No sentient, compassionate being could begrudge the Democrats this week this small, still moment of relief and even joy. From what seemed like certain Electoral College death, with a candidate who is manifestly mentally and physically incapable of being president for four more years, they are now in the throes of Kamala euphoria. And who could blame them? In an instant, the Democratic ticket is the younger option for American voters; a fresh alternative to the previously dotaged duo; a non-white and female breakthrough, which has already narrowed the Trump lead. It’s a female Obama!
The initial themes Harris deployed, more to the point, seemed solid against Trump: prosecutor vs felon; future vs past; positivity vs hatred. She gave speeches that finally worked. Her opening ad centered a word usually associated with the right in America: “freedom” — to the sound of Beyoncé. And the polls showed a small recovery for the Democrats among black, Latino, and young Brat-ty voters. The swiftness of Harris’ consolidation of support also gave off the hint of a political canniness previously absent from her vice-presidency. And the mainstream media pivoted instantly to hype, hope, excitement and ... amnesia.
Yes, amnesia. With Harris, amnesia is essential. We all have to become unburdened by what we — and, more specifically she — have been. And beneath the enthusiasm linger some obvious, loud, unanswered questions. Why did Biden so quickly put his weight behind a vice president he had previously ignored, sidelined, and regarded — according to almost every media outlet — as something of a burden? Why has Obama taken his sweet time to endorse her, after calling for an open nominating process? And why did no other viable candidate come forward to challenge her?
The official answer is that a Harris nomination avoided a mess at the convention, quickly united and energized the party, safeguarded Biden’s war chest, and solidified the demographics of the base. Fair enough, and it seems to have worked (although I suspect a little chaos and a fresh face emerging from the convention would still have been preferable).
But there are other plausible explanations for Harris’ unexpectedly sudden dominance. Could it be that Biden and all of Harris’ rivals still expect to lose in November, and Harris is a useful sacrificial lamb? Or that Biden suspects that a Harris defeat would vindicate him in retrospect? Or that the Dem governors knew it would be political death to challenge a black, female candidate for president in a woke party, and see 2028 as by far their best shot?
I suspect it’s a mix of all of the above — and not quite the strategic breakthrough some may want it to be. And Harris’ opening ad takes a bold stand against “chaos, fear and hate” and issues a brave call for freedom, universal healthcare, and public safety. And maybe the platitudinous vagueness of this is just the overture before we get actual proposals or policies. But at some point, Harris is going to have to square what she has said and done in the past with what she proposes to do as president.
Her record on the national stage — from 2019 till now — is that of a super-woke leftist. In speech after speech, and in an ad she narrated just before the 2020 election, she insists on the need for “equity” as well as “equality,” and by “equity” she means that “everyone ends up in the same place.” She is a presidential candidate who endorses “equality of outcomes” over “equality of opportunity,” a position that even Communist China has now abandoned.
One moment in her catastrophic 2020 campaign for the Dem nomination also stood out for me. There was a discussion in a debate about issuing an executive order that would ban all assault weapons. Biden made the simple point that this was not within the president’s constitutional authority: “There are some things you can do [as president]. Many things you can’t.” Harris replied, giggling: “I would just say, Hey Joe, instead of saying no we can’t, let’s say yes we can. And yes we can!” As she said this, she burst into hysterical laughter. Go watch the clip. She’s not a serious person.
In the only primaries outside California she campaigned in, she favored decriminalizing illegal border crossings and compared ICE to the KKK. On June 1, 2020, as BLM riots were so spreading out of control that even the NYT had an A1 story the day before — “Appeals for Calm as Sprawling Protests Threaten to Spiral Out of Control” — she tweeted out a bail fund for those arrested in the rioting, and urged people to donate. As the chaos surged in June, she told Stephen Colbert:
They’re not going to stop. This is a movement, I’m telling you. And everyone beware. They’re not gonna stop … They’re not going to let up and they should not. And we should not.
Also in June 2020, she said on national television, “It is outdated, and it is actually wrong and backward to think that more police officers will create more safety.”
