He’s Winning This Right Now

And Harris’ fawning media blitz didn’t help much. It might even have hurt.

(Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

A billion dollars is a lot of money, and Kamala Harris has reason to be extremely proud of raising that amount in less than three months. It’s roughly what Joe Biden raised in the entirety of 2020. Harris has also just completed a tour of fawning television interviews — from The View to Howard Stern to Stephen Colbert, who nudged, coached and celebrated their mutual idol. She had a terrific convention and, by everyone’s judgment, won the sole debate. The entire legacy media is behind her, at times embarrassingly so.

And yet, she’s obviously struggling to close the sale. At this point in 2020, Joe Biden, with far fewer resources than Harris, was 10 points ahead of Trump, and finished around 8.4 points ahead in the polling. Biden won the actual election by 4.5 percent, almost half the margin the polls predicted. At this point in 2016, Hillary Clinton was 6 points ahead, finished 3.6 points ahead in the polls, and ended up 2.1 percent ahead in the popular vote.

Run the numbers on Harris and you can begin to realize why smart Democrats are browning their whites. Today, Harris has a lead of just 2.6 percent nationally — much weaker than Clinton and Biden at this point. It’s the same in the swing states. Cillizza notes that in Pennsylvania at this point, Biden was +7 and Harris is barely +1; in Michigan, Biden was + 8, and Harris is tied. If the polls underestimated Trump’s national support by 2.5 points in 2016 and by 4 points in 2020, and the skew continues, then we could well be looking at the first victory in the popular vote that Trump has ever won. More to the point, nothing is really shifting. If anything, there’s a slight drift back toward Trump right now.

The big infomercial push was obviously a response to this. So I dutifully sat down and listened to or watched Harris’ media appearances, to see if she had found a way to close the deal with undecideds. I wanted to hear her answer two baseline questions that are still unresolved in my own mind. Why do you want to be president? And what change would you bring to the White House and the country?

These are not hard questions. They’re the most fundamental to a presidential campaign, and having listened to her closely in these interviews, I still don’t know. She has quietly dropped many previous positions on the border, fracking, Medicare. And, yes, she has offered some new policies. It’s unfair to say she hasn’t by this point. But giveaways to first-time homeowners and entrepreneurs, and help with aging parents and money to new parents, have not exactly seized the public’s attention. She flounders when asked how she’d pay for them, and over all, they remind me of Churchill’s remark: “Take away this pudding! It has no theme.” “I was born in a middle-class family” doesn’t cut it.

The closest Harris has gotten to articulating her agenda is the following, from the 60 Minutes interview:

In the last four years, I have been vice president of the United States. And I have been traveling our country. And I have been listening to folks and seeking what is possible in terms of common ground. I believe in building consensus. We are a diverse people. Geographically, regionally, in terms of where we are in our backgrounds. And what the American people do want is that we have leaders who can build consensus. Where we can figure out compromise and understand it’s not a bad thing, as long as you don’t compromise your values, to find common-sense solutions. And that has been my approach.

This is a classic Harris quote. It’s impossible to disagree with, but it’s also so empty that it’s hard even to agree with it either. It doesn’t tell us what she personally would push for before she’d compromise, what she really has conviction about, what she really believes in. In fact, the more I listened to her in these interviews, the more worried I became that she doesn’t actually believe in anything.

She’d have a Republican in the cabinet. Fine. Good, actually. But without substantive examples of possible compromises, apart from the Lankford bill (which was about expediting mass migration, not stopping it), it’s weak sauce compared to Make America Great Again, Cut Your Taxes, End the Wars, and Deport All The Illegals. Trump knows how to sell — in fourth grade language. Harris only knows how to charm elite liberals — in language only elite liberals use. It’s the only political skill she’s ever needed to have. And it’s not going to be enough.

And when directly asked what change she would bring compared with Biden, she actually said none. Twice! When only 28 percent of Americans think the country is on the right track! On The View, Harris said she’d have done nothing different in the last four years; on Colbert, she said the change was that she was “not Joe Biden” and that she was “not Donald Trump either.” When asked by 60 Minutes whether she regretted unprecedented levels of illegal mass migration and abuse of asylum laws, she said: “It’s a longstanding problem. And solutions are at hand. And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions.” She doesn’t answer the questions in a way that makes it very clear she is not answering the questions.

