Dear Weekend Jolter,
When John Edwards exited the 2008 primary race to let Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama battle for the nomination while he tended to his, um, home life, he memorably declared he was stepping aside “so that history can blaze its path.”
Democrats, judging by this week’s convention, are really working to recapture that feeling, to convince the electorate that gathering behind Kamala Harris’s sudden candidacy is the full force of History.
“Something is happening in America, you can feel it,” Hillary Clinton announced at the week’s start, her hair tousled by the winds of progress. “Joy” and “freedom” were conspicuously (and repeatedly) made 2024’s “hope” and “change,” bywords to evoke a movement, the type that swept Obama to victory in different times.
The Obamas made the comparison explicit on Tuesday night. Michelle identified “a familiar feeling that’s been buried too deep for far too long” as she declared, “Hope is making a comeback.” As Jim Geraghty writes, “the Obamas had a message that was loud and clear: In Harris, we have our true successor to ‘hope and change.’” The nominee’s closing speech — which, unlike Donald Trump’s, was concise — deployed lofty language and stressed national unity in between the attack lines, in the spirit of the host city’s hometown hero.
History, of course, will be made if Harris is elected the first female president, shattering the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” that gave Hillary Clinton a concussion.
But it’s hardly a demonstration of deep perspicacity to notice that Kamala Harris is no Barack Obama. Political movements take time to develop; the Harris presidential campaign has existed for one month, and was willed into existence not by voters but by a handful of party power brokers including President Biden. The companion to hope is change, and Harris’s peculiar incumbent-insurgent’s campaign cannot embody it as she is at this moment vice president. To make the clean torch-pass from the Obamas to Harris believable, they would have to pretend the unpopular sitting president really was just a “bridge” and leaves no policy legacy to his running mate. But as NR’s editorial notes, he lives on — Harris’s economic agenda is Bidenomics, but bigger.
Rich Lowry elaborates on what Kamala Harris is missing that Obama, and Trump, had:
She’s not the instigator and leader of a movement, the way those two men were (the coalition of the ascendant and MAGA, respectively).
She doesn’t have a distinct mode of politics, whereas both Obama and Trump had the feel of something we hadn’t seen before.
She doesn’t have any signature issues, when Obama and Trump made themselves synonymous with, on the one hand, ending the Iraq war and, on the other, building the wall.
The delegates can make Harris their nominee at track-and-field speed, but they can’t make her Obama.
Ironically, it was the Obamas who seemed most aware that the Harris-Walz campaign and the rest of the party have their work cut out to vanquish Trump. “This will still be a tight race in a closely divided country,” Barack Obama cautioned, dusting off an old line of his: “Do not boo. Vote.” Michelle Obama practically ordered Democrats to do so, saying there’s no room for “foolishness” this year. Bill Clinton, invoking 2016, also pleaded with voters not to be complacent.
Yet there are signs that the Harris campaign is exhibiting a risky overconfidence in a race that, with Biden out, should be eminently winnable. After moderating her positions without explanation on issues from fracking to health care, Harris dove so far to the left with her blame-shifting economic plan that even the Washington Post editorial board decried its “populist gimmicks.” Dan McLaughlin says the Harris team may regret not having their candidate take questions from the press and voters during this honeymoon period:
She has responded with what amounts to a strategy of trying to run out the clock: no interviews or press conferences or other unscripted remarks from the candidate, no platform (until Friday’s rollout of her first economic ideas), no “issues” section on her website . . . This is how you run when you think you’re safely ahead and just want to avoid mistakes and kill the time in which your opponent can get back off the canvas.
Unfortunately for Harris, it’s August. As Dan notes, part of her strategy might rest on the assumption that her opponent is so well-defined and disliked that she doesn’t need to do more, which is indeed the biggest factor in her favor. But in a one-point race, small things make the difference. As this newsletter was being printed and bound, RFK Jr. announced he’s suspending his campaign and threw his support to Trump, excoriating Democrats in the process — yet another reminder of the uncontrollable nature of politics.
