Month: August 2024

Howdy everyone! Here is A Closer Look with Seth Meyers:

You all know what to do. I hope everyone in the Frog Pond is doing well.

Cheers!

It doesn’t seem like Rex Huppke is the most objective observer, but in his column in USA Today he made me laugh by writing that Donald Trump’s interview with Elon Musk was a disaster that made the disgraced ex-president sound “like a disoriented, racist Daffy Duck.” The whole thing went even worse than Ron DeSantis’s infamous glitchy campaign launch on X/Twitter.

As with DeSantis’s debacle, things got started with technical problems, in this case causing a delay of 40 minutes. Musk made the highly unsubstantiated and quickly debunked claim that he was the victim of a distributed denial of service attack.

When Trump finally made an appearance, he slurred his words and spoke with an unfamiliar lisp, inviting the Daffy Duck comparison.

While political pundits were busy noting down Trump’s claims and number of attacks aimed at Harris and Biden, many couldn’t help but notice that the 78-year-old candidate was speaking with a slight lisp. Musk had said the chat was for people to “get a vibe for how Donald Trump talks.” But, instead, people were more tuned in to Trump’s funny-sounding voice.

Was his mouth numb from a dental visit? Was he having a stroke? These are the questions listeners focused on, which might not be so bad considering what he was actually saying. For example, he promised to shutter the Department of Education if elected to a second term, said President Joe Biden has “a stupid face,” and complimented Musk for firing employees who try to unionize. Then he praised Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as being “on top of their game.”

As for the racism, it was both familiar and off the charts. Just as he did in his famous 2015 press conference announcing his first campaign for president, Trump accused foreign leaders of emptying their prisons and sending murderers to the United States. Rather than providing evidence, he simply stated it’s what he would do if he were a foreign leader and insisted that Musk would do the same thing if in a position to do so.  He backed this up by once again promising the largest mass deportation in U.S. history, but his plan is indiscriminate and without respect to criminal records.

This rhetoric is supposed to help him win the election, but I don’t think it’s the most effective way to utilize concern about immigration for political advantage, and most people were less focused on what he was saying than how he was saying it. That’s even more true in the aftermath, as almost all the post-interview analysis focuses heavily on Trump’s lisp and slurring.

At the conclusion of the interview, Musk asked the listeners, which peaked at only 1.3 million, to vote for Trump. And that seems to be the purpose for which Musk bought Twitter in the first place. The two are awfully chummy for social media competitors, and Trump’s Truth Social stock tanked after he resumed posting on X/Twitter on Monday.  It has continued to drop on Tuesday. Nothing could be worse for Truth Social than Trump going back to using Twitter, but he knows he has to win to stay out of prison and that comes before pleasing investors or protecting his wealth.

Did his appearance on X/Twitter help the cause of winning?

Based on the mocking response and new concerns about his health, I don’t think so. It was a double-loss.

I’m back from my annual Cape Cod vacation. We go up there every year to visit old friends and it’s a nice break from politics. The weather wasn’t great but it was truly terrible here in Pennsylvania while we were gone. Our yard and driveway are strewn with debris, so fixing that is now how on my to-do list. Doesn’t seem like we lost power though, although I know my mother-in-law did for a period of time. It now looks like the Democrats are less likely to loser power than when we left.

The polls seem to be moving in the correct direction. The overall shift may be modest, but some subgroups and survey answers have shifted dramatically. Kamala Harris’s approval numbers have taken a big leap, and she’s consolidated the youth vote and shored up some slippage Biden was experiencing with Blacks and Hispanics. The Democrats are now more interested and more enthusiastic about the election, and they sure are more optimistic. After more than a year of looking at Trump in the lead, Democrats have seen Harris ahead in 11 of the last 13 national polls, and tied in the other two.

One of the big mysteries right now is why Trump isn’t actively campaigning. He did a rally in Montana last week but that’s not considered a swing state. It appeared to be an effort to aid in the defeat of Democratic U.S. Senator Jon Tester, but that won’t move the needle in places that will decide the presidential election like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona. Harris and her running mate Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota have visited all of those states, drawing large and raucous crowds.

Now, if Trump is freaked out about almost being murdered at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, I can certainly understand. It would freak me out. I kind of doubt he’s eager to do rallies at the moment. I read somewhere that the Secret Service has requested that he not do outdoor rallies because they’re much harder to secure on short notice than indoor events. Assuming he’s inclined to honor that request, he may be running into another problem which is that he’s built quite a history of not paying bills associated with his rallies. For example, it came out when he went to Billings, Montana that he still owes Missoula County $12,922.82 for an appearance he made in 2018. The city of Billings has not been reimbursed $45,900 is spent for a bulked-up police presence that day.

