There Are No Backsies on Dobbs
Since the day after the debate in June, I have conceived of the shift from a Joe Biden to a Kamala Harris campaign in three ways: The Vice President would more vigorously explain the wildly successful policies of the Biden-Harris Administration. She might (and indeed, has started to) chip away at the Double Hater logjam that has embodied presidential elections since 2016. And she would speak about choice far better than Biden ever could.
At the time, I maintained that Gretchen Whitmer was the only Democrat nationally who speaks better to choice than Harris does. In assuming the presidential ticket, Kamala’s team has made abortion something far more. They have made reproductive rights a cornerstone of a revamped democracy agenda.
That has happened in a curious way. Dobbs only happened because the Supreme Court has become a supercharged, wildly undemocratic wing of right wing policy. The fight to get abortion referenda on state ballots has repeatedly, perhaps most notably in Ohio, had to first defeat anti-democratic efforts to disempower referenda generally. In Wisconsin, voters first had to put Janet Protasiewicz on the Supreme Court before they could turn to protecting reproductive choice, but organizing to do that has laid the groundwork for renewed Democratic vitality. To restore reproductive rights, in state after state, democracy must be renewed.
But all that’s in the background. Kamala’s team has succeeded in making abortion something more: the most obvious item on a laundry list of the ways the far right has tried to take rights (and books) away, a fight for Freedom, one that has enthused millions of younger voters, especially women of child-bearing age.
And so, as I thought it might, Kamala’s focus on choice is one of the things that has remade the race.
It didn’t take rocket science to offer that prediction (though surprisingly few pundits did so, and most people pushing for a Thunderdome primary, who were overwhelmingly men, missed it). Democrats have successfully run on choice since Dobbs; it has played a central role in Democratic campaigns even in places like Andy Beshear’s Kentucky. Yet Kamala’s clarion voice on the issue largely got ignored as people plotted for ways to bypass the first woman Vice President to replace Biden.
Thus far in this campaign, a focus on abortion has also provided a way to make visible the patriarchy presumed in most threads of the right wing coalition backing Trump, especially but by no means exclusively Christian nationalism. Lest voters ever forget, Kamala’s campaign keeps rolling out one after another video in which JD Vance demands women get back to the role his Church dictates for them: breeding children.
A number of things — the successful convention, a surge in registration among those women of child-bearing age, polls showing that abortion is the most important issue for a larger number of voters — have led horserace journalists to finally cop on.
Or perhaps they’re just noting Trump’s response to Kamala’s focus on choice. I think choice (and the way it harms Trump with women voters) is one reason Trump’s team made Tulsi Gabbard a more formal surrogate; in their appearance together in LaCrosse, billed a Town Hall, Tulsi told the story of her own attempt to conceive using IVF, effectively adopting Tim Walz’ story and focus. Certainly, it’s the reason why, over the course of one day, Trump said wildly contradictory things about choice.
Yesterday, both NYT and WaPo had stories describing the background to that. Trump whisperers Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, who in July first seeded the false narrative that a GOP platform that enshrines fetal personhood reflects a “softened” stance on abortion, treat it as primarily a matter of messaging.
Back in 2022, the former president had told allies — as the Supreme Court was preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade — that the move would hurt his party. Since that year, when Republicans underperformed expectations in the midterm elections, Mr. Trump has been privately emphatic with advisers that in his view the abortion issue alone could kill their chances of victory in November. And he is willing to make as many rhetorical and policy contortions as he deems necessary to win.
It is through that narrow political lens that Mr. Trump has been weighing the subject, despite his role in reshaping the Supreme Court that overturned the landmark 1973 abortion decision.
The results have been confusing and fluid, a contradictory mess of policy statements as he has once again tried to rebrand himself on an issue that many of his supporters view in strict moral terms, and had come to believe that he did, too.
[snip]
Still, even by Mr. Trump’s standards, the past few weeks have been head-spinning for people trying to keep track of his slippery social conservatism.
Twice divorced serial philanderer Donald Trump doesn’t have social conservatism. He has a politically expedient con. Trump has convinced Christian nationalists he was anti-choice in public while attempting to limit the political damage of anti-choice policies behind the scenes. And that con is running headlong into the consequences of the actions he took to sustain the con.
WaPo states this more clearly; this is not about messaging (though WaPo cites Republicans mocking how bad Trump’s messaging on it is). It’s about Trump’s record. Trump had wanted to run on other policies, immigration and Trump’s distorted claims about the economy, but now he’s having to answer for his anti-choice policies.
Many Republicans are hoping that other topics, like the economy and the border, will take precedence for voters, and they cite polls showing broader voter interest in those issues than in abortion.
Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that women voters will compare the Trump and Biden-Harris administrations, and that under Trump, “the economy was better, groceries and gas cost less, our neighborhoods were safer, and young women like Laken Riley were still alive” — a reference to a Georgia student allegedly killed by someone who entered the country illegally in 2022.
But, as noted, in the month since she has entered the race, Kamala has made abortion the primary issue for more voters than immigration is, and it rivals the economy as the most important election issue among women voters.
Swan and Maggie describe how Trump became what they describe as “agitated” after watching the way the DNC made abortion a primary focus.
In private, Mr. Trump was agitated by the speeches at the Democratic National Convention, according to a person close to him, many of which tied him to Project 2025, an effort by people supportive of Mr. Trump to develop policy proposals for him if he wins that include restrictive ideas for reproductive measures. He was especially bothered by Ms. Harris’s assertions that a second Trump term would further imperil abortion rights.
This is more than agitation.
It is flailing.
Panic.
A recognition that he is losing because of actions he took as President, he is losing because of what the payoff he owed to social conservatives who put him in the White House, a far right SCOTUS, did to women. What NYT journalists with another book contract describe as “head-spinning” is not about branding, it’s about panic because Kamala threatens to hold him accountable for his actions.
No matter how many contradictory statements Trump makes about what a second Trump term would do, there’s no escaping what his first term did do. There are no backsies on Dobbs. There are no backsies on Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. There aren’t even any backsies on that platform granting fetuses protection under the 14th Amendment, even if NYT’s Trump whisperers continue to pretend that didn’t happen.
I mean, come on! If not for the three people Trump added to SCOTUS and those, like Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, paid for by the same far right Christian nationalists that pushed Vance as a candidate, Trump would be sitting in trial for his attack on January 6 as we speak. Trump is only here, in the race, because of those ideologues who were willing to alter the Constitution to serve a far right agenda. Trump has survived thanks to that Court; he is panicking as he considers the possibility it’ll sink him as well.
And even as Kamala already has Trump panicking, it could get worse for Trump and his party.
There’s something about the WaPo version of this story that I can’t get out of my head; it’s actually one of the reasons I went through the trouble of writing this post. Its subhead (presumably not written by the journalists) suggests Trump’s wild gyrations on choice come during the “final stretch” of the campaign. “Heading into the campaign’s final stretch, Republicans careen between their base and swing voters on the powerful issue of reproductive rights.” The temporal observation, that we’re in the last stretch, is undoubtedly true viewed through the lens of the traditional interminable US presidential campaign. Labor Day kicks off the last, most intense period of a campaign, though importantly, the period when low-information voters first start to tune in. Given Trump’s attempt to stave off criminal charges by announcing his run early, in November 2022, it’s far more true of Trump, who is 91% of the way through his run to regain the presidency.