Asked by 60 Minutes what her end-game would be in Ukraine, she said: “There will be no success in ending that war without Ukraine and the UN charter participating in what that success looks like.” Here’s her response to a question about Netanyahu: “We are not gonna stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.” FFS.

She also utters these platitudes as if she is revealing some profound and previously unheard-of truths. Perhaps in her mind she is, which is somewhat disconcerting. And I’m not sure that showing her being feted by Howard Stern, who acted like an over-excited fangirl, or by Stephen Colbert in front of a rapturous Manhattan audience, is going to win over the few undecideds in the Midwest.

In fact, choosing these pliant tools, far from dispelling the notion that Harris is scared of robust questioning, just reinforces it. “I don’t want you being made fun of,” Stern confessed. Colbert gushed, “I want to talk about the debate for a second, which was one of the greatest debate performances I had ever seen anyone do.” In my view, what Harris really needs to do is a Fox News townhall or a rollicking, risky press conference, where she takes command. (She has just agreed to a CNN townhall, which is encouraging.) Buttigieg can do it. So can every candidate in living memory. So why can’t she?

Because — let’s be honest — her team either fears or knows she may not be up to it. And this is bleeding obvious. A presidential campaign where you rarely face the press, never deal with a hostile interview, and never hold a presser is a campaign defined by fear. You can smell it from miles away. The same explains the one decision she says she made alone: picking Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro. Walz didn’t make her feel insecure. Shapiro did. So she went with Tim. Not a great sign for a future president.

Look: I’m voting for her. Or rather, I’m voting against Trump. (The most striking aspect of the various endorsements of Harris — from The New Yorker to The Atlantic — is that they were almost entirely about Trump.) But I’ll tell you this: catching Trump’s various podcast and radio spots gives a very different impression. He is as reckless as she is careful; as conversational and natural as she is stilted and scripted. He is much more comfortable in the new media universe than she is.

Check out his interview with Theo Von, and watch him and Theo talk about cocaine addiction; or see Trump’s appearance on comic Andrew Shulz’s show. Here’s Schulz bursting out laughing when Trump says he’s “a basically truthful person” — and Trump carries on. And here is Trump explaining his stream-of-consciousness rally speeches:

I call it the weave. What you do is you weave things in … What you need is an extraordinary memory because you have to get back to where you started. I can go so far here or there. And I can come back to where I started. And some people think it’s so genius. But the bad people they say he was rambling. It’s not a ramble. It’s a weave!

Then he talks about his talent for giving his enemies nicknames, like “Tampon Tim.” He doesn’t use some because they don’t trip off the tongue, like “Comrade Kamala.” “You’ve got to be able to peewm,” he explains. The interview was less fawning than Call Her Daddy’s. At one point, Schulz interrupts Trump when he badmouths America now: “It’s always a great country.”

Can she take a risk? Can she break out of this defensive, insecure crouch? Can she borrow just a smidgen of the fierce game Obama was showing last night? I hope so. But this, I fear, is who she is: reactive, insecure, with no real inner core. And the more you are exposed to her vacuousness, the more the whole fakery of it all sinks in, and the less conceivable she becomes as a president. She has to change that dynamic with something bold and risky. And she has around three weeks to do it.

New On The Dishcast: Walter Kirn

Walter is a novelist, literary critic, and journalist. He’s written eight books, most famously Up in the Air, which became a film starring George Clooney. He’s now the editor-at-large for County Highway and co-hosts a weekly podcast with Matt Taibbi, “America This Week.” Way back in the day, I edited his work for The New Republic, and he guest-blogged for the Dish.

Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on Tim Walz as a “white minstrel” of a Midwesterner, and Walter watching speeches by Obama and Trump on LSD. That link also takes you to commentary on recent episodes on animal welfare, Trump, and Harris. Readers also continue to debate many aspects of the presidential race.

Money Quotes For The Week

“I’ve never seen an election in which the forecast spent more time in the vicinity of 50/50, and I probably never will,” – Nate Silver.

