Dear Weekend Jolter,
There’s the well-oiled Democratic Party machine we’ve come to know. Exerting influence on par with the “Lord Almighty’s” to toss President Biden from the race, they briskly swapped him for Kamala Harris as one might an idol for a bag of sand. A unified party will fête her, as Republicans did Donald Trump, in Chicago next month, before sending off the veep and a yet-to-be-named running mate to vanquish the new oldest person in the race.
Unless — the hastily formed plan doesn’t hold up nearly as well as its architects think. Of course, the party would be much better positioned today if an untold number of aides, campaign officials, and senior administration figures hadn’t covered up the president’s condition so that a competitive primary process could have produced a road-tested and broadly popular nominee. The Democrats are instead playing the bad hand they dealt themselves.
But one must squint to see what they’re doing differently, besides Find+Replace for “Biden” and “Harris” in the campaign literature. Harris for President, like Biden for President, is still hammering Project 2025, trying to make a bogeyman out of a 900-page think-tank document of proposals that, despite connections to its contributors, Trump has disavowed and the official party platform does not endorse in critical areas like abortion (this fact check is helpful). The strategy feels very online and geared toward partisan-news-consuming coastal voters; the progressive version of what DeSantis did. Instead of Chevron and “woke banking,” they’re talking about the Comstock Act and Schedule F. Is that more effective than reminding people, over and over, about January 6?
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris’s other liabilities will be treated as a buffet upon which Republican ad-makers can feast. Time will tell whether her elevation to presumptive nominee, favorable media treatment, and the convention itself can boost her image and convince wavering Democratic voters as well as other anti-Trumpers to rally, but her polling to this point is not encouraging, as Rich Lowry highlights, despite some post-Biden movement.
And the connection to Biden — especially whatever role she might have played in concealing from the public his decline — will be difficult to escape. The Wall Street Journal reported shocking details this week about how long those in Biden’s orbit have been concerned. The piece describes a meeting with congressional Democrats on the infrastructure bill in which the president could barely articulate what he wanted lawmakers to do — in October 2021. “This was a conspiracy,” Charles C. W. Cooke writes.
Should the president’s condition worsen to the point of presenting a national-security risk (if it hasn’t done so already), the questions about the VP’s involvement will grow louder. Recalling the vice president’s past attempt at refuting the now obviously accurate descriptions in the Robert Hur report, Jim Geraghty writes: “Harris lied. Everyone around Biden lied.” (Biden, for his part, vowed Wednesday to continue to serve.)
Her problems don’t end there. From NR’s editorial:
Undoubtedly, Harris will fare better than a moribund octogenarian. But that does not make her George Washington. On the contrary: Harris is still a representative of the most unpopular administration in modern history; she is still more disliked than any vice president since polling began; and she is still a California progressive whose voting record in the Senate was to the left of Bernie Sanders.
Audrey Fahlberg reports that as Republicans in Trump’s orbit recalibrate to run against Harris, they’re planning to hit everything from the candidate’s California roots to her frequent word salads to the closed-door process that installed her atop the ticket. Their core strategy, she reports, is to blame her for Biden administration failures, argue she’s more liberal than her 2020 running mate, and “accuse her of being part of the conspiracy to hide her boss’s decline from the public.”
All this would matter much more if she were running against an upright citizen. But her opponent is Donald Trump, and despite the ebullient unity on display in Milwaukee, he’s still underwater in polling with the rest of the country even after the assassination attempt, and his advantage over Harris is slimmer than that over Biden. Some in MAGA Land continue to display atrocious instincts, as witnessed in the now-scuttled plans to feature Holocaust-minimizing Candace Owens at a fundraiser.