“The RFK Jr. factor is a major wildcard in the race that nobody should sleep on,” Phil Klein writes. One of an infinite number of wildcards that Harris should budget for, on the assumption that inevitability is Obama’s thing, not hers.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
On the Democratic presidential nominee’s unburdened convention speech: Harris’s Collection of Clichés
On Tim Walz’s: Walz’s False Freedom
Breaking down the Biden impeachment-probe report: The Biden Family Scandal
The editorial on Harris’s economic agenda, once more, is here: Kamala Harris Proposes Bidenomics, but Bigger
An increase is overdue: How to Expand the Child Tax Credit
ARTICLES
Noah Rothman: There’s Still Time to Define Kamala Harris for Voters
Noah Rothman: Democrats’ Brazen Covid Revisionism
Audrey Fahlberg: A Disorganized DNC
Audrey Fahlberg & Brittany Bernstein: The Harris-Walz Messaging Strategy: Freedom, Joy — and TBD
Brittany Bernstein: Tim Walz Accepts VP Nomination in Speech Combining Misleading Attacks on GOP with Cheery Optimism
Rich Lowry: The Media Bristle at Inconvenient Facts on Immigration
Caroline Downey: Texas Children’s Hospital Fires Nurse Who Alleged Medicaid Fraud in Secret Child Sex-Change Program
John Fund: The City That Democrats Debased
Mark Antonio Wright: Trump Is Behind Not Because the Press Is Hyping Kamala but Because He’s Unpopular
Mark Antonio Wright: Russian Conscripts Are Dying in Kursk. How Will the Kremlin Control the Narrative?
Abigail Anthony: In Britain, Two-Tier Policing and a Two-Tier Judiciary
Zach Kessel: ‘Reprehensible’: Columbia Students Who Occupied Campus Building Let Off without Consequences
Charles C. W. Cooke: I Hate Everyone
Charles C. W. Cooke: ‘A Friendly Argument with David French’
CAPITAL MATTERS
Stephen T. Parente & Theo Merkel take a close look at the true, enormous cost of Harris’s 2019 health-care plan: Quantifying Medicare for All, Harris-style
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen returns to the best art museum in D.C. (IMO) for a glittering, glinting exhibition of stars: Can Hollywood’s Gods and Goddesses Beautify the Swamp?
Armond White laments a turn toward cliché by Chiwetel Ejiofor: In Rob Peace, Masculine Endeavor Goes Bad
FROM THE NEW, OCTOBER 2024 ISSUE OF NR
Frederick M. Hess: Gadget Overload Is Hurting Our Schools
Audrey Fahlberg: The Joyful Vacuity of the Harris Campaign
Eli Steele: A Stanford Professor’s Dangerous Fuzzy-Math Crusade
Jack Fowler: Higher Ed, Higher Power
Seth Cropsey & Harry Halem: The Coming World Crisis
GET YOUR BACK-TO-SCHOOL EXCERPTS
The new issue of NR is out, and it’s an education-themed special. You’ll of course find much more, including Audrey’s report on the Harris campaign’s mystery policies. Speaking of which, let’s hear it for Audrey, Jim, and Jeff’s stellar Dem convention coverage this week (they were last seen partying with Lil Jon; we hope they make it back). But back to the special section. We’ll start you off with Frederick Hess’s piece on the proliferation of tech in the classroom:
While technology has a useful role to play in schooling (we’ll get to this momentarily), experience has offered much cause for skepticism.
The past decade of school-tech acquisition has yielded equal parts frustration with what’s going on and unbridled enthusiasm for what’s next. “While that last generation of technology disappointed, the new stuff will be a game-changer,” the spasmodic thinking goes. Stanford’s Larry Cuban nailed it two decades ago when he titled his history of education technology “Oversold and Underused.”
The pandemic unleashed a vast new wave of tech enthusiasm. An Education Week survey in 2022 found that before the pandemic, two-thirds of districts provided a device (usually a Chromebook or an iPad) to every student in middle or high school. By March 2021, that was up to 90 percent, and 84 percent in elementary schools. This was cause for much celebration from school leaders and tech aficionados.
