Good morning and welcome back to another edition of Carnival of Fools. Only two Tuesdays of this improbably memorable (and disturbingly unreal) campaign season yet remain, and I hope you subscribe so we can suffer through them together, as well as afterward. And while I remain officially agnostic about how it will all turn out — ask me on November 6 and I’ll give you a solid prediction — with half a month to go, the Harris campaign and its partisans clearly believe that they’re losing, while Trump and his fans are acting both in public and private like they are cruising toward victory. Will this turn out to have been a grandly ironic combination of premature panic and unearned confidence? All anyone can say right now is that Trump is riding a wave of good polling, and the “bad vibes” for Kamala that I wrote about in last week’s newsletter have now given rise to a cluttered cacophony of terrified Democratic voices.
Darkness Visible for the Harris Campaign
For if there is any substantive value to “momentum” or “vibes,” the Harris-Walz campaign is on an express elevator to hell, going down. Two weeks remain in what seems to be a historically close race, and nearly every polling number, whether nationally or in swing states, has begun to turn against the Democrats. The weighted polling models, such as Nate Silver’s or that of 538 (now owned by Disney/ABC), have all flipped from narrowly favoring Harris to narrowly favoring Trump. Democrats have now fallen into a Styronesque depression, moaning disconsolately about how all of this is the media’s fault, for lack of anyone else to plausibly blame until the race is officially over. (Then, in the event of a loss, it will be knives out for Harris, Biden, and anyone stupid enough to be caught between them and the mob.)
The panic-button reaction from the Left right now is best epitomized by this priceless piece from aged hack Michael Tomasky, writing for the tatterdemalion remains of the New Republic: “The Media Has Three Weeks to Learn to Tell the Truth About Trump.” His primary command? The New York Times needs to start writing “accurate” headlines, ones like “Trump Fans Flames with Xenophobic Lies.” (Let this serve as a reminder that the typical reaction of bewildered and frustrated extremists is to double down on something that failed when tried once already but that nevertheless gives them the most personal satisfaction.)
Meanwhile Donald Trump is back to, well, enjoying himself on the campaign trail. Dare I say that, ironically enough, he’s out there in this final month doing events with a fair bit of . . . joy? Over the weekend, he put in a stunt shift for the cameras as a fry cook at a Philadelphia-area McDonald’s and, as I noted yesterday, the media reaction to what most people viewed as an unusually upbeat but otherwise typical campaign stunt said far more about how miserably unhappy they are about Kamala Harris’s repeated demonstrations of comparative flat-footedness than any number of Tomasky pieces ever could. (Dan McLaughlin now reports that Newsweek, in a move sure to persuade voters still on the fence, is publicly investigating the health-inspection record of the McDonald’s location that hosted Trump.)
Behind all of this lies the palpable frustration among Harris’s partisans at her inability to ever capitalize on the massive amounts of friendly earned media she has been given by exuding even the slightest hint of electoral charisma. Her campaign has racked up all the usual endorsements, is employing every available surrogate, and is given the friendliest of venues to display her wares, but the initial amphetamine rush of July and August proved incapable of generating authentic excitement — for at its center lies a black hole of non-personality in Harris herself. Whatever Trump’s many, many character flaws, he nevertheless has a character to exude, at the very least. Meanwhile, the longer Kamala Harris exposes herself to attention (even with the help of favorable edits from CBS), the more she is revealed as an attractive cipher. It’s unsettling precisely because her refusal to take firm political positions suggests she may not actually be intelligent enough to have ever formed any.
Let’s Be Honest: Kamala Harris Probably Can’t Tell a Joke Either
The Al Smith Dinner, named after the former governor of New York and failed 1928 Democratic presidential nominee, is held annually in New York City to benefit Catholic charities in the region. A mainstay for the city’s politicians and social elite, it becomes one of the national political calendar’s primary events every four years, as both presidential candidates typically attend and are expected to deliver a comic speech razzing their opponent. (They also have to sit through the same.) The spirit of the night is amicable and self-deprecatory. The two biggest political opponents in the nation break bread for a good cause and to laugh — taking as many hilarious gut-shots at their opponent as possible and cheerfully weathering the same when it’s their turn to sit down. It’s the sort of situation where all you have to do is read your lines and absorb some abuse, and people will like you more for having taken it like a man (or woman). Donald Trump — famously the subject of many a celebrity roast himself — came this year and delivered a series of zingers.
But Kamala Harris skipped it completely, sending a brief (and laugh-free) video instead. Once upon a time, skipping the Al Smith Dinner was an inconceivable act, for a Democratic politician in particular — an electorally dangerous show of disrespect to Catholic voters, who in a forgotten era of mid-20th-century America still faced remarkably out-in-the-open limits on their access to the corridors of elite cultural and political power. Nowadays Republicans under Trump and Democrats under Harris are assembling stunningly different-looking coalitions, and traditional Catholics don’t fit in particularly well with Harris’s worldview. (Neither do they with Trump’s, for that matter, at least if the coarseness of Trump’s cuckoldry-based humor was any indication.)
It seems like a pointlessly self-inflicted wound for the Harris campaign; Trump’s performance was off in its tone, and had Harris been there in person to bear the brunt of it, he would have come across as truly unpleasant. So why did she pass on an easy lay-up of an event? I don’t believe it’s necessarily because her team has concluded that Catholic votes are ungettable. I am instead pretty sure it’s because they concluded this poor fumbling incompetent is incapable of even telling a joke passably. She couldn’t go out there and benefit from Trump’s boorish comportment because she couldn’t even return serve; she’s not quick-witted or relatable enough to either poke fun at herself or insult the world’s most easily insultable man in any biting or even piquant way.
It’s a terribly unfortunate comment on the caliber of candidate the Democrats are saddled with.
Nature vs. Nurture
The ongoing descent of Nature — the most famous and prestigious academic journal of the sciences — into woke self-parody is one of those sad declines that I have been paying attention to out of the corner of my eye for years now. Well, last week they printed an impassioned column arguing that the scientific community must now “stop using ‘summer’, ‘winter’ and the rest when inviting researchers to events — it’s a small step, but it’s necessary and inclusive.” I am glad to see the leading lights of the scientific community devoted to the most pressing matters in basic research — the renaming of academic conferences so as not to emotionally disadvantage the Global South — but I could not help but agree with my colleague Abigail Anthony when she pointed out how insultingly insufficient this effort was. Why stop there, save lack of courage or surfeit of bigotry? Forget “summer conference.” Whenever you say “good night” to a fellow scientist, realize: It’s already tomorrow morning across the International Date Line. Let us hope scientists address this issue next.
Next Tuesday will be the penultimate Carnival of Fools until our November electoral doomsday (assuming Nature hasn’t convinced the world to dispense with the marking of the passage of days out of equity concerns, that is). Until then, I bid you farewell and advise you to prepare for chaos.