Trump is still Trump. The race is winnable for Harris perhaps for this reason alone, at least more winnable than it would have been running Biden’s halting voice on a speakerphone. Her campaign, capitalizing on the relief of donors, said it raised a staggering $100 million over the span of two days. But Democrats will have their work cut out for them in Chicago and beyond to brand and then stage-manage Kamala Harris as aggressively as they did Biden in 2020, and again this year. Noah Rothman, with the last words:
The party’s prospects now rest on the skillful execution of a bait-and-switch. Maintaining the party’s enthusiasm for its new candidate demands that Democrats preserve the abstraction of Kamala Harris for as long as possible. The moment she is expected to speak extemporaneously at any length, the party is likely to encounter a bruising reminder of why they never trusted her in the first place.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
The Harris editorial, once more, is here: Enter Harris, Stage Left
And our editorial on Biden’s exit — and what might come next — is here: Joe Biden Should Resign the Presidency
Fiscal restraint is a distant memory: Kamala Harris Going for Gold in the Spending Olympics
This is hostage-taking, not justice: Russia’s Conviction of Evan Gershkovich Is Grotesque
ARTICLES
Noah Rothman: Joe Biden Won’t Make It to January
Michael Brendan Dougherty: The Graceless Exit
Philip Klein: Biden Still Hasn’t Explained Why He Dropped Out of the Race
John Fund: If We Ignore the Biden Medical Cover-Up, We Will Be Condemned to Repeat It
Jeffrey Blehar: Democrats Are United Around Kamala, but Chaos Still Reigns
Haley Strack: Harris’s Personnel Problem: Over 90 Percent of VP’s Staff Left in Last Three Years
Rich Lowry: Sorry, Everyone — Oswald Still Acted Alone
James Lynch: Secret Service Director Stonewalls Lawmakers at Hearing on Trump-Assassination Attempt
James Lynch: Secret Service Director Kim Cheatle Resigns after Shocking Trump Rally Security Failure
Audrey Fahlberg: After GOP Convention Victory Lap, Trump Campaign Pivots to a Post-Biden Race
Zach Kessel: SEC Finalizing a ‘Big Brother’ Database to Track Americans’ Stock Trades in Real Time
Zach Kessel: ‘They Should Be Ashamed of Themselves’: Netanyahu Unloads on Anti-Israel Protesters in Passionate Address to Congress
Abigail Anthony: Morning After the Revolution, Years Before an Apology
Abigail Anthony: Male Cyclists Take Gold, Silver, and Bronze at Women’s Competition
Jay Nordlinger: Canceling cable, &c.
Roy Eappen: How Deep Does the Corruption of Transgender Ideology Go?
CAPITAL MATTERS
Aaron Garth Smith & Christian Barnard examine the phenomenon of rising school funding and falling enrollment: How ‘Ghost Students’ Cost States Billions
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Don’t miss Brian Allen’s fascinating portrait of an artistic enigma: Marisol Rediscovered, Finally
Armond White is not convinced that adding an “s” to an old favorite in order to reboot it with modern cultural touches is quite enough: Twisters Pluralizes Hollywood’s DIE and ESG Storms
FROM THE NEW, SEPTEMBER 2024 ISSUE OF NR
Matthew Continetti: The Short Goodbye
Christine Rosen: The Self-Aggrandizement of Jill Biden
Jay Nordlinger: ‘Disperser of Enemies’
Charles C. W. Cooke: Long Live the Legislature
Andrew Stuttaford: Javier Milei Takes Up His Chain Saw
Jack Butler: Did the Early ’90s Break Politics?
Vahaken Mouradian: Rhapsody of a Rodeo Rookie
EAT PRAY EXCERPT
The new issue of NR is out, and you can tell from the listing above there’s much to choose from. As an entry point, let’s turn to our colleague who was smart enough to get the hell away from here, and report from Buenos Aires. From Andrew Stuttaford:
I was in a large, packed room in the Hilton. A conference held in June by the Cato Institute and an Argentine free-market think tank, Libertad y Progreso, had entered its final hours. Elon Musk had just spoken — remotely. Now self-styled anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei, Argentina’s president since December, had turned up, clad in a suit, not his trademark leather jacket, and, considerably calmer than his reputation, was giving a speech.
He ranged from hard-core economic theory — the translator muttering in my headset struggled a bit with that — to philosophy, to the merits of markets, of liberty, of property, to the demerits of Argentina’s political class — “the caste” — to the governor of Buenos Aires Province, “a communist midget.” At the end, a fiftysomething local told me that he’d been waiting all his life for an Argentine president to make a speech like that.
Milei’s anarcho-capitalism is a direction of travel rather than a destination anytime soon. Much of the journey will involve taking a route through classical liberalism and libertarianism, with — given Milei’s Manichaean view of politics, a product probably of both his psyche and Argentina’s experience — possible detours into rougher territory. Milei takes a firm line on law and order. On social issues, he is (very broadly speaking) a liberal from the era before such beliefs curdled into authoritarian progressivism, but with additional twists stemming, ironically, from his anti-state ideology. Thus he favors drug legalization, but not if taxpayers have to pay for its consequences, a stance that may reassure his conservative supporters. He opposes abortion (a topic on which libertarians can disagree).
