Casey Stengel asked the famous question in frustration when talking to the 1962 Mets after they racked up a record breaking 162 losses in their inaugural season.
The same question might be asked of both the Trump and Harris campaigns. Both look like they are doing their level best to lose the upcoming face-off this November. Unfortunately, only one of them can lose. And that is very, very unfortunate.
When Donald J Trump selected J.D. Vance to be his running mate it was apparent to roughly everybody that there was a very good chance that President Joe Biden was going to be forced out of the race. However, the Trump campaign simply assumed that (1) Biden would be the opponent, and that (2) Trump would easily win, perhaps in a landslide.
As a result, Trump’s VP selection was drenched in hubris. He made no effort to broaden the pool of potential voters he could appeal to. Nor did the campaign do any serious research into potentially damaging revelations about Vance, or come up with responses to those revelations. Not surprisingly, the roll-out did not go well.
And then after successfully pushing Biden out the door, along comes Kamala Harris to the rescue. Except that in the VP selection process, she, like Trump, decided to double down, this time, ideologically. She eventually settled on Tim Walz, currently the governor of deep blue Minnesota, who distinguished himself by fiddling in 2020 while Minneapolis burned. In so doing, she selected as her running mate a hard-left progressive like herself.
Harris did not attempt to broaden her appeal by selecting Josh Shapiro, an outspoken defender of Israel and a relatively moderate Democratic governor of a must-win swing state. Instead Harris apparently decided to placate the progressive wing of her party which had lobbied furiously against Shapiro.
This even as “Squad” member Cori Bush (D-Mo) was in the process of suffering the same ignominious fate as fellow Squad member Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), who was similarly ousted in his primary. The defeats of these two has been largely (and probably correctly) attributed to their outspoken sympathy for Hamas.
Which also raises the question of how a Harris Administration would treat foreign policy, specifically with respect to Iran / Gaza and Israel; Ukraine and Russia, and potentially China and Taiwan. It just won’t do to simply assert that Trump is clueless. Of course he is. But that doesn’t grant the opposition a get-out-of-jail-free card. We should hear what the candidate has to say. Something other than I’m not the other guy.
But there is a problem here. Actually two problems. The first is that Harris was part and parcel of the cover-up of Biden’s mental deterioration. Right up until the infamous debate Harris was still insisting, as she had previously on many occasions, that Biden was sharp as a tack. Since she is such an obvious liar, the question is: why would anybody believe a word she says?
There is second problem that is not unrelated to the first. While she is busy jettisoning her past positions at the speed of light, she apparently thinks people will take her seriously. For instance, all of a sudden she is “tough on the border”. That Green New Deal she signed on to, well that was then. And that bit about defunding the police? She doesn’t buy into that anymore.
Harris once wanted to ban fracking. And she wanted to ban offshore drilling on federal lands. Before she was against it she was in favor of Medicare for All, not to mention that she once wanted to eliminate private health care insurance. And she wanted to start a program of “mandatory buy backs” of “assault weapons”.
In short, she endorsed the whole laundry list of progressive goals. And now she is trying to walk away from them. In that effort she is getting an assist from the clerks in the press who call them selves journalists. But she chose a running mate that, from a policy standpoint, is even more extreme than she is.
Not only is he on board with all her past positions, when he was Governor of Minnesota he issued executive orders giving minors access to irreversible chemical and surgical treatments for gender dysphoria. Under his tenure Minnesota had some of the most draconian Covid-era restrictions, which unsurprisingly had little or no positive effects. His administration also attempted to ration social benefits by race. And let’s not forget the mayhem in Minnesota on Walz’s watch that overwhelmed law enforcement during the “mostly peaceful” protests that occurred in the wake of the George Floyd murder.
The net of all this is that the two main contenders are acting like amateurs who don’t know the rules of the game. In his VP selection, Trump has doubled down on abrasiveness. But not on policy; it isn’t clear he even has what could be reasonably described as a coherent policy outlook.
Harris, on the other hand, has not had a single press conference since Biden dropped out. Thus far she has been busy trying to disguise her extreme ideology by running a Biden style basement campaign. But her choice of Tim Walz as VP nominee gives the game away. She has assembled a team of hard core lefty extremists. And she can not be trusted.
A pox on both their houses.
JFB
