The Weekly Sift

After Biden stepped down, the story was supposed to be “Democrats in Chaos”.
But instead it’s the Republicans who are floundering.

---

If this were an ordinary election cycle, Trump would be flying high right now. The out-of-power party usually holds its convention first, gets a lot of media attention for its message, paints its nominee in his or her most favorable light, and has a bright new (or maybe distinguished old) vice presidential nominee everyone’s excited about. In 1988, that combination of factors temporarily gave Mike Dukakis a 17-point polling lead over George H. W. Bush. Then the Republicans held their convention, and the rest is history.

If anything, you’d expect Trump to be flying higher than is typical for the inter-convention lag, because he survived an assassination attempt. Right now, he should be getting as much sympathy as he’s ever going to get. And Kamala Harris is an unknown quantity who wasn’t even considered all that popular even a week ago.

Instead, just about every poll is within the margin of error. The RCP polling average has Trump up 1.7%, down from the 3.1% lead he had on Joe Biden. And the news cycle is running in Harris’ favor. She’s raising incredible amounts of money and signing up incredible numbers of volunteers. She’s getting new endorsements just about every day. (Barack and Michelle Obama have disdained the kingmaker role in the Democratic Party, so their endorsements Friday put the final exclamation point on Harris’ rise.) In a few weeks she’ll have her own convention to showcase her vision, and her own shiny new VP candidate.

I’ve had to admit to being wrong about a lot of things lately, so what’s a few more? I totally did not anticipate how smoothly the transition from Biden to Harris would go, how quickly Democrats would unite behind Harris, and just how exciting the whole process would be. Harris was ready to go, Democrats were eager to get past the angst of the previous month, and Harris’ people have artfully exploited social media, especially Tik Tok. Framing the race as the Future vs. the Past is brilliant. “We are not going back” is the perfect response to “Make America Great Again“.

Biden’s gracious exit had a lot to do with this, and I think we should all be grateful to him. He has been an excellent president under difficult circumstances, and I agree with him that he deserved a chance at a second term. But the future of American democracy depends on beating Trump, and he came to recognize that he wasn’t in a good position to do that. So he responded to the world as it is rather than the world as it should be.

---

The Harris boom seemed to take the Trump campaign by surprise, in spite how often they had claimed Biden would have to step aside. I think that’s because Trump himself still cannot imagine how someone with power could voluntarily surrender it for the common good. [1] In a similar situation (which he is sort of in now — he’s the over-the-hill guy dragging his party down) he would be plotting his next coup, not anointing his successor. Even if he could somehow be induced to withdraw, he couldn’t possibly do it without whining.

So Republicans didn’t have anti-Harris talking points ready to go, and instead fell back on kneejerk racist and sexist attacks.

Dahlia Lithwick has a complex but worthwhile interpretation of the whole catalog of attacks against Harris: DEI hire, slept her way to the top, Jezebel, childless cat lady, and so on. What unites these lines of attack is the belief that a woman’s life is not the sum of her own choices, but the sum of the judgments men have made about her. The attacks are “rooted in the idea that any woman who succeeds in America does so only because men desire her, sleep with her, promote her, and support her”. Those kinds of attacks may have worked in the past, but after Dobbs, American women have been pushed too far.

There are a thousand good reasons that going after Harris for her race and gender are stupid and should stop now. But from a purely strategic perspective, chief among these reasons is that every woman who votes has been told within the past two years that someone else—a doctor, a legislator, a husband, a Supreme Court justice—is better suited to make life choices for her than she is. I’m not sure they’re buying it. Reducing Harris this time around to a cartoon version of a person who never made any real choices because powerful men have been slinging her around the chessboard for 30 years is not a persuasive argument for the GOP, even while it’s a familiar one. Maybe Republicans think women resonate with being called lazy sluts who stand on the shoulders of powerful men for the entirety of their careers. But it seems to me that a failure to treat the putative next president as a moral and political actor in her own right signals a failure to believe that women voters are themselves moral and political actors as well.

---

Having watched their initial attacks backfire, Republicans seem to have settled on framing Harris as a “San Francisco radical“.

This is another thing Republicans do that Democrats don’t: demonize parts of America. Democrats threw the kitchen sink at George W. Bush, but I never heard anybody say that he was bad because he was from Texas. Ted Cruz and Greg Abbott are objectionable because of their beliefs, actions, and character, not their home state.

Anyway, the San-Francisco-radical attack seems to be centering on Harris’ support for defund-the-police policies, San Francisco’s status as a “sanctuary city”, and her role in the Biden administration’s border policies. She must have anticipated this, so we’ll see how she responds.

Oh, and she supposedly wants to ban plastic straws. (She does, but only after somebody comes up with a better paper straw.) Clearly this is a great issue for Republicans to build their national campaign around. Forget climate change, abortion, Ukraine, democracy, the Supreme Court — plastic straws.

---

I consider myself attuned to the symbolic meaning of various superheroes. But I’ve been surprised by one association: Kamala Harris as Captain America. I might have expected Storm from the X-Men, or a warrior from Wakanda, or even a white female icon like Wonder Woman. But no: Captain America. And it works.

---

I expect the Democratic Convention to contrast strongly with the Republican Convention, and that it will provide Harris with the polling bounce Trump didn’t get. One reason: Democrats are not ashamed of their recent history.

Two weeks ago, the RNC engineered none of those emotional moments we often see at conventions, when the party loudly applauds some elder statesman. Think about all the people who could have been featured at the Republican Convention but weren’t: most obviously Mike Pence, but also the Bush family, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, and Mitch McConnell. Cindy McCain could have waved to a crowd cheering the memory of her husband. None of that happened, because today’s Republican Party has no past. It’s just Trump.

But in Chicago next month, Joe Biden’s ovation will probably last longer than his speech. Barack Obama will be welcomed home. Hillary Clinton will pass her glass-ceiling-breaking torch to Kamala. Maybe there’ll be one last video montage paying homage to Jimmy Carter. Rising stars like Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer will get prime-time slots. And I guarantee you that Harris and whoever she picks as VP will give more inspiring acceptance speeches than Trump and Vance did.

It will be great TV. People will feel good watching it. And it will move the needle.

---

---

[1] When DC relaunched Superman in 1986, John Byrne came up with a new solution to an old problem: If Lex Luthor is so brilliant, why can’t he figure out that Superman is Clark Kent? The answer came in Superman #2 “The Secret Revealed”. Luthor had a subordinate investigate what relationship Superman had to Kent, and the answer came back that they were the same person.

Luthor fired that woman, because “I know better. I know that no man with the power of Superman would ever pretend to be a mere human. Such power is to be constantly exploited. Such power is to be used.”

In short, he had the answer, but his worldview wouldn’t let him accept it. That’s also what happened to Trump. Sure, he kept saying the Democrats would have to replace Biden, but he couldn’t imagine that Biden would step aside gracefully for the good of his party and the country. Because Trump knows better. He knows that human beings will hang onto power at all costs, because that’s what he tried to do after he lost the 2020 election.