If you're engaging in backroom political wrangling, it can't hurt to have someone who works as a high-pressure Hollywood lawyer in your corner.
Iknow it’s only July, but it’s not too early to declare that the 2024 Man of the Year in American politics is our nation’s second gentleman, Doug Emhoff.
You will have noticed, over the past four years, the many theories released into the ether as to who is actually running the Biden White House. My own concoction has been that it’s my old sparring mate, Steve Ricchetti, but that’s no more than a low-confidence surmise. It could be Tom Donilon or Ron Klain or Lady MacBiden or Carnac the Magnificent. But there has never been an alternative theory floated as to who is running the Harris vice presidency. As a mutual friend tells me, “Doug speaks to her first and last.” In politics, that’s the ultimate power: It was said memorably of Hubert Humphrey, but it could have been said with equal force about many other wet-finger politicians, that they found the last person with whom they spoke to be the most persuasive.
Doug Emhoff appears in network B-roll as the pleasant-looking man dancing without rhythm at White House joyfests. He’s The Escort, more seen than heard. In real life, he’s a deal-making Hollywood lawyer. Year in and year out, in one venue after another, he has been buttonholing possibly important people — West Wingers, donors, media types — and saying in so many words, “Kamala stays in the picture.”
How has he fared? Well, six months ago Kamala Harris was widely reviled — and perhaps even more widely ridiculed. Greg Gutfeld couldn’t go 48 hours without using her as a sure-thing laugh line. She was regarded as “insurance” for Joe Biden: Her popularity ratings were, somehow, even lower than his.
And how is she doing today? Well, she has pulled even with Donald Trump in the polls, pulled ahead in the money race, and brought the legacy media to the edge of mass onanistic delirium. She is within days of accepting the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party — by acclamation. I think we have our Words Edgewise Man of the Year.
• I tried to follow the National Conservatism Conference in Washington earlier this month. Wouldn’t we all be a shade more receptive to the NatCons’ statist prescriptions if their leaders had ever worked in the productive economy?
To listen to the NatCons, you would think that millions of people around the world are sneaking into our country to grab for the American Dream, which in the NatCon vision seems to be securing an internship, or even worse, a fellowship, at either the tax-exempt Foundation for Something Better or the tax-preferenced Institute for the Study of Something of Possible Importance.
• The problem with the overblown rhetoric of the Joy Reids of the world is that there’s one lunatic in the audience who believes her.
• Oh, to be a political columnist in these tumultuous days! To exhume a term from my days in the satellite business, we members of the commentariat are now at Max-Q, the point in the launch — or reentry — at which the vehicle is at the most stress from dynamic forces.
• A timeless comment on the prospect of war with Russia. There used to be a sign in Vilnius. Maybe it’s still there. On one side it read, “In June of 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte passed this way with six hundred thousand men.” On the other side, the eastern side, it read, “In November of 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte passed this way with six hundred men.”
• I am halfway through John Irving’s latest novel, The Last Chairlift. I have only 450 pages to go. You know what you’re going to get in an Irving novel — the creepy boarding school, the OCD wrestling matches, the bizarre domestic arrangements, the jolting nocturnal fantasies. As it happened, I overlapped with Irving at the creepy boarding school, wrestled him a few times, and was tormented by some of the same tormented members of the faculty. I forgot most of it as soon as I could. Irving remembered it all and began to write it down, with copious and artful embroidery, in The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, and almost 20 other big and boisterous novels. I’ll leave it to others better informed to designate his rightful place in the literary hierarchy, but I wish to salute him for a half century of honest and prodigious work. You done good, John.