Strongly pro-American, he is realigning Argentina to be closer to the West. He canceled plans to enroll the country in the BRICS bloc and backs both Ukraine and Israel. Argentina is the first Latin American state to designate Hamas a terrorist group. Milei’s idea of a West under threat internally and externally likely goes some way (along, presumably, with his antiestablishment sympathies) towards explaining his association with politicians such as Donald Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, two figures not known for their libertarianism.
In the early 20th century, Argentina was one of the richest nations on earth, but it is now, on some measures, a developing country, a decline arguably without equal in the modern world and almost entirely due to misgovernment. Its people would have avoided a lot of misery had they been far quicker to put someone like Milei, an economist drawn to “Austrians” such as Hayek and Mises, with their profound suspicions of the state, into the Casa Rosada, Argentina’s (pink) White House.
Noah Rothman looks ahead, to what may be the next big plot twist in the 2024 race and/or beyond:
What we do have . . . is ample evidence that Biden is a spent force. Had he stuck to his guns and refused to step back from the nominating process, it would be easier to envision Biden’s continued tenure in the Oval Office until Inauguration Day. But with the news that Biden will step back from politics at the end of his first term, the president became a much-diminished figure. He seems to know it.
Today, Biden is only a political liability for Democrats. His nominal occupancy of the presidency denies Democrats the opportunity to retail the notion that Trump is “too old” for the presidency, as some of the Democratic Party’s craven opportunists insisted shortly after Biden withdrew from the race. The president’s allies cannot square the logic of their contention that Biden is too old to govern next January but A-OK for the next five months — his continued tenure in the Oval Office makes his allies look like fools. And because the president cannot simply disappear from the public eye, Biden is all but bound to say and do things that are so agonizingly off-message that they throw his fellow Democrats off their games.
Sooner than they think, Democrats will come to resent Biden’s refusal to abdicate the office he occupies. For that reason, the party will probably have to reprise its display of collective action to push the president out of office once and for all. The opportunity will present itself after the Democrats’ nominating convention, in which Biden will be given a lavish sendoff, deliver a tightly scripted farewell address, and hand proceedings off to Harris, who will debut her vice-presidential pick. After continuity has been established, Biden’s allies will insist, the president’s best course of action will be to surrender the reins to his deputy so she can run for the White House as an incumbent. . . .
This scenario would have been just short of science-fictional two days ago. But given the president’s disappearing act and the apparent lack of enthusiasm for the job, it seems more likely than not that the 46th president will leave office well before January 20, 2025.
Haley Strack reports on the turmoil and turnover on Kamala Harris’s staff:
Throughout her career as a senator and then vice president, Kamala Harris developed a reputation as a difficult boss who struggles to retain staff due to the atmosphere of suspicion and disorder that tends to develop among her subordinates.
Data from the government watchdog group Open the Books — released Monday, as Harris consolidates her position as President Biden’s successor atop the Democratic ticket — makes clear just how extreme Harris’s personnel problem really is: 91.5 percent of the staff Harris began her vice presidential term with three years ago have since left.
“Kamala Harris is taking center stage in the national discussion these days. However, our analysis of her payroll as vice president shows an extraordinary churn,” Open the Books CEO Adam Andrzejewski said. “The stories out there are more than just anecdotes, they’re substantiated by the hard data available to us. Only a rare and loyal few staffers have persisted through her term as vice president.”
While high turnover is typical for a vice presidential staff, the level of churn — and public backbiting — in Harris’s office stands out.
A theme of instability has pervaded the vice president’s office since Harris took office in January 2021. Months after she assumed the vice presidency, many staffers left Harris’s office in a mini-exodus due to burnout and in pursuit of better career opportunities, Axios reported at the time.
The conspiracy theorists are living their best life these days. But Rich Lowry puts to rest the theory that is being treated anew by some on the right — and left — as established fact:
The JFK conspiracy theories originally emanated from the Left. As the Right has come to hate and distrust the Deep State, though, the theories have seeped over, without the Left giving them up. . . .
