J.d. vance

Wednesday

Ben Domenech

A debate night for Vance to remember and for Walz to forget

It’s not always easy to tell who wins a political debate. Sometimes performances need time for people to process them and have key moments emerge that connect with American voters. And sometimes you witness a debate performance so dominant, so one-sided, that one party in the spin room is left arguing more out of hope than belief that debates just don’t matter.  Tonight was one of those nights for Democrats — and this one wasn’t even close. J.D. Vance was smooth, empathetic and emphasized his life experience with hardship and poverty. Tim Walz was nervous and unsteady from the opening question and didn’t seem to find his footing until more than an hour into the debate.

Monday

The Spectator

Biden admin upended by chaotic weekend

The Biden administration is struggling to find its footing amid a series of unfortunate events that are testing the oft-vacationing president and his vice president, who is currently auditioning for the top spot in American politics.Hurricane Helene decimated parts of North Carolina, leaving millions of Americans without power, at least thirty dead and many more missing. Entire towns are practically gone, and pictures of video of the storm’s aftermath show flooding enveloping homes and washing out highways. Local officials are begging for assistance and resources; state Representative Neal Collins, for example, tweeted, “I currently have two people on oxygen needing generators & 1 person on dialysis needing one.

Friday

The Spectator

GOP blasts Kamala for ’too little, too late’ border visit

Kamala Harris is aiming to project strength on border security, but her critics aren’t buying it.For the first time in over three years, Harris is visiting the border, following an onslaught of ads from former president Donald Trump’s campaign that have savaged her record as America’s border czar. Her trip also comes after a bombshell report from Texas congressman Tony Gonzales about how tens of thousands of illegal immigrants with murder and sexual assault convictions are freely roaming America.

zelensky
Jacob Heilbrunn

Ukraine becomes another battlefront in the American election

They were the odd couple, one lumbering in his trademark oversized Brioni suit, the other ripped in his olive green military attire. The two had been engaged in a kind of mano-a-mano verbal combat before their official meeting in Manhattan at Trump Tower. It was getting ugly. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky suggested that J.D. Vance’s plan, such as it was, for ending the war between Ukraine and Russia was “too radical.” Add in Zelensky’s visit to an armaments factory together with Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, and Trump and his flunkeys went nuts. House Speaker Mike Johnson wrote a sniveling letter demanding the ouster of Ukrainian ambassador Oksana Marakarova.

Wednesday

The Spectator

GOP demands investigation into Zelensky visit

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky just stopped by an ammunition factory in Scranton, Pennsylvania — which CNN points out is President Joe Biden’s hometown.Now, a group of House Republicans is demanding answers about what taxpayer dollars and US resources were used in what they allege was essentially a campaign event for Democrats.The Hill reports that this past Sunday, Zelensky “was flown to Pennsylvania in an Air Force C-17 plane.” He was also protected by the US Secret Service.

Grace Curley

Tim Walz faces a Yale Law reckoning

The Harris-Walz team has a plan to coax Trump into another debate. According to NBC News, the Democratic National Committee will accuse Trump of being a chicken in the hopes of getting under his skin: “The chicken billboards, which will first appear at Trump’s rally Monday in Indiana, Pennsylvania, include a digitally altered image of Trump in a chicken suit alongside the words ‘There’s no debate: Donald Trump’s a chicken.’” The tactics here aren’t subtle, but considering Trump’s penchant for taking the bait, it just might work. But if Operation Chicken lays an egg, then the last big televised event of this campaign season is next week’s vice presidential debate, when Ohio senator J.D.