Not so Kamala Harris.
As I calculated Wednesday, Kamala is just starting the second third of her campaign, what we might call her second trimester if it were three times as long. As of today, she has 60% of her campaign, 64 days of 107, left to go.
And so, even as Kamala has already made Trump an equivocating wreck, nine-tenths of the way through his campaign and just in time for low-information voters to witness it, she has only just laid a foundation to build on. Even as the press described Trump’s flopsweat as abortion threatens to ruin his bid, Kamala’s campaign rolled out a bus tour to focus on reproductive rights.
They are, quite literally, taking it to Trump, to Palm Beach, for the kickoff.
Today, Team Harris-Walz is announcing the launch of its “Fighting for Reproductive Freedom” bus tour with a kickoff event in Donald Trump’s backyard in Palm Beach, Florida, on Tuesday, September 3. Senator Amy Klobuchar, Harris-Walz campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Republican TV personality Ana Navarro, and reproductive rights storyteller Anya Cook will hold Trump directly accountable for the devastating impacts of overturning Roe v. Wade, including threatening access to IVF.
This fall, the bus will make at least 50 stops in key states, touching blue communities and red ones, with support for reproductive rights transcending party lines. Each stop will emphasize the stark contrast between Vice President Harris and Governor Walz, who will restore the protections of Roe when Congress passes a bill to do so, and Donald Trump and JD Vance, who will enact their dangerous Project 2025 agenda to ban abortion nationwide, restrict access to birth control, create a national anti-abortion coordinator, force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions, and jeopardize access to IVF.
This is a bus tour of diverse surrogates, not Harris or Walz themselves. The grand-daughter of César Chávez, Julie Chávez Rodriguez, is the only royalty on this bus. But the bus provides the campaign a low-effort way to build on the foundation established at the DNC, to try to yoke state referenda more closely to partisan races, to try to make races like that of Florida Senate candidate Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (or that of Angela Alsobrooks or Dan Osborn) more competitive. If that works, who knows how close Kamala might make the Florida race itself? Even assuming Kamala won’t beat Trump in his own state, it will serve to reinvigorate a state party that had been struggling, but which also just recently delivered embarrassing defeats to Moms for Liberty, the book-burners who serve as both Ron DeSantis and Trump’s surrogates to reach women.
Thus far, horserace journalists have been absolutely loathe to hold Trump accountable for the bad things that happened when he was President: his failures on COVID as well as jobs lost for reasons other than pandemic, the spike in crime, his corruption of rule of law.
But Kamala has finally made Trump own something, his role in stripping women of their bodily autonomy.
And in response, Trump has started to panic.
Update: This Public Notice piece on the press’ willingness to let Trump flip flop on choice with impunity him on it names several other policies he should not have backsies on either.
There’s no earthly reason to give Trump the benefit of the doubt here. Besides dismantling the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate, the Trump administration also tried to undermine private insurance coverage for abortions, prohibited clinics from receiving federal funds under Title X if they even referred people elsewhere for abortion services, and slashed grants for teen pregnancy prevention programs. A second Trump administration will be comprehensively terrible for reproductive rights generally, not just abortion, and no amount of uninformed flip-flopping will change that.
And just 10 – or 9 depending – days until the debate. I’d like to see KH be able to bypass the moderators – if necessary – and deliver a long painful but lingering fatal blow to Trump. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRwCPUEND1U
The debate is September 10th and his sentencing is the 18th. Even with him getting probation, the sentencing will remind voters of his criming, just 48 days before the election. If he surprises us with a good debate performance, his sentencing blunts the advantage. If, as I expect, she destroys him, the sentencing will add to Harris’ momentum.
An alternative senario also needs to be considered. And it it’s also one which doesn’t play out well for Trump IMHO.
There is a chance that the sentencing will not go ahead, should the argument about the impact of the SCOTUS immunity decision, regarding some evidence from Trump’s time in office, be accepted by Justice Merchan.
In those circumstances, Trump and Trumpers will crow, but I believe the majority of the population will see that occurrence for what it is:
an unjust outcome, resulting from the unprincipled perversion of the course of justice by a SCOTUS designed to favor a wholly undeserving Trump.
As I understand it, but will be corrected, Merchan has the option to declare a mistrial. The possibility of a retrial of Trump on overwhelming evidence resulting from the thinnest of contrived and controversial technicalities, instead of the case proceeding to sentencing, is not going to boost Trump’s campaign, except amongst true believers who swallow the myth of his victimisation.
Thanks for this! Choice IS my motivational issue, and living in MO i hope the referendum we have on the ballot in Nov will help lift Kunce past Hawley. Time will tell!
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Good post.
“Twice divorced serial philanderer Donald Trump doesn’t have social conservatism. He has a politically expedient con.”
Spot on, and the underlying, omnipresent and all but certain ‘October Surprise’ by Ratfucking surrogates of The Felon Guy is what I wonder about. His con quiver of Lewandowski, Stone, LaCivita et al are probably frothing at the chance to land a serious body-blow on Harris/Walz.
Can they?
She and Tim have rolled with it nicely and are capable of holding their own – true that – but how vile will the Team Orange Anemic Squitter response be to the LCD/low information voter set be?
As a precocious child watching politics since the late 60’s it never ceases to amaze me how a solid majority of folk will not care about facts – the orange idiot will get at least 35% of the popular vote and the MSM will, as you put it ‘horserace’ a nothing-burger to gain eyeballs and clicks.
Easiest route to stop the madness? Take both chambers of Congress and the Executive branch by solid margins and eliminate the EC. Less easy route? Have the SCOTUS represent all 12 Circuits and create another 3 seats.
No backsies on Dobbs? We can sure AF try.
I think you need to revisit your suggested routes to “stop the madness,” noting which one requires a constitutional amendment. (Hint: it’s the one reform which hasn’t been achieved previously.)
Maine just approved our inclusion in the popular vote EC compact, which, if and when it reaches critical EC mass, will certainly have been bouyed by a sweep-type election aftermath on the state-level.
It will be immediately challenged right on up to the SC, of course, but if such a sweep is powerful enough, that critical mass event would likely also be preceded by passage of SC reform legislation that could make such repeal litigation much less perilous.
And given the current state of the Compact (lacking just 61 EC votes short of the 270 minimum), that’s actually great positioning because the Compact is the cart and SC overhaul is the horse.
Biden’s biggest failure, imo, is his unwillingess (until quite recently) to embrace SC reform. I understand the source of his rationale (coming as he did from the comity era of US national politics), but that decision wasn’t based on facts on the ground that were entirely predictive of Dobbs, immunity, and the execrable rest.
Fixing our worst minority-rule-enabling national defects must become a paramount effort going forward. And the knock-on effects will cascade from there, e.g.: once the SC is fixed, gerrymandering suits will quickly make their way to cert approval there.
The chances of a constitutional amendment to remove the electoral college are slim to none – and Slim just left town. A better, quicker idea would be to increase the size of the House of representatives. This was done after every decade’s census until 1924. The population of the country has tripled since 1924 but we’re still stuck at 435 representatives. I’d suggest an increase to 1300 representatives. Right now each representative represents 750,000 constituents. This would bring representation closer to the people and have the effect of reducing the outsized influence of the smallest states on the electoral college. Like increasing the size of the Supreme Court (heartily endorsed!), this does not require a constitutional amendment, only a law passed by the House and Senate and signed by the President. Vote Blue – Make it so!
