President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

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Father of 11-year-old killed in crash says Trump and Vance are using son ‘as a political tool’

 

Tomorrow on the Wall Street Journal opinion page.

 

I thought it was a big risk, but I suppose that's the sort of thing you have to do when you're the Democrats in that position. Like a fake punt in the third quarter that gets you back into the game. I'd say that, if anything, the Harris-Walz campaign has been rather conservative in playing its hand since the convention and relying a little bit too much on just letting Trump make his own mistakes. That works several days a week but sometimes it allows him to set the tone. But last night felt like a knockdown blow. This is always been the case but it seems impossible to me that anyone other than the willfully ignorant could vote for Trump based on last night.

And I'm going to disagree with Alma et al on the value of the Taylor Swift endorsement by virtue of its timing. Taylor Swift endorsing Kamala immediately before the convention grabs the attention of the exact people who were probably not watching TV last night and points at the stupid stuff like a 20-something sharing a meme. The timing of that could not have been accidental. And yeah, you can talk about follow-through and whether or not the Swifties will actually vote (or that they weren't already voting to begin with), but I went into the post, and she had over a million likes in 12 minutes. The simple fact is that woman has a staggering command of the national conversation particularly in the heads of the exact people the Democrats need to step up.

 

Anyone who has worked or works in PR or media relations knows Taylor's post was written and rewritten and worked on and certain words were chosen for certain sentiments, etc. Hell, look at how she signed it and the photo itself. And the timing was certainly deliberate, meant to be read by the talking heads while analyzing a debate that Harris clearly and cleanly won. I wonder if it were a poor performance by Harris, would it have been posted last night or held onto. Perhaps it would've been to help damage control in that situation.

But I don't think so. I think it was prepared, it was a great night for Harris, and boom.

My daughter already had requested her absentee ballot from NC. She was ready and will certainly vote. But she also texted me immediately, "About damn time, Taylor. Let's go." You can bet she and her friends were talking about it in their studio classes today in NYC. Hopefully her friend from Arizona gets her ballot. And her two friends from Pennsylvania. She's NC. Every one of those votes would count.

We're only eight weeks away. Use every shot in the arm you can, and if nothing else, this is another very strong example of how smart the people running the campaign are and have been since the change. Maybe we can start to trust they have a good plan in place for the rest of the sprint.

 

Harris did exactly what you want a candidate to do in an election with very few undecideds. Make the other guy look so weak and out of touch that only his base will stick with him. And there's no doubt at all the Taylor Swift endorsement was timed for that moment.

Look, Trump still has 70-75 million voters who don't care if he's the next Hitler. What Harris, Walz and the Democrats need is to shore up the 81 million who voted for Biden the last time, particularly in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada.

You need Plus-1, not a mandate. I'm expecting a torrent of "Harris is the devil incarnate!" TV ads and mailers here in Georgia for the next six weeks. But I think Harris solidified the swing voters who weren't sure she was strong enough to carry the ballot.

And if there are still really 25 percent of African-Americans voting for Trump, you just have to write that off as collateral damage.

 

When I was a prosecutor, only about half the office were gun owners and less than a quarter carried. But I also worked under a progressive DA - and his successor, who ran against him by painting him as a neo-con, is even further to the left. We were allowed to use the police range whenever we wanted, as long as there wasn't a training program going on, and the armorer at the PD would take the whole office out there every so often so that the prosecutors who were not gun owners/experienced with guns could get a better understanding of how they work. That was fun because they'd pull out some of the illegal guns they'd confiscated (sawed-offs and fully autos) to let us see how they functioned.

I started carrying after being in court one day for a bond hearing where I was asking for $2 million on a guy who shot up his girlfriend's car while she and their baby were in it (thankfully neither got hit), and turned and looked at him only to realize that his parents lived two doors down. His brother was gang-affiliated and had just come home after serving 8 years on a manslaughter conviction for a killing he did when he was 16. I'm sure they recognized me, too.

I stopped carrying when I left the DA's office and I sold my guns when my oldest kid was born - convinced after reading research that boys with guns in the house are far more likely to do something terrible with them (particularly suicide) in their teenage years than anywhere near the rate at which people act in self-defense with a firearm. I'm not a hunter. Maybe when they're grown I'll get another because I do like going to the range, but by then I may not care to.

A friend from law school works for a DA who requires his ADA's to carry, but they're in a rural county where that's as much about projecting an image to the voters as it is about actually maybe needing it.

 

I would bet that there were at least two version's of Taylor's statement prepared, and that if things had really gone badly that they would have held it back for better timing. That was so well executed, much like Kamala's entire debate performance. There was only one person on that stage who came off as presidential.

 

Thanks for the first-person insight. And yeah, I live in redneckistan northeast Georgia where my House of Representative has an assault weapon on his campaign signs, so my mileage varies.

 

Another point. Harris's line about how if Trump was President the Russians would already be in Kiev and probably attacking Poland by now. There are a lot of people of Polish extraction in Pennsylvania (and other battleground states) who might very well have responded to that line of attack.

 

The way to get civility back is to GET RID OF TRUMP. Make him a loser. Make him an outcast. Make him a pariah.

Emphatically enough that his ball slurpers sre ashamed of themselves.

Denazification. We need this shitstain out of our national underwear.

 

That was one helluva moment. She was fully prepared and deployed that nugget of information perfectly. And it was in the larger context of showing trump would rather side with murderous dictators than democracy and the United States.

For goodness sake he used Orban as a character witness. Happily, as if he thought that was a great move and a winning line.

I talk about the danger of catered feeds and news silos all the time. And nobody is more isolated in his fake world than trump.

“THEY’RE EATING THE PETS” is another example. What’s left if his brain is rotting and diseased by conspiracy theories.