A billion dollars is a lot of money, and Kamala Harris has reason to be extremely proud of raising that amount in less than three months. It’s roughly what Joe Biden raised in the entirety of 2020. Harris has also just completed a tour of fawning television interviews — from The View to Howard Stern to Stephen Colbert, who nudged, coached and celebrated their mutual idol. She had a terrific convention and, by everyone’s judgment, won the sole debate. The entire legacy media is behind her, at times embarrassingly so.
And yet, she’s obviously struggling to close the sale. At this point in 2020, Joe Biden, with far fewer resources than Harris, was 10 points ahead of Trump, and finished around 8.4 points ahead in the polling. Biden won the actual election by 4.5 percent, almost half the margin the polls predicted. At this point in 2016, Hillary Clinton was 6 points ahead, finished 3.6 points ahead in the polls, and ended up 2.1 percent ahead in the popular vote.
Run the numbers on Harris and you can begin to realize why smart Democrats are browning their whites. Today, Harris has a lead of just 2.6 percent nationally — much weaker than Clinton and Biden at this point. It’s the same in the swing states. Cillizza notes that in Pennsylvania at this point, Biden was +7 and Harris is barely +1; in Michigan, Biden was + 8, and Harris is tied. If the polls underestimated Trump's national support by 2.5 points in 2016 and by 4 points in 2020, and the skew continues, then we could well be looking at the first victory in the popular vote that Trump has ever won. More to the point, nothing is really shifting. If anything, there’s a slight drift back toward Trump right now.
The big infomercial push was obviously a response to this. So I dutifully sat down and listened to or watched Harris’ media appearances, to see if she had found a way to close the deal with undecideds. I wanted to hear her answer two baseline questions that are still unresolved in my own mind. Why do you want to be president? And what change would you bring to the White House and the country?
These are not hard questions. They’re the most fundamental to a presidential campaign, and having listened to her closely in these interviews, I still don’t know. She has quietly dropped many previous positions on the border, fracking, Medicare. And, yes, she has offered some new policies. It’s unfair to say she hasn’t by this point. But giveaways to first-time homeowners and entrepreneurs, and help with aging parents and money to new parents, have not exactly seized the public’s attention. She flounders when asked how she’d pay for them, and over all, they remind me of Churchill’s remark: “Take away this pudding! It has no theme.” “I was born in a middle-class family” doesn’t cut it.
The closest Harris has gotten to articulating her agenda is the following, from the 60 Minutes interview:
In the last four years, I have been vice president of the United States. And I have been traveling our country. And I have been listening to folks and seeking what is possible in terms of common ground. I believe in building consensus. We are a diverse people. Geographically, regionally, in terms of where we are in our backgrounds. And what the American people do want is that we have leaders who can build consensus. Where we can figure out compromise and understand it’s not a bad thing, as long as you don’t compromise your values, to find common-sense solutions. And that has been my approach.
This is a classic Harris quote. It’s impossible to disagree with, but it’s also so empty that it’s hard even to agree with it either. It doesn’t tell us what she personally would push for before she’d compromise, what she really has conviction about, what she really believes in. In fact, the more I listened to her in these interviews, the more worried I became that she doesn’t actually believe in anything.
She’d have a Republican in the cabinet. Fine. Good, actually. But without substantive examples of possible compromises, apart from the Lankford bill (which was about expediting mass migration, not stopping it), it’s weak sauce compared to Make America Great Again, Cut Your Taxes, End the Wars, and Deport All The Illegals. Trump knows how to sell — in fourth grade language. Harris only knows how to charm elite liberals — in language only elite liberals use. It’s the only political skill she’s ever needed to have. And it’s not going to be enough.
And when directly asked what change she would bring compared with Biden, she actually said none. Twice! When only 28 percent of Americans think the country is on the right track! On The View, Harris said she’d have done nothing different in the last four years; on Colbert, she said the change was that she was “not Joe Biden” and that she was “not Donald Trump either.” When asked by 60 Minutes whether she regretted unprecedented levels of illegal mass migration and abuse of asylum laws, she said: “It’s a longstanding problem. And solutions are at hand. And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions.” She doesn’t answer the questions in a way that makes it very clear she is not answering the questions.