The size of the House has been fixed for decades because the chamber can’t hold more.
You’d have to build a NEW chamber to hold more people. Good luck getting that through Congress!
Wikipedia: Since 1913, the number of voting representatives has been at 435 pursuant to the Apportionment Act of 1911.[The Reapportionment Act of 1929 capped the size of the House at 435. However, the number was temporarily increased in 1959 until 1963 to 437 when Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the Union.[
The House can’t hold more! What a pathetic excuse for holding back progress and representative democracy! We live in an electronic age. Physical presence is no longer required for most purposes. The size of the House was caught up in the Wet-Dry, Urban-Rural disputes of the early 20th Century and hence was not increased after the 1920 census as was the custom for more than 120 years. Decisions made 100 years ago shouldn’t be a barrier to a more perfect Union.
Bruce F. Cole is referring to the Electoral College Compact, not a constitutional amendment. The Compact is a coalition of states, in which each state passes a local state law that would give their EC votes to whichever candidate wins the national popular vote. A commitment within each state’s power to make, although red states are guaranteed to disagree with it.
It’s an intentional workaround to the practical impossibility of amending the Constitution in the current climate. With Maine’s agreement, the Compact states comprise 209 of the 270 needed. States representing 50 more EC votes have action pending, which means a minimum of another eleven EC votes is required.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
thirteen hundred representatives? nine hundred more politicians than we already have?
The excess can be remote workers.
from what I have seen in reporting is the only time all elected officials show up is when there is a “command” .performance. The rest of the time the chambers aren’t full, It won’t matter for the State of the Union event, the senators and congress people can stand if there aren’t enough seats. Given the state of the Union address is given from time to time, couldn’t they just rent something larger for the day? Makes more financial sense than building a new “stadium” where most don’t show up on a daily basis.
Looks like if you quadruple the number of reps then California would have the same population per rep as Wyoming. Oddly, the proportion of the house votes belonging to California wouldn’t change appreciably, probably because the smallest states aren’t much of a factor in apportionment. Increase the number might have the side effect of making it harder to rent a rep, but given the amount of political money washing around, it probably wouldn’t really stop the big bribers.
There’s possibly an effect within a state; by increasing the number of reps you might shift the proportion of red vs blue seats but without gerrymandering it might well be a wash.
With a little planning they could probably cram the larger number of reps into the chamber especially if they consumed the gallery (put the airlines in charge of designing the seating ;-). In this day and age it’s probably not important to have them all in one room anymore.
If the same Huntington-Hill method were used to apportion 100 senators by population the result would be more interesting. California would go from 2 to 10 while a bit over half the states would have a single senator. That would still have one California senator per about 4M voters vs one Wyoming senator per 600K voters so there would still be a rural bias in the Senate but that would be improved from the current one California senator per 20M vs one Wyoming senator per 300K. Another factor might be to increase the number of Senators since the current small number seems to encourage all too many of them to become prima donnas.
HAPPY to see my repeated pleas for the House of Reps size to be expanded being resurrected here, but need to be clear on size needed for equity in representation ==> simply divide by the lowest state population and House will likely not exceed 609 in number, based on population extrapolation (future census state size estimates) i ran statistically.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2023/09/04/oligarchy-has-arrived-congress-must-take-notice-and-act/#comment-1013052
with one fewer staffer per rep, and thoughtful renovating, current space would be adequate
See the German Bundestag, which has a minimum of 598 seats (currently 735), for parsimonious space usage on House floor. The British House of Commons fits 650 members into much smaller space (1/3?? 1/4?? the square footage size???). Germany’s equivalent of the US senate (state representation) — the Bundesrat — has 69 seats/members.
Other ways to estimate needed House of Reps size for equal representation
https://www.amacad.org/ourcommonpurpose/enlarging-the-house/section/7
there is a current lawsuit suing over this as unconstitutional, but cat in lap is preventing me sending link
Thank you.
This and Mr. Cole’s statement are pure wishcasting. The EC is going nowhere, not through a Constitutional Amendment nor with the EC Compact. Packing the SCOTUS is not going to happen. Removing the filibuster is not going to happen. Using Executive Orders to pass monetary legislation is going to be rejected by the SCOTUS. Please, Democrats, please try to just win the way it’s always been done – through the vote and winning the EC.
Amending the Constitution for anything is crazy talk and engaging in it just reflects a lack of reality. Now explaining how the rich corrupted our State Legislatures and our Constitution during the so called “Progressive Era” is a worthy goal, but alas no one will take up the cause.
I loathe the 17th Amendment.
Decisions made 100 years ago allowed the US rich to buy the country which is now being bought by foreign interests.
The rich *bought* senators before the 17th amendment.
“Amending the Constitution for anything is crazy talk and engaging in it just reflects a lack of reality.”
And yet the Constitution has been amended 27 times and still very much needs the Equal Rights Amendment ratified regardless of your personal sentiment.
As EOH noted above, the EC compact, 61 electors shy of enactment, has states with 50 electors considering it now. AZ has 11 electors, PA 10. Does that mean it’s not going to be a big lift? Of course not, but that’s why I framed, in my comment above, the conditions for enactment as being a blue wave election that has the capacity to pull states like those two and the 4 that have it underconsideration already into the compact. And I also noted the need for such a wave to result in SC reform as a pre-condition for the compact to withstand the inevitable court challenges.
Your pov, otoh, amounts to “Don’t bother with anything but GOTV because the lift is too heavy and we may as well just resign ourselves to perpetual electoral deck-stacking.” I don’t have a problem with that mindset, as long as the GOTV impulse is genuine, because that’s how a wave election is accomplished. I just hope that if such an sweep does occur, the Dems like you who are resigned to permanent second-class voter status see the light and back court reform and the completion of the compact at that point, and not let the golden hour pass without bringing it to completion.
ME’s compact bill passage had to overcome our centrist Dem Gov, who like you resisted this game-changing step toward actual democracy in our Presidential elections (she let it pass without her signature): https://www.maine.gov/governor/mills/news/governor-mills-allows-national-popular-vote-legislation-become-law-without-her-signature-2024
If you read her reasoning in that link, you’ll see that she came to the realization that our 4 measly ec votes added to the running total had strategic value, and that the compact endeavor is inherently worthy and just might get pulled off. Myself, I’m fed up with the skewing effect of the electoral college system (not to even mention the opportunity for fucking with POTUS elections, as was demonstrated last time), and the structural disadvantage it imposes on liberals in this country.
There are 13 Fed Circuits, which makes it better for breaking ties. We need to unpack the McConnell/Trump Court as soon as possible.
Obama won Florida with 53% of the national popular vote. Here is as a trajectory that gets her north of 55%. She can win Florida.
“Here is as”.
Is this the auto-correct version of “Harris has”?
Court reform measures are a part of the Dobbs reaction, and will play a role in voters seeing policy differences. Republicans are happy with SCOTUS as is.
Vance seems closer to Dobbs, Alito, Project 2024 – Kevin Roberts, and Leonard Leo than Trump, which makes Trump’s age a major anti-Dobbs factor.
