Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The best profile of Kamala Harris you will read is by Joan Walsh in the Nation. An excerpt:

I heard the rapid staccato click of high heels. Harris walked in, greeted me warmly, and immediately yanked open the curtains. She was not afraid of the heat. She wanted sunshine in here.

She is about to get much more sunshine—and heat—than she asked for. A few days after our conversation, President Joe Biden had the worst debate performance of his career and sent the Democratic Party into a crisis over his ability to win the 2024 election against Donald Trump. Pundits and more than a few Democratic leaders clamored for Biden to step aside, as polling showed his path to a second term drying up. On July 21, Biden announced that he was suspending his campaign for president and endorsed Harris as nominee soon after. Prominent Democrats quickly lined up behind her as her work wooing Biden’s delegates began.

Harris and I spoke when she was still trying to win a second term for Biden, dispatched to reach voters who were among the most critical to his reelection. In the days before I met with her, I was repeatedly told: Do not suggest that she’s “found her voice” in the two years since the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, when the Supreme Court robbed American women of rights we’ve enjoyed for half a century—although she kicked off her Dobbs anniversary tour the day we spoke. Do not say that she’s “having a moment” on the 2024 campaign trail. Or ask if there’s any “daylight” between her and the president over Israel’s brutal retaliation against Hamas in the wake of the October 7 massacre. (On policy, there isn’t, though Harris has been more critical in public about the mercilessness of Israel’s response and the toll on Palestinian civilians than Biden has.) Do not ask whether anything “surprises” her after a long career as a district attorney, an attorney general, a senator, and now as the nation’s first Black, first Asian, and first woman vice president. This struck me as a defensive tic, a reaction to the feeling that she has repeatedly been underestimated. (That feeling simmers under the surface of our conversation as well.)

I was warned against going down these paths not just by her staff but by some of the friends who’ve known her for decades. They were not protecting her; they were protecting me—from her impatience with what she thinks are stupid questions she’s heard time and again.

So I struggled with how to phrase a question about whether Dobbs has given her a new mission. I think I maybe even used the dreaded word “moment.”

“I appreciate that perhaps for some who weren’t paying attention, this seems like a ‘moment,’” Harris allowed. “But there have been many moments in my career which have been about my commitment to these kinds of fights, whether they’re on the front pages of newspapers or not.”

The problem, though, is that Harris could use this redemption story. Her 2020 presidential primary bid went poorly. (Full disclosure: My daughter, Nora, was her Iowa political director in that race. I also worked with her sister, Maya Harris, at an Oakland nonprofit 25 years ago.) The first year or so of her vice presidency didn’t shine. The past two years have been different: Since Dobbs, she has been Biden’s top ambassador on issues of reproductive justice—yes, unlike Biden, she’ll say “abortion,” but she also frames the issue around broader themes of maternal health and family support. When we met, Harris had just come from a taping at MSNBC where she sat alongside Hadley Duvall, the brave Kentucky woman who spoke about being raped by her stepfather and becoming pregnant at 12 and railed against Republicans who would force girls to have their rapist’s baby.

Duvall had a miscarriage but remembers she took comfort in knowing she had “options”—options she wouldn’t have now in Kentucky or in many other states. “One of the things I’m utterly in awe of is the number of people who have decided, ‘I’m gonna tell my story, because I don’t want other people to go through this,’” Harris told me. “I said to Hadley, ‘I’ve seen, in moments of crisis, the universe has a way of revealing the heroes.’”

After Biden’s catastrophic debate performance and declining poll numbers, the Democratic Party needs a hero. Can Harris pull it off? Senior Democrats as well as some progressives who had been pushing Biden to stay in the race have lined up behind her, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. At press time, former President Barack Obama had not endorsed Harris, yet several of Harris’s strongest presumed rivals for the nomination, including California Governor Gavin Newsom and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, had. ActBlue reported raising nearly $50 million in small donations in the seven hours after Biden’s announcement. Now the way in which she navigates this unprecedented situation could mean the difference not only between getting herself or Trump into the White House—but between democracy and autocracy.

