The Democrats and the media are still scared shitless of Trump

The media wants you to think of the current race as something akin to a prime 2008 Barack Obama battling a beleaguered 2016 Donald Trump.  The one is the candidate of all our hopes, dreams, and aspirations.  The other is completely unhinged, bitter, angry, and unfit. Both are serious cases of projection…

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” is a classic Shakespearean phrase that encapsulates our penchant for overcompensating when we aren’t nearly as confident as we’d like to believe.  The line occurs in the famous “play within a play” in Act 3 of Hamlet, when the titular prince sets a trap for his uncle by asking the performers to recreate the murder of his father, hoping that the “plays the thing” to “catch the conscience of the king.”  The Player Queen, an obvious stand in for the real queen, Gertrude, insists she would rather die than be remarried.  “The instances that second marriage move Are base respects of thrift, but none of love. A second time I kill my husband dead When second husband kisses me in bed.”  Gertrude has, of course, already remarried, to the man who murdered her husband no less.  Confronted with her analog on stage, she exclaims that the Player Queen protests too much when Hamlet asks her, “Madam, how like you this play?”  This infamous reaction captures the complexity of human nature in a few short words the way only Shakespeare can.  Gertrude is simultaneously guilty about her own transgressions and therefore projecting them onto the play itself, as Hamlet believed would be the case, but the Player Queen is also making statements about the future she cannot possibly be sure of either, not knowing how events will unfold.  While we might prefer to attribute this sort of reaction to Gertrude alone, the phenomena is typical of people in general.  There’s a reason why we doubt when someone protests their honesty too much, proclaims their innocence a few too many times, or generally seems to be overcompensating for something in matters both large and small.  Given few things are larger than the outcome of a Presidential contest, we will find this same tendency on both sides of the political aisle, but rarely has it been so manifest in the sudden coronation and perceived rise of Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz.  To hear Democrats and the media tell it, the Vice President has instantly become the most dynamic figure on the American political scene, completely upending the presidential race by spreading “joy” and generating positive “vibes,” rising in the polls as fast as anyone we’d ever seen while driving her opponent crazy, leaving him unhinged and unable to adapt.  Think of it as something akin to a prime 2008 Barack Obama battling a beleaguered 2016 Donald Trump.  The one is the candidate of all our hopes, dreams, and aspirations.  The other is completely unhinged, bitter, angry, and unfit.

Perhaps needless to say, the underlying reality isn’t nearly as clear as the prevailing narrative holds.   Despite claims that Vice President Harris is running away with the race by riding a wave of momentum and presumed popular support, she currently leads Donald Trump by a scant 1% in the Real Clear Politics national average, an approximate shift in the race of four points since she joined.  (Please note, these numbers are as of Friday afternoon, new, somewhat outlier polls from The New York Times and Sienna have shifted them slightly in Vice President Harris’ favor since the time of this writing.)   Further, the underlying polls themselves are scattered, some in favor of the Vice President, some the former President, and almost all within the margin of error.  For example, Emerson has Harris with her widest lead of 4% while Rasmussen has Trump with the same advantage.  Pew, meanwhile, has Harris up one while Fox shows Trump up the same; CNBC has Trump up two; Ipsos has Harris the same.  The battleground states are equally scattered and even harder to measure.  Here, President Trump retains a small advantage, and as of Friday, was leading in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, and Georgia.  Similarly, recent polls show a dead heat in Michigan and Wisconsin though Vice President Harris maintains small leads in both states (2.1% and 1% respectively).  However you look at it, the race remains highly competitive based on the supposedly objective data, with partisans on either side able to pick polls that show their preferred candidate is likely to prevail.  At best, the Vice President’s stunning rise has been rather limited and her momentum more a breeze than a gale force wind.  At worst, there is reason to believe all if it is an illusion if you consider the historical difficulty of polling President Trump in particular, sound and fury signifying nothing to use another Shakespeare quote.  Whatever your opinion of the former President, the 2020 election featured the largest polling error in 40 years according to Vanderbilt University.  As they described in July 2021, “Public opinion polls ahead of the 2020 election were the most inaccurate in a generation, according to Josh Clinton, Abby and Jon Winkelried Chair and professor of political science, who recently served as chair of a special task force convened by the American Association for Public Opinion Research specifically to evaluate polling. The task force found that polling during the two weeks before the election overstated support for then-Democratic nominee Joe Biden by 3.9 percentage points, which was the largest polling error since 1980 when support for Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter was overestimated by 6 percentage points. The presidential election between Biden, the eventual winner, and incumbent president Donald Trump was much closer than polling had indicated.”

