.e., complete shitstorm).

I said that Biden and Sanders were in the best positions because they had the best name recognition and “they are popular with Democrats all along the ideological spectrum, and this seems to confound and perplex political analysts and activists alike.” I also pointed out that columnists who were dismissing their chances were taking “no account how delegates are actually awarded in the Democratic primaries.”

In a simple formulation, Democrats liked Biden and Sanders a lot, and it simply wasn’t true that their appeal split or fell along ideological lines only. Sanders had a lot of strength in white working class circles, and Biden was extremely well-liked in many progressives circles, particularly in the black community. They both had big built-in bases of support that others would struggle in a crowded field to match. Biden and Sanders would pile up delegates everywhere, even when losing, and grind out a lead over folks like Beto O’Rourke and Kamala Harris.

It wasn’t rocket science. It was based heavily on how delegates are won in the nominating process and who was in the best position to win them. In early 2019, O’Rourke and Harris were in a terrible position, and projecting that that would significantly change based on their supposed Kennedyesque qualities wasn’t serious political analysis. Anyone on the street could have come up with that theory, as it was based entirely on feel and faith.

So, the reason these “smart and well-connected” political commentators were so terribly wrong is that they didn’t conduct actual analysis. Instead, they did something that looks like this:

Since JFK inaugurated the television era of politics in 1960, successful presidential candidates have been theatrical candidates. The exceptions, like Gerald Ford or George H.W. Bush, had short tenures that tended to prove the rule. Winning politicians have had narrative electricity—they were performers and story-tellers who could command the attention of people who loathed them no less than those who revered them.

First, the question wasn’t who was successful as a presidential candidate, but who was successful in winning their party’s nomination. That list includes Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bob Dole, Al Gore and Mitt Romney, along with Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush. When you include all the names, it becomes obvious that “theatrical candidates” don’t have any historical edge whatsoever. It also doesn’t explain Richard Nixon’s immense political success.

Second, Harris continues to underestimate Biden’s appeal to Democrats. For some, he’s old and boring, but for others he’s warm and genuine and loyal and dependable. There’s a lot of love for Joe Biden, and a lot of appreciation for how well he served Barack Obama. This certainly exceeds anything that could have been said about Walter Mondale. Progressives missed this too, and they badly miscalculated how strong Biden would run in the primaries based almost wholly on this reserve of good will. The pundit class also blew their prediction with respect to Bernie Sanders, for a similar reason. They simply couldn’t understand that Sanders had the best approval ratings of any of the candidates, and that this cut across the whole ideological spectrum of the party. Perhaps the political class needs to evaluate what charisma actually looks like, and maybe it doesn’t require youthful good looks and virility.

But more importantly, they should reevaluate the importance they place on superficial factors and pay more attention to mathematics and rules. Biden and Sanders were the finalists, just as I predicted, because they were almost guaranteed to come in close to the top in every contest involving a crowded field. They had done the hard work of building that advantage long before the 2020 campaign season commenced.

Harris calls Biden “a generic politician, wrapped in plain packaging,” and marvels at how that seems to be just the right contrast to Donald Trump. This, too, is overthinking things. Any Democratic nominee would likely be in a similar position against Trump. This election is a referendum on his performance in office, and his performance has been disastrous. Policy proposals have marginal importance. Identity politics aren’t likely to be determinative. This is a Trump “yes or no” election, and it’s very likely to be a no regardless of who Biden chose as his running mate or what he does or doesn’t do in the campaign.

Sometimes, the boring and bland analysis is the most reliable, but what you want from an analyst is accuracy and understanding, not some hot take about how a backbench congressman reminds them of a young Jack Kennedy.

I have a few nits to pick with Ezra Klein. Let me begin with a simple assertion he makes:

In 2016, Hillary Clinton tapped Tim Kaine to be her vice president. In 2008, Barack Obama chose Joe Biden. In 2004, John Kerry named John Edwards. In 2000, Al Gore ran with Joe Lieberman. What did all these picks have in common? They were all to the right of the candidate atop the ticket — each of them was meant, at least in part, to mollify voters uncomfortable with either the ideology or the identity of the Democratic nominee.

