Dear Weekend Jolter,
Give the Harris campaign this: If the Democratic nominee loses next month, you won’t see leaks that she and her team ignored pleas from Doug Emhoff to try and connect with swing voters, in the way that Hillary and the Clinton camp dismissed Bill’s advice eight years ago.
As Jim Geraghty documents on his swing through swing country, Kamala Harris intends to leave nothing on the table in the quest for the states Hillary Clinton snubbed, especially Wisconsin. The vice president hit Milwaukee, La Crosse, and Green Bay on Thursday alone. Tim Walz was in Green Bay on Monday. On top of that, Harris made repeat stops this week in Michigan (a state Clinton also mostly ignored in the general), as well as Pennsylvania. The campaign, to the chagrin of some, is looking for support beyond the traditional base.
It is fair to ask — just days after the Western world was exposed to the most unintentionally hilarious and toxically faux-masculine ad ever created — whether Democrats may have overlearned the lessons of 2016. But for them, any overcompensation (even the embarrassing sort) beats complacency. The frantic Democratic campaign schedule reflects not only a determination to learn from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 mistakes, but party panic — right now — that the euphoria from President Biden’s nomination handoff to Harris has faded, and that the attempt to make her an instant icon using one-word catchphrases and the Obamas’ blessing hasn’t really worked.
As Noah Rothman observes, “The joy is gone.” A popular yard sign in the D.C. burbs and beyond declares some version of the phrase, “Kamala Harris. Obviously.” With the election nearly a fortnight away, those signs already look like artifacts from August, in danger of becoming a 2024 version of Paul Ryan’s “fading Obama posters.” Observe that Kamala Harris, reputed shoo-in, just did her first formal interview with Fox News. She was evasive, unable or unwilling to directly answer questions about the Biden administration’s immigration policies or her own past positions, uninterested in talking about subjects apart from Donald Trump’s awfulness. She probably persuaded no voters. But — and this part’s important — she went on Fox, the move of a distressed candidate who knows the needle could float either way on November 5. Marquette has Harris up by one point nationally; Fox News has Trump up by two. The RCP average of Wisconsin polls just tipped to Trump, by a tenth of a percentage point, as of Friday morning. Trump leads by less than a point in RCP’s Michigan average. He’s up by a whisker in Pennsylvania.
Unfortunately for the Democratic nominee, the agenda she has promoted for years does little to complement the campaign’s outreach in its closing weeks. Rich Lowry explains how Harris’s and other Democrats’ embrace of well-outside-the-mainstream stances on the trans issue, for instance, have come back to bite. Reporting from Wisconsin, Jim writes,
The most recent Marquette poll shows that the priorities of voters in Wisconsin are a lot like the priorities of voters everywhere else in the country: Thirty-seven percent rank “the economy” as the most important issue, 15 percent name “immigration and border security,” and 15 percent answer “abortion.” . . . Harris has spent a lot of time and energy emphasizing her commitment to those in the 15 percent but left a lot of blanks in her economic agenda.
Yet an upside for Harris is that she is not laboring under such delusions as fed Hillary Clinton’s sense of entitlement in 2016. Leading up to that election, polls showed her consistently ahead in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. And so we didn’t (thank the Lord, in hindsight) see Hillary Clinton try to go out pheasant-hunting. The polls were wrong.
Noah identifies as an asset for Democrats that they are running scared in 2024, campaigning as if “on the cusp of an epochal humiliation.” He writes, “If complacency is the enemy of winning campaigns, you at least cannot say the Democratic candidate or her supporters are content to rest on their laurels.”
Hillary Clinton infamously was unready to give a concession speech on Election Night 2016. “I had to come up with something to say,” she told the BBC a year later. It’s difficult to imagine that Kamala Harris would be similarly unprepared — in the end, a mindset that just might work in her favor.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
The perpetrator of a massacre is dead: Justice in Gaza
The administration plays more politics: Biden-Harris Threat against Israel Is a Moral Disgrace
At times, Trump is running against himself: Trump Seems Intent on Undermining His Tax-Policy Record
ARTICLES
Noah Rothman: Why Kamala Harris’s Fox Interview Was a Failure
Noah Rothman: Trump Gives the Harris Campaign What It Needs
Audrey Fahlberg: Is Vivek Ramaswamy’s Gamble Paying Off?