Asked by 60 Minutes what her end-game would be in Ukraine, she said: “There will be no success in ending that war without Ukraine and the UN charter participating in what that success looks like.” Here’s her response to a question about Netanyahu: “We are not gonna stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.” FFS.
She also utters these platitudes as if she is revealing some profound and previously unheard-of truths. Perhaps in her mind she is, which is somewhat disconcerting. And I’m not sure that showing her being feted by Howard Stern, who acted like an over-excited fangirl, or by Stephen Colbert in front of a rapturous Manhattan audience, is going to win over the few undecideds in the Midwest.
In fact, choosing these pliant tools, far from dispelling the notion that Harris is scared of robust questioning, just reinforces it. “I don’t want you being made fun of,” Stern confessed. Colbert gushed, “I want to talk about the debate for a second, which was one of the greatest debate performances I had ever seen anyone do.” In my view, what Harris really needs to do is a Fox News townhall or a rollicking, risky press conference, where she takes command. (She has just agreed to a CNN townhall, which is encouraging.) Buttigieg can do it. So can every candidate in living memory. So why can’t she?
Because — let’s be honest — her team either fears or knows she may not be up to it. And this is bleeding obvious. A presidential campaign where you rarely face the press, never deal with a hostile interview, and never hold a presser is a campaign defined by fear. You can smell it from miles away. The same explains the one decision she says she made alone: picking Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro. Walz didn’t make her feel insecure. Shapiro did. So she went with Tim. Not a great sign for a future president.
Look: I’m voting for her. Or rather, I’m voting against Trump. (The most striking aspect of the various endorsements of Harris — from The New Yorker to The Atlantic — is that they were almost entirely about Trump.) But I’ll tell you this: catching Trump’s various podcast and radio spots gives a very different impression. He is as reckless as she is careful; as conversational and natural as she is stilted and scripted. He is much more comfortable in the new media universe than she is.
Check out his interview with Theo Von, and watch him and Theo talk about cocaine addiction; or see Trump’s appearance on comic Andrew Shulz’s show. Here’s Schulz bursting out laughing when Trump says he’s “a basically truthful person” — and Trump carries on. And here is Trump explaining his stream-of-consciousness rally speeches:
I call it the weave. What you do is you weave things in ... What you need is an extraordinary memory because you have to get back to where you started. I can go so far here or there. And I can come back to where I started. And some people think it's so genius. But the bad people they say he was rambling. It's not a ramble. It’s a weave!
Then he talks about his talent for giving his enemies nicknames, like “Tampon Tim.” He doesn’t use some because they don’t trip off the tongue, like “Comrade Kamala.” “You’ve got to be able to peewm,” he explains. The interview was less fawning than Call Her Daddy’s. At one point, Schulz interruptsTrump when he badmouths America now: “It’s always a great country.”
Can Harris take a risk? Can she break out of this defensive, insecure crouch? Can she borrow just a smidgen of the fierce game Obama was showing last night? I hope so. But this, I fear, is who she is: reactive, insecure, with no real inner core. And the more you are exposed to her vacuousness, the more the whole fakery of it all sinks in, and the less conceivable she becomes as a president. She has to change that dynamic with something bold and risky. And she has around three weeks to do it.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a paid subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: a rollicking chat with Walter Kirn on Middle America and the election; many reader dissents over my take on Vance; eight notable quotes from the week in news, including an Yglesias Award about Ta-Nehisi; 20 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break of dreamy Joe Rogan back in the day; a cool window from Norway; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
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New On The Dishcast: Walter Kirn
Walter is a novelist, literary critic, and journalist. He’s written eight books, most famously Up in the Air, which became a film starring George Clooney. He’s now the editor-at-large for County Highway and co-hosts a weekly podcast with Matt Taibbi, “America This Week.” Way back in the day, I edited his work for The New Republic, and he guest-blogged for the Dish.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on Tim Walz as a “white minstrel” of a Midwesterner, and Walter watching speeches by Obama and Trump on LSD. That link also takes you to commentary on recent episodes on animal welfare, Trump, and Harris. Readers also continue to debate many aspects of the presidential race.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Tina Brown on her new substack, Musa al-Gharbi on wokeness, Sam Harris for our quadrennial chat before Election Day, and Damon Linker on the election results. Wait, there’s more: Peggy Noonan on America, Anderson Cooper on grief, Christine Rosen on humanness in a digital world, Mary Matalin on anything but politics, and John Gray on, well, everything.