“They fucked up in 2014 [when Putin invaded Crimea]. That’s why we are here. We fucked it up. Barack never took Putin seriously,” – Joe Biden to a friend, according to Bob Woodward.

“Goal 1 – Instill Equity as a Foundation of Emergency Management,” – FEMA on its current website under “Strategic Plan.”

“Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports,” – Cara Ocobock and Sarah Lacy, laying waste to what’s left of Scientific American’s reputation.

“As women, we have to work 10 times harder. We got to be smarter. We got to play the game to even get our foot in the door sometimes. Can you tell the Daddy Gang when people tell you no, when people look at you and doubt you, what does that ignite in you?” – one of Alex Cooper’s questions for Kamala Harris.

“As a black lesbian — who Donald Trump doesn’t believe has genes as good as his — is he going to try to exterminate me?” – Aisha Mills, transqueer Dem strategist.

“Wokeness has not peaked. Cancellation peaked because wokeness seized control of all the institutions it sought to control and drove out all dissenters, obviating the need for further cancellations as it imposes its agenda uncontested,” – Wesley Yang. Yep.

Yglesias Award Nominee

“Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a book that I find praiseworthy, valuable, and thought-provoking. I don’t agree with everything he says, and I certainly haven’t changed my mind about his views on ‘white supremacy’ and reparations. But I cannot sit here and pretend The Message didn’t affect me deeply simply because I’ve criticized its author in the past,” – Glenn Loury.

The View From Your Window

Vik, Norway, 10.26 am

Dissents Of The Week

A reader writes, “I disagree with your take on JD Vance”:

I get it! I get being really, really unhappy with Harris and desperately wanting a sane, normie, well-spoken conservative to endorse. But Vance is not your savior. Sure, he did an awesome job sane-washing Trump — sounding polished and civil during the debate. But this supposedly devout Catholic has apparently never heard of “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor,” judging by his telling his supporters to keep the Haitians-are-eating-cats memes coming. And, of course, he supports Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election. He has sold his conscience in exchange for power.

I have written as much earlier this summer. But I may have a little more sympathy for Vance’s plight. He cannot realistically hope to forge a new conservatism without allying with Trump. So he is constrained. But I can hope there is something in there that also understands why Trump is so toxic. There was once.

Another dissent:

You wrote that you are so against Harris that if the choice were between her and Vance, you’d go for Vance. Oh, no. If the Republican Party were the only one in the country, and the only choices for president were Trump and Vance, I’d — well, actually I’d vote “None of These Candidates.” But if I had to choose, I’d pick Trump. Trump is seeking power to feed his id and stay out of prison. Vance has a brain. And an agenda. And that makes him a lot more dangerous.

That’s if you think the agenda is so dangerous. I see a shift to the economic left and an emphasis on shoring up the family. Another reader writes:

You “acknowledge” that Vance’s debate tone is “not one he’s used on wingnut podcasts.” But isn’t that a problem? He code-switches. He can be a genial, ah-shucks, hardscrabble-boy-who-made-it-big on a Tuesday, but be yucking it up at Trump rally on Saturday, saying the Democrats tried to kill him. He’s not excising the anti-liberal sentiment bubbling up on the right. He’s riding it like a wave.

And the fact that he’s peddling the Big Lie is even worse. Unlike Trump — whose mind is so warped by self-aggrandizement so as to simply not compute anything to the contrary — Vance knows Trump lost. Say what you will about Vance — and I say plenty, and little of it good — he’s not an idiot. So the fact that he knows better puts in him in a special demagogic category with Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley.

I get it. One more dissent for now:

Almost 20 years ago, you denounced a “conservatism of faith”: a big government, theoconservative, freedom-hating, tariff- and tax- and spend-loving ideology that had little concern for limited government. And then you broke up with the GOP — for good, I thought. But now you are praising Vance and his commitment to a “pro-family policy pragmatism, a more realist foreign policy, and a less culturally progressive government.”

Everything you accused the Bush-era GOP of being, Vance is to a greater extent. He is a committed “postliberal” — that is, a theocon on steroids. He is committed to using state power to enforce traditional morality. He wants to  ban pornography and disenfranchise childless people through a bizarre scheme to allow parents to cast votes as proxies for their children.

