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Come on, Harris, Commit Yourself!

I didn’t watch the Harris Town Hall on CNN. My friends and I were busy laughing to old George Carlin and Lenny Bruce records that likely proved much more enlightening. We heard George’s monologue about farting in school on Class Clown, which brought to mind Donald Trump’s farting in the courtroom.

One reason these old comedians are funny is that their remarks are so specific and pointed. Kamala, in contrast, often speaks in generalities, and I think generalities bore people or even turn them off. She reinforces General Kelly’s charges of fascism. Well, what does fascism really mean to most voters, especially young ones? She is vague on border issues and the environment.

As reported in the NY Times, on CNN she tended to give long, circular, winding answers to pointed questions.

Would she expand the Supreme Court? Would people who make $500,000 see their taxes increase? Would Americans pay for benefits for migrants crossing the border? How would she codify Roe v. Wade into federal law? And what about Gaza?

Her answers boiled down to: Donald Trump would be worse.

Giving direct and specific answers seems to threaten her. Shadi Hamid of the WaPo says: “I think she’s so afraid of alienating people with the wrong answers, but this can lead to the worst of both worlds, where she ends up offering answers that satisfy no one.” She punts once again on Gaza and the Palestinian disaster. She is just too cautious.

And Harris is not talking to the kitchen-table issues of working people, the constituency that used to provide the very basis of Democratic support. Have the Dems in fact written off the working class, giving them over to Trump? They would vigorously deny this, of course. But as commentator Ruy Teixera said, “Harris’s advantage among college-educated voters is more than forty points higher than it is with working-class voters. Her campaign, he felt, was targeting the ’NPR vote.’” Why is she doing this when she will get the NPR vote anyway?

And those on the Left “worry that Ms. Harris—like Hillary Clinton in 2016—is falling into a trap of banking on liberal voters without offering significant policy change.” It seems that a majority of cultural elites now are happy to support free trade and business.

When I worked for the Laborers’ Union in the ‘90s, the president asked my opinion about whether the union should endorse the proposed NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) that President Clinton wanted. We discussed strong pros and cons, and the union finally did endorse the bill. Many, and not just Republicans, now argue rightly that NAFTA was instrumental in losing thousands of jobs to Mexico.

Harris offers plenty of talk about the middle class but very little on the working poor, the people who are really struggling now. In 2021 [latest data] the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 6.4 million people in the U.S. were “working poor,” those “whose incomes still fell below the official poverty level.” We now know how many of these folks will vote.

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The Harris Brinksmanship over Arms to Israel

THAAD antimissile launcher for Israel: $800 million per battery of six

Readers know I have gotten really worked up over President Biden’s consistent refusal to cut off arms sales to Israel. So have a lot of people—and not just progressives.

In April of this year I stressed the political consequences:

If Biden doesn’t come to his senses about the rearming, he will turn off a great many voters in November. The growing protests, particularly among younger people, show that many will sit out the election if the president doesn’t change course. AIPAC’s [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] talking points in fact support exactly what many Republicans are saying about the conflict.

One month later I wrote:

As of now, 57 Democrats in Congress have signed a letter urging Biden to withdraw the billions in aid and arms he still quietly permits to flow to Israel. Some 66 percent of the “41 million eligible ‘Gen Z’ voters in 2024 have opposed aid to Israel.”

Now Kamala Harris is apparently following the same policy, which seems discordant with the values she otherwise proclaims. To be charitable, I think she is in a bind. Right now she can’t afford to alienate the Jewish vote because the election is so close. If she wins in November, I have a strong hunch her administration will stop these terrible arms sales. Politics makes strange bedfellows.

American Jews constitute some 2.4% of the U.S. population, and these 7.5 million people are quite a diverse group. Many identify with no religion. Many feel as I do that Israel’s present government is committing atrocities in Gaza using our weaponry. And it’s not just the bombs. Per Reuters today, “Israel has stopped processing requests from traders to import food to Gaza, according to 12 people involved in the trade.” Such things go on with apparent impunity.

A few days ago, top administration officials “warned they would resort to punitive measures, potentially including a suspension of military aid, if humanitarian aid flows are not increased within a month.” I am assuming that would only happen after the election.

Feelings about what Israel is doing in Gaza run high, particularly among younger voters: “Of those under 40 years old, 33 percent believed that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians. These numbers were collated two years before the current genocide.” And now the numbers are growing.

Our group affiliations and history largely determine how we think about Israel. I spoke last year about my anti-Zionist youth and the feelings it engendered. See “Down the Rabbit Hole in Gaza.” There is wide agreement on the stark immorality of what the Israeli regime is doing. They have received billions of dollars of U.S. aid and weapons since the October 7 massacre. No one talks about the millions of dollars AIPAC spends on lobbying for Israel each year.

