CSotD: The Road Ahead

Ann Telnaes shares the ebullience flowing out of the DNC, adding a dash of feminine pride to the contrast between joyous celebration and the sourpuss dread driving the GOP campaign. And she’s not wrong to show Justice and Liberty as boosters for Harris, given that we’ve seen Justice denied amid a flurry of hostility directed at the immigrants for whom Liberty is a welcome.

And at the other end of the Earth, Fiona Katauskas celebrates the emergence of positive masculinity in a week in which Andrew Tate was once again arrested for his toxic behavior while Tim Walz was being celebrated for his way of demonstrating male traits.

It’s been a long time since we saw Sheriff Taylor walk down that dirt road with his boy Opie, watched Eddie’s Father pause courtship to attend to his son, or saw Dabney Coleman transformed from too-busy, inattentive father to dynamic action hero in Cloak & Dagger.

(I include that last one because, immediately after our divorce, my boys adopted a cat they named Jack Flack. The message was not lost on me.)

We’ve had too many blustering jackasses in the spotlight and too many good men shifted to the sidelines. Let’s see how this all plays out.

Meanwhile, Dave Brown illustrates what I wrote yesterday, that the Trump/Vance ticket is back on their heels. He’s certainly not the first cartoonist to riff on Nighthawks, but his inclusion of the DNC dance party in the background justifies the parody by magnifying Hopper’s deadpan picture of loneliness with a message of what they’re missing out on.

However, let’s not get too giddy here.

Michael Ramirez (Creators) fires back with a Golden Oldie, but while accusing Democrats of tax-and-spend policies is nothing new, it’s a familiar attack that holds its punch because people who want to relate to it already get it.

It’s based on them not understanding the impact of tax cuts for plutocrats, plus a misperception that national budgets are arrived at like personal budgets. We even talk about “kitchen table” issues, without pointing out that, when times get tough, the answer is to get a second job rather than deciding to cut costs by no longer feeding your children or taking them to the doctor when they’re sick.

And, along that same line of familiarity, they’ve already begun screaming “Commies!” and “Socialists!” which apparently inspired Tom the Dancing Bug to illustrate how little Americans know about those economic systems:

As noted the other day, I once spent a week with some for-real communists from the Soviet Union and saw how their system worked, and didn’t. They were lovely people, extremely capable within their own industries, and we had a lot of fun, but their knowledge of laissez-faire capitalism (and the free press) were less than I’d expect from 10-year-old Americans.

Unfortunately, we’ve got a significant number of people here who are just as ignorant about how economics work. And economic ignorance won’t stop them from voting in November.

Eric Allie (Counterpoint) isn’t even trying to make a sensible point about Harris’s approach to economics, perhaps in part because he has no idea what it is, and is merely picking up on a popular joke about that unfortunate Australian break-dancer, and in part because he’s hoping nobody has noticed that the economy is rebounding, the Dow has leapt back and inflation is finally down so far that the Fed is planning to cut rates.

But that’s like wondering if Don Rickles really thinks that people are hockey pucks. It wasn’t a serious expression; it was just his way to get a laugh.

Anyway, the only thing dumber than calling somebody a hockey puck is for them to argue the point. We can expect a shower of meaningless insults over the next three months.

Meanwhile, Nick Anderson (Tribune) suggests, the defection of RFK Jr to the Trump campaign raises some interesting questions. The first one is a semi-paranoid one, whether he was put up as a stalking horse by those hoping the Kennedy name would draw voters from the Democratic ticket, but however conspiratorial that seems, it leads to the second question of whether Trump needs additional loonies in order to swell his existing ranks.

With the election so close, and with the Electoral College making only certain states really matter, a few more screwballs could tilt the balance.

Turnout will matter and that will come down to voter suppression on one side and keeping everyone motivated on the other.

But it’s time to put away the pom-pons and begin to unveil the substance that will keep people cheering.

As Harris is pressed to offer policies, Bill Bramhall offers a pleasant response, but one that can’t stand up on its own.

All presidents take an oath to uphold the Constitution, and so promising to do what you are required to do anyway doesn’t amount to much, unless you are able to make the point that your opponent is determined not to do so.

That could come up at the debate September 10, but Harris would do well to make sure it has legs beyond whatever moment happens then.

Fortunately for her, as noted in today’s Barney & Clyde (Counterpoint), those planning to undermine the Constitution have not kept their plans a secret.

Trump once praised Project 2025, then, once the public weighed in against it, announced that he’d never heard of it and didn’t approve of it, despite the number of his former employees who wrote it, and despite his having selected a running-mate who has praised the plan and worse screeds.

As Matt Davies points out, simply opposing the overthrow of our system of government could turn out to be a cool hand.

However, as with upholding the Constitution, this assumes that the Harris/Walz ticket is able to make basic loyalty a significant point in the campaign.

The dual necessity to swat back insults and make voters pay attention to thoughtful points is the sort of challenge that has confounded more than one intelligent but naive candidates.

It’s not unlike trying to do smart comedy with a heckler in the audience: You can’t work with him shouting insults, but if you leap down his throat too harshly, you risk losing your place in the script plus turning off your audience.

Though speaking of hecklers …