Back in New York, Harris resisted the idea that her past two years represent any sort of evolution into a stronger leadership role. So I flipped to what her longtime friend, California Senator Laphonza Butler, told me. Butler didn’t see some post-Dobbs awakening in Harris either, but she mentioned one thing she thought might be new, and I shared it with Harris: “I see a Black woman who got sick and tired of trying to please everybody and just said, ‘Fuck it. I’m not gonna make everybody happy. I just have to be me.’”

Harris responded with the trademark laugh that’s launched a thousand hateful Fox News segments and told me: “I love Laphonza Butler.”

During the tumultuous 2020 primary there was a lot of concern that Kamala Harris was not progressive enough for the Democratic party. Some called her Kamala the Cop and believed that her professional history as a DA and Attorney General made her a responsible for the system that led to the murder of George Floyd. I always thought that was overblown but primaries are like that. In any case, Joe Biden, who was hardly the exemplar of ultra-progressive ideology won the election and ended up governing as the most progressive president since FDR and LBJ and the real world results have been sterling.

Axios reports that Harris expects to continue in that vein:

Vice President Kamala Harris has used her first days as Democrats’ likely nominee for president to make it clear that she’ll pursue big — and expensive — parts of Joe Biden’s domestic agenda that never made it across the finish line. Harris is signaling that even as Democrats play defense on Biden’s mixed economic record, she’s eager to go on offense for the next four years.

• Her plans include pushing for nearly $2 trillion to establish universal pre-K education and improve elderly care and child care — as well as a permanent tax cut for working-class families.
• Her instincts are to go further than Biden’s attempt to raise corporate taxes to 28%, according to people familiar with the matter who recall that Harris backed raising them to 35% in 2020.

 Harris previewed her economic priorities when she dropped by her campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del., on Monday, and then again at her rally in Milwaukee on Tuesday.

• “We believe in a future where no child has to grow up in poverty,” she said in Wilmington. “And where every person has access to paid family leave and affordable child care.”
• That’s music — and code — to progressives’ ears.
• As a senator, Harris was a champion of the expanded child tax credit, which provided annual tax breaks of up to $3,600 per child for families. Biden included it in his $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill, but it expired after one year.
• Harris led the internal — and ultimately unsuccessful — effort to restore some version of the tax credit.

[…]

• As vice president, she has governed as a moderate, helping Biden to push through his Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Chips and Sciences Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.
• In the administration’s most heated economic debate — whether to lower some of Donald Trump’s tariffs to help lower inflation — Harris sided with Biden and argued to keep the tariffs in place.
• More broadly, she has embraced the pillars of Biden’s new industrial policy, and accepted the emerging consensus that tariffs are a legitimate tool in international economics.

• “She’s a classic progressive who is skeptical of trade but doesn’t want to go as far as Trump in terms of imposing blanket tariffs,” a former Biden administration official said.
• “Right now, on economic policy, she is the midpoint of the Democratic Party, which is far from the center” of the overall political conversation, the official said.
•  In one of her first acts as vice president, Harris convened a group of small business owners to signal that her sympathy rested with scrappy entrepreneurs and not big corporations.
• It’s a point she has made on the road all year, announcing new grants for women and minority-owned businesses in swing states.
• Weeks into her term as vice president, she called JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan to press them to issue more loans to minority and low-income communities under the Paycheck Protection Program.
• People familiar with the discussions said her message was clear: We are willing to work with you, but we also are watching you.

Sounds good to me. Trump’s “populism” is phony as we know but he and his pals may realize one day that they made a mistake by adopting that tone. It’s made progressivism sound a lot more mainstream. All they have left is the culture war. Good luck with that.

When Donald Trump began his third run for president back in 2022, he said very explicitly that his campaign was organized around vengeance for his 2020 humiliation. “I am your retribution!” he proclaimed, assuring his devoted cult following that their belief in the Big Lie would be rewarded when he exacted punishment on the political enemies who had denied their Dear Leader his second term. It was a speech you might expect from any demagogue but in Trump’s case it also spoke to the deep psychic wound he suffered as a malignant narcissist unable to accept that he had lost so it was hard to know if he had any other goals beyond the need to prove that he was a winner after all.

