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Kamala Picks a Midwestern Smoothie
With Trump floundering, she aims to turn out her ideological base, not to win over swing voters.
Peggy Noonan
Aug. 8, 2024 5:53 pm ET
Kamala Harris just won her third week in a row of the first three weeks of the hundred-day campaign. She kept everyone in the political class wondering who her vice-presidential nominee would be, made a surprising choice, and unveiled him at a Philadelphia rally that was boffo. Now the runup to the convention, which has so far included packed rallies in Eau Claire, Wis., and Detroit, where a crowd packed into a hangar, with Air Force Two in the background. She’s stealing Donald Trump’s signature move. I continue to believe the woman isn’t creating a movement but a movement is creating her, and showing up.
Mr. Trump spent most of the week having what a GOP strategist told Politico is a “public nervous breakdown.” He has been particularly Saturnine and gloomy in his late-night postings. At every event since she was (still somewhat mysteriously!) elevated to her position as presidential nominee, most everything has been, for Ms. Harris, bright good fortune.
For the first time this week I thought people were wondering about the impact of Mr. Trump’s age. He is 78. He hasn’t been able to focus, make his case. Is he, in another irony of 2024, turning into Joe Biden?
On Thursday afternoon, at a news conference in a Mar-a-Lago ballroom, Mr. Trump aimed to put his supporters’ anxieties aside. He was not free-associative as usual, but kept to talking points. He was somber and darkly lit. He talked about the dangers facing the world—“in my opinion, we are very close to a world war”—and seemed to imply this is no time for unsteady hands. He spoke of illegal immigration and inflation. Ms. Harris is “barely competent.” “Hillary was smart.” He offered three dates for debates.
It was OK. It was proof of life, and a certain verve. He went long, took on all comers, and underlined, legitimately, that Ms. Harris is getting away with not doing news conferences or interviews.
On the choice of Gov. Tim Walz: He was a relatively moderate liberal congressman for 12 years and has been a highly progressive leftist in his past 5½ years as governor. Republicans will be sure to make his positions clear.
But the headline in Ms. Harris’s choice is that the ticket she has created is full-on progressive. No mix, no shade. She’s cementing in support for one part of the party and a particular vision of the future. She could have reached to the center, with a relative moderate like Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, to broaden her pool of voters, and didn’t.
I believe this means she’s not going broad but deep. She doesn’t intend to win this by going an inch to the right but through left-wing turnout—the young, minorities, those who haven’t steadily voted in the past, if ever. She is giving them a jolt, a straight shot of progressive: The future is left-wing. Getting them to show up is the strategy. Centrists and Trump-rejecting Republicans aren’t the central concern. If they can be won over through small symbolic or stylistic moves, fine, everyone’s welcome. But they’re not a focus. Getting out our people is the focus.
A few weeks ago I said she’d shown no sign of wanting to go to the center and may in fact think this is the time for a battle between rightist and leftist policy. Seems to me that’s what she’s doing.
I don’t know if this is a shrewd strategy to achieve victory in November, but it strikes me as a signal moment and, in the largest sense, not constructive. When you need voters who aren’t in your tent, you moderate. When you stick with your side, when it’s all or nothing, you go on, if you win, to operate in an all-or-nothing style, which in a 50/50 country causes more tension, anger and division. You aren’t persuading the other guy, you’re just overwhelming the other guy. It’s heady, and polarizing.
What progressives vs. conservatives guarantees is a country with two sharply divided blocs, with less give at the edges.
As for Mr. Walz himself, I think the Harris campaign fully understands what he stands for but assumes voters in general will be confused by the way he comes across. How is that? They’ve pushed him from the beginning as a regular guy who looks like a Republican, he hunts, ice-fishes, you want to have a beer with him. “The one thing about Tim Walz is that he kind of dropped out of a Norman Rockwell painting,” David Axelrod said on CNN. “He looks and sounds like small-town America.”
Fair enough. That’s what everyone in Washington and New York is saying: He looks like a centrist.
As I listened, my first thought was: We’re a nation of casting directors now. That is how Mr. Trump thinks: He casts people in roles based on broadcast TV values. Tall, gray-haired, distinguished Rex Tillerson looked like a secretary of state, so let’s make him secretary of state.
My second thought: I think Democratic strategists are misreading their guy. We are being instructed that he is “Minnesota nice.” He always gets personal. What I think I’m seeing is Midwestern smoothie. This is a gifted actor, a natural who plays the part of the affable Midwesterner really well. But he gets pretty lippy pretty fast; he’s a hot figure, not a warm one.
On MSNBC in December: “I think any time you can highlight how strange these people are, it’s a good thing.” “I don’t need (Mike Johnson) giving me a sermon, I need him to live one.” On CBS in 2023: Republicans are “down there debating whether slavery had a value to it.” At a rally this week: “These guys are creepy and yes, just weird as hell.” In the “White Dudes for Harris” Zoom call, referring to Mr. Trump: “Make that bastard wake up afterwards and know that a black woman kicked his ass and sent him on the road.”
Excuse me, that is many things, but it isn’t Midwestern nice. He looks as if he likes Trump voters. But listening to him this week I thought: He doesn’t, not at all.
Democratic political professionals at this moment are excited by meanness, just as so many MAGA people are. It would be better if, instead, they leaned away from it, in contrast, and didn’t lean in. Hot is more alienating than they think. Ask Mr. Trump.
It is widely reported that Ms. Harris’s decision hinged on personal vibrations. I suspect this was put out there as a head-feint to obscure, after the announcement, how far to the left Mr. Walz is. It may be true, or partially true, but since when do presidential candidates have to have “chemistry” with their running mates? Jack Kennedy didn’t bond with Lyndon Johnson, Boston needed Houston, full stop. Ronald Reagan picked George H.W. Bush because he was tired, Bush had come in second in the primary and was a moderate, so take him. They grew to appreciate each other. That’s the most you can hope for. Barack Obama needed a white haired establishmentarian who didn’t frighten the horses. It wasn’t personal. Anyway, this line strikes me as more of the increasing babyishness of high politics.
