The Shortest Presidential Campaign

Succession

It’s hard being the veep. Presidents can loom large over the world stage. Vice presidents tend to be mostly off the stage altogether—or they are brought onto it for a variety of tasks that no one else wants, including the presidential staff (a subject mined with great humor by Julia Louis-Dreyfus in HBO’s Veep). The conundrum of being a veep has ended up serving as fodder for more than one memoir. Richard Nixon’s was probably the most bitter. Now we get Kamala Harris’s,107 Days, which has the strange distinction of also being a memoir about her failed presidential campaign—one of the shortest in United States history. She tells the story of her messy succession to the Democratic presidential nomination and eventua loss to Donald Trump. A book that opens with grumblings about being pushed to the side during Biden’s presidency ends with numerous grievances about getting pulled into the limelight. In his review, Jeet Heer notes that Harris makes a compelling case that the Biden administration ended up being selfish and corrupt—regarding both the upcoming 2024 elections and the devastation of Gaza. But what is often left out, and yet still not hard to miss, is just how feckless Harris’s politics was too. For while she in retrospect insists that the Democrats needed to break with Joe Biden much earlier, she never fully reckons with how she also needed to break with his politics. Read “The Shortest Presidential Campaign”

Family Matters

From Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another borrows a basic conceit: a group of countercultural misfits, living underground, whose lives on the fringe are disturbed by the return, years later, of a government tormentor. Pynchon’s book toggles between the 1960s and the Reagan-era ’80s, when most of the excitable energy of the counterculture had burned out. Anderson brings the idea to the present moment, with an activist group called the French 75 who stage radical direct-action campaigns, including liberating detainees at an immigrant detention camp and bombing courthouses. The movie’s action begins in earnest after the group is disbanded when its leader—played by Teyana Taylor—betrays them. The betrayal forces her lover, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and their daughter (Chase Infiniti) to go on the run. Their lives are upended when a military strongman named Stephen J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) comes looking for them, and what follows is Anderson’s most entertaining and heartfelt movie yet—a political blockbuster that truly understands the appeal and promise of the left. Reviewing the film, John Semley writes, “The dirty work of revolution, according to this film, need not be so grim and self-serious; it can involve excitement, and sex appeal, and the pleasure of ripping around on skateboards and slamming Modelos with like-minded comrades. It is a joy to watch.” Read “Paul Thomas Anderson’s Wild American Epic”