Trump arguably has passed the MAGA torch to Vance and the Roman Church while at risk of not making four more living years, and Catholics are a distinct numerical minority. So, how tightly bound are evangelicals and Catholics where the evangelicals might see their status as second-class Christians in the current Republican Party while outnumbering the Catholics.
Will the VP debate be a trial run of the Harris – Trump session, or a differing prelude? The personalities are different but the issues are constant. (Not OT as far as having two debates and the main theme of the post being anti-Dobbs thoughts energizing both. The debates will matter and how might media horserace hopes evolve after them with the key issue becoming more focused as Marcy delineated?)
Let’s avoid the broad brush lumping all Catholics together. Biden is Catholic. So are Justice Sotomayor, 14 Democratic Senators, and 66 of 122 Catholics in the House. Catholics are NOT uniformly conservative or fascistic.
I don’t know how many times I am going to have to spell this out in comments here: there is a schism between Catholics in the US which may also suggest a growing schism within a part of the US Catholic Church and the Roman Catholic church. The recent excommunication of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a noted QAnon-er Trumper, should make that very clear.
ADDER: source — https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2022/12/PF_2023.01.03_religion-congress_REPORT.pdf
Schism was the formal charge against Vigano. So, yes. But evangelical congregations are generally not hierarchical. Often charismatic around a present-time founding figure. The Vatican top down structure still opposes abortion and birth control, and divorce, even with Francis an incremental reformer. Some still favor the Latin Mass. A hierarchical structure can be expected to have a similar conservative – non-conservative split within levels as the general population, but the level of hierarchical downward management is historical and ongoing as dogmatically stronger among the elders, of which the Church has many. Admitted, those conservative within the faith is less a litmus test with the Federalist Society than an encompassing political conservative outlook, but Leonard Leo sits upon a ton of cash and Trump defers; Leo being a proud Knight of Malta..
Really, just stop. Your comment about the Latin Mass alone is proof you’re poorly informed as the Latin Mass is at the heart of serious conflict within the church, much of it driven by the same portion of the US Catholic Vigano encouraged. Even your crack about Francis being an incremental reformer undercuts the size of reform he has already taken with abortion in particular (see https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/21/europe/pope-francis-absolve-abortion/index.html).
Just stop, and address the specific problematic individuals like Leonard Leo who is a fascist.
Leonard and the zealots overplayed their hand drawing blow back onto all Catholics. To ask people not to point out that obvious fact does a disservice to our Constitution. The swamp drainer picked two SCOTUS appointees from the same high school in DC.
Louisiana Catholics are jamming the 10 Commandments down kids throats while the local Catholic Educational facilities are asking their parishioners for expansion money in anticipation of gutting public education for charter/religious school money.
Not calling out religion got us into this mess IMHO.
So call out religion and the failure to protect individuals’ First Amendment rights.
The problem is isn’t Catholicism specifically because there are other faith groups likewise abusing others’ rights.
A small rant from my naively neutral corner of the planet:
It looks like schisms have widened between many conservative institutions in our country since our 1st black POTUS took office. Politics&Religion are just two good examples, as inexplicably intertwined as always.
To wit, Republicans have split asunder into TakeAmericaBack-trumpublicans & MAGAts (?morphed TeaPartiers) vs old guard GOPers (?Raygun-McCain-Repubs) vs newt-drown-baby in bath-tommytubbers vs LincolnProjectHammerheads vs doublehater-swinger-Independents (?rfk-jr-libertarians) vs kinzinger-warriors for common sense vs fox-shockjock-rush-medal of freedom-flag fliers, etc, etc.
The religious folks chanting their mantra “Freedom Faith Family” now must now add “Felon” to their chant and reckon with fissured Evangelicals For Harris. And as crystallized in this thread Christian-CatholicChaos cracking over bodily freedom.
Yes, tectonic shifts in our laboratory of democracy will cause quakes and cracks…we just need to hold our shit together until the shaking stops.
Harris/Walz seem to be trying to do so, much to the utter chagrin of foreign enemies and our own domestic oligarchs.
Sorry Rayne, long rant!
Absolutely. My sister and her husband were in the Catholic Worker movement and he became a full time deacon in a Seattle church. They are as staunchly liberal as they come. The current image surrounding Catholics in the US has been conjured by the strident “blue army” contingent (Virgin Mary blue, not Dem blue, lol) who have allied themselves with their former rw protestant enemies, all based on visceral opposition to abortion of any kind, and anti-feminism of course. (Ironically and disingenuously, the evangelicals only recently converted to strict anti-abortionism when it dawned on them that allying themselves with rw Catholics was strategically smart.)
I feel strongly that Joe Biden can make a powerful counter-argument to this, and that it could be a far-reaching game changer if done well. I’m going to post a sample of what he could say in a prime-time address below. He is uniquely positioned to make this argument in Harris’ stead, and such a message to the American public would cement his position as one of the best Democratic Presidents in our era.
So I wrote the speech sample, but it was 1,100 words so I posted it on dKos, Here’s the link:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/9/2/2267491/-A-Proposed-Speech-for-Joe-Biden
I think Harris’s choice of Walz as her running mate might be not least motivated by the way how the topic Dobbs can now be dealt with. Abortion used to be (wrongly) considered as concerning only women, but now the A-word can be avoided, the issue itself be treated in the broader context of reproductive rights, and Walz’s personal history is the obvious proof that men are (at least: can be) as much affected by these rights as women are.
And naming the bus tour “Fighting for Reproductive Freedom” is really good. It’s a fight that more people might be willing to join than the old battle between pro-choice and pro-life.
The A-word is “autonomy, bodily,” which has implications for everyone.
I incorporated the Reproductive Freedom League in Kentucky in 1974, publishing a monthly newsletter for more than a decade. RFL was the state affiliate of NARAL during that time, and I served on the national NARAL Board from 1976 – 1980.
RFL was active in defending the entire spectrum of reproductive rights, from sex education policy in schools to contraceptive access to abortion rights.
NARAL is now known as Reproductive Freedom for All. Too bad it took 50 years to get the messaging right.
Come on. It’s not that the messaging was wrong. In the 1970s National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws and before it the Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws was wholly on point because it wasn’t about other reproductive rights after Roe v. Wade or Griswold v. Connecticut before it.
Timing of a third debate is still open. Timing, moderation and broadcast info for Sept 10 – https://news.yahoo.com/news/harris-trump-walz-vance-debates-173133025.html
How about a week, or maybe eight, nine days after the first one?
On the eve of his sentencing, the day of it, or the day after—I’d love to see Donald’s debate performance on one of those days. :)
Margret Sullivan has a good take on the NYT’s both-siderism this morning, coincidently right after Marcy’s post on Memorandum’s rolling new stories list. In discussion with James Risen, Sullivan says “He wrote to express his outrage at his former employer for a recent story.”
https://margaretsullivan.substack.com/p/an-ugly-case-of-false-balance-in
To address housing shortages, mass deportation—to free up housing vacated as its former occupants are rounded up in prison camps—is treated as one option, and a proposal for tax cuts to spur construction and grants to first-time home buyers, is just another? And both have”…drawn skepticism from outside economists?”
Sighhhhh…
This was what the Nazis did: “free up” Jewish housing for authentic Germans.
Yes, the echo is pretty obvious there.
– the echo is pretty obvious there.