Ian Tuttle: 2024 Leaves No Doubt: The Television Age Is Over
Stanley Goldfarb & Roy Eappen: Money Is Driving Medicine’s Embrace of Child Transgenderism
Dan McLaughlin: The DOJ Is Suing Glenn Youngkin for Enforcing the Law
David Zimmermann: IDF Confirms Top Hamas Leader Yahya Sinwar Killed in Gaza Battle
Rich Lowry: Kamala Harris Should Have to Answer for Equity
Charles C. W. Cooke: Kamala Harris Is an Idiot
Brittany Bernstein: Western Media Couldn’t Give the Victims of the 10/7 Hamas Massacre a Single Day
Ryan Mills: Conservative School-Board Movement Still Alive and Well — Despite Media Obituary
Ryan Mills: Meet the ‘Real Men’ behind the Harris Masculinity Ad
Jack Butler: Beware the Temptation of an ‘Exercise Pill’
CAPITAL MATTERS
In the case of threats of devastating strikes, we actually are going back. Michael Watson explains: History Lessons from the Port Strike
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Sometimes I’m jealous of Brian Allen’s itinerary, and this is one of those times. Feast your eyes on archaeological delights from the Greeks, in Italy: The Gods Await You at Paestum
Armond White views the latest Travis Kelce–hosted game show, which is based on elementary-school-level knowledge, as an indictment of our education system: Are Americans Smarter Than Celebrities?
EXCERPTS-VILLE, THE FLAVORTOWN OF NEWSLETTER PARTS
Ian Tuttle, whose insights you’re going to start seeing regularly on NRO, identifies an important trend in our politics:
We are moving from an essentially televisual to an essentially digital age. The convulsions of the last several years have much to do with the disintegration of a set of structures, rules, and incentives that have shaped America’s information economy for more than half a century.
Television maintains certain presuppositions about authority, expertise, and credibility. Anthony Fauci’s Covid pronouncements, “51 former intelligence officials” declaring Hunter Biden’s laptop a Russian dupe, and “fact-checking” debate moderators are all natural products of a televisual culture. They assume certain things about the way information is produced, verified, delivered, and defended.
If televisual forces (network executives and anchors, newspaper editorial boards, etc.) seem more and more defensive, it is because they are now in the position of conducting rearguard actions against the digital culture that has overtaken them — and that operates on altogether different premises. Joe Rogan and Walter Cronkite occupy entirely different roles in their respective information economies. If the basic question of television news is: Who said it? Do I trust them?, the basic question of digital news is: How does it map onto my prior beliefs? How does it make me feel? Indeed, what constitutes “news” in each economy will be different. The salacious rumor is digital. Proclaiming it bunk is televisual.
Part of the surpassing strangeness of the past decade (“It’s, like, surreal!”) is that our politics has lagged behind our manifest communications revolution.
For all that was made of Barack Obama’s digital wizardry in 2008 and again in 2012, Obama was in fact the last president of the televisual age. Handsome, eloquent, and charismatic, Obama embodied and embraced the televisual symbolism of the Baby Boomer generation. The massive events and awestruck crowds were Woodstock-style spectacles. Every rally was a March on Washington, every speech was “I Have a Dream.”
By contrast, Donald Trump, who by every reckoning is a creature of television, has in fact been the first president of the burgeoning digital age. He was the first national politician to recognize that digital media function differently from televisual media. Much of our “post-truth politics” panic has been a failure to recognize that the information economy of the digital world is simply different from what has gone before it, and that individual malefactors are often reacting to structural changes. Facts behave differently online. Donald Trump, in his animal way, understood and exploited that.