Harris believes illegal aliens should get work authorization and free healthcare. She favors unproven, irreversible medical experiments on gay, autistic, and trans children. She favors, and the Biden administration has enforced, systemic government discrimination against men, whites, Jews and Asians to compensate for past discrimination against African-Americans and women. Her Senate record is one long series of DEI initiatives. And yes, Biden selected her using a DEI process: no men were to be considered, and in the hysteria of 2020, white women were also seen as no-go areas for the veep role.
Her record as vice president rivals Dan Quayle’s. Every single media outlet, including all the mainstream ones, said so until last week. No, she wasn’t given the formal title of “Border Czar,” because such a title doesn’t exist. But she was the administration’s “point-person” on immigration and the Southern border, as every media outlet also told us until this week. So she is strongly attached to the Democrats’ weakest issue by far: mass, illegal immigration.
She deserves some pity for this. The Biden administration, unwilling to do anything to stop the illegal influx, stuck poor Harris with the task of so reforming Central America’s dysfunctional countries that no one there would ever want to leave. So of course she failed. She was, in reality, deployed to deflect the issue of mass illegal immigration away from Biden — not to actually do anything. But that video of her reiterating in weird, somber tones — “Do not come. Do not come.” — added a patina of excruciating cringe.
She’s also obviously incredibly insecure. That laugh is a nervous one — it’s to cover up her awkwardness and her inability to say something that actually means something. All of those famous, inane, Jack Handy ramblings about space or the passage of time are designed to say something meaningful while not saying anything concrete:
I think it’s very important, as you have heard from so many incredible leaders, for us at every moment in time, and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past but the future.
What the fuck does any of that mean? And what does she actually believe in? From locking up criminals as California’s AG to pushing bail for BLM rioters, from imprisoning cannabis users to favoring national weed legalization — is quite a journey. It will be interesting to watch the campaign and see if Harris is able to tell a story of her different political identities that doesn’t amount to pure expediency.
And she is a world-historically bad manager of people. That’s not my view or the view of the GOP. It’s the view of almost everyone who ever worked for her. In just her first year-and-a-half as veep, Harris lost her chief of staff, communications director, domestic-policy adviser, and national security adviser. After three years, she had a 92 percent staff turnover! Only 4 out of an original 47 could stick it out.
She wasn’t much better in the Senate, ranking #9 out of 114 for highest turnover from 2017 to 2020. Her presidential campaign was plagued by in-fighting, family members — her sister, Maya, in particular — pulling rank, constant leaks to the press, strategic incoherence, and endless resignations and layoffs. She blew threw $40 million and had to pull out two months before Iowa. “You can’t run the country if you can’t run your campaign,” wrote Gil Duran, a former staffer.
If you want to read a classic examination of how not to run a political campaign, check out the NYT’s retrospective piece. It’s brutal. Think of how Obama ran his campaigns. Now imagine the exact, polar opposite. That’s All-Drama Kamala. And all the staffers echo the same complaint: she doesn’t do her homework and then berates aides who try to help her. She was vindictive and toxic as an employer. In greasy pole Washington, attaching yourself to a veep is a rare chance for access to power, a jewel in the careerist crown. And yet so many ambitious and previously successful people simply couldn’t work for Harris without quitting in bitterness and disdain.
I raise these issues not to rain on the Democrats’ parade — they deserve a moment of jubilation and relief — merely to recognize the reality they now face. And look: in 2024, who knows what could happen? Maybe Harris’ relative youth (she’s my age!), her sex, her non-whiteness, and her freshness will change the dynamics of the race. She’s certainly off to a strong start, and the MSM will go overboard in celebrating her. Maybe Trump will suddenly seem too old or too nasty or now just too boring in comparison. Maybe he’s peaked way too soon. Maybe ugly personal attacks on her — along with the weirdness of J.D. Vance — could shift things one more time. Maybe Harris is key to preventing black and Latino and youth defections to the GOP. I don’t know. The race remains tight. And anyone predicting anything right now needs to remember where we were just three weeks ago.
