Will The Kamala Sugar Rush Subside Before Election Day?

Just a few things have happened since my last post on here.  I felt a little guilty referring to President Biden as a "selfish old man" when he was stalling his departure from the race even as the walls had been closing in on him.  Biden's more than half century of public service has been far from "selfish" and there's been more upside than downside to his Presidency, but I still say he was being selfish by choosing to run for re-election and refusing to bow out even when it was abundantly clear that he wasn't up for nearly five more years on the job.  But after observing the last three and a half weeks in American politics, it makes me wonder if anything we've seen thus far in 2024 has been real.

Republicans seemed like tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists when they insisted that Biden would be replaced as the Democratic nominee before the convention.  It turned out that they were right, but it mostly doesn't seem like the comedy of errors the Democrats endured through June and July could have been planned.  After all, Hanlon's razor tells us to never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.  Still, what about that June debate?  

I wrote a post on here blasting the debate for being planned so early in the cycle.  It didn't make sense and still doesn't that Biden would call for a general election debate in June....unless of course an escape hatch was being plotted back in the spring when the debates were requested.  Even up to the point of Kamala Harris taking the reins from Biden, I wouldn't have believed that this switcheroo had been in the works for a while as it all just seemed too risky.  But having seen the way events have unfolded since July 21, it becomes harder believe that the state of the race today is merely a happy coincidence.

Within 48 hours of Biden abandoning his re-election bid and endorsing Vice President Harris, she secured nearly unanimous support from every establishment Democrat.  It made sense that the party wanted to avoid a messy nomination fight or to try to take the nomination away from a woman of color who was next in line, but the instantaneous speed at which Harris transformed from a national embarrassment to a folk hero doesn't make sense.  I shared the relief most Democrats felt when we put the burden of Biden's endemic performance deficiency in the rear view mirror, but that doesn't explain the Harris rallies with tens of thousands of attendees seemingly put together on the fly with A-list performers in tow.

Looking at it from multiple weeks after the fact, it's hard to shake the feeling that this wasn't the game plan for months.  Whether Biden was in on it or a useful idiot whose cognitive decline inadvertently served its purpose to force him out of the race is open to debate, but that's nonetheless how it played out, and with storybook timing.  Harris got her endorsement from Biden and basked in the most successful campaign rollout in history, buying herself two weeks of positive media.  Then she picked her running mate, winning another two-week media cycle.  And next week begins the Democratic convention, giving her another two weeks of scripted, scrutiny-free salesmanship.  That takes us just about to Labor Day before even the first opportunity arises to test the Democratic Presidential nominee's proficiency for the position she's applying for.  

Whether this is serendipity or something carefully planned in a smoke-filled room back in the spring when Biden's cognitive slippage was unmistakable, it's been simultaneously clever and disturbing.  It's clever because it completely caught the Trump campaign off-guard and sent the GOP nominee into a messy and defensive spiral, but it's disturbing because the public and the media have so unquestioningly fallen in line in elevating someone to the highest office in the land based on a rudimentary image makeover.  It reminds me of the spring of 2008 when Hillary Clinton, when contrasting herself against Barack Obama in the primaries, successfully reinvented herself as a beer-swilling, white working-class hero, and both voters and the media seemed to buy it without hesitation, at least for the rest of that primary season.

The conventional wisdom has been that reality will catch up to Harris after Labor Day when the convention is over and her campaign gets more scrutiny...and, for that matter, when the Trump campaign and its surrogates finally settle on a more cogent line of attack against her.  I'm not so sure.  When Biden was the nominee, certainly in 2024 but even in 2020, the strategy was to silo him as much as possible from unscripted situations and let the press's anti-Trump bias work to the campaign's advantage by accepting that few hard questions will ever have the opportunity to be asked.  Four years ago, it was just a matter of Biden getting through the scheduled Presidential debates and then letting him be the guy who records videos from his basement for the rest of the campaign.  Expect more of the same with Harris, for the obvious reason that there's precedent for voters liking her much less when they get to know her.

Just as was the case five years ago, when she ran one of the worst Presidential campaigns in recent memory, Harris had nowhere to go but down when she opened her mouth.  She was astonishingly bad in debates ("I answered wrong because I didn't hear the question"...on three separate occasions) and awkward on the stump and in media interviews.  I suspect her handlers know that this version of Kamala Harris needs to be kept under wraps.  It's not a trend I like, and one that I think could blow up in the Dems' face much as it (almost) did in 2020 when the late-deciding vote broke for Trump who seemed to be working much harder to win.  In one sense, I'd be willing to accept whatever strategy is most helpful to keep Trump from returning to the White House, but for the second cycle in a row, the process makes me feel dirty.  Voters should see as much of their candidates in pressure-cooker situations as is possible, and nobody is ultimately served well if the parties work overtime to shield them from it.

And on a note of personal privilege, it appears my instinct was right back in 2006 when I speculated that recently elected southern Minnesota Congressman Tim Walz seemed like a guy who was going places.  I met him in person on the campaign trail as my parents lived in his district and I was impressed by his energy and charisma.  He survived six terms in a conservative-tilting Congressional district and then got the Democratic nomination in a crowded gubernatorial field in 2018.  His gubernatorial tenure wasn't perfect and he shifted dramatically left from the guy who was elected in Rochester in 2006, but he still got re-elected by a more comfortable margin than I'd have predicted in 2022.  And while I never could have foreseen he’d go national up until now, when I heard he was on Harris’ radar as a running mate, I quickly got comfortable with the idea that he’d once again rise to the occasion and exceed expectations.

Was Walz the best choice?  We won't know until the November 6 postmortem.  I think Josh Shapiro was probably a better strategic choice, but who knows what can of worms might have been opened over the Israel-Palestine issue if he was selected.  Walz should be a reliably plucky communicator on the campaign trail and in media interviews, generating positive buzz for the campaign.  I don’t think that moves votes from one column to the other, but it keeps the Democrats on offense and could enhance enthusiasm and thus turnout.