Donald Trump’s rhetoric, meanwhile, hasn’t stopped being dreadful and self-defeating. Noah Rothman, on Trump’s latest gift to his own critics:
It’s a sad commentary on the state of intra-Republican political affairs when merely pledging to uphold the law is described as breaking with Donald Trump.
“Obviously we don’t want to have the United States military, we’re not going to have that, be deployed in the United States,” said Representative Byron Donalds, a staunch Trump ally, on Tuesday. “That’s been long-standing law in our country since the founding of the republic.”
The rebuke was occasioned by the former president’s cynical musing about the many subversive agents operating in the United States and the need to deploy the armed forces to subdue them.
“I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people. Radical left lunatics,” Trump told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo over the weekend. “I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.” The comments, which veered wildly away from Bartiromo’s premise, reveal the extent to which Trump remains fixated on what he called “the enemy from within.”
If he is restored to the White House, it’s not likely that Trump would be able to violate the Posse Comitatus Act at will. But nor would Trump be entirely bereft of the tools that would allow him to do just that, and his former defense secretary, Mark Esper, thinks he would certainly try. . . .
Trump’s remarks are a godsend to the Harris campaign at a time when it needs all the help it can get.
Stanley Goldfarb and Roy Eappen, with Do No Harm, get at a startling truth regarding the intersection of transgender medicine and children:
Medical providers stand to earn a windfall from children’s gender-transition procedures, which helps explain why the industry has endorsed the most aggressive treatments for gender dysphoria.
That’s our conclusion after looking at transgender medical interventions — puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries — performed on minors at children’s hospitals and affiliated health systems between 2019 and 2023. The facilities for which there are publicly available data provided nearly 14,000 treatments (including 5,700 surgeries) at a total cost to insurance companies and taxpayers of nearly $120 million. The real numbers are almost certainly higher, since major health systems such as Kaiser Permanente don’t disclose data, nor do patients who pay out of pocket.
At first glance, these numbers may look small, especially for an industry that makes billions of dollars a year. But they reflect a massive business opportunity, one that involves not only far more transgender treatments but also a lifetime of additional medical care for those subjected to those treatments. Despite barely existing before 2018, gender transitions for children will likely soon be a billion-dollar industry, if they aren’t already.
Our analysis shows that the average intervention makes more than $8,500 for medical providers. That’s significantly more than the cost of the typical hospital stay, which, according to provider MDC Healthcare, is on average $2,600 per day in the U.S. All told, the cost of the average transgender treatment for a child is equivalent to 62 percent of annual health-care spending per person, based on federal data. In other words, hospitals and health systems can bill most of a patient’s annual medical expenses in a single day.
But transgender treatments almost never end after just one day. When a child receives puberty blockers, which some hospitals provide to children as young as age nine, there’s a 98 percent chance that the child will go on to receive cross-sex hormones. One in three will eventually have surgery. Moreover, puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones often have permanent side effects — such as weight gain, blood clots, and sexual dysfunction — as do surgeries, which can also leave scars and recurring infections. These issues require physical and mental-health treatment throughout adulthood.
CODA
For something like 20 years, I’d been trying to rattle loose from my memory any information that could help identify a song I’d fallen in love with on a trip to see a good friend. I couldn’t remember the name of the band, the name of the song, or even, really, how it sounded. Useless, useless brain.
Then, unbidden, there was a concert promo, for a local, upcoming Dispatch show. Dispatch! That was it! The band! A quick bit of Googling, and I found the song, at last: “The General.”
On the one hand, looking more closely at the lyrics in the year 2024, I see it’s a bit too charitable toward one Robert E. Lee (the song is mostly a message from him to his troops that they can lay down arms). On the other, the hook of this anti-war song is unassailably perfect. Listen to it, over and over, and it won’t go stale. The band even rereleased the song two years ago, in Russian, as an appeal to Russian soldiers to oppose the Ukraine invasion. Perhaps that was too ambitious, but it was a nice thought.