Politics

Good evening. Ella Baker, a giant of the civil rights movement, left us with this wisdom: give people light and they will find a way. Give people light. Those are words for our time. The current president has cloaked America in darkness for much too long. Too much anger. Too much fear. Too much division. Here and now, I give you my word: if you entrust me with the presidency, I will draw on the best of us not the worst. I will be an ally of the light not of the darkness. It's time for us, for We the People, to come together. For make no mistake. United we can, and will, overcome this season of darkness in America. We will choose hope over fear, facts over fiction, fairness over privilege.

There’s an infamous anecdote from an old New York magazine story, in which then-New York mayor Michael Bloomberg arrived at a party, ‘gestured towards a woman in a very tight floor-length gown standing nearby and said, “Look at the ass on her.”’Presumably Mr Bloomberg exuded similar bluntness during his negotiations to speak at this year’s Democratic National Convention. When you’re the 19th richest man in the world, you can stroll into a room and say what you want. Money talks, and therefore so does Michael Bloomberg.

I almost gave tonight’s DNC performance a miss. How could they top the fey chap pretending to be a bat while miming to a poor rendition of Buffalo Springfield’s 'For What It’s Worth' as a collage of kneeling athletes in 'Black Lives Matter' t-Shirts flitted by behind him? It was...special. I’d say that the chap who tweeted that it was 'the moment Trump won reelection' was right, except that there have been so many such moments: positive ones like President Trump’s magnificent speech at Mount Rushmore last month, as well as negative ones like the Biden campaign’s pick of Kamala Harris as his running mate. One wag said that that decision was a huge in-kind donation to the Trump campaign. That sounds right to me.

It’s no fun to see Bill Clinton in a virtual vacuum. He’s a people person, a glad-hander, a back-rubber, a donor-stroker, a bottom-fondler. But on Tuesday night, Clinton was a prisoner of Zoom. The big dawg had no legs to rub against.Clinton probably felt as bad about it as his audience. No extended ovation and whooping. No chance to mingle in the green room and offer a White House internship to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Not even an over-long embrace of Rosalynn Carter or a back massage from Jeffrey Epstein’s 22-year-old masseuse after an arduous journey on a private jet to Africa.Tuesday Night was Legacy Night at the Democratic convention, which is not in Milwaukee even though it claims it is.

If there's been one hallmark of the Trump campaign's messaging against Joe Biden, it's that the former VP is the real racist. Biden repeatedly misrepresented Trump when he claimed that the President called neo-Nazis and white nationalists 'very fine people'. He also was wrong to accuse Trump of xenophobia when he shut down travel from China following the coronavirus outbreak. The Trump campaign hasn't just pointed out these falsities, but launched a counteroffensive aimed at proving that Biden is actually the candidate who has a problem with race.

Kamala Harris is no radical. Indeed, no matter how vaguely inclusive the label ‘progressive’ may be, Harris’s long record as a California prosecutor makes it difficult to shoehorn her professional career under that rubric. The real Kamala Harris is a liberal careerist with no deep convictions whose ability to woo wealthy supporters allowed her to win a seat in the Senate.Harris’s story bears extensive similarities to that of Barack Obama. Born biracial to two academically-gifted parents, a contentious divorce found young Kamala being raised by her mother in a linguistically foreign country — French-speaking Montreal, rather than Indonesia. And, like Obama, Harris’s younger sister is named Maya.

Kamala Harris’s selection as the Democratic vice presidential nominee has been touted as the remarkable success story of a daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica. It is that. But it also represents the dramatic ascendency of a subset of the Democratic party that used to be dismissed as the ‘loony left’ of politics: the ‘San Francisco Democrats.’ The phrase ‘San Francisco Democrat’ was coined by Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s UN ambassador, who brandished it as a weapon at the 1984 GOP convention in Dallas. San Francisco was where the Democrats nominated Walter Mondale to challenge Reagan.

More than half of registered voters support President Trump using executive action to bypass Congress and extend coronavirus relief measures, according to a new poll. Trump opted to sign a series of executive orders this past Saturday rather than wait for Congress to reach an agreement on legislation as a prior relief package was set to expire. Democrats and the White House met repeatedly over the past couple of weeks, but despite making 'progress' both sides said they were still too far away to be even close to making a deal. A new poll conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies and provided exclusively to The Spectator found that 51 percent of voters agreed that it was right for Trump to take executive action under these circumstances, while just 24 percent disagreed.

SeattleSo the revolution devours its children. On Tuesday, Seattle’s police chief Carmen Best announced her retirement just hours after the city council had voted to strip her department of roughly 130 of its 1,400 officers, with more such cuts promised in the future. Best, 54, was Seattle’s first black police chief. She had served in the department for 28 years. Announcing her departure, Best remarked: ‘It’s not about the money. And it’s not about the demonstrations in our city. Be real. I have a lot thicker skin than that.’‘It’s really about the overreaching lack of respect for the men and women who work so hard, day in and day out,’ Best added.