Thursday

Ben Domenech

An election stuck in the trenches

Welcome to Thunderdome. In the space of four weeks, the incumbent president was dethroned from his nomination and replaced by his running mate in a behind-the-scenes coup led by the most powerful person in the party (who still insists on the absurd claim it was an “open primary”). Within that time, the nation witnessed the first of not one but two assassination attempts targeting his opponent, the former president who has faced a thermonuclear level of lawfare in an attempt to seize everything he owns and put him behind bars.

tim walz weirdness polling
Roger Kimball

A vindication for our polling obsession

One of the entertainments that every election season brings revolves around polling. Every season seems to bring more and more and more frequent polls. The measure registered voters and (for all I know) unregistered ones. They register people who are designated “likely voters” and they claim to filter for gender(s), age, race, ethnic back, party affiliation or non-affiliation, ZIP code, income, and favorite pastimes, and what seems like a thousand other things.    Like everyone else who is interested in politics, I pay fretful attention to the results of these surveys and questionnaires beginning about a year out from the election itself.

Monday

Ben Domenech

Trump and Kamala are competing over who’s more online

The messaging in the 2024 election has devolved into a contest to determine which campaign is more online, to their detriment. In 2019 (she never made it to 2020), the first Kamala Harris presidential campaign infamously imploded because, among other reasons, her staff and communications strategy were "way too online" — obsessed with the constant progressive social media flashpoints above and beyond the issues fundamental to the primary electorate. Instead of talking to voters about their priorities, Harris’s campaign was too focused on trending topics, memes and crafting the best clips of their candidate for the online audience.

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Thursday

Amber Duke

The rise of BlueAnon

Someone call the disinformation police! Left-wing conspiracy theories and attempts to manipulate the media are spiraling out of control ahead of the 2024 election. From tall tales about former president Donald Trump staging his own assassination attempt to the lower-stakes speculation that Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance is wearing guyliner, “BlueAnon” has reemerged in a big way. BlueAnon is a blanket term coined by some conservatives to describe liberal and left-wing conspiracy theories. It intentionally rhymes with QAnon, the arguably better-known right-wing conspiracy, and mostly arose in response to what many regard as the Russian collusion hoax, the idea that Trump colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 presidential election.

BlueAnon
Ben Domenech

Tim Walz’s Minnesota vibes

The first thing a Minnesota political activist tells me when I ask about Tim Walz is this: when he gets mad, he tends to spit when he talks. The blue-state governor’s version of Minnesota Nice leans hard on the aggressive side of passivity, with an abiding predilection for taking offense at questions that fall into the category of what most politicians expect. His superior on the Democratic ticket, Kamala Harris, responds to such queries with awkward laughter in an attempt to buy time for an answer. But for Walz, the very act of questioning is felt as an insult to his character, leading to an unleashing of bitter invective founded in righteous anger that will absolutely lead to a follow-up call from his staff, as it did for multiple people over his years in Minnesota politics.

Walz
James S. Robbins

What does Appalachia mean?

The selection of J.D. Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate has made Appalachia the regional epicenter of America’s political universe. But above the social media sniping and political gamesmanship lies a message of diversity, identity and internal conflict at the very heart of what it means to be an American. J.D. Vance, a native of Middletown, Ohio and the bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy, was immediately criticized by Kentucky governor Andy Beshear as a phony who acts “like he understands our culture” when “he ain’t from here.

Appalachia
Bill Kauffman

A matter of presidents

Virginia spawned four of the first five US presidents. Between Reconstruction and the roaring twenties, Ohio’s executive fecundity earned it the sobriquet “Cradle of Presidents.” But the next time fate, or providence, guides you to western New York, the friendly folks at the Buffalo Presidential Center will set you straight on the most president-haunted city this side of Washington, DC.

presidents

Friday

Cockburn

Will Kamala actually appoint a Republican to her cabinet?

Will Kamala actually appoint a Republican to her cabinet? A rare surprise in the otherwise routine Harris-Walz interview on CNN last night: when asked if she’d appoint a Republican to her cabinet, Kamala said, “Yes I would.” This is perhaps in response to two Democratic presidential candidates from the last decade — Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — endorsing Trump and joining his transition team. President Biden appointed a few Republicans to ambassadorial positions — notably Arizonans Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain — but Harris appears ready to go a step further. The likeliest option would be to appoint a serious-minded ex-military Beltway figure to a role like director of national intelligence or defense secretary: Mark Esper, for instance.

Kamala

Monday

Charles Lipson

Two successive 2024 campaigns in a very strange election year

This is one very strange presidential campaign.  That’s not just because it seems to go on forever. This one seemed to begin shortly after Eisenhower left office. It’s also because there have been two general election campaigns in a row. The first pitted Donald Trump against Joe Biden and ended with Trump’s decisive victory. The clincher was Biden’s humiliating debate performance, which showed the world what his aides, his party and a compliant media had been hiding: the president was suffering serious cognitive decline.  Once voters had peeked behind the curtain, they were convinced Biden could not serve another four years. Indeed, it was questionable whether he was competent to serve now. That question still hovers, unanswered, over the White House.

kamala harris campaigns

Friday

The Spectator

Kamala wraps up her coronation

Chicago Pour one out for the Beyhive. For the bulk of the final day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the topic of conversation was: who is the mystery guest? The speculation ran rampant but was mostly focused on the myth of the goddess — Beyoncé herself was going to descend from the sky to affirm the ascendance of Kamala Harris. And then it turned out that the bright shiny mystery box contained... nothing at all. Too bad, so sad. But this itself seems in keeping with the 2024 cycle, where all promises decay into a great big pile of fail.For the delegates and consultants, this was a perfectly fine convention, logistical failures aside — a daily hammering of the impending evil and danger of a second Donald Trump term.

Ben Domenech

Kamala Harris checks the box

Welcome to Thunderdome. So after all that, the rumors of huge celebrity appearance or endorsements — Beyoncé! Taylor Swift!!! George W. Bush!? — what Democrats delivered in Chicago was a convention that just felt like a box-checking exercise. There were no huge surprises. There was no over-the-top Hollywoodland display. The biggest name to show up was Oprah. The parties were decidedly lackluster. The off-air logistics were a disaster. The mood was one of nervous energy, with many partisans content to sit in their seats looking at their phones for five hours while smart Democrats roaming the halls admitted that they were concerned things were about to get, as the Obamas said, tough.

Tuesday

Elisenne Stoller

Trump and Vance tour swing states to dim DNC limelight

While the DNC is in full swing in Chicago, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are spending the week traveling to battleground states as part of their campaign’s way of counterprogramming. Trump’s schedule is packed this week, with more events than he’s done in several weeks. Today, Trump made an appearance in Howell, Michigan, to “deliver a strong message on law and order, making it clear that crime, violence and hate of any form will have zero place in our country when he is back in the White House,” according to Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt. Trump came under fire from Democrats for choosing Howell, part of Livingston County, which was rocked by white supremacist demonstrations last month with some chanting “Heil Hitler” and has links with the KKK.

dnc trump vance
IVF
Ben Clerkin

Tim Walz’s misleading IVF story could prove fatal

For years, Tim Walz has claimed that he and his wife Gwen used in-vitro fertilization to conceive their two children Hope, twenty-three, and Gus, seventeen. The Minnesota governor has weaponized his emotional journey to attack Republicans opposed to the procedure and used it to lockdown the VP slot on Kamala Harris’s protection of reproduction rights ticket.   But the New York Times reports — giving Walz the softest of soft landings — that in fact his wife had intrauterine insemination, or IUI, to conceive, not in vitro fertilization, or IVF.  There is a huge difference between the two procedures, as Walz knows. Principally that there are no moves by Republicans to use the overturning of Roe v. Wade to ban IUI.

Thursday

Ben Domenech

Will the Barstool Bros undo Kamala’s rise?

Welcome to Thunderdome. The month of Kamala Harris’s rise has been marked by a few major factors, but none has been more significant than the total buy-in of the decrepit husks of media organizations desperate after so many years to find someone, anyone, to elevate in opposition to Donald Trump. They love to love this candidate, who is in almost no sense of traditional terminology a candidate — no platform, positions thoroughly malleable, an operation in branding and vibes at a moment when branding is dying and vibes are utterly out of step with the demands of the moment — she is more machine now than woman, and this embarrassingly inadequate media is loving every minute of it.