Of course, past performance is no guarantee of future results, but as recently as May, ABC News reported that pollsters “still face Trump-era challenges,” noting that “in the face of a third Trump candidacy, another major topic of conversation was how pollsters have turned to weighting their samples at least in part by the 2020 vote preferences of respondents — one way to try to correct for fewer responses from Republican-leaning voters.  Still, different sampling and weighting techniques featured trade-offs and offered no silver bullets.”  They continued to quote Cameron McPhee, chief methodologist for SSRS, a nonpartisan pollster who works with CNN.  “We’re trying to measure very small shifts in people’s attitudes and opinions about the candidates and the election and the state of the country.”  In other words, at least some of the perceived momentum could be a self-fulfilling prophecy as pollsters “tweak” their models to reflect the perception of a changed race rather than reality, but if we were to apply the average polling errors from 2016 and 2020, President Trump is currently leading by a significant margin and will handily defeat Vice President Harris by a larger electoral total than he did Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  Is this wishful thinking on my part?  It might well be, but no more so than reading relatively small if not outright tiny changes in the polls and concluding we are witnessing a never before seen political phenomena so potent and powerful that her opponent simply can’t come to grips with the greatness.  This might be said to be doubly true considering the person they claim has conjured this unprecedented political trick was most recently a punch line for being the least popular Vice President in modern history.  As Jimmy Kimmel quipped when her approval rating sank to 28%, how is that even possible for a Vice President?  It’s like hating on the second string quarterback.  To put this in perspective, Dick Cheney had a higher rating after he shot someone in the face.

There is also the old saying, not attributable to Shakespeare unfortunately, that actions speak louder than words, that we should watch what people do rather than what they say to ascertain the truth about how they really feel.  Here, we find precious little that would lead us to believe the Vice President has, so far, achieved anything near a groundbreaking momentum.  If she were so confident in her abilities, she wouldn’t need to hide herself and her running mate from reporters or press conferences to the point where even the mainstream media has taken notice.  CNN’s Jim Acosta actually had to reduce himself to asking a campaign spokesperson last week point blank, “Would it kill you to have a press conference?  Why haven’t you had a press conference?”  Rather than immediately agreeing to one, the spokesperson chuckled at the very idea, claiming “Listen, Vice President and Governor Walz have been busy crisscrossing this country since the launch of this campaign” despite that they had few to no campaign events scheduled the entire week.  Mr. Acosta pressed him further, “You know a campaign rally is not a press conference, do you mind if I cut in?  Why hasn’t she had a press conference?  She’s the Vice President.  She can handle the questions.  Why not do it?”  Bizarrely, the spokesperson claimed, “We actually are going to do and you hear her take questions out on the stump,” another fabrication when the only non-scripted answer she’s given in a month was a jumbled statement about understanding the power of diplomacy.  “She said last week we’re going to have a sit down interview here before the end of the month,” the spokesperson protested, knowing the month was barely half over.  Instead of talking to reporters and the American public, “What she’s going to be focused on, what this campaign is gonna be focused on, is communicating directly with the voters that are going to decide who gets 270 electoral votes.”  Mr. Acosta, to his credit, was unimpressed, asking “Is she going to commit to a press conference this week?”  Again, the campaign spokesperson demurred, claiming “that’s why we’re doing a bus tour” and reiterating that they’d do a single paltry interview sometime in the next three weeks.  For his part, Governor Walz has also been conspicuously absent from any and all press availabilities, perhaps the least media exposed Vice Presidential candidate in modern memory, especially compared to his Republican counterpart, Senator JD Vance, who appeared on all three major talk shows recently.  He also went so far as to taunt his opponent by stopping by Air Force Two because the reporters there must be lonely.