One may blame Harris for being responsible, in part, for what this administration has done. One can also hope she will have the courage, if she wins, to bring this sickening boondoggle to an end.

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Democrats Are Jittery

Well, why not? They are bombarded with constant negative scrutiny: that the race is too close to call, that the Harris campaign has screwed up royally, that the pollsters are all over the lot, that the choice of Tim Walz was a disaster.

Zak Cheney-Rice, a sharp writer for New York Magazine, tells us some of the things that have made for this “autumn chill” on the campaign. The joyous liberal response after the demise of Biden has given way to anxiety and jitters. I think the biggest problem is that Harris looks unsettled and has pivoted to the center. Per Zak, she “has betrayed [the campaign’s] original promise of unbridled possibility, the consequences of which will reverberate beyond November 5 regardless of who wins.”

Walz successfully went after Vance before their debate, then played nice during their encounter. Worse, from my point of view, is Harris’s failure to move off the Biden stance on Gaza and Israel. Young voters are particularly turned off by this. Zak says:

Israel’s brinkmanship is an issue in which Harris has failed to create meaningful daylight not only between herself and Trump but between herself and the unpopular Biden. The result will be her co-ownership of atrocities against Gazan civilians as well as further confirmation that, for all the history-making potential of her candidacy, we have seen these politics before.

Harris wants voters to embrace change but she is not giving them a real roadmap of how to get there. For many, I believe, it looks like more of the same, and they have clearly repudiated Biden. Trump will wave his magic wand and all will be well. In his rallies, he pledges to end the war in Ukraine “in twenty-four hours.”

Under my plan, incomes will skyrocket, inflation will vanish completely, jobs will come roaring back, and the middle class will prosper like never, ever before.

Maybe MAGA means “Magic AGAin.” When these people have lost power over things they value, magical thinking gives them a sense of control. Obviously, this notion is fundamental to Trump’s appeal. For such voters, better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. From that point of view, as many have pointed out, Harris is really the unknown quantity. She is offering them what they perceive as more of the same policies that have made their lives dismal.

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Election Polling Is a Mess

from The New Yorker

We news junkies seem to be vastly dependent on polling in this most fraught of elections. That’s a big mistake. As has been many times demonstrated, the polls often conflict and are thus wrong. The “why so?” is complicated, as Robert Kuttner explained in The American Prospect. He cites Michael Podhorzer,

who astutely points out that all polling is “opinion journalism.” Why? Because pollsters make assumptions about who is a likely voter and how to weigh or overweigh different demographic groups. “The ‘opinions’ are not about issues or ideology, but about methodological approaches.”

There is a long history of presidential polls being wrong, some of which is explained here. The pattern has remained unchanged for about a hundred years. The polls now predict no better than they did then. Even so, the polling practice has proliferated. It’s a business, after all, and following polls can be addictive.

Last month, Pew came out with a study, “Key things to know about U.S. election polling in 2024.” It’s a little more positive than I’ve suggested, maybe because Pew is a major pollster. A big problem, they say, is predicting who will actually vote.

Roughly a third of eligible Americans do not vote in presidential elections, despite the enormous attention paid to these contests. Determining who will abstain is difficult because people can’t perfectly predict their future behavior – and because many people feel social pressure to say they’ll vote even if it’s unlikely.

Nate Cohn in a recent NY Times post says, “The newer opt-in [online] pollsters haven’t fared any better,” and newer ones keep popping up. So Why are they doing no better than traditional polls? The problem is, as always, “how to find a representative sample without the benefit of random sampling, in which everyone has an equal chance of being selected for a poll.”

Instead, the internet has made things messier and more difficult. So many problems in verifying the data, and so few solutions. I found another fascinating study that illustrates a difficulty other than what the critics have been talking about. Axios summarized it this way: There are stark gaps between what Americans say they think and what they really think about hot-button political issues.

I think the findings from that new study are amazing. To wit, how the general public [61% of all Americans] misrepresents its views:

    • In general, I trust the government to tell me the truth: public response, 22%; privately, 4%
    • In general, I trust the media to tell me the truth: public response, 24%; privately, 7%
    • We live in a mostly fair society: public response, 37%; privately, 7%
    • The government should close the U.S.-Mexican border: public response, 52%; privately, 33%
    • The government should restrict the expression of views deemed discriminatory or offensive: public response, 26%; privately, 5%.

You can check out more of these results here (scroll to Key Findings). If indeed valid, what these outcomes plainly mean is that nearly all public opinion polling sampling may be invalid. Can pollsters ever really discover how people are going to vote?