That such conspiracy theories have so long endured, and, in fact, found new converts on another part of the political spectrum, is a stunning victory of paranoia over reason and fiction over fact.
For all its consequence, the JFK assassination is an uncomplicated murder case. In fact, the simplicity of the case is inversely related to the complex mental gymnastics necessary to implicate anyone other than Lee Harvey Oswald. There’s a reason that the Dallas police almost instantly solved it.
It doesn’t matter to the conspiracy theorists that, despite all the effort devoted to the attempt, they’ve come up with no evidence for their claims, while they reject the massive evidence pointing to Oswald acting alone. They recycle the same old misunderstandings of the facts, not knowing or caring that they’ve been debunked long ago. . . .
There were only three shots that day, and they were all fired from the Texas School Book Depository. Almost all the witnesses thought the shots came from the direction of the depository. Multiple witnesses saw a man with a rifle in the sixth-floor window. A couple of Oswald’s fellow employees were on the floor beneath him and saw cement loosened by the shots fall from the ceiling; one of them heard the sounds of the bolt-action rifle above and shells hitting the floor.
All of this is why the police had an accurate description of the gunman within minutes and why an officer immediately rushed to the depository and found Oswald right after the assassination; he let him go when Oswald’s supervisor said he was employed there.
The idea that Oswald couldn’t have hit Kennedy or that there were more than three shots is based on a series of misconceptions. It is said that Oswald didn’t have time to get off the shots, often based on a fallacious reading of the Zapruder tape. But the real timing of the shots has been duplicated, or improved upon, many times in tests.
It is alleged that it would have been impossible for Oswald to hit Kennedy because he was allegedly a poor shot. Actually, he was a good shot during his stint in the Marine Corps, exceeding the score needed to be a sharpshooter, and he practiced once he procured his rifle. The longest shot, the third, which killed Kennedy, was from only 88 yards away — considerably closer than Thomas Crooks was to Trump in Butler, Pa.
That mail-order rifle, we’re told, was no good. Tests afterward showed it was accurate, in fact as accurate as the M-14 that was used by the military at the time.
Of course, there supposedly was no way the “magic bullet” — the second shot — could have wounded two different men, JFK and his fellow passenger in the car, Governor John Connally, in multiple places. In reality, that’s what a bullet traveling in that direction would do, passing through Kennedy’s neck and then through Connally’s chest. As Bugliosi points out, it would have taken a real magic bullet to hit Kennedy on the neck and then disappear, not hitting Connally or embedding somewhere in the car. Instead, it did what you’d expect of a bullet passing through the soft tissue of one man and then hitting the man sitting in front of him. This, too, has been confirmed by various studies and tests.
There was no one on the famous “grassy knoll.” It was an unpropitious spot — not behind the motorcade where Oswald was but in front of it for everyone to see. There is zero evidence — none — of additional shots. No bullets lodged in any cars or were found in the vicinity. No spent casings showed up on the grassy knoll itself. It’s all made up. (The House Select Committee on Assassinations did conclude there was an additional shot, but based on a recording that was grossly misinterpreted and has since been exposed as a clear mistake.)
Moreover, Kennedy’s two entrance wounds were from behind — where Oswald was shooting from.
Oswald was caught dead to rights.
Shout-Outs
Kevin D. Williamson, at the Dispatch: Government Isn’t Your Mamaw
Katie Pavlich, at Townhall: Was the War Chest Transfer From Biden to Harris Legal?
Aaron Sibarium, at the Washington Free Beacon: Top Transgender Health Group Said Hormones, Surgeries Were ‘Medically Necessary’ So That Insurance Would Cover Them, Documents Show
CODA
The most important city of the moment is Chicago, where all political roads lead in a few weeks. So: time to dust off another song from that identically named band. I’ve always been partial to “Fancy Colours” (despite its belligerently un-American spelling), which leads into a much more famous song on Chicago II. Both are great.
And off that same album, I don’t know why, but I feel like this one would make for perfect theme music for the title sequence of a sitcom about this year’s Democratic convention. You can envision it, right? Kamala Harris entering to the horn section, a quick glimpse of Jaime Harrison shuffling papers, Biden wandering off somewhere when the vocals kick in? If not, well, as the president would say, Anyway . . .
Have a restful weekend, and thanks for reading.