On the subject of economics, Vance does not favor free-market friendly attempts to reduce poverty — think UBI — but massive, top-down government intervention in the economy. He wants to raise the minimum wage to at least $11 an hour, perhaps $20 (outbidding Bernie Sanders and the Squad, I guess). Channeling Marx, he has stated that housing shouldn’t be a “commodity”.

He is the absolute embodiment of everything you denounced in “Crisis of Faith,” and yet you have proudly declared that you would vote for him over Harris. What happened to your commitment to the conservatism of doubt — to your view that “the market is a much more reliable indicator of how individuals actually want to live their lives than a government directive or program”? Have you asked yourself why you lost your old conviction that conservatism should be “dedicated to restraining government and empowering individuals to live rich and fulfilling lives”?

There’s a lot to unpack there. A brief response:

I remain committed to the conservatism of doubt, of markets, of limited government, pragmatism, and realist foreign policy. I stand by my book, The Conservative Soul, and believe it has held up well. But I’ve also seen the Pyrrhic victory of neoliberalism and the struggles of working-class Americans, and have no problem adjusting policies to deal with that outcome. That’s Oakeshottian trimming. And it sure isn’t “post-liberal”.

I also don’t see Vance as a hardcore theocon or homophobe, though his stance on abortion is too extreme for me. His thinking out loud about how to support family life has led him into some weird-ass culs-de-sac, but he won’t end marriage equality or abortion on demand in most states. And he’s right that strong family structure is vital for a successful and stable democracy, as well as for the flourishing of African-Americans.

The theocons, more to the point, lost the culture war. And in so far as we are now in a new one, and the extreme left is waging a Kulturkampf against oppressor groups, biological reality and religious freedom, I’m with the religious right against the woke left. There is no social activism on the right that is as powerful and pervasive as the current left in government, corporate America, media, and education: indoctrinating school kids with the precepts of critical theory; transing gay kids; abolishing educational standards and the idea of individual merit; favoring race and sex discrimination; and describing America as a form of white supremacy. If you want to keep big government at bay, the Orwellian powers now being deployed to indoctrinate and censor a generation should be anathema. The only reason for a conservative to back Harris is to stop Trump.

More dissents, on a variety of topics, are posted on the pod page — arriving in your in-tray shortly. As always, keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Mental Health Break

Way before he was a pod god, and what an incredibly sexy dude:

In The ‘Stacks

• Ayaan reflects on the anniversary of Oct 7, and Niall recounts the Holocaust in Lithuania: “a higher share than in any other country the Nazis occupied.”
• Sasha Ingber takes stock of “Israel’s probes into its largest intelligence failure.”
• Climate change likely played a big role in Helene and Milton.
• Ben Ryan is gobsmacked by a new report showing at least 14,000 minors got a sex change over the past five years. Yeah: remember when they told you this wasn’t happening anywhere?
• The downfall of Diddy “reminds us that using power and influence to oppress others isn’t a white thing; it’s a human thing,” writes Monica Harris.
• Richard Hanania details how “conservatives are lying about immigrant crime.”
• Noah Smith debates Nate Silver on the economy and Matt Yglesias on nuclear: “Bloggers love to argue.”
• Nate cautions against internal polls. JVL is much more optimistic on the polling than I am — and Joe Klein joins me. Tim Noah sees promise in the new Times/Siena.
• Richard Reeves counters Andrew Solomon on his “willful ignorance of the male suicide crisis.”
• Matt Taibbi fisks Ruth Whippman, “the Robin DiAngelo of gender.” Delish.
• Celeste Davis runs through the theories as to why male college enrollment keeps dropping.
• Michael Behrent spotlights three members of the “conservative left.”
• Musa al-Gharbi gives “two cheers for the woke.”
• Ana Kasparian just launched Unaligned, “a place for open minds and ideas that transcend partisan purity.”
• Zaid Jilani recently launched The American Saga, “a decidedly anti-partisan perspective.”
• And Van Jones finally launches his ‘stack. Subscribe!

The View From Your Window Contest

Where do you think? Email your entry to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. Proximity counts. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a View From Your Window book or two annual Dish subscriptions.

See you next Friday.

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