In the meantime, Vice President Harris and Governor Walz somehow found time to release perhaps the cringiest piece of staged, scripted, completely irrelevant and unfunny political propaganda ever conceived, released as a YouTube video last week.  In it, the newly minted dynamic duo are supposed to be having a “normal” conversation about themselves and the state of the race and the country, just regular people like you and me concerned about the future.  After all, “We talk about it being halftime in America,” explains Governor Walz.  “We’re a touchdown behind and I kind of like the idea of being a little bit behind,” only to have the Vice President cackle in response, “Well, I’m looking at Coach Walz right now.  I’m looking at Coach Walz.”  From there, they diverge into a strange, perhaps even racist aside, were this a Republican, about “white guy” tacos and black pepper being the top of the spice level in Minnesota, while the Vice President believes she’s the first of her kind to grow chili peppers in the official residence the Naval Observatory.  As if this discussion wasn’t riveting enough, they continue to an obviously staged scene where they claim Governor Walz missed Vice President Harris’ phone call to join her on the ticket, as if neither of them has staff to coordinate basic scheduling functions.  All that was missing was a “Can you hear me now?” and claims of a bad signal.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t get better throughout the next seven minutes.  Bromides are piled on top of platitudes, so many that one wonders if the script was assembled by randomly piecing together the talking points of other likely failed politicians.  They talk about America as a hopeful country, the excitement they are generating, how we’re seeing “exactly who we are as America,” and the only way they win is “they keep the pedal to the metal.”  Perhaps the only interesting segment is when Governor Walz talks about Bruce Springsteen’s The River as a transformational album in his life after he got his first car in 1980.  Even this, however, is completely undermined when the Vice President claims she’s not only familiar with one of Springsteen’s more obscure efforts, but actually knows the full track listing of the double album.  (Someone should ask her to sing “Drive All Night, by the way.)  This is akin to her once claiming she smoked a lot of pot and listened to Tupac in college despite that he debuted years later.  Regardless, there was no substance anywhere to be found, nothing resembling real, actual people.

The substance, of course, was supposed to come the following day in the form of a new economic plan announced in Raleigh, NC, but even that went so poorly, The Washington Post of all outlets, saw fit to tear it apart before it was even officially released.  As the left of center economist Catherine Rampell quipped, “When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?”  In her view, it was hard to overstate how bad the plan was, “‘Price gouging’ is the focus of Vice President Kamala Harris’s economic agenda, her presidential campaign says. She’ll crack down on ‘excessive prices’ and ‘excessive corporate profits,’ particularly for groceries.  So what level counts as ‘excessive,’ you might ask? TBD, but Harris will ban it.  That’s the thing about price gouging: As has been said of hardcore pornography, you know it when you see it.”  She continued, attributing a purely political purpose for the mishmash of mostly recycled ideas, “It’s not hard to figure out where this proposal came from. Voters want to blame someone for high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate greed. Harris has chosen the latter.”  The entire editorial board wasn’t much more flattering the next day.  “Americans are clearly still anxious and angry about the high cost of groceries, housing and even $5.29 Big Macs. While the inflation rate has cooled substantially since the 2022 peak, an ostensible Biden-Harris administration accomplishment, prices remain elevated relative to the Trump years. So it’s a real political issue for Ms. Harris. One way to handle it might be to level with voters, telling them that inflation spiked in 2021 mainly because the pandemic snarled supply chains, and that the Federal Reserve’s policies, which the Biden-Harris administration supported, are working to slow it. The vice president instead opted for a less forthright route: Blaming big business. She vowed to go after ‘price gouging’ by grocery stores, landlords, pharmaceutical companies and other supposed corporate perpetrators by having the Federal Trade Commission enforce a vaguely defined ‘federal ban on price gouging.’  Never mind that many stores are currently slashing prices in response to renewed consumer bargain hunting. Ms. Harris says she’ll target companies that make ‘excessive’ profits, whatever that means.”  They concluded, “Even adjusted for the pandering standards of campaign economics…Ms. Harris’s speech Friday ranks as a disappointment.” A more general disappointment, it seems, is likely in order and resuming the regular ranting about President Trump turned up to eleven, seriously CNN referred to him as having a “discombobulation” while “raging” last Friday, isn’t likely to help in that regard either. All of this says a lot more about their weaknesses than anything else.