As is the echo in Trump’s recent comment that Harris `is a defective person”,
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4856807-donald-trump-kamala-harris-cnn-interview-reaction-2024/
which sounds better in the original German.
I recently saw this recorded lecture about the enabling conditions that led to the Holocaust, given 11 years ago by historian Timothy Snyder. Very interesting, and disturbing.
Risen recently wrote a scathing article for the Intercept about the media’s general failure with Trump coverage:
https://theintercept.com/2024/08/28/trump-campaign-election-media-coverage-journalists/
allan_in_upstate
“…Trump’s recent comment that Harris `is a defective person”…” As well as being racist, it sounds like a Scientology term.
I believe their term is “Subversive Person” (SP, for short). But, yeah, what YOU said.
Both terms serve to other-ize and ostracize, while simultaneously controlling, “troublemakers” threatening to spoil everything for the true believers with, y’know … truth and shit.
[Moderator’s note: this is one and ONLY time I will help with email address. It begins with a and ends with 9. You’ve used VPNs regularly and this time you’ve used a server flagged for spam. If this happens again, don’t comment because I won’t clear it from moderation as I have no way to confirm your identity. /~Rayne]
Marcy, Rayne or others – First, any thoughts whether Harris is better arguing Trump’s issue shifting as cognitive decline, or a fear reaction with dishonest weaseling? Also, should she in debate emphatically state Dobbs is a terrible divisive decision on outcome and poorly reasoned, and demand Trump face the simple question, for it or against it as to how it burdens women in conservative states?
A “cognitive decline” argument won’t work, the popular image is Biden’s stutter and brain freeze, not Trump’s word salad. Weaseling has the virtue of being more in his character, and the enduring popularity of “flip-flop” as a perjorative is a point in its favor. The disinterested voters supposedly influenced by this puppet show don’t care or understand how Dobbs was reasoned. They simply need the implications of it rubbed in their faces and Trump needs to own it.
Amen on judicial reasoning. Nobody cares about its quality, except a few law professors, and any practitioners who have to deal with subsequent cases based on precedential judicial word salad.
The weaseling (or flip-flops) is already baked in, and isn’t as strong an argument. However the cognitive decline aspect is already primed because of Biden, and would be a better issue for the on-the-fence voters as well as the low information voters just starting to pay real attention.
I really don’t know why Kamala isn’t hitting this at all-maybe pulling her shots because it may hurt Joe/Joe’s supporters? Maybe she’ll pick it up after the debate when Trump’s sure to have at least a few senior moments {rambling/kids off my lawn/stuck in a different era}.
You had it right when you talked about this is TFG running into “consequences” of his choices. It’s also the first time that he cannot find a way to avoid “consequences.” Oddly enough, though, this is a topic on which TFG could see there would be “consequences” but was unable to convince others that there would be. And, as Simon Rosenberg wrote recently, since Dobbs, every Republican has underperformed AND every Democrat has overperformed at the polls. It may have finally gotten through to people that, “Yes, Republicans actually mean it…” and if it also gets through to the commentariat, that’s the ballgame.
As a Florida Man, Trump doesn’t do consequences. This reminds me of my favorite scene in The Good Place. The heros are trapped in a bar in Hell, surrounded by demons, and the Florida Man suggests throwing a Molotov cocktail. One character asks why, and he says “whenever I have a problem, I throw a Molotov cocktail. Boom! Right away I have a different problem”. Same with Trump.
There are certain words whose precise definitions I often have a bit of trouble with.
‘Fascism’ is one; ‘subversive’ is another.
My helper for the latter: “The Good Place” was a wonderfully subversive television show.
=====
Sometimes plain English is wonderful; every word of Wheeler’s two paragraphs that follow are…plain English.
Golden plain English. Thank you.
=====
“No matter how many contradictory statements Trump makes about what a second Trump term would do, there’s no escaping what his first term did do. There are no backsies on Dobbs. There are no backsies on Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. There aren’t even any backsies on that platform granting fetuses protection under the 14th Amendment, even if NYT’s Trump whisperers continue to pretend that didn’t happen.
I mean, come on! If not for the three people Trump added to SCOTUS and those, like Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, paid for by the same far right Christian nationalists that pushed Vance as a candidate, Trump would be sitting in trial for his attack on January 6 as we speak. Trump is only here, in the race, because of those ideologues who were willing to alter the Constitution to serve a far right agenda. Trump has survived thanks to that Court; he is panicking as he considers the possibility it’ll sink him as well.”
Thank you, from this (lapsed) Roman Catholic and former Michigander…
Excellent post/piece! You nailed it!
Tulsa Gabbard has become “First Vice President of Trumpland.”And the fact that she has admitted she’s tried IVF makes her salient to Trump’s desire to appear more supportive of the abortion rights issue than the evangelical/“Republic of Gilead” right-wingers in the Republican Party.
Gabbard has a long history of succumbing to cults. She’s similar to Ginni Thomas in that way. Trumpland is a cult.
Vance is just VP of Trumpland and he was put onto the ticket to attract Silicon Valley multimillionaires and induce the billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk to spend even more money on getting Trump elected.
Trump behaves like a Sun King, much like Ruppert Murdoch.
Sun Kings select “flavors of the month humans” to orbit around them for awhile, then Sun Kings discard those respective flavors like used toilet paper.
Harris needs to destroy Trump in the September 10th event (they are not debates).
Restoring Roe must be considered a floor, not a ceiling. Access to abortion had steadily diminished before Dobbs, with a host of TRAP laws, waiting periods, the Hyde amendment, and protestors looming outside clinics. As the wrenching stories told publicly by women (and their partners) indicate, abortion is health care. Harris’ question to Kavanaugh about laws about men’s bodies makes this clear and easy to understand.
The extremes the GOP is willing to go to in order to prevent a popular vote on abortion can be seen in what has happened in Arkansas this week, where failure to staple a photocopy to a ballot initiative gave the state Supreme Court a pretext to keep voters from weighing in.
Adam Unikowsky (Harvard Law 2007) has a long, detailed look at the issue on his substack: https://adamunikowsky.substack.com/p/they-didnt-submit-a-photocopy-that
Wonderful post, thank you.
As one comment noted above, there are many ways in which men are affected as much as women by the issue of reproductive freedom; many times when the man did not ask for the child, does not want the child forced on him or the mother at that time. The right of a father to not force his teen daughter to carry a rapist’s child to term. The right to use birth control when the goal is pleasure and not conception. The right to work with his partner to have (or not have) a baby when the time is right in their lives, taking into account the may other relevant factors. It’s a man’s issue just as much as it is a woman’s issue. I wonder how many men will be speaking.
And when a women is sitting in her car in a hospital parking lot, sweating, crying and wailing, waiting to become septic so she could walk back into the hospital and have a life saving abortion; a man is likely sitting in the car with her, holding her, consoling her and praying she doesn’t die before the hospital will help her.