As the campaign has gone on it’s become clear that Trump has actually evolved into a true authoritarian. Yes, he’s still simple-minded and juvenile in many ways, and it will always be all about him, but it’s become clear that his attraction to strongmen has developed into a yearning to be a member of their club in a new and different way. And he’s being more and more open about it. We always knew that he admired Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his bromance with the tyrannical North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and affection for various middle eastern leaders was no secret. He’s always bragged about his ability to “get along with” dictators.

He talked about it in his soporific acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention:

I got along very well, North Korea, Kim Jung Un. I got along very well with him. The press hated when I said that.

“How could you get along with him?”

Well, you know, it’s nice to get along with someone who has a lot of nuclear weapons or otherwise. See, in the old days, you’d say that’s a wonderful thing. Now they say, “How can you possibly do that?”

But no, I got along with him and we stopped the missile launches from North Korea. Now, North Korea is acting up again. But when we get back, I get along with him. He’d like to see me back too. I think he misses me, if you want to know the truth.

He spoke similarly about how the Taliban really thought highly of him. In the same speech he said that when snipers were killing American soldiers in Afghanistan he spoke with the Taliban leader:

 I spoke to the head of the Taliban. You’ve heard this story. Abdul, still there. Still the head of the Taliban. The press got on me, “Why would you speak to him?” I said, “Because that’s where the killing is.” I don’t have to speak to somebody that has nothing to do with it.

And I told him: “Don’t ever do that. Don’t ever do that again. Don’t ever, ever do that again, you’re going to stop.” Because during the Obama administration, many great people and soldiers, a lot of soldiers, were being killed from long distance. I said, “If you keep doing that, you’re going to be hit harder than anybody has ever been hit by a country before.” And he said, “I understand, Your Excellency.” He called me “Your Excellency.” I wonder if he calls the other guy “Your Excellency.” I doubt it.

(That’s complete nonsense, of course.) We’re all familiar with his embarrassing encounters with Putin and Xi. They saw him coming a mile away.

But for all of his shameful fawning sycophancy over murderous tyrants, he has mostly confined his strongman adulation to matters of foreign policy and national security. His domestic authoritarianism has generally been cloaked in demagogic ranting about crime and such things as the use of executive power to exact revenge on his enemies and abuse the presidential pardon power to excuse his accomplices’ crimes. The plan to round up tens of millions of people and force them into detention camps and deport them is about as authoritarian as you can get. (In fact, the proper word is “fascist.”)

But he’s going even further now, drawing a direct line between the foreign tyrants his admires so much and his own domestic agenda. He’s noted on the campaign trail that some of them, like China’s Xi is a  “brilliant man” who controls 1.4 billion people with an “iron fist.” . He recently acknowledged his new best friend, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, by saying “this is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it, right? He’s the boss and … he’s a great leader, fantastic leader. In Europe and around the world, they respect him.” (They don’t, actually.)

Now he’s making it clear that we need that here in the U.S.

A fundamental thing that gets lost in the coverage is that Trump isn’t just promising to govern like an authoritarian, he’s *campaigning like an authoritarian*. Lies, fear, sweeping false promises—Trump’s following the dictator playbook on fooling people into giving up democracy. https://t.co/WokcG8T6km

— Jesse Lee (@JesseCharlesLee) July 21, 2024

His reference to Orban was about a visit that took place just a few days ago at Mar-a-Lago when the Hungarian president flew in to brief him on his recent meetings with Putin and Xi during the NATO summit in Washington. An axis (if you will) of mutual interest is forming among the world’s authoritarian leaders and Trump wants to be a part of it. As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, scholar on fascism and authoritarian leaders observed he is “immersed” in it.