He completely shafted El Paso, Texas for a February 2019 campaign rally at the El Paso County Coliseum “that cost the city $470,000 in security and other related expenses.” It’s a criminal fraud that he’s conducted all over the country from South Carolina to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New Mexico, Arizona, Washington and elsewhere. At a certain point, the large indoor arenas may simply not want to do business with him.

Another factor that could explain his lack of activity is his well-known crowd size anxiety. Half empty arenas are embarrassing, and doubly so when his opponents are pulling over 16,000 like Harris and Walz just did in Nevada (4,000 people were turned away). Trump has telegraphed his concern about this. At his press conference last week at Mar-a-Lago, he falsely claimed his January 6, 2021 crowd was bigger than the August 28, 1963 crowd at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom that witnessed Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech. Then he went on his shitty Truth Social site and made the deranged claim that the crowd for Harris and Walz’s appearance in Detroit was faked using artificial intelligence.

I’m actually not sure it’s helpful to cause of freedom that Trump is hiding from his own crowds. Whenever he speaks these days, he seems to do more self-harm than anything else. But the rallies are good organizing tools that should pay off in voter contact, volunteers, networking and enthusiasm. That’s why Harris and Walz will probably keep doing them on a near-constant basis between now and Election Day.

I’m just relieved to have some reason to hope, because I haven’t been very hopeful over the last two years, and it was wearing on me. How about you?

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of FDR’s home in New York’s Hudson Valley. I’m painting from my photo from a recent visit, seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 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.

I have now darkened the shadows a bit. The front lawn and driveway have been revised. Finally, the sky has received some attention.

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.

I’ve written about it here, and I talked about it during our latest pondcast with Bill Hangley Jr., This is a terrible election cycle to be an incumbent at the top of the ticket, and I predicted that if either Joe Biden or Donald Trump dropped out, their respective replacements would instantly jump out to a lead and be favored to win the November presidential election. In other words, people want to punish someone in charge, and they don’t much care who the replacement might be. This would favor Trump except he’s running for a second term. He’s not new. He’s not change. He’s part of the system people wan’t punished. Given a choice between Biden and Trump, the people were saying “neither.”

For the same reason, I didn’t think Kamala Harris was the ideal replacement for Biden. It was nothing particular to her, but she was still part of the Biden administration. Someone completely fresh would be better. But she doesn’t have to be ideal to benefit from the strong voter preference for someone new. She’s being showered with praise for how her campaign has rolled out on a dime, and she deserves some praise. She’s hit all her marks, she has a good freedom message and she’s strong on the stump, and her choice of Tim Walz as a running mate was well-reasoned and well-received. But she really didn’t need to be perfect, as Nate Cohn explains:

Seventeen days later, Kamala is brat. The donations are flowing. Arenas are packed for her rallies. The groundswell of support isn’t coming from just the Democratic base, either. Her favorability ratings have surged in recent polls, with now almost half of voters saying they have a favorable view of her. She’s taken a narrow lead in the polls against Mr. Trump, and she might still be gaining.

How did Ms. Harris do it? What’s striking is that she didn’t have to do much. Mr. Biden’s decision to drop out, and her entry into the race, instantly electrified the Democratic Party, and she’s ridden an enormous wave of pent-up enthusiasm for a new face and fresh energy.

It’s worth pausing and thinking about all the things she didn’t have to do to pull this off — the kinds of things that desperate campaigns might try, or that might have made it into a West Wing episode, like a new policy platform, a new message, a soaring speech or an exhaustive news conference. She’s backed away from earlier left-leaning positions on fracking, the border and Medicare for all, but there hasn’t been the need for a Sister Souljah moment scolding the left to redefine her as a centrist. Instead, she has campaigned as a mainstream Democrat, with the usual Democratic message focused on issues like abortion and Mr. Trump’s criminal conduct.

My only quibble here is that her freedom message is different from Biden’s protecting democracy message even if it’s closely related. I’d also add, that far from trying out some Sister Souljah moment, she embraced the left by picking Walz, and that seems to have helped rather than hurt. It’s important that the Democratic base is fired up. But, according to my analysis, it’s the swingy voters who are happiest, because they’re the ones who were most dissatisfied with the choice between Biden and Trump. Now they can vote for someone else, and that’s exactly what they’ve been telling pollsters they wanted to do for more than a year.

