Three Month Tea Leaves

Kamala Harris made a clear declaration of her plans and policy priorities this week with her selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. Reuters dubbed him a "progressive policy champion," his record affirms that label, the socialists are rejoicing, and his elevation contradicts the Harris campaign's efforts to walk back the leftist platform she ran on in the 2020 Democratic Presidential primaries.

This affirms that the progressives are still in charge in the Democratic Party - or that the party fears them more than it fears any other constituency. Including Jews. Selecting PA governor Josh Shapiro would have signaled to that long-oppressed and currently-fearful population that Harris would be at least somewhat of a friend to Israel. But, vocal pro-Hamas voters in Wisconsin and Michigan, two of the three swing states that Harris needs (the other being PA) to win the White House are, we might conclude, seen by the Harris camp as less reliable than the Jewish vote, no matter how likely it is that a Harris administration turns its back on Israel. Given what I’ve seen, they may be right - many Jews I’ve crossed paths with would rather chew hot gravel than turn their backs on Team Blue.

And, indeed, the gambling markets reacted to the news by shading those states toward Harris. If that persists, then residents of Pennsylvania will (as things look right now) decide who our next President will be. Four other swing states - NC, GA, NV, and AZ - are currently leaning red. Trump could lose NV, AZ, and WI, but still eke out a victory if he takes Pennsylvania. However, if NC or GA tip blue in the next few weeks, Trump is likely toast.

All this is a snapshot, and much can and likely will change in the next eighty-something days. Trump may implode as he did in 2020, and he's already had a couple missteps. Harris may not be able to pull off the basement-and-teleprompter strategy that appears to be the plan. She is one mouthful of babbling word salad from going the way of Mike Dukakis, no matter how much the machine* bends things in her favor, and one debate could unmask her the way it unmasked Biden. The big decision for the Harris camp will be whether to risk such a debate. If she ducks it, the Right can hammer her by dipping into her rich history of empty blather. If she goes on stage, she can't rely on teleprompters and canned responses. Biden’s State of the Union address gave the nation a reason to believe he was not the dodderer his detractors claimed, but that mask was ripped off when he had to go off-teleprompter at the June debate. Harris faces a similar predicament.

But, big picture: How is it we got to this point, where our choices have been reduced to being between a right-populist and a full-blown leftist?

One might think that the tea leaves would caution the Dems against going further left - two Squad congressvarmints lost primaries to moderates, Bidenomics is being exposed as the fraud it is, “woke” is causing misery and failure everywhere, people are recoiling from the Left’s virulent antisemitism, and the border policy has made many blue-city folks unhappy. A political calculator might say “moderation is the path to success.”

But, no.

The Left, which we can now conclude Harris embraces wholeheartedly, may see opportunity in Trump’s candidacy this year. Rather than Trojan-horsing America as they did with "moderate Joe" during the election, and then running amok, they're making no pretense to softening their image. Picking Walz is a declaration, an affirmation of intent, and a sign of bravado.

While NYTimes asserts that Harris picking Walz is about assuaging midwesterners' racism by picking an "everyman" white guy (with white hair, no less), I think it's more about telling the wild-eyed progressive fringe that they remain in ascendance.

It’s also about assuaging a crowd that is apt to say "I'm withholding my vote because I don't think the Dems are socialist enough" and thus cost Harris one of those three swing states.

That the Right is chock full of people who say the same thing about Trump's GOP reinforces that presumption... and sums up the election strategy:

• Count on “Never-Trump” to sideline GOP voters.

• Energize the far-left to get out the vote.

• Campaign about personality rather than policy.

• Rely on The Machine to keep Harris shiny.

Harris is in a honeymoon period right now. With a deluge of lickspittle lubricating her path forward, with her last-minute ascension to the nomination, with the "nice guy" memes about Walz already flooding social media, and with the Democratic National Convention still ahead of her, she is rising in the polls, and will continue to rise through the end of the month. Come September, when the shiny-object fascination has dulled a bit and reality intruding again, the real race will begin.

We don't yet know how Harris will campaign. Will she duck and cover, relying on prepared speeches and the machine, or will she attempt to show America that reports of her vapidity are greatly exaggerated?

We also don't yet know how Trump will campaign. Will he repeat the "prompt an implosion and then get out of the way" tactic that took Biden off the ballot? Will he run on policy? Or will he run on personalities and personal attacks? No matter what, were I running the Trump campaign, I’d be piling it on in PA.

I'll check back in a few weeks.

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*The machine I refer to, here, in the past, and going forward, is the alliance between the left-leaning legacy media, the Big Tech Big Money folks in Silicon Valley, the faculty and student bodies in our elite universities, the Democratic Party's apparatchiks, and the entrenched bureaucracies across government high and low.