Thank you for bringing up men. IMHO too many males are clueless about parenting. If we talk about reproductive rights there should be wide ranging discussion around sex education. Males first need to understand menstruation and how any of our bodies actually work. What underlies my continuing frustration is the social messaging that dumbs males into horndog bro dumbass culture. We can trace a lot of problems to this ignorance. Reactionary right wing males want old school patriarchy. Yet their concepts of being a father yearn for dominance. Being a parent can be a many splendored thing, if not enlightening, even if excruciating at times. How to be a stand up dad is also on the ballot. Many many essays these days on crisis of masculinity. How should males respond to strong females? I find a lot of the transphobia bound up in this too. OMG males who live as women! Most of that discussion precludes females transitioning or masc lesbians embracing their butchness. The nuances are complex. My daughter has decided not to have kids. That is simply a viable choice. As a millennial she sees the future in a different way than I did. Now I see the future starting to shift from obsolete grotesque to something where women finally can define that future. I’m voting for Planned Parenthood!
choice is an every body issue. Whether you want or do not want a child is something most people have to think about at some time in their lives. Whatever caused some people to think they had the right to control the lives/bodies of others, is beyond me. Must had some sort of complex which they ought to have sought medical help with.
The Supreme Court decision has had a major impact on health care in the U.S.A. People aren’t happy about it and it is going to have an impact in the upcoming election.
In Ireland, abortions were banned. Then a young woman, needed one, but they refused. She died–bled to death while her husband could just stand and observe. Following that, there was a huge uproar in Ireland and the ban on abortions was removed.
Canada and the U.S.A. are democracies. Citizens have the right to make their own decisions regarding their own bodies.
I’ve got to say after several of these “choice is an every body issue” comments my hackles are up.
Testicle-endowed persons aren’t dying for lack of choice just as they don’t end up statistics under increasing maternal mortality rates. The testicle-endowed persons may have an interest but uterus-endowed are committed.
Let’s cut to Harris on this in her question to justice nominee Kavanaugh: “Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?”
Agreed 100%. After a while I came back to my comment above, and realized it was incomplete if not plain wrong. I was reacting to what I saw as commentary that reproductive freedom was a women-only issue. As you say so well, men do have an interest in the deal but women are committed. Thank you for making the point.
Reply to bloopie2
September 1, 2024 at 6:01 pm
It’s personal for me though I don’t have the degree of commitment I once had.
I may fret with my son about his looking for future jobs in places which restrict reproductive care, but I’ve had to make detailed plans with my daughter since Dobbs if she should have a health care emergency while traveling on business in certain red states.
They may both feel the same about reproductive rights but only one of them has been in danger.
When we first got married, my wife was just entering graduate school for a masters in bilingual teaching in elementary education. This was a big deal for her. When she/we became pregnant, it was a momentous decision on her part to get an abortion. I was supportive whatever she wanted, so we did. Later when she was 36 she wanted a child. After two miscarriages we felt a big karmic despair. Then it was hard to get pregnant. Was it my sperm count? I am 5 years older. Then it happened. Then OB/GYN visits. We did Lamaze together. All positive. We worked with midwives at a hospital on day of birth. It seemed smooth until it wasn’t. Baby was upside down and stuck in birth canal. This turned into an unexpected dire situation. Fortunately a doctor came in and turned baby around. My wife was totally knocked out but I was a panicked witness to my baby daughter’s emergence. Then she was whisked away to ICU. 30 years later my daughter is who she is as a fully functional adult with her own tribulations. My point tho is that reproductive rights involves the whole existential reality of pregnancy. From condoms to prenatal care to daycare to free school lunches for all kiddos and beyond. I could also tell some horror stories from my kith and kin of births gone horribly wrong. This is very complex big issue. I have yet to hear any Christian Nationalist talk at all about any aspect of this reality. I don’t want to hijack the thread about the horserace politics, but underlying fundamental issues are intersectional on every tangent.
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I remain in awe at then Senator Harris’ framing in that one question. It is a Magna Carta Moment.
RE: Horserace coverage.
It occurred to me this morning as the press clearly recognizes the start of the “home stretch” part of a campaign where disengaged voters begin to become engaged, that the allegory might need an upgrade. Aren’t we actually talking about a mashup of one campaign landing the plane, and the other burning up on re-entry? How else can one explain the sudden equivocation on abortion?
Asteroid coverage, train wreck coverage or plane crash coverage, you name it, but it’s not a horserace any more, unless one of the horses is a zombie horse with a zombie jockey. It isn’t a matter of how fast you run any more, so your buddies get eaten by the zombies instead of you.
And speaking of zombies, this also makes Harris’ “next question” response so remarkable, because getting the press to repeat Trump propaganda is one of his superpowers. The fact that people seemed to be waking up to this, and in particular his non-stop gaslighting that he puts on display just about daily, speaks volumes about that river in Egypt.
I think the secret to Trump’s superpower of media manipulation is simpler than anyone has been giving it credit for:
It’s just always having someone respond the instant they ask for a quote. Give them something to say all the time and they will print it, true or not, factual or not, because the media can’t actually do journalism anymore, all they can do is tell you what people said, so give them something that isn’t trivial to disprove and they’re never going to really call you out, they’ll just keep printing your statement over and over.
(I noticed this with the Arlington coverage, where his campaign claimed to have footage proving their innocence, that they will never show anyone – all coverage of this includes that quote and not all coverage mentions that they have not actually shown the claimed footage to anyone, and even the coverage that does mention that doesn’t call out that it almost certainly doesn’t exist…)
Trump is merely perfecting a talent Republicans have displayed for decades: time- and process-shifting. “Oh, we were just honoring (half-truth #xxxx) ” like when they flew veterans into National Parks facilities closed for their very own government shut down. “How could they dishonor the troops!?” Classifying documents and then accusing people of mishandling classified documents. Funny how that doesn’t work in reverse, contrary to what Trump, et. al. seem to believe?
That thing someone said (Karl Rove?) about politics being news with the sound off is so true it hurts.
Piling-on here; or when desperate humans seeking asylum were conned into getting on a bus and dumped onto Martha’s Vineyard by a pious FL governor. How did that stunt turnout?
I read the headline differently. My pee in the soup comment is that it will be rough to just reinstate Roe legislatively. That is, yes, Trump can’t disavow Dobbs. Nor can the country return so easily to the status quo ante.
I very much support reinstating Roe legislatively and hopefully slowly turning SCOTUS around. If we can do that with more appointments, fine. Or hopefully Alito and Thomas are gone soon and Harris appoints the replacements.
But the Republic of Gilead has had a taste of power and just taking that away probably will result in violence. The threat of state violence against medical providers has to go away first, but replacing that with terrorism is going to be a very painful step forward.
I guess we’ll cross this bridge when we get to it, but I think if Harris-Walz wins, the immediate reaction from the right will probably be a whole lot of complaining and probably a few shootings. But the real shooting will get started when Planned Parenthood starts providing abortion care in Texas again.
Adjacent to this is my thought on what it means when people talk about a “second civil war”. What would that look like in practice? Well, it’ll look like incels and racists shooting up Walmarts. Just more of that, but directed at Planned Parenthood, well-known Democrats and liberals, etc.
None of this is to say we shouldn’t do it when we have the power. But there will be blow back.
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My mother was born before women had the right to vote. I was born before “the pill” was available to women. And before no-fault divorce. And before women could apply for credit on their own.
When I was in graduate school, I signed up to be a Teacher-Guide for Women’s Studies in the newly formed Experimental College at Kent State. Civil rights was a broad field then, just as it is today.
So, Kamala Harris has always been an advocate for women’s rights, from the time her parents pushed her in her stroller to the time she helped a friend in high school. She demonstrated this advocacy throughout her career, as many of us saw when she was a Senator.