Please send any guest recommendations, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com. A fan of the pod writes:
I love hearing your thoughts/beliefs and discussions on Christianity. Your honest exploration and openness to the ideas of others from a different — or even no — faith helps me think through my own beliefs.
Hearing your reverence for the Catholic mass makes me want to go back and visit the church (I’m a Protestant now). My father just died, and he will have a Catholic funeral. As sad as I feel about his death, I feel some comfort at returning to my home church for the service, especially the music.
I get it! I get being really, really unhappy with Harris and desperately wanting a sane, normie, well-spoken conservative to endorse. But Vance is not your savior. Sure, he did an awesome job sane-washing Trump — sounding polished and civil during the debate. But this supposedly devout Catholic has apparently never heard of “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor,” judging by his telling his supporters to keep the Haitians-are-eating-cats memes coming. And, of course, he supports Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election. He has sold his conscience in exchange for power.
I have written as much earlier this summer. But I may have a little more sympathy for Vance’s plight. He cannot realistically hope to forge a new conservatism without allying with Trump. So he is constrained. But I can hope there is something in there that also understands why Trump is so toxic. There was once.
Another dissent:
Almost 20 years ago, you denounced a “conservatism of faith”: a big government, theoconservative, freedom-hating, tariff- and tax- and spend-loving ideology that had little concern for limited government. And then you broke up with the GOP — for good, I thought. But now you are praising Vance and his commitment to a “pro-family policy pragmatism, a more realist foreign policy, and a less culturally progressive government.”
Everything you accused the Bush-era GOP of being, Vance is to a greater extent. He is a committed “postliberal” — that is, a theocon on steroids. He is committed to using state power to enforce traditional morality. He wants to ban pornography and disenfranchise childless people through a bizarre scheme to allow parents to cast votes as proxies for their children.
On the subject of economics, Vance does not favor free-market friendly attempts to reduce poverty — think UBI — but massive, top-down government intervention in the economy. He wants to raise the minimum wage to at least $11 an hour, perhaps $20 (outbidding Bernie Sanders and the Squad, I guess). Channeling Marx, he has stated that housing shouldn’t be a “commodity”.
He is the absolute embodiment of everything you denounced in “Crisis of Faith,” and yet you have proudly declared that you would vote for him over Harris. What happened to your commitment to the conservatism of doubt — to your view that “the market is a much more reliable indicator of how individuals actually want to live their lives than a government directive or program”? Have you asked yourself why you lost your old conviction that conservatism should be “dedicated to restraining government and empowering individuals to live rich and fulfilling lives”?
There’s a lot to unpack there. Read my response here (for paid subscribers), along with a few more dissents. More still on the pod page, on a variety of topics. Please keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as the Oct 7 anniversary, Diddy, and “the Robin DiAngelo of gender.” Below is one example, followed by three new substacks:
Richard Hanania details how “conservatives are lying about immigrant crime.”
Ana Kasparian just launched Unaligned, “a place for open minds and ideas that transcend partisan purity.”
Zaid Jilani recently launched The American Saga, “a decidedly anti-partisan perspective.”
Here’s a list of the substacks we recommend in general — call it a blogroll. If you have any suggestions for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the contest). Contest archive is here. Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. There you’ll find the latest remix from the super-sleuth in San Mateo:
After my VFYW Reimagined featuring the garden arch with the Monet-inspired water lilies, I thought this week I’d vamp on the double street names at this location — by creating a type of double image called an anaglyph. An anaglyph is two superimposed images taken from slightly offset positions and rendered with different colors to create a 3D effect when viewed with special glasses:
