Kamala harris

The West faces a new type of housing crisis

From our US edition

Throughout the West, particularly the Anglosphere, housing costs are ravaging the middle class. Homeownership, long the key to social mobility, is on the decline, particularly among younger generations and minorities. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, house prices in high-income countries have been rising “three times faster than household median income over the last two decades,” causing the standard of living “to stagnate or decline.” Unlike previous housing crises, this one is not primarily caused by mass displacements due to wars or natural disasters or population growth.

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letters

Letters from Spectator readers, November 2024

From our US edition

The rise of BlueAnon The adults on both sides have checked out completely and it shows. We are an empire on the decline and there is no denying that now. — Virgil Hilts As a basic foundation for this story you could do no worse than to recall an incident that occurred during LBJ’s campaign for senator in Texas in 1948. He proposed to accuse his opponent of “fornicating with a goat.” When an aide asked if he truly believed it, LBJ reportedly said, “Of course not. I just want to hear him deny it on the radio.” — Richard Lindo The academic legacy of Donald J. Harris It’s astonishing that Kamala will probably win with a true Marxist theoretician in the family — I guess the time is right for the US to get its very own socialist “utopia.

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The joy of politics

From our US edition

Laramie, Wyoming The Joy of Sex, by the appropriately named Alex Comfort, was a bestselling illustrated sex manual published in 1972 and released in a new edition in 2008. In 2024, anyone with sufficient imagination to describe and illustrate The Joy of Politics would beat out Elon Musk in the race to become the world’s first trillionaire. Politics — like sex — has always been with us, but the conception of politics as “joy” began, you may argue, with the adoption of the “Ode to Joy” that concludes Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony by the European Union as its official anthem in 1985.

Donald Trump, king of comedy?

From our US edition

In spooky season, it’s only appropriate that the “joy” has been drawn out of the Harris campaign like a demon facing an exorcist. It may have found a new host in her opponent: former president Donald Trump brought down the house at the Al Smith dinner for Catholic charities in New York City last night, which Kamala opted to skip. Trump has also faced criticism this week for canceling events and dodging interviews with CNBC and the Shade Room. His remarks are worth watching in their entirety (you can do so below), but here are some choice one-liners. Clearly Trump has benefited from keeping the company of comedians Andrew Schulz and Theo Von lately. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

comedy

The final countdown for 2024

From our US edition

Welcome to Thunderdome. Tonight I invite you all to tune into a live conversation at 8 p.m. Eastern with Kmele Foster of the Fifth Column on the shifting race, gender and class divides in 2024, part of the Substack Election Dialogues series — more details are here!We’ve already surpassed 8 million early votes in this election, so that means we’re at the beginning of the final rounds with fewer than twenty days to go. For Kamala Harris, she’s still sprinting around with a media tour (well, really only 60 Minutes and last night’s Fox News interview count as media) that she really should have done months ago.

Kamala creaks in hard-hitting Fox News interview

From our US edition

Vice President Kamala Harris sat down with Fox News’s Bret Baier for a half-hour interview in which Baier politely took no prisoners, pressing Harris on the issues most voters cite as their top concerns. Harris took almost zero accountability for the Biden-Harris administration’s failures and offered few answers on her specific policy positions, pivoting instead to besmirching rival Donald Trump and provide offerings from her platitude grab-bag. Baier hit the ground running by asking Harris how many illegal immigrants she thought her administration has released to date — “One, 2 million?

bret baier fox news

Kamala enters the Fox den

From our US edition

Vice President Kamala Harris will finally sit down with Fox News this evening after months of pundits justifiably criticizing her campaign for mostly avoiding challenging media. Chief political anchor Bret Baier will conduct the interview, which will air during his show in the 6 p.m. hour. It will be a thirty-minute live-to-tape sit-down and will run in its entirety with no edits and no commercial breaks. Based on recent appearances, this could end quite poorly for Kamala. The Democratic nominee struggled to justify the Biden-Harris immigration policy during an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, and the network felt the need to edit out a word salad answer about her relationship with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

bill clinton

The Big Dog unleashed on immigration

From our US edition

The Big Dog has returned to the campaign trail, and he’s up to his old tricks. No, not those tricks — the one where he offers a running commentary on the choices campaigns are making instead of just stumping for the Democratic candidate. Barack Obama does the same thing, of course, except he’s just perpetually disappointed in all Americans. Bill Clinton’s mistake is being too honest about what he thinks is really going on and warning Democrats why they might lose if they don’t shape up.

The New York Times guide to ignoring Kamala’s plagiarism

From our US edition

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo found five instances of plagiarism in Kamala Harris’s book Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer, he revealed in a Substack article Monday. Harris, or her ghostwriter Joan O’C. Hamilton, lifted five passages almost word-for-word from an NBC News, Urban Institute and Bureau of Justice Assistance report, as well as a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release and, most embarrassingly, Wikipedia. The book, though some of the wording is changed slightly, cites none of these sources. “Taken in total, there is certainly a breach of standards here,” Rufo writes.

kamala harris plagiarism

Why are Indian Americans so successful?

26 min listen

Indian Americans are the second-largest immigrant group in the United States. They're also one of the most successful. That includes the election campaign; Kamala Harris, Usha Vance, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy. Freddy Gray is joined by Shruti Rajagopalan, economist at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. They discuss the buzz around Indian Americans in politics, and ask why they're so disproportionately successful. You can find Shruti's website here: https://shrutiraj.com/cv-and-bio/ and her substack here: https://srajagopalan.substack.

Hunters laugh off the Harris-Walz campaign effort to win their vote

From our US edition

Avid outdoorsmen are slamming a new political coalition formed by the Harris-Walz campaign aimed at winning their vote in the 2024 presidential election. “Hunters and anglers want to support Harris-Walz as much as the fish and game want to be eaten,” one Maryland-based hunter who recently bagged a state record bear chuckled to The Spectator. Governor Tim Walz kicked off the “Hunters and Anglers for Harris-Walz” group on Friday with an article placed in Outdoor Life magazine. The coalition is described as “a new national organizing program to engage, mobilize a broad coalition of sportspeople, conservationists and rural and gun violence prevention voters in key states across the country.

hunters Embroidered campaign hats of US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor and Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz (Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)

Which campaign has the better ground game?

Republican strategist, and friend of Americano, Luke Thompson joins Freddy Gray to talk about the ground game of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. From postal voting, to party registration, to machine politics, whose is better? And what impact did Biden's exit from the race have on the organised parts of the Democratic Party?  With Luke's unique insight working on two current senate races, and as a longtime consultant to Vice-Presidential nominee J.D. Vance, they analyse the state of an election that continues to be unpredictable.  Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Obama pitches black men on Kamala Harris

From our US edition

Former president Barack Obama made his pitch on Thursday to black men on why they should vote for Vice President Kamala Harris, accusing them of having hang-ups about voting for a woman. Obama stopped off at a Harris campaign office in Pittsburgh ahead of a rally in the city and said he wanted to “speak some truths” to black men as recent polls show former Donald Trump doing comparatively well with the group.

The Gretchen Whitmer chip video IS the Democratic message for 2024

From our US edition

Early voting has started and the efforts to sway undecided voters are growing more unorthodox as we head toward Election Day. Donald Trump deconstructed the art of the dismissive nickname on Andrew Schulz’s podcast; Kamala Harris likewise partook in a much-vaunted “media blitz” through the friendly studios of The View, Call Her Daddy, Stephen Colbert — and the slightly more testing environs of 60 Minutes. Dem VP pick Tim Walz is also kicking off what Politico bills as a “man-focused media blitz,” which comes across a bit Harvey Fierstein. As for high-profile Harris backers?

CBS: from the Tiffany Network to the cheap discount bin

From our US edition

Once upon a time, in a land faraway, CBS was called the “Tiffany Network.” The network’s glittering jewel was its news division. This is the story of that division’s decline and fall, driven by partisan goals and leftist ideology. CBS News gained its fame in the 1940s, under the leadership of Edward R. Murrow, who not only painted a vivid word-picture of London during the Blitz, but also recruited the best broadcast journalists in the business. For decades, they formed the core of CBS News, first on radio and then on television. That tradition continued through the 1960s, when tens of millions of Americans turned to Walter Cronkite for an honest report of the day’s news. If the newscast included editorial comments, as it sometimes did, they were offered by Eric Sevareid.

CBS

Kamala thought the vibes could save her

From our US edition

Welcome to Thunderdome, where the vibe is Miller High Life — which should only ever be enjoyed in a longneck as befitting the champagne of beers — and a Kamala Harris campaign that is turning from ebullience to despondence in short order. As my colleague Amber Duke and I discuss in the latest Thunderdome podcast, the refrain is a simple one: the joy is gone. The summer vibes that once sent a thrill down the pant-legs of everyone on the set of Morning Joe, including Mika and her lower-T colleagues, are now reduced to a point of constant contention: what is Kamala doing wrong — and how can she right the ship? And: why can’t Tim Walz be more like Josh Shapiro? And, even more: why won’t Joe Biden just shut up?

Kamala’s press tour ends in viral mockery

From our US edition

Amid lingering questions about what Kamala Harris stands for — plus a precipitous decline of the momentum the vice president enjoyed after leaping to the top of the Democratic ticket — her campaign decided it was time to send her into the media fray. This was a very calculated media tour, of course. With the exception of the traditional 60 Minutes interview on CBS (which Trump declined this time around, as his team claimed the outlet wanted to do “live fact-checking”), Harris stuck to friendly, low-risk outlets where she was unlikely to make any major fumbles.Unfortunately for the Harris campaign, this simple task would prove to be too much for the veep.

Who is Kamala Harris talking to?

From our US edition

Kamala Harris has spent the better part of the last week off the campaign trail and planting herself in the middle of New York City, finally making herself available to questions about what kind of president she will be. She faced one minor tough grilling while appearing on 60 Minutes and has now completed what her own campaign referred to as a media blitz, appearing all in the same day on The View, The Howard Stern Show and The Late Show With Stephen Colbert — all with hosts and moderators who have declared their unwavering support for Harris.While traveling to New York, she marched toward reporters on an airport tarmac to pick a fight with Governor Ron DeSantis over a media report that he was refusing her phone calls.

Weathering the storm: on the ground in hurricane-ravaged Florida

From our US edition

Fort Lauderdale, Florida I’ve lived in seven US states and five countries, but when I arrived in St. Petersburg, Florida in 2019 I knew it was my last stop. There is no such thing as paradise on earth, but for me, St. Pete is as close as it comes. But every year during hurricane season, we’re on pins and needles hoping the big one won’t come and wipe us off the map. Our homeowner’s and flood insurance rates are insane, but I still don’t know anyone who feels like their policies are comprehensive enough to sleep easy when the Weather Channel vans prowl our streets like hungry hyenas looking for viral footage during hurricane season.

Saturday Night Live is helping Trump

From our US edition

“Me and Vice President Harris are the same!” concluded Saturday Night Live veteran Dana Carvey, in character as Joe Biden, when he returned to NBC’s legendary sketch comedy show for the first episode of its fiftieth anniversary season. After Carvey, who left SNL’s regular ensemble in 1993, uttered those politically unhelpful words, former cast member Maya Rudolph, playing Kamala Harris, nervously gave him the bum rush off stage, only for him to wander back on to smell her hair — one of Biden’s stranger campaign trail moves — before the two delivered the show’s signature, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!” line to a cheering studio audience, millions of viewers at home and millions more who (like me) caught it later via social media streaming.

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