What’s surprising is that this has not been widely recognized. And, believe me, it’s not just young people who know this. I can tell you that I recognized her strengths as soon as I became aware of her. And I am very grateful that she has been willing to fight for all of us and for our American ideals. I’m equally thankful for her wonderful team.
Chauvinists should panic! Things are not looking good for them.
Truly said, thank you. Now let us get those young people to go out and vote.
As long as it is not the kind of young people who voted for the AfD in Germany
You know what?
An Austrian named Arnie The Govenator needs to talk sense into those youths in Germany. Wearing is Conan skins and broadsword.
If you don’t know the history, you’re doomed to repeat it.
Brilliant post.
The Ipsos/ABC post showed a 52%-46% advantage for Harris/Walz among poll respondents. This is only a poll, the similar margin that Biden obtained against the incumbent, and Obama’s win over Senator McCain are the main data points. The poll only confirms that nothing has changed. Word games using “margin of error” and average of polls can hide the result only temporarily.
As Ms. Wheeler notes, the former President is like a monument. The caretakers can change the color of the lights shining on the monument. But its still the same size and same shape.
Harris/Walz is like the tide coming in, or the Autumn leaves changing color: a process. And the evidence so far is that VP Harris is swinging into that process. It may well be that instead of dreading Joe Biden’s next appearance with the thought of how bad will it be this time, we now anticipate VP Harris’ next big moment with the expectation that she will be amazing again.
Or to keep it simple Kamala Harris has the chops.
Trump won Florida with mere 51% of the vote in 2020, so it’s definitely winnable for Kamala. Biden got just under 48%, so there was a 3 point gap. In fact, Florida looks pretty close to a swing state to me. In 2018, DeSantis won with 49.6% to Gillum’s 49.2%. For the senator, Scott beat Nelson 50.1 to 49.9. We think of Florida as deep red because their GOP is so vocal, extreme and loony. But those are razor thin margins. The Harris campaign has probably taken notice.
Spot on!
AND
Abortion is on the ballot in Florida.
My county is deep red, but I’ve seen a large uptick in the number of locals posting such things as “Will my husband know who I voted for? No. Voting records are sealed. Roe your vote.”
The woman here are ready.
One of the more dishonest things about the Dobbs majority is how they ignored the commerce clause dimension of practitioner mobility and medical practice uniformity nationwide. Roe was a 7-2 decision setting out a clear controlling federal rule allowing practitioners to comfortably move from state to state as jobs and better pay or greater prestige might attract, without any worry about a gotcha imperiling a license to practice or even being jailed, if generally willing to perform abortions when a patient requested the procedure. The Court faced a hodgepodge of local practitioner traps for the unwary, and Roe standardized unnecessary uncertainty away. Alito did the lookback centuries and here’s how I read history bit, which is a crock.
Adding to this (and Rayne’s comment about disaster planning for travelling in Red states): There’s clearly also the commerce aspect of regular workers being unable to safely travel. Maybe Blue states should start legislating the right to not be fired for refusing to travel to Red states? (I know it’s a silly and unworkable idea)
This is an informative analysis.
Regarding his failures on COVID, I hope that there is more emphasis on how COVID isn’t something that just happened to occur while Trump was president. Under Trump, employees from the CDC, NSF, USAID, and USDA, whose jobs were to monitor and prevent outbreaks of contagious diseases, were taken out of China before the outbreak. While we can never know for certain whether had they remained in China they would have succeeded in preventing the pandemic, it’s quite possible that they could have. There is a perception that Trump’s economy was great before COVID that renders Trump faultless for the pandemic, despite the fact that his administration took reckless action that likely caused the pandemic in the first place, for which he doesn’t seem to get any blame.
I don’t recall seeing Trump laying a wreath at any of the 1.1 million covid dead’s tombs.
Courtesy of the New Yorker:
https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a60634
“After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v. Wade, much to the ‘shock’ of everyone,” Trump, the former president and front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination, said on his social media platform.
Per: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-was-able-kill-roe-v-wade-rcna84897 — How the man felt before age related decline muddled his mind to where he forgot his own will and hubris.
Reproductive rights and abortion are not just issues for women. Plenty of young men are interested in not becoming fathers before they are ready.
It’s good that there are men (regardless of age) supportive of a woman’s right to choose. But implicit in that is the right a woman has to choose to have a baby even if a man does not want a baby. Or a woman can choose not to have a baby even if a man wants the baby.
I think we’re probably on the same page. So, this is just a point of clarification.
“Plenty of young men are interested in not becoming fathers before they are ready.”
Of course you’re correct but most of them are still going to vote Trump regardless. So I don’t think this issue is much a of a lever for testicular voters.
Unfortunately I heartily agree. While my journey has lead me to understand that rights have no gender, most males consider reproductive rights and transgender sports to be female issues. Getting males involved in the protection of these rights would be the goal; however, I think the emphasis on the impacts to individuals is less of a selling point with males than discussing the loss of Constitutional Rights that Dobbs confirmed is the path forward. Alas stories and not Constitutional Language is what I hear.
I would be interested to find out if and how it is affecting college applications and attendance – I know every time my son gets marketing from a regional school that I would have considered a great prospect in the past (Iowa, especially), I weigh letting them know that their state’s ban takes them out of consideration.
It would be a bit disingenuous on my part, though, since he’s one of those that isn’t actively searching, for a relationship or a college (and things like the rugby team and local ski areas are high on his list & my likely long-distance worry. Until the immigrant round up starts, that is.)
“just recently delivered embarrassing defeats to Moms for Liberty, the book-burners who serve as both Ron DeSantis and Trump’s surrogates to reach women.”
Speaking of which, Shawn McReesh of the NY Times had a comically bad whitewashing article about them yesterday. He included this jaw dropping graf: “The Moms For Liberty can get a bit carried away — one of their local chapters once quoted Adolf Hitler (“He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future”) and then issued an apology disavowing the Führer (“We should not have quoted him in our newsletter”) — but still, their summit on Friday made for a good case study. It was packed with the sort of voters Mr. Trump hopes can help him win in November: fired-up suburban women.”
Approvingly quoting Hitler isn’t “a bit carried away” – it’s flat out fascist. And just as McReesh doesn’t mention their electoral losses in Florida, he also doesn’t mention J.D. Vance, who shows just how much so many Americans (including those McReesh refers to as “fired-up suburban women”) hate the positions Moms and Vance have taken on abortion, birth control, book bans, and homophobia.
Somehow McCreesh didn’t report on what the AP described as unavoidable: “A painting that was prominently displayed on an easel next to the security station attendees had to pass through before being allowed into the conference area showed Vice President Kamala Harris kneeling over a bald eagle carcass, a communist symbol on her jacket and her mouth dripping with blood.”
And the Times was forced to add this hilarious and embarassing correction to his screwup in the article: “A correction was made on Sept. 1, 2024: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that a local chapter of Moms for Liberty had accidentally quoted Adolf Hitler in a newsletter. The group, which later issued an apology, was aware that the quote was from Hitler when the newsletter was published.”
The reason McCreesh made the mistake is almost certainly because he was just publishing spin from a Moms PR agent. He clearly didn’t bother to talk to anyone who knows or understands the group. He was just delivering straight up propaganda for them.
NYT must have recently assigned McReesh to campaign coverage. CUNY’s Prof. Jeff Jarvis spanked him today for his latest bullshit:
Absolutely ridiculous how hard NYT tries to normalize Trump’s combination of lies and cognitive impairment to paint him as a credible candidate.
He’s a longtime assistant to Maureen Dowd, which probably explains a lot. Lack of objectivity for a news reporter is perfectly fine at the Times if someone’s plugged into the cool kid network.
The distinction between news and opinion eroded under AO Sulzberger and AG Sulzberger has blown it up. And now AG is mad that the people he considers beneath him see what he’s done. He’s genuinely too dumb to understand how people can figure out what’s going on, as if Google doesn’t exist. Something’s not right with AG.
I didn’t know Trump could count ‘nine things,” let alone weave them together. The exception might be nine ways to rip off his creditors.
Just slip out the back, Jack (Smith)
Make a new plan, Stan (Woodward)
Don’t need to be coy, Roy (Cohn)
Etc., etc.
Most disturbing of all is the NYT does not identify M4L as a rightwing astroturf group funded by Koch money. Retired UMass professor Maurice Cunningham, author of “Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization,” predicted this media shortcoming before the convention’s opening gavel. The legacy media abets the destruction of a cornerstone of our democracy – public education – by naming these folks as “moms”.
https://www.masspoliticsprofs.org/2024/08/30/editorial-advisory-on-moms-for-liberty-national-summit/
Wonderful post.
I think you are right that Trump is panicking. His campaign, and what is left of his party, also lacks basic political capabilities to deal with effective politicking by Harris. Trump has learned a little bit about politics, to be sure, and it is now his instinct to move to the center for the general election. One of the most basic tasks for a partisan pol. But he has no capabilities for a move to the center as a person other than that he is a very capable inventor of lies. He doesn’t know how to get out of the box of contradictions with limited damage like a more experienced pol. And he has purged his party of anyone who has move-to-the-center capabilities or understanding. All that is left is extremists and his family.
Dude has reaped what he sowed, not only Dobbs but the party purge. Screwed on policy, screwed on politics.
It now is never the case where the response is: “Did he really say that?”
CFTFG did say it; a given.
So, yes, he did tell FoxNews “Every Democrat, every Republican, everybody wanted Roe v. Wade terminated and brought back to the states.”
And of course he tells us this week “Who ever heard you get indicted for interfering with a presidential election, where you have every right to do it.”
He’s his own worst enemy, albeit he is insulated by his yes-man handlers; co-dependents in the rump GOP; and a cult numbering tens of millions. Bothsiderism, horse race, distorted permission structures, and ‘it can’t happen here’ mainstream media help him a bunch.
Can he tack to the middle and also invite fence-sitters to join his cult of true believers? I hope his comments mentioned above come up in the debate.
“It didn’t take rocket science to offer that prediction (though surprisingly few pundits did so, and most people pushing for a Thunderdome primary, who were overwhelmingly men, missed it). Democrats have successfully run on choice since Dobbs; it has played a central in Democratic campaigns even in places like Andy Beshear’s Kentucky. Yet Kamala’s clarion voice on the issue largely got ignored as people plotted for ways to bypass the first woman Vice President to replace Biden.
Thus far in this campaign, a focus on abortion has also provided a way to make visible the patriarchy presumed in most threads of the right wing coalition backing Trump, especially but by no means exclusively Christian nationalism.”
It seems, to me at least, worth noting how the first Trump term could have been avoided had enough men realized the blindingly obvious – that Clinton was FAR more capable a POTUS than Trump.
And so is Kamala Harris.
This is not a subject worthy of any serious reasoned debate on policy but only a contest about which sports team one roots for in the American Political Super Bowl.
Even if, as I suspect will prove true now that Biden has stepped down, Harris wins; we need a generation or two of serious civic education.
THIS (electing oBama, or Clinton, or Biden, or Harris) should be obvious.
We, who know better, need to educate to fix this glaring defect.
Short term campaign. It’s what most developed countries have, and for the most part, it works. Harris has that (incidentally) and it will work in her favour. It’s the actual fight without all the shit talking preliminary. Media hates it – we can only love it. :-)
One tactic on abortion I would like the dems to use is to stress that choice does not necessarily mean to terminate a pregnancy, and a Harris administration would do all in its power to help and support those women who chose to carry a fetus to term. This subtle reframing (often implied but rarely spoken directly) could put a wedge between some pro-life voters and the republican party. By showing respect to those who believe that life begins at conception (for themselves), you might get around some people who see primarily an us vs. them situation. By stressing the Harris administration will do all in their power to support mothers and young children and especially difficult pregnancies or special needs children, you can show that pro-choice encompasses even those whose beliefs may differ as long as their differences are restrained to themselves.
I think that’s an excellent suggestion. Emphasize the positives that a Harris presidency can bring to supporting families during pregnancies and after.
Great essay. This passage caught my eye because I think Reagan did the same thing in his time: “Trump has convinced Christian nationalists he was anti-choice in public while attempting to limit the political damage of anti-choice policies behind the scenes.”
But Trump’s not trying to limit the social, economic or political damage of anti-women’s rights policies behind the scenes. He’s only attempting to limit his association with them in public, so that fewer people vote against him.
Excellent column, Marcy! Getting Trump to own anything besides a building he doesn’t really own, is impossible. He was recently interviewed by a young CNN reporter about the incident at Arlington Cemetery where the Army employee was bullied to get a photo op – Trump blamed everyone except himself! It was ghastly to watch! Like a 78 year old manchild with a ridiculous birdsnest on his head, Trump was frantically trying a blame the Gold Star family, the Army, Democrats, and even some stray camera that happened to be lying there unattended, for his buffoonish picture with his stubby thumb up at some poor soldier’s gravesite that he would call a “sucker” or “loser”, if the microphones weren’t around. What a vile man!
If, as now seems probable, VP Harris wins the presidential election, the entire primary season as well as using party activists to pick the nominee, would be exposed as a masochist exercise that only benefits the media. The Democratic party in particular has to establish qualifications, an age limit, and a process that allows Democratic elected officers to pick the best 5 candidates.
Comes Around
“ I was able to kill Roe v. Wade”
Donald proudly said of Dobbs
Neil and Brett and the handmaid
Will they also disappear Trump’s mobs
Be careful what you wish for
What goes around comes around
Now galloping with Gish for votes
yields the battleground
Mic on, mic off
The debate is bound to matter
Like Alexander Smirnov
Trump’s sunk by his own spatter
Heh! Very nice! :-)
Something Marcy reposted today seems to be on point with:
Kamala Harris is cutting off Trump’s political oxygen
She’s also not taking the bait from the press.
https://www.publicnotice.co/p/kamala-harris-strategy-for-dealing-with-trump
David Lurie Sep 03, 2024
Heh. Cutting off his narcissistic supply. I think I need to stock up on popcorn this week ahead of the debate.
DOWNBALLOT!
Harris’s Operation Will Put $24.5 Million Toward Down-Ballot Democrats
She is sending $10 million each to the House and Senate Democratic campaign arms, and another few million to help elect Democratic governors, state legislators and attorneys general. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/03/us/politics/harris-down-ballot-democrats.html
Sept. 3, 2024 Updated 9:57 a.m. ET
Kamala Harris is a tremendously positive leader for fairness and justice. She genuinely enjoys bringing out the best in everybody.