Teachers and parents, meanwhile, have been less euphoric. Parents decried the alienating reality of online education and complained about the hassles of balky school websites and software. As for teachers? Sixty percent told Education Week that the biggest problem with technology was distracted students, and 80 percent said that more screen time led to worse student behavior. What’s more, the existing research makes clear that it’s hard to draw any clear relationship between technology and improved learning outcomes.
Yet the enthusiasm for technology continues to grow. Schools are hustling to finish spending billions in expiring federal pandemic aid, much of it on new technology, while ed-tech hucksters and TED talkers wax rhapsodic about the promise of AI, connectivity, and digital tools. This is all playing out amid an urgent push for phone-free schools and a steady drumbeat of data suggesting that phones are bad for the learning and well-being of kids.
Indeed, at schools where phones have been banned, students tell reporters and researchers that they’re thankful for the respite from the constant demands of texting and social media. The distractions produced by 24/7 access to messaging apps, social media, and games are staggering, especially when the median teen receives 237 (!) phone notifications each day.
Just a few years ago, articles in the New York Times and the Washington Post reassured parents that school closures weren’t a big deal because online learning was a satisfactory alternative. Now, these same outlets feature a spate of headlines like “Get Tech Out of the Classroom before It’s Too Late,” “When Students’ Cellphones ‘Colonize Their Minds,’ ” and “Schools Should Ban Smartphones. Parents Should Help.”
Noah Rothman reality-checks the Democrats’ retelling of pandemic history at this week’s convention:
The party’s nostalgic look back at the pandemic began early in the night with a video montage that featured Donald Trump issuing what proved to be overly optimistic forecasts about the virus’s trajectory and speculating about the experimental medications that might alleviate symptoms. Despite the paucity of moments in which Harris played a large role in 2020, the vice president was presented as a savior who delivered the nation from its despair. The video ended by suggesting that when Americans resumed the social and economic lifestyles they had left behind during the pandemic, they did so with gratitude in their hearts for the Democrats who made it possible.
Such brazen revisionist history didn’t end there. “He took the COVID crisis and turned it into a catastrophe,” said Representative Lauren Underwood (D., Ill.). Minnesota lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan mourned the death of her brother as a result of infection — a trauma compounded by the fact that she couldn’t visit him or hold a memorial service for him after his passing. “Millions of American families went through the same thing,” she noted, implicitly attributing her torment to the Republican governor of Tennessee. “While schools closed and dead bodies filled morgues, Donald Trump downplayed the virus,” declared Representative Robert Garcia (D., Calif.). “He told us to inject bleach into our bodies, he peddled conspiracy theories across the country.”
That last rhetorical flourish is a brazen lie, albeit one that Democratic partisans have thoroughly internalized. It was so egregious it even earned a few fact-checks. But the overall sentiment reflected in the Democrats’ Covid programming is no less mendacious.
The party in power abandoned any sense of propriety in its romanticized remembrance of the pandemic because, in its members’ minds, it is a story of Democrats’ spectacular managerial competence. The party faithful convinced themselves that the global pestilence would have been better contained and its outcomes less agonizing if the Oval Office had been occupied by a more technocratic figure. But the preponderance of evidence indicates that the non-pharmaceutical interventions to which Democrats were partial — social distancing, masking mandates, and the like — did little to prevent the spread of infection while creating a host of other social maladies, the effects of which persist to this day. . . .
It wasn’t Donald Trump who insisted on keeping schools closed. Indeed, he spent the latter part of 2020 lobbying for in-person education. No, it was Democratic politicians and their allies in unions — the teachers’ unions, specifically — who morally blackmailed America with the prospect of a mass die-off among educators if they exposed themselves to the ambulatory disease vectors we call children. America’s kids are still trying to recover the ground they lost.
The massive job losses that were incurred in 2020 as a result of state-level “lockdowns” have led the Democratic Party’s more shameless hacks to claim that Joe Biden created “millions of jobs” when state economies reopened. But who was doing the reopening? Leading the pack were Republican governors, and they were accused by their Democratic counterparts of conducting the modern equivalent of ritual human sacrifice for their efforts. Democratic states were the last to let go of their restrictions on essential interpersonal interaction.