It definitely matters that Harris looks like a much better campaigner than she did in 2020, and that she and Walz and projecting joy and optimism to contrast with the dour, apocalyptic hatred of the Trump/Vance ticket. But I truly believe that if it had been Trump who dropped out, his replacement would be receiving most of the same boost in energy and good will that Harris/Walz are enjoying.

The lack of ideological component to this is what we saw in the British and French elections, where the Tories and Emmanuel Macron’s party were decimated in favor of the left in the U.K. and to the benefit of fascists in France. The only reason Biden was holding almost even here is because Trump shared the same incumbent problem.

I now see Harris and Walz as favored to win, with the only doubt introduced by the Electoral College and possible shenanigans related to non-certification of state election results by MAGA election officials. Because this isn’t an ideological battle, but a battle for newness, I believe Harris had the correct instincts in picking Walz. His strong progressive record is largely irrelevant. What matters is that he’s new, energetic and extremely likable. It shows that Trump was on the right track when he chose Vance over retreads like Marco Rubio, but Vance’s problem is that he’s not likable. Yes, he holds some extremely weird, offensive and unpopular beliefs but the policies of the running mate rarely matter. It’s the meanness of those policies rather than their substance that hurt Vance, because he can’t promote or defend them with a smile.

One policy issue that I think is really still potent in this election is women’s reproductive rights, and Vance is an albatross on everything related to women. The policy issue that has the most salience for the right is immigration, but that was true in the U.K. too and Labour went on to have one of it best ever election results. Unhappiness with immigration will keep Trump and Vance from completely collapsing, but it won’t put them over the top. They’ve been pushed into the role of the incumbents, and that’s not where you want to be in this election cycle.

Greetings! What a week, am I right? How about some vintage tunes? Hawkwind sounds good about now:

The bar is open and the jukebox is limited only by your imagination. Cheers!

Every single person I asked about the vice-presidential pick expressed at least a personal preference for Tim Walz. Some thought that maybe a different candidate would be better on the narrow but obviously tantamount issue of winning, but in my circle of friends and associates, Walz was unanimously the sentimental choice. And I guess I fit into that category as well. I didn’t think Walz would lock down a key state for Harris, which both Mark Kelly and Josh Shapiro had the potential to do, and I wasn’t sure he was the smartest choice for that reason. But the more I thought about it, the more I warmed up to the idea of the Minnesota governor being on the ticket. In the end, it was what I was rooting for.

The risk seems really minimal, which is something I just couldn’t say about Shapiro. I think there’s some joyful warrior synergy between Harris and Walz. He’s a really likable guy, and I foresee a lot of smiling and laughter coming out of the campaign which will really contract with Trump and Vance’s doomsday message.

Walz’s record as governor is very strong from a progressive point of view, which is why progressives preferred him to the alternatives. But he got his national profile started by winning a very swingy purple district in the U.S. House of Representatives. The way he communicates and comports himself works very well in those competitive political spaces where this upcoming election will be won and lost.

I like that he has extensive executive experience as the head of a sizable state because I think that’s better preparation for being both a president and an effective vice-president than serving in the U.S. Senate. Looking back, the Democrats almost always choose a senator for a veep candidate, and I’m glad they went in a different direction here.

I’m not worried that Walz will be painted as a radical leftist because he doesn’t act like one and his legislative accomplishments are actually as popular as they are extensive. The more Republicans complain about Walz’s record, the more that outstanding record will reach the American voters’ consciousness, and that’s like free advertising.

I can’t point to one state where Walz will help specifically, but I suspect he will help in all 50 of them to one degree or another. Unlike J.D. Vance, who is an albatross.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of FDR’s home in New York’s Hudson Valley. I’m painting from my photo from a recent visit, seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 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.

I have now added some paint to the foreground. Further, I have started to refine the white trim and cornices.

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.

We liked doing Episode 13 with Bill Hangley Jr. so much that we asked him to come back for a second podcast, or pondcast, as we call them in these parts. It’s the third episode we’ve done with a guest and I think Brendan and I prefer it this way so expect more guests in the future. Bill is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and musician who recently did a guest post here at the Pond: The Case of Kamala. In part one, he joined us to discuss that piece and the controversy over President Biden possibly dropping out, which he did about an hour after we finished recording. Much of what Bill discussed turned out to be pretty prescient, as Harris was received with a lot of enthusiasm. Another purpose for Bill joining us was to promote his amazing new song: For My Father, Who Loves the Law. Please give it a listen. I think it’s great and I love Bill’s singing voice.