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I’m Not an Immigrant

Since I wrote this piece in 2018 the situation hasn’t really changed. The major mania for the Trump camp is still immigration and exclusion. Now it’s the Hatians who have displaced Latinos at the bottom of the immigrant barrel.

My great-grandfathers on both sides were German immigrants who came to America in the mid-late 19th century. You can be sure they were not as reviled as the Irish and Italians who came a bit later. Yet Trump and his father long denied their German ancestry, buying into the tradition of hate and exclusion that now extends to Latinos, the new vassals for the GOP.

Prejudice to me is the flip side of identity politics. And drawing immigration lines in the sand is like pulling up the drawbridge after the last good guys are inside. I’ve generally been thought of as one of the good guys (despite being Jewish) because of family, social class, education, and skin color. See Jive-Colored Glasses.

But you soon come to understand if you’re at all aware that the deck is unfairly stacked—even though (to mix the metaphor) you paid to sit in first class. Looking at the lives of the poor and the excluded, it’s hard to feel real empathy unless you have been there yourself. Sympathy is easier and more socially acceptable. Ultimately, I don’t aim to feel either: I want to change the politics of exclusion to one of inclusion.

Trump of course was the perfect GOP candidate to exploit fears of immigration, just as Stephen Miller became the perfect guy to push the policy of zero tolerance. Now Miller and his cohorts want to reduce the “refugee cap” to as low as 15,000 in 2019.

The recent separation of parents and children, and the chaos it caused, is in my view the most inhumane (if not the most politically stupid) thing that Trump has done. Now the administration compounds its culpability by telling the ACLU it should be the responsible agency for finding the separated and deported parents. One might call this wagging the dog or, better, weaseling out.

The White House thinks its stance will play well with the base because they will stick with anything. It will not play well with Hispanics, suburban women, resettlement groups, and the two-thirds of the country that opposes Trump’s immigration policy.

Separating kids from their parents is what the Nazis did. The consequence is trauma and severe long-term consequences for the kids. And what is to be done for those 463 parents already deported without their children? This sick series of government-provoked horrors ought to be the number-one focus for Democrats in November.

But immigration is surely the knottiest issue—politically and policy-wise—of all. Trump’s approach does violence to everyone. And so far, Democrats are all over the map on the issue. The one thing I can think of is to increase the number of judges so that the asylum seekers can be processed with some fairness and dispatch. This is more than a crisis in border security; it’s an ongoing political crisis.

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Cats and Dogs for Lunch and Trump’s Demise

Enough words have been spilled on this, but you have to listen to those with some authority―e.g., Frank Luntz, the long-time Republican pollster on how Trump has blown his chances in the election:

Luntz said he thought it wasn’t that the Democratic nominee won the debate, but “I think more accurately, is that Donald Trump lost.”

“And this is not the worst debate performance I’ve seen in my career, but it’s very close to it,” he added. . . . “I think that he loses [the election] because of this debate performance.”

Luntz cited in particular the comments about people in Ohio eating dogs and cats. We all know how this went down. (There are 46.5 million cat owners in the U.S., and 65.1 million own dogs.) Thankfully, my cat does not live in Ohio.

Let’s not fail to mention Trump’s comments about Democrats killing just-born babies.

Harris’s reaction shots throughout were priceless, worth more than any verbal commentary.

On another note, I thought she fumbled her message on the economy, where she clearly trails Trump in the polls. Harris offered a lot of hollow phrases, like “the dignity of home ownership” in her “opportunity economy.” One writer says she needs to address people’s real problems more directly:

You deserve the freedom to live a good life. No one gets to take advantage of you to get rich. If you are growing up in West Virginia or rural North Carolina, you should be able to find a good job where you are and not have to leave seeking work. When you have kids, a big tax credit will help you to decide for yourself whether to work or stay at home. Reproductive freedom includes the chance to raise a family without choking economic stress.

I’d be more specific than that. Republicans now offer their own bogus answers to these problems, and their partisans have no choice but to believe them. Only Harris can stop this inanity. And she will have to do it with plan specifics, not high-sounding generalities. “Democrats are the party of the system this year, and if they don’t show that the system can change radically, the advantage will pass to those who promise to break it.”

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Harris’s Overhyped Interview: We Learned Nothing

The problem was not so much with Dana Bash, though she let Kamala off the hook too often. The problem was that the Vice President kept hiding behind Biden’s coattails and spoke mostly in generalities. She kept saying, “My values haven’t changed.” Dana should have asked, “Well then, what are your policies for carrying them out?” It would have been telling if Dana had used a few hard-hitting questions instead of the puffballs she tossed out.