But I’ll say this. Harris is one of the weakest and wokest Democratic candidates there is. She cannot credibly appeal to the center after such extreme-left posturing; she cannot run a campaign; she cannot run an executive office; she has never been able to win elections outside the left-liberal, one-party state of California; and she has nothing to offer to those of us who really, really don’t want to vote for Trump but don’t want to unburden ourselves of every moderate or conservative principle we ever had. Apart from that, she’s perfect.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: my convo with Anne Applebaum on autocrats and Trump; reader dissents over my latest piece on Trumpism; six notable quotes from the week in news; 14 pieces on Substack on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break of hand-tutting; a majestic view of Barcelona; 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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I know I wrote in to cancel last week, but I just decided I would like to continue my subscription after all. Reading your latest column, “Regime Change in America?,” changed my mind. Sorry for the flip-flop.
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Back On The Dishcast: Anne Applebaum
Anne is a journalist and historian. She’s currently a staff writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s Agora Institute. She’s written many books, including Red Famine, Gulag: A History, and Twilight of Democracy, and her new one is Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. Also check her substack, “Open Letters.”
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on whether Trump is a kleptocrat, and whether Kamala can connect with the public. That link also takes you to listener commentary on our recent episodes with Lionel Shriver, Stephen Fry, and Erick Erickson. And readers continue to grapple with the presidential race, with my responses throughout.
Our first episode with Anne — back in February 2022 debating the crisis in Ukraine — is here. A snippet:
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: Jeffrey Toobin on the Supreme Court, Eric Kaufmann on reversing woke extremism, and Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy on animal cruelty. (Van Jones’ PR team canceled his planned appearance.) Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
A lot of interesting points in your latest column on Trumpism. But it’s hard to see the positive or useful political reconfiguration you’re positing when a core feature of Trumpism is, “You can’t trust election results; so if we lose, it was rigged.” It’s probably the most damaging, worrisome aspect of Trumpism, and tens of millions of Americans — and crucially, the new VP nominee — have signed onto it.
Ultimately some of the wisest, most prescient words about Trump remain the ones you wrote at the dawn of the phenomenon. You refreshed our memories about Plato. You said late-stage democracy is ripe for the emergence of tyranny. I think that’s a far better gloss on our current state of affairs than your new theory that a Trump-Vance victory may be a “rebirth of sorts” for democracy.
It will take a victorious Trump all of 30 seconds to begin discussing the “many, many people saying we should probably change the Constitution” to allow presidents to serve more than two terms. Sorry to be gloomy, but it seems unrealistic to think that the extreme polarization, the massive proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy theories, and the erosion of faith in elections will retreat or dissipate. If anything, they seem to be strengthening and accelerating.
Good points. I made many of them in my column on J.D. Vance. I cannot vote for Trump for these reasons. I don’t disagree with my big picture analysis in 2016, and fear the worst. But that’s precisely why I am hoping for a more coherent conservatism to emerge from the current nihilist strongman cult. I think there’s a chance Vance could help nurture it. So I see that — maybe naively — as a hopeful sign.
Read a few more dissents here, and more on the pod page. As always, 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 Kamala party, pro-Hamas vandals, and psychedelic dogs. Below are a few examples:
Erickson cautions Republicans not to lean into the “DEI nominee” label too hard.
Amid the election chaos, some fantastic news: “Biden signed into law America’s first comprehensive nuclear energy bill since 2005.”
If you have any recommendations 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. Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today, including this entry:
I decided to focus my “VFYW Reimagined” on the round corner in the photo and make it a separate building. And since we don’t see the actual endpoints of the skybridge in the VFYW, I connected the skybridge to the round building. I also added more pedestrians and vehicles near the round building:
Another sleuth writes:
After reading the food portions of last week’s VFYW, I realized that Senegalese soup played a role in my earlier legal career, thanks to Seinfeld. In the 1990s, my county’s prison was under the supervision of the federal court in Philadelphia, as the result of an overcrowding lawsuit. In 1996, Congress passed the Prison Litigation Reform Act, which, among other things, allowed prisons to petition to terminate ongoing injunctions against them. We filed for relief, and as part of our prep for the case, we went to hear an argument in the 2nd Circuit on the same issue.
Because my boss was a huge Seinfeld fan, the trip to NYC included a stop at Al Yeganeh’s International Soup Kitchen, which was made famous (or infamous) in the “Soup Nazi” episode. I ordered the Senegalese soup and promptly spilled it all over the back of the county car we were driving. The distinct aroma of that soup was with us the entire drive home. I got grief over that for many years. But we did win our case and terminated the court’s supervision, so a happy ending.
