I just wanted to check in to give people an update from Tom Sullivan. He’s doing fine. He’s staying at a friend’s house and power came on last night. His own house is still out. They still have no water and are having to bring it in from a creek nearby for flushing and bathing. WiFi is sporadic.
However, there does seem to be a lot of services flowing and local businesses are coming to the rescue with free water and supplies to keep things going. Some grocery stores are open and Jose Andres is in town, so the townsfolk even have some good eats. The airport is letting in some flights but it’s erratic. Lots of helicopters, fire trucks and other rescue vehicles have been going night and day. Lots of people are still missing.
I haven’t had the heart to even ask him about the prospects for the election in his area. I’m not all that hopeful, I’m sorry to say. Asheville is one of the blue cities the Democrats were depending on… But we’ll see. You can be sure if there’s a way to get people out to vote, Tom will be there working to see that it gets done.
Writing about a debate on the morning after always feels more like theater criticism than political analysis. How did they look, how did they sound, did they come off as authentic and real or were they phony and glib? Were they believable to the faceless Real Americans watching who were being asked to decide which of them to vote for? But that’s what these televised debates really are.
The substance is usually secondary because they’ve practiced their lines and have a specific message they want to impart regardless of the topic they’re being asked to address. They’re political rituals which we use to decide if the person appears to be someone we want to watch perform the role of whatever office they are seeking.
The worst debate ritual we’ve all ever witnessed happened last June when President Joe Biden was seen to be doddering and incompetent. It wasn’t that most Democrats disagreed with his policies to the extent that he articulated them or were unhappy with his record, quite the opposite. It was his performance and it resulted in him having to withdraw from the race. One of the best debates of the last few decades was the one after that, when Vice President Kamala Harris wiped the floor with Donald Trump whose performance revealed him as unprepared and incompetent while she was effective and commanding. Trump has retreated into a negative feedback loop ever since.
The interesting thing about both of those debates, as consequential as they were, is that neither of them seem to have moved the polls very much. Biden was behind by about 2-3 points in the polling averages after the debate and today Harris has a 2 point lead in the same averages today, all within the margin of error. It’s mind boggling to me how this race could be so close but if those polls are correct (a dicey assumption) the country is closely divided and nothing seems to change that.
We are cursed with having to re-run the last election because Donald Trump has convinced most Republicans that he has a right to be president because the last election was stolen from him. What he says or does is irrelevant to that question as far as they are concerned. They want a restoration. The rest of us are voting against that. It’s really not more complicated than that.
There are issues at stake, of course. Republicans are obsessed with foreigners being put in their place, whether it’s here at home or overseas (although they do seem to have a soft spot for American adversaries.) They don’t believe everyone should have access to affordable healthcare, that climate change is real, guns should be regulated or that women have a fundamental right to control their own bodies. But they do believe the rule of law only applies to other people. Democrats believe the opposite. In the age of Trump these issues have become proxies for which team you’re on and for the most part those teams can easily be defined as Trump vs Not-Trump.
In light of that it’s very hard to see how a Vice Presidential debate could possibly change any of that and last night’s event between JD Vance and Tim Walz almost assuredly will not. The two men obviously came into the debate with some very specific performance strategies and they both did what they needed to do.
Vance obviously decided that his goal was to shed the intellectual extremist “cat-ladies” persona and portray himself as the smart conservative who wrote “Hillbilly Elegy.” He is very adept at changing roles, having even changed his name several times so this came very natural to him. Walz clearly wanted to highlight his record and show his wonky side with a lot of details about issues. He came across as less polished than Vance but effectively made his points on the issues the campaign wanted him to raise even if his performance wasn’t as slick.
Mostly they were agreeable and collegial, just a couple of Midwestern guys having a friendly disagreement after which, under other circumstances, they would go out and have a beer together. That performance was a bit over the top, in my opinion, certainly Vance’s who has all the charm and warmth of a King Cobra. Walz is a genuinely nice guy but he could have been a little less accommodating to Vance’s shape-shifting.
I suspect that Vance may go viral with some of his answers though. His lies were overwhelming and the fact checks are brutal. Walz got dinged for saying that he was in Hong Kong during the Tienanmen Massacre in 1989 when he was really only there for the demonstrations (and he called himself a knucklehead for saying it). But Vance denied that he had supported a national abortion ban when there is written proof that he did. He whined about the moderators “fact-checking” him — a real beta boy move. He mansplained the female moderators, which is something he just can’t help doing even when he’s really trying not to be a flagrant misogynist. And with Olympian level chutzpah he said that Donald Trump saved Obamacare. That’s just for starters.
And there there was the big one: he refused to answer whether the 2020 election was stolen and it became Tim Walz’s finest moment and the most memorable moment of the debate:
For everyone tonight, and I’m gonna thank Senator Vance, I think this is the conversation they wanted to hear and I think there’s a lot of agreement. This is one that we’re miles apart on. This was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen. And it manifested itself because of Donald Trump’s inability to say—he is still saying he didn’t lose the election. I will just ask, did he lose the 2020 election?”
Vance responded with his clumsiest evasion of the night with a weird pivot to federal censorship, an issue that has urgency only among the most online right wingers.
And then Walz delivered the coup de grace by bringing up the absence of Mike Pence:
JD Vance has said in the past that he would have done what Mike Pence refused to do and even with his slick delivery he was unable to finesse that reality. We all know that if he had said anything otherwise, there is an orange man down in Florida who would have flipped his blond lid.
CBS ran a snap poll after the debate and this is what they found:
It appears they both accomplished what they set out to do when it comes to issues and the debate watchers were happy to see a convivial debate. But while Vance may have been nicer than they expected they still liked Walz more. I suspect that may end up being more important than any single thing either of them said.
Salon
He won’t debate and now he won’t do the traditional 60 Minutes interview:
Former President Donald Trump has backed out of a previously scheduled interview with “60 Minutes,” the most-watched newsmagazine in the United States, CBS News said Tuesday evening.[…]
“For over half a century, 60 Minutes has invited the Democratic and Republican tickets to appear on our broadcast as Americans head to the polls,” the network said in a statement. “This year, both the Harris and Trump campaigns agreed to sit down with 60 Minutes.”
Trump had committed to the interview first, followed by Harris, through campaign spokespeople, CBS said. Veteran CBS anchor and correspondent Scott Pelley was lined up to interview Trump.
“After initially accepting 60 Minutes’ request for an interview with Scott Pelley, former President Trump’s campaign has decided not to participate,” CBS said.
Why? Here’s Trump’s spokesman:
I don’t understand this. If they didn’t do live fact checking they could cut away from the taped interview and fact check with relevant footage and production values like they do with their usual interviews. Would that have been better?
It’s not the “live” fact checking they object to. It’s the fact checking. Trump lies so much they knew it would be overwhelming either way.
I suspect a lot of the cult members think they will be contributing to his campaign. But no. He’s running a scam while running for president. Never say he didn’t warn people:
Trump had inked a deal with Tony Robbins, the frighteningly upbeat motivational speaker, by which Robbins would pay Trump $1 million to give ten speeches at his seminars around the country. Crucially, Trump had timed his political stops to coincide with Robbins’ seminars, so that he was “making a lot of money” on those campaign stops. “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it,” Trump said. …
He wasn’t lying for once.
Tom Nichols has a typically tart piece in the Atlantic today about the state of the election. This part of it is one of the most depressing aspects of this whole thing. Harris will win the popular vote by millions of votes, you can bet money on that, but once again the electoral college could favor Trump. What kind of a democracy is this?
I think it’s important to ask why this election, despite everything we now know, could tip to Trump.
Perhaps the most surprising but disconcerting reality is that the election, as a national matter, isn’t really that close. If the United States took a poll and used that to select a president, Trump would lose by millions of votes—just as he would have lost in 2016. Federalism is a wonderful system of government but a lousy way of electing national leaders: The Electoral College system (which I long defended as a way to balance the interests of 50 very different states) is now lopsidedly tilted in favor of real estate over people.
Understandably, this means that pro-democracy efforts are focused on a relative handful of people in a handful of states, but nothing—absolutely nothing—is going to shake loose the faithful MAGA voters who have stayed with Trump for the past eight years. Trump’s mad gibbering at rallies hasn’t done it; the Trump-Harris debate didn’t do it; Trump’s endorsement of people like Robinson didn’t do it. Trump once said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote. Close enough: He’s now rhapsodized about a night of cops brutalizing people on Fifth Avenue and everywhere else.
For years, I’ve advocated asking fellow citizens who support Trump whether he, and what he says, really represents who they are. After this weekend, there are no more questions to ask.
I think maybe we’re not asking the right question. We talk a lot about saving our democracy but it’s pretty clear that we don’t really have one at least in the sense of one person one vote and majority rules. We never have.
But there have been improvements from the beginning when only white landowning men could vote. So maybe we actually could take the next step and get rid of the anachronistic electoral college. Sadly, I suspect that won’t ever happen until the Republicans lose one in the electoral college whenthey’ve won the popular vote.
You can just imagine the howls. Actually we did. In 2004 when it looked as though that might happen to George W. Bush they had armies of pundits and talkers out there denouncing the illegitimacy of such an outcome. But it didn’t stick for obvious reasons.
This change is long overdue. Rocks and cows should not have more say over the running of this country than the people who live here. It’s undemocratic to its core.
As you wait for the debate tonight, watch this if you missed it:
Rachel Maddow shows JD Vance explaining his lack of faith that democracy can deliver on his conservative ideals, and shows the influences behind Vance’s preference that the United States government be gutted and instead run by a dictator.
This guy is so deeply creepy that I honestly don’t think I can live in a country led by him.
Dan Rather also has a few words for his former employers at CBS:
According to CBS News’ editorial standards, moderators Norah O’Donnell, anchor of the “CBS Evening News,” and Margaret Brennan, host of “Face the Nation,” are there to ask questions and enforce the rules. They are not fact-checkers. CBS says it is up to the candidates to fact-check, though “the moderators will facilitate those opportunities” during rebuttal time. While both fact-checking (ABC during the Harris-Trump debate) and not fact-checking (CNN during the Biden-Trump debate) have drawn criticism this year, for the most part, the criticism was unsurprisingly partisan.
CBS is not abdicating completely. In a live blog and on social media, CBS News’ misinformation unit will provide real-time fact-checking. So, the audience is expected to watch the debate and simultaneously monitor a blog?
Simply put, this “rule,” imposed by CBS, incentivizes lying. It invites the participants to bend the truth, since their opponent then has to spend his rebuttal time calling out the lie, rather than giving an opposing view. And the calling out of a lie by an opponent rather than an impartial moderator is less credible.
Angie Drobnic Holan, the director of the International Fact-Checking Network at the Poynter Institute, told the Associated Press, “You’re basically off-loading one of your journalistic responsibilities onto the candidates themselves, so I don’t think that it’s ideal. It takes journalistic courage to be willing to fact-check the candidates, because the candidates are absolutely going to complain about it. I don’t think the moderators’ first goal is to avoid controversy.”
Norm Ornstein, a political scientist with whom I spent many an election night at CBS News, had nothing nice to say about his former employer on X. “I spent 30 years as an election analyst for CBS. It was the gold standard for television news. Those days, and their standards, are long gone.”
It seems clear that CBS is trying to avoid the blowback ABC got after the presidential debate. A journalist, much less a news organization, should not be afraid to take heat. Their responsibility is to call out lies. If they don’t do that on live television, during the most consequential election in modern history, they are the lesser for it. But the biggest loser is the American electorate.
I’m not sure why they even need moderators. Just have a couple of laptops there printing out the questions for the candidates and have the mics shut off automatically after 2 minutes. There’s no need for humans to be involved at all.
Trump’s henchmen aren’t very good at this:
Speaking with Fox Business on Monday, Republican Representative Greg Murphy claimed that attacks by the Democrats on the MAGA leader’s health care plans were futile, almost entirely because Trump and his vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, don’t actually have a “full, fleshed-out plan.”
“The Harris campaign has just released this new report, it came out this morning, they’re calling it ‘The Trump-Vance Concept of Healthcare: A plan to rip away coverage from people with preexisting conditions and raise costs for millions,’” said guest host Cheryl Casone. “We’re now starting to have that conversation about health care, which is still a main issue for voters across this country. What do you make of the campaign doing this?”
“Well, Kamala and her crew, it’s absolute nonsense. There’s not a full, fleshed-out plan by the president or J.D. Vance, and for them to come out with a book of fiction, they’re just a bunch of damn liars,” Murphy retorted.
Lol. Right. They don’t have a plan. It’s only been 14 years since the ACA was passed. You can’t expect them to have a fill, fleshed out plan. They just plan to repeal what we have and replace it with a concept of a plan. Good enough for government work I guess.
By the way, JD has described his “concept” in some detail:
Think about it: a young American doesn’t have the same health care needs as a 65-year-old American. A 65-year-old American in good health has much different health care needs than a 65-year-old American with a chronic condition. And we want to make sure everybody is covered.
But the best way to do that is to actually promote some more choice in our healthcare system and not have a one-size-fits-all approach that puts a lot of people into the same insurance pools, into the same risk pools, that actually makes it harder for people to make the right choices for their families.
In other words: the Trump plan, according to Vance, is to permit insurance companies to discriminate against people with preexisting conditions.” Which in essence means “Vance is advocating a partial or complete return to the system that existed before Obamacare.” KFF explained how the sort of high-risk pools envisioned by Vance worked prior to the ACA — or more precisely, how they never worked.
What an amazing life.