Kamala gave up on the Green New Deal, she said, because Biden’s new climate plans coopted most of it. Well, in fact they didn’t, and a good interviewer would have questioned that. The whole point of the exercise seemed to reinforce what she had already established at the DNC—her good-guy, middle-class likeability. There she did make an excellent acceptance speech, hitting all the right notes. But personally she blew it for me when she reinforced the Biden arms for Israel policy while calling blandly for a cease-fire. And sadly, there was nothing on abortion.

So thanks for an hour of apple-polishing and raising questions that got pro-forma answers. CNN is more disgusting by the day; how many inane commercials kept interrupting this unproductive show? Kamala couldn’t even give straightforward answers to her role in the border security mess. She babbled on about price gouging and giving first-time home buyers $25,000 in down payment support. How’s that going to help lower inflation? She sometimes sounded like Tim Walz who when challenged about his DUI arrest appeared evasive. And what was he doing there at all?

The Harris campaign has to do better than this.

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Sen. John Goodman (D-IL) Speaks to the DNC

Let me borrow the words of a favorite author, Saul Bellow. He opened his novel Augie March this way: “I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city―and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”

Unlike Augie, I grew up in a wealthy Chicago and its suburbs, living a pretty innocent life, finding it hard to knock on doors and understand a world delimited by stern Republican boundaries. It took the McCarthy era to open my eyes to the incontestable conservative authority that then moved the world. Chicago was its capitol. Trump is its debased inheritor who puts the old party to shame.

The history of Chicago political conventions will not be lost on some of you. Now we have the “Happy Days Are Here Again” Kamala revelry which we can’t help but treasure and enjoy. Yet, for us oldsters, 1968 won’t go away. Vietnam split the party irrevocably, and there are still echoes of that in the dissent over the war in Gaza, which simmers in the background. Thousands of protesters are kept under wraps by Chicago’s good cops.

Party heavyweights have rightly kept the celebration going but there will have to be a reckoning. How Kamala handles this knottiest of issues, whether and how she will break with Biden’s wretched policy of arming Israel will be her biggest challenge. I have a hunch she will be up for it. Everything in her history predicts it.

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More Conversation Stoppers

Michigan Central Station before restoration
    • Your “Check Engine” light is on.
    • Do cat ladies wear cat suits?
    • She “all of a sudden decided to become a Black person.”
    • “Welcome to the ‘Underconsumption Core’ TikTok Trend—Dog Owner Edition” (Newsweek)
    • Next time you’re in Paris, go for a swim in the Seine.
    • Reporter Evan Gershkovich: “The food was really good.”
    • Mingus to a pushy nightclub patron: “Your breath stinks. Get away from me.”
    • If Trump had been wearing ear muffs. . .
    • Overheard: “Your midlife crisis don’t mean shit to me.”
    • A Jewish Vice President?. . . Talk to your doctor.
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Harris and Mingus

Maybe she looks a little looney here because this photo was cribbed from a video of her jazz-buying spree in DC last year. Kamala Harris and her husband are big jazz fans, as some of you may know. Husband Doug Emhoff was written up in The Atlantic last month:

The second gentleman, who might also be called the first jazz fan, is such a devotee that he named his children, Ella and Cole, for Ella Fitzgerald and John Coltrane, two of his favorite musicians. . . .He said, “Jazz isn’t constructed. It’s a little messy, like democracy can be at times.”

Anyhow, Kamala calls Mingus “really one of the greatest jazz performers ever.” Well, who is going to argue with that?

The fact that she bought Mingus’s most ambitious (and his favorite) album, Let My Children Hear Music, impresses me. She has good taste. The music is a little messy and a little disciplined, like democracy. Here is the opening number from the album, which has an almost classical feel to much of it, despite the title―“The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife Are Some Jive Ass Slippers.”

To accompany the album Mingus wrote a strong extended essay, which got some notoriety. Here’s part of what he said:

I think the music on this record is serious in every sense. I say, let my children have music. I said it earlier. For God’s sake, rid this society of some of the noise so that those who have ears will be able to use them some place listening to good music. When I say good I don’t mean that today’s music is bad because it is loud. I mean the structures have paid no attention to the past history of music. Nothing is simple. It’s as if people came to Manhattan and acted like it was still full of trees and grass and Indians instead of concrete and tall buildings. It’s like a tailor cutting clothes without knowing the design. . . .

Sy Johnson―my good friend, now deceased―orchestrated, arranged and conducted much of the Children album. You can find his comments throughout my book Mingus Speaks. Here’s one such: Mingus’s “music is just full of earth and it’s always got its feet in the dirt. I mean it’s jazz, it has human cries in it, and it’s full of humanity.”

I’d like to think that may be what appealed to Kamala. Her humanity is the foundation of her appeal. It’s what people tune in to. And it’s more important than all the money she’s raised and all the memes that have taken hold online. That is what will beat Trump.