A tremendous amount of consequential things happened between Part One and Part Two, which is available on Spotify and Apple, among other podcasting networks. Biden dropped out, Trump was almost assassinated, J.D. Vance became associated with living room furniture and dolphin sex. Bill, Brendan and I discuss those developments and a lot more. Not that I think it’s ideal, but this is a long episode because once we got talking we didn’t want to shut up. I think Bill has a refreshing and basically optimistic take on things, and he’s really insightful. Discussing the comparative bumpiness of Vance’s rollout compared to Harris’s, he says, “It’s hard to roll out when you have square wheels.” Quips like that are what makes it such a pleasure to talk to Bill about all the events of the day. His take on the Democratic vice-presidential contenders is fascinating, as are his thoughts on Trump’s decision to attack Harris as only recently black.

We’d also like to announce that we set up a Patreon page for the pondcast, and ask that you become a member, paying or otherwise. We definitely need some financial support to be able to produce a regular podcast, and Brendan puts in a lot of work to edit these pondcasts into shape. Also please like and subscribe to the pondcasts because that helps grow our audience.

I hope you enjoy listening as much as we enjoyed making it. Until next time…

I think maybe people are starting to get wise to Donald Trump’s old tricks. It used to be that every time the man said something outside the norm of basic human decency that everyone would go racing to cover it on the assumption that it would somehow hurt him and discourage future similar transgressions. But it never seemed to work out the way people expected. Racist or sexist comments or behaviors that would sink any other politician wound up being water off Trump’s back. Far from destroying him, it made his supporters more grateful and loyal. Even felony convictions didn’t stop his march toward the GOP nomination or his persistent polling lead over Joe Biden.

But this past week, things have played out a little differently.

Susan Glasser of the New Yorker noted the standard playbook. Trump somewhat inexplicably agreed to do a Q&A with a panel at the National Association of Black Journalists conference. He arrived late and his campaign ended the planned hour session after a mere 34 minutes. But in that brief span of time, Trump managed to put on a deplorable display of naked racism, highlighted by his false claim that Kamala Harris only recently decided to self-identify as black.

Trump’s efforts, over the past twenty-four hours, to shift the political debate to his own untrue and offensive assertions about the Vice-President’s race may well be a political disaster, but they are not an accident, a flub, or an undisciplined lapse. This, in 2024, is as absurd as subscribing to the credulous spin that Trump’s near-death encounter with a would-be assassin’s bullet had remade him into a unity candidate for the ages. Even Trump couldn’t help mocking this ridiculous line from his advisers…”

“Trump is Trump is Trump. The Harris attacks represent a textbook example of his approach to politics, combining his belief in the strategic power of race-baiting to mobilize his base and his favorite tactic for disrupting a bad news cycle: changing the subject to something even more outrageous. Every minute spent debating Harris’s race—or his own folly in raising it—is a minute not spent on Trump’s own failings: on his advanced age and manifest unfitness for the Presidency; on his legal liabilities and criminal conviction; on his kooky Vice-Presidential nominee and his party’s extreme right-wing agenda.

Commentators as diverse as Marcy Wheeler and Jonathan Last agreed with Glasser that whether Trump’s Q&A was damaging to him or not, it was intentional. It was not a series of gaffes, but one more example of a well-worn strategy to monopolize attention and move other negative stories off the front-page. Last put it his way, “Saying Harris isn’t really black is a gagillion times more effective at getting attention than rolling out some policy paper.”

But the Harris campaign didn’t fall into the trap. All Harris had to say is that it was “the same old show” and “America deserves better.” She didn’t otherwise even acknowledge his antics.

“…it was the same old show: the divisiveness and the disrespect. And let me just say, the American people deserve better. The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth. A leader who does not respond with hostility and anger when confronted with the facts. We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us – they are an essential source of our strength.”

The pattern repeated itself when J.D. Vance tried to defend his running mate:

“[Harris] is everything to everybody, and she pretends to be somebody different depending on which audience she is in front of. I think it’s totally reasonable for {Trump] to call that out, and that’s all he did,” Vance said.

A spokesperson for Harris’ campaign responded to Vance’s remarks by calling him “the most unpopular Vice Presidential nominee in history.”

Rather than play the victim or wallow in hurt feelings, Harris and her campaign just punch back even harder. I think we’ve gotten past the “Oh my God, he said whut?” phase of Trump’s political career. Now it’s just, “a convicted felon said some shit, he’s a terrible person and everyone hates his VP pick.”

It’s a big improvement and a sign that Trump’s tired act may be nearing its end.