Bring Back the Vibes!

Remember when Harris was all about laughing ... and winning?

Oct. 24: Harris momentum stalling … Harris unveils plan for campaign’s closing argument … DOJ warns Musk … Tucker Carlson discusses angry Dad giving vigorous spanking to ‘bad little girl’ …

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Vice Pres. Kamala Harris when she was in the lead. (Uncredited photo / Harris campaign website.)

When Vice Pres. Kamala Harris first took the presidential-race baton from the cold, almost-dead hands of Pres. Joe Biden, she immediately had the Big Mo.

Right off the bat, Harris was posting better poll numbers than Biden had been. Then she began closing the gap with former Pres. Donald Trump. Then she began beating Trump in the polls, and then — even with GOP pollsters skewing the averages by flooding the zone the way climate change floods flood zones — Harris began showing up in statistical models as most likely to win the presidency.

Now, statistically, they’re tied again. And last week, 538 [insert appropriate grumbling here] began giving Trump the better odds again.

A new poll out yesterday has some new troubling numbers for Harris when it comes to young men of color. There’s serious questions about how real this is, but Harris and former Pres. Barack Obama are sure acting like it’s worth addressing. And don’t even get me started on young all men of white color. 

It’s all worrying enough that even The Fucking News, which fucking hates polling/horserace shit, is talking about it. But polls are only part of the reason why. The Harris campaign, too, has changed.

So what the fuck’s going on? Time for some unprovable theories!

Republican pollster Frank Luntz said this week that the flip was caused by a single strategic shift by Harris. She started attacking Trump.

“[T]he moment that she turned anti-Trump and focused on him and said, ‘Don’t vote for me, vote against him,’ … that’s when everything froze,” Luntz said.

Which moves your dutiful TFN to say that awful phrase which no respectable or fucking news outlet wants to find itself saying: Frank Luntz may have a point.

And after last night’s Harris town hall on CNN, one of those allegedly