Scott Stantis isn’t the only media person upset because Kamala Harris isn’t playing the game right, though it should be noted that he’s not one of the celebrity journalists who aren’t getting proper respect.
Still, he’s right: She hasn’t made the usual rounds that aspiring politicians are expected to make, and as a result a large number of bespoke silk undies are in knots, particularly among the members of the White House Concubines Association, who expect to be treated as the important figures they are.
It strikes me as kinda funny that New York Magazine has suspended Olivia Nuzzi for having had a “personal relationship” with RFK Jr. She admits to having been too friendly with him, but denies they did the nasty. After all, however, one must have ethics if one is going to cover powerful political people.
Except when one doesn’t.
Each year, the stars and the star-struck mingle in a jaw-dropping slobberfest which earned the name “Nerd Prom” and, nine years ago, was the subject of a documentary that, instead of shaming the self-important participants, made them giggle:
The problem with Harris declining to talk to the Usual Suspects is not that she isn’t working to get her message out. As Stantis notes, she made an epic speech at the Democratic Convention and had an absolute triumph in the debate.
As he doesn’t note, she has also held massive rallies, including a joint appearance with her runningmate in Nevada, recently held a lengthy interview with three top representatives of the National Association of Black Journalists, and sat down for a live-streamed talk with Oprah Winfrey.
Nothing more annoying than debating whether to let someone sit at your lunch table only to see her cheerfully eating lunch with some other kids.
Lisa Benson (Counterpoint) claims she isn’t answering questions, but the problem is that the usual suspects in the media aren’t listening, because she isn’t making the traditional tour.
Is that a good idea? Donald Trump took his message straight to the people and it’s done him pretty well, so I can’t see why Harris couldn’t go the same route, not exclusively cherry-picking sympathetic interviewers like Oprah, but hitting local venues instead of the traditional showcases.
As for answering questions, if Harris has a fault it’s that if you ask her what time it is, she tells you how to make a watch. There were several times in the NABJ interview where you could hear her interviewers sputtering and trying to break in to ask another question because she was going on at such length.
And, yes, she has a stump speech. Every candidate does. But beyond the familiar stories of growing up middleclass with a single mom, she does present plans and answer questions.
For instance, someone complained that she hasn’t laid out a Ukraine policy, but she was quite plain on that topic in the debate and if you missed it, go take another look.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, the hate and lies being dished out by JD Vance are, as David Cohen argues, being dismissed not with the usual “Trump being Trump” attitude but with the new variation, “Vance being Trump.”
The media has long shrugged over the rhetoric coming from that corner, under-reporting it in some cases and sanewashing it in others, with active condemnation seeming to come only from commentators with a firm point of view that conflicts with the Trump/Vance approach.
Ann Telnaes, for example, responds with astonished condemnation over Vance’s statement that he knows he’s telling lies, but intends to keep making up stories as long as they advance the goals of the Trump/Vance ticket.
Jen Sorensen takes advantage of her four-panel format to expand on that outrage, laying out the bigotry and lies in a way that forces her readers not just to confront the liars but to confront their own bland tolerance of the phenomenon.
It’s not simply a he-said-she-said contrast in political opinions or policy proposals. The Haitians in Springfield are not illegal aliens, they haven’t been killing pets and, despite Vance’s claims, there has been no increase in diseases in the area.
And when the officials who know and understand these issues say what’s really happening, “That’s not what I’ve heard … ” is a foolish response, particularly when the person who started the gossip has apologized, admitting she was spreading an unfounded rumor.
It’s too bad that the media paid more attention to Vance’s claim about the cat that was stolen and eaten than they did when it turned out that the cat was alive and well and had been hiding in the basement.
Juxtaposition of the Day
We’ve had an odd shift in the dialogue since the second attempt on Trump’s life, and he is now firmly against inflammatory rhetoric, though he’s not against selling photos and other souvenirs of the moment.
It has been pointed out that the potential assassins, like those who targeted Gerald Ford in a similar pair of thwarted attempts, appear to have been more psychologically impaired than politically motivated.
It’s also been pointed out that Ford didn’t try to make political hay from the attempts, much less profit from them.
As both Britt and Sheneman suggest, however, the hateful, fearful atmosphere that Trump has labored for nine years to create is surely a factor in this pair of attempts by armed lunatics, and it’s important to recognize that, while Trump speaks of “them” as the instigators, a look at the two suggests there was a great deal more “us” in their fact-free motivations.
A hero-worshipping MAGAt, for example, posted on social media that Trump had dodged bullets twice, but he didn’t dodge the first bullet and the second fellow never got a shot off.
It’s similar to Trump’s recent claim that the audience at the debate went crazy over him. It’s not a matter of proving whether or not the audience went crazy. There was no audience.
Just as there were no dogs or cats or infectious diseases or illegal aliens, except in Trump’s limitless imagination.
Michael de Adder is reluctant to count Trump among our finest speechmaking presidents, but he really does hate Taylor Swift. Dude’s gotta tell the truth sometimes.
Never mind. Here’s one for those WHCA party animals:
Aas mentioned before Christopher Wray publicly countered the idea that Trump was wounded by a bullet, explaining that the FBI had traced all of the assassin’s bullets and there wasn’t one that followed a path anywhere close to Trump’s ear. He declared it to likely have been shrapnel from a nearby seat.
While I certainly don’t read eithe the NY Times or the Washington Post or the New Yorker or The Atlantic, Lawrence O’Doinnell recently showed pages from all of the above from early this year which excoriated Harris for being such a failure as a veep that “insiders” allegedly wanted her replaced before Biden’s summer campaign. Why should she possibly go to those same publications to sell her own campaign–especially having witnessed the bloodthirsty reporters from some of the Washington press corps who showed up at Biden press conferences in August to ask for a confession that Biden was lying about not having been consulting neurologists? Just because Trump is a fascist is no guarantee that these people will cut her any slack, so giving them interview time where they’d go out of their way to not appear slanted would definitely be an unforced error.
Apparently, interviews with Black and Latino outlets don’t count as far as the MSM and Stantis are concerned.