I don’t think John Edwards was generally perceived to be to the right of John Kerry, and he certainly did not run his campaign for president to Kerry’s right. Their voting records in the Senate reflected the difference in their respective states, with Massachusetts obviously being more liberal than North Carolina, but Kerry did not pick Edwards to mollify the center. He was trying to mollify people on the left who had responded to Edwards’ “Two Americas’ populist pitch.

It really wasn’t that different from what Biden is doing by picking Harris.

Biden’s decision to run alongside Sen. Kamala Harris breaks the trend. Harris is, by any measure, to Biden’s left. The New York Times describes her as “a pragmatic moderate.” But according to the DW-NOMINATE system, which measures the ideology of members of Congress by tracking what they vote for and whom they vote with, Harris has been one of the most liberal members of the Senate since arriving in 2017, sitting reliably alongside Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Cory Booker atop the rankings. In Biden’s final term in the Senate, he was the 26th most liberal member — and the Democratic Party was significantly more conservative then.

Yet, there’s still a problem here. People who are running for president tend to abandon previous moderation in their positions because they are no longer primarily interested in their constituents but rather about winning over the more partisan folks who make up the electorate of primary elections. When they might have voted to confirm a judge or cabinet appointee in the past, they don’t want to have to explain their “lack of backbone” to the activist base. Therefore, all presidential contenders have a tendency to vote in a completely partisan manner in the years leading up to the election. It was common to see roll calls in 2019 where virtually the only Democrats voting no were Harris, Booker, Warren, Gillibrand, and Klobuchar, all of whom were seeking the Democratic nomination. Harris’s voting record might be pretty far to the left in any case, but it’s hard to use this as a reliable metric.

In any case, Harris is hard to pin down. A lot of the progressive left doesn’t like her record as a prosecutor, but just as many love her for the positions she’s championed, or simply for who she is and what she represents. You can’t make simple statements like Biden picked her to placate the left, or to reassure the middle. Wall Street and Silicon Valley are thrilled with Harris, mainly because she isn’t Elizabeth Warren and has not been a crusader for breaking up the Big Tech monopolies. But there are people on the left who sincerely believe that she’s a good pick because she’s more progressive than the alternatives on other issues.

I also think this is strange:

Within the complex narrative that governs campaign politics, Harris came to be seen as the “safe” choice for Biden. But that says more about how American politics has changed than it does about who she is and what she believes. At the turn of the century, a Black, Indian American woman with one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate wouldn’t have been priced in by pundits as the safe pick.

I don’t know how this became the common wisdom, or if it’s really accurate to say that it did. Kamala Harris appears to be a risky pick for all the reasons listed above, especially considering Trump’s success in 2016 in beating a far better prepared and educated woman based largely on his ability to coalesce a backlash against a black president and “smartypants elitists who think they know it all.” On paper, Harris is an ideal opponent for him, but that assumes that he’ll get to re-run the 2016 election, which he won’t.

In truth, Harris isn’t a safe pick. It’s closer to the truth to say she’s a courageous pick. I’m sure Biden tested all the contenders very thoroughly to get a good estimate on how they might affect the results in key battleground states. If Harris had showed up as a major liability, he would not have chosen her, but that doesn’t mean that she’ll be an asset in rural Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin.

She’s not far to the left or right in the middle. She will excite some people in the Democratic base and boost turnout with them, and she’ll cost the ticket some votes with other constituencies. There are probably as many or more people who will dislike her for making Mike Pence look stupid in a debate as will celebrate watching him be eviscerated. The most popular kid in school is rarely the smartest.

The most important thing is that Biden wants her and she’s well-credentialed and capable of doing the job. She’s a solid pick, but she’s not a sop to the left or some reassurance to the middle. She’s both more and less than that.