Caroline Downey is out with another important report on the troubling persistence of gender-transition procedures for minors:
Texas Children’s Hospital has fired a nurse who accused the facility of engaging in Medicaid fraud to cover gender-transition procedures for minors.
Vanessa Sivadge came forward in June to announce that she had uncovered evidence that the hospital was using Texas Medicaid to finance cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers for child patients, in violation of federal law. Given her work refilling prescriptions and coordinating with physicians to answer parents’ questions about treatment plans for gender dysphoria, Sivadge had an intimate understanding of the hospital’s gender-dysphoria treatment practices — but the hospital denied her allegation in a July 22 press release.
Before Sivadge went public with the allegations, she submitted a request for internal transfer out of Texas Children’s endocrinology clinic on religious exemption grounds.
The day after Sivadge went public with the Medicaid story in June, she was put on leave. TCH cited the story and her religious accommodation request in justifying her suspension.
On August 16, TCH fired her effective immediately, Sivadge told National Review.
Around the time that Sivadge voiced her concerns, Dr. Eithan Haim — formerly a surgeon at Texas Children’s Hospital — was revealed as the anonymous whistleblower behind a 2023 story published by Christopher Rufo exposing Texas Children’s secret sex-change regimen for minors.
Haim revealed that TCH was conducting transition surgeries on and administering cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers to children, despite hospital leadership having announced that they stopped these interventions the year before, in accordance with a legal opinion issued by the state attorney general Ken Paxton declaring such procedures abusive. Paxton’s February 2022 non-binding legal opinion equated transgender treatments with child abuse. The opinion prompted Governor Greg Abbott to order the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to conduct an investigation into so-called gender-affirming care in the state.
Oh yes, and amid the Dem convention fanfare, House Republicans released a final report concluding that President Biden indeed engaged in “impeachable conduct.” James Lynch has the story:
House Republicans have largely concluded their impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden after finding that the president engaged in “impeachable conduct” to further his family’s years-long influence-peddling campaign, which racked up more than $27 million from foreign sources made to believe they could influence the operations of American government through their access to the Biden family.
Foreign individuals and entities from Ukraine, China, Russia, Romania, and Kazakhstan sent the Biden family and its business associates millions through shell companies designed to obscure the source of those funds, House Republicans determined. Hundreds of thousands of dollars from those business dealings, including funds traced to China, went directly to Joe Biden.
The House Ways and Means, Oversight, and Judiciary committees released a lengthy final report Monday detailing each facet of the impeachment inquiry, nearly putting an end to a high-profile congressional probe into the Biden family’s overseas business enterprise and the long-running criminal investigation into Hunter Biden that will culminate with his upcoming criminal tax trial.
The report suggests that Joe Biden committed “impeachable conduct” but defers to the judgment of lawmakers in assessing whether the Biden family’s influence peddling merits impeachment.
“The totality of the corrupt conduct uncovered by the Committees is egregious. President Joe Biden conspired to commit influence peddling and grift. In doing so, he abused his office and, by repeatedly lying about his abuse of office, has defrauded the United States to enrich his family. Not one of these transactions would have occurred, but for Joe Biden’s official position in the United States government. This pattern of conduct ensured his family—who provided no legitimate services—lived a lavish lifestyle,” the report asserts.
“The Constitution’s Remedy for a President’s flagrant abuse of office is clear: impeachment by the House of Representatives and removal by the Senate. Despite the cheapening of the impeachment power by Democrats in recent years, the House’s decision to pursue articles of impeachment must not be made lightly. As such, this report endeavors to present the evidence gathered to date so that all Members of the House may assess the extent of President Biden’s corruption,” the report adds.
CODA
A couple song titles come to mind in observing American politics this month: “Joyful Noise,” by the Derek Trucks Band, and (hat tip to Jay’s headline) “Cirkus,” by King Crimson. Good songs, those.
Have a fine weekend.