Trump is immersed in the new autocratic international order and role of US if he wins will be to stand down and allow Xi and Putin to expand. The talk of "peace" and non-intervention by Vance & Co is about creating conditions for autocrats to succeed. https://t.co/2NRl6GRXG4

— Ruth Ben-Ghiat (@ruthbenghiat) July 21, 2024

Greg Sargent of The New Republic hosted Never Trumper Rick Wilson on his podcast this week to talk about this and it was, frankly, chilling. Wilson spent years in the right wing fever swamps and knows all about their tactics and strategies. He says we must take this very seriously and that even if the media cynically dismisses all this as a “schtick” or old news, Trump and his henchmen are deadly serious.

Media analyst Jamison Foser noticed the same thing:

Trump sees himself as part of this emerging “autocratic international order” and is openly campaigning on that issue. His followers are being programmed through his usual mind-numbing repetition to accept this as normal politics. It may be normal in some countries but up until now it’s never been normal in America. In fact, it’s what normal people used to call un-American,

Thought you might need another reason to smile

Didn't like the way this @JDVance1 bloke (newly picked as #Trump's running mate) slagged off the UK lately. Looked into him. Not great. Made a parody song inspired by @ABBA called "Vance VP" 🎶

Shout out #americast (@BBCsarahsmith/@awzurcher) & @RestIsPolitics for ℹ️ profiles 👍 pic.twitter.com/OLjGJ4haOZ

— MarshFamilySongs (@MarshSongs) July 20, 2024

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Y’all misogynists don’t act racist

Team MAGA was on its back foot for a couple of days after President Joe Biden on Sunday dropped out of the presidential race and passed the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris. Republican attack lines prepared for one old white guy against another old white guy would need reworking to smear the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father.

Donald Trump will not be able to hold his tongue, of course. He never has. But his MAGA cultists never quite mastered the art of the dog whistle (CNN):

In an interview with CNN’s Manu Raju Monday, Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett suggested President Joe Biden selected Harris as his running mate solely because she is Black: “One hundred percent she is a DEI hire,” he said, referring to diversity, equity and inclusion. “Her record is abysmal at best.”

DEI is how one now utters the N-word if one is a Republican congressman from Knoxville. Or anyone else in the MAGA movement. (Expect Alexandra Petri and Andy Borowitz to have great fun at the GOP’s expense.)

Post by @borowitzreport

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On that subject, the Associate Press reports:

Republican leaders are warning party members against using overtly racist and sexist attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, as they and former President Donald Trump ‘s campaign scramble to adjust to the reality of a new Democratic rival less than four months before Election Day.

“This election will be about policies and not personalities,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told reporters after a Tuesday closed-door meeting with his caucus. The race is nothing personal, “and her ethnicity or her gender have nothing to do with this whatsoever.”

Johnson’s caucus and right-wing media are off to a rocky start.

“The right-wing media machine is throwing everything but the kitchen sink at Kamala Harris,” writes Oliver Darcy in CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter:

Over the last 48 hours, Harris has been derided as a radical California liberal; she has been smeared as a “DEI” candidate; she has been denigrated as a “mistress” for her previous relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, even though it occurred after Brown was separated from his wife and was not a secret; she has been ridiculed for her laugh and described as unlikeable; she has been characterized as having been too tough on crime as a prosecutor, but also pro-illegal immigration; she has had her candidacy labeled a “coup”; and she has been subjected to commentators mocking even the pronunciation of her name, among other things.

[…]

“Suddenly she’s the next messiah?” Fox News host Jesse Watters said Tuesday night as he railed against Harris. “The only reason she is in the White House is because of the DEI deal Biden cut with Bernie [Sanders] to seal the nomination.”

The salvo is a page out of the right’s playbook targeting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, a bogeyman it has used to blame for everything from airline safety issues to the Baltimore bridge collapse.

Ask Baltimore’s Brandon Scott. After the Key Bridge collapse in March, social media posts labeled the Black mayor of the majority nonwhite city a “DEI Mayor”:

“We know what these folks really want to say when they say DEI mayor,” he told The Banner. “Whether it is DEI or clown. They really want to say the N-word. But there is nothing they can do and say to me that is worse than the treatment of my ancestors. I am proud of who I am and where I come from.”

Sexist and ethnic slurs are not the only weapons in the MAGA arsenal. Harris can expect a flurry of meritless legal challenges. Election law expert Rick Hasen on Monday addressed some early ones at Slate.

The Guardian reports that Team Trump on Tuesday filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) over Harris changing the name of the Biden-Harris campaign:

The complaint, filed by the Trump campaign’s general counsel, David Warrington, argued that the Biden campaign could not rename its committee from “Biden for President” to “Harris for President” once Biden dropped out of the race on Sunday, and roll over $91m.

“This is little more than a thinly veiled $91.5m excessive contribution from one presidential candidate to another, that is, from Joe Biden’s old campaign to Kamala Harris’s new campaign. This effort makes a mockery of our campaign finance laws,” the eight-page complaint said.

The reenergized Democratic campaign for president has now pulled even with Trump in new polls. The Trump campaign means to throw sand in the gears:

Whether the complaint generates traction with the FEC remains unclear, but the Trump campaign has been looking for any way to slow down the momentum Harris has been able to generate with voters and donors after she quickly became the presumptive Democratic nominee.

The strategy, according to people familiar with the matter, has included opening new legal battles to try to prevent Harris from accessing Biden’s funds, although the complaint on Tuesday stopped short of a lawsuit.

Election lawyers at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center counter that “because Biden and Harris share a campaign committee, the Vice President and her running mate can continue using the campaign’s existing funds for the general election if she is on the Democratic ticket as either the presidential or vice-presidential nominee.”

Hasen believes that this Trump complaint too is headed nowhere and will take months to arrive. But that’s not the point. The GOP is in spaghetti-flinging mode for now, hoping to find a line of attack against Harris that sticks. This filing, Hasen explains, “gives Trump legal fodder to say that Harris engaged in a greater campaign finance violation than the one that formed the basis for turning his NY business records misdemeanors into felonies.”

Yes, but what Trump is really looking for is a 2024 version of “but her emails” that doesn’t scream the N-word.

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Josh Marshall notes that even though the Democrats are now hugely enthused about the election, the naysayers who wanted Biden to drop out are still unhappy:

[A]lready we’re hearing that this rush of support for Harris is yet another bad thing. Democrats have only just changed the last terrible thing pundits said they were doing only to be told that their solution is also a disaster in the making or at least a mistake. I don’t want to pick on anyone but this piece by Graeme Wood seems to capture this whole new storyline. In a way the argument is just a continuation of the Thunderdome craze of the last six months: a contested convention, blitz primaries, and the like. The new terrible mistake is rallying around Kamala Harris too quickly. Because this just compounds what Wood and seemingly many other pundits and columnists feel is the belief that “Democratic politics felt like a game rigged by insiders to favor a candidate of their choice, and to isolate that candidate from the risk associated with campaigning.”

I wish I understood this reflex to stomp all over Democratic hopes from pundits who claim to be liberals. And why they want this Mad Max run to the convention I will never understand. It just makes no sense to me that they are determined to turn the process into a circus when Orange Hitler is on the ballot. Luckily it looks like Harris will have enough delegates pledged to her before the early virtual vote on August 7th so this will soon be put to rest.

As Marshall says:

The point is that it’s what Democrats really seem to want – even those who were bitterly opposed to seeing Biden pushed off the ticket and most who might have had questions about Harris as a candidate. What a political community actually seems to want, expressed through the mechanisms of the political process, somehow isn’t quite good enough for these commentators. They are demanding that they slow down, compel a few rising star governors to declare their candidacies and duke it out for a month. They’re in love with forms and visual contests and look on actual politics when it presents itself with something that looks a lot like contempt.

[…]

[B]eneath this seeming appetite to let politics run its course in all its ferality is something quite different: It’s a kind of disdain for actual voters and how actual politics works – not always pretty, mixed with peoples overweening ambitions, their intense loves and fears, and all the rest. If Democrats want to get behind Kamala Harris, stop fighting with each other, stop watching the unmerited pain of an aging leader most of them respect and even love, and get on to running a campaign against a menacing adversary … well, that’s just fine. They don’t have anything to prove to folks who write for a living.

President Biden calls in during Vice President Harris’ remarks: “I’m watching ya, kid. I love ya.”

💙 pic.twitter.com/M1dOFR8bqa

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) July 23, 2024

The contrast between both of these people and that Orange Monster is just so profound.

Did you know about this? It’s outrageous. But I think they’re quite serious. Or at least JD Vance is, and there is a very good reason to believe he will be president if they win the election in November, either in the next term if Trump finally collapses or the one beyond. (If you think elections will still be operative at that point you’re dreaming.)

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A post shared by Gavin Newsom (@gavinnewsom)

Josh Marshall has the story:

This spring, HHS finalized new regulations under HIPAA to limit law enforcement access to medical records tied to reproductive health. The rule was first proposed in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision as a way to limit the ability of state and local law enforcement agencies to access medical records to stymie or criminalize access to legal reproductive health services, most specifically abortions, but not only abortions. It also applies to contraception and the full range of other endangered reproductive care.

So for instance, consider the ability of a woman from an abortion-ban state to travel to another state to get a legal abortion, or her ability to receive legal abortion drugs through the mail. The news has been filled with proposed or actual laws which would attempt to restrict travel to receive abortions in other states, charge those who travel or criminalize those who might facilitate such travel or facilitate the legal shipment of prescribed abortion drugs through the mail. Of course, local police agencies might simply take it upon themselves to pull records to see who had unexplained disruptions to their menstrual cycles.

Your local sheriff might just want to know.

And so does JD Vance, it turns out.

But to enforce these laws or know when there’s something to enforce you really need access to medical records. You need to know and be able to prove when a woman was pregnant and then, before the end of normal gestation, stopped being pregnant. So if you live in Texas and you’re pregnant, can you go to your OB-GYN or will that be held against you if you’re found to have ceased being pregnant after a visit to Kansas? Does your OB have to report you to law enforcement if they believe there’s a real and present risk that you’ll go out of state to get an abortion or seek a prescription from an out of state doctor for mifepristone? And what about contraception, which some states are now also making moves to limit? Or how about IVF? This was the context of the HHS rule which was proposed in spring of 2023 and came into effect this spring. It applies to all of those questions.

Now when this rule was first proposed back in 2023, a group of 28 members of Congress wrote to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra demanding he withdraw the proposed rule “immediately.” (I was reminded of this letter when I saw this write up this morning.) They argued that the proposed rule “unlawfully thwarts the enforcement of compassionate laws” and “creates special protections for abortion that limit cooperation with law enforcement, undermine the ability to report abuse, restrict the provision of public health information … erase the humanity of unborn children” and “interfere with valid state laws protecting life.”

Now, I said 28 members of Congress. That’s not very many. You’ll remember there are 535 of them, or which 100 are senators. Vance was one of only eight Republican senators willing to go this hard for menstrual surveillance by state law enforcement agencies. The other 20 signatories are members of the House and a quick review of the names shows they are mostly hardcore Freedom Caucus types. But think about it: even in the House GOP caucus, they could only get 20 people to sign this thing. That’s how extreme it is. But JD Vance signed.

I don’t know what Vance really believes and judging from his abrupt change of beliefs in the last few years, I suspect he doesn’t believe in much. But this interview with his college roommate was very interesting. He thinks Vance is a very, very angry guy filled with resentment. And it’s pretty clear from his rhetoric that his anger is directed largely at women.

He’s a very dangerous man.

Vance’s stump has got a nice Jeb Bush quality to it. And I mean that in the worst way possible.

The lone, singular clap at the end is just 👩🏽‍🍳👌🏽 https://t.co/5Zdb1zimZ1

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 22, 2024

That was a very bad speech. It turns out he’s not very good at this. Imagine that.

I wrote the other day that Trump made a mistake in picking him, largely because he thought he had it in the bag and was listening to his offspring, Tweedle dee and Tweedle dumb. But I assumed he was at least competent as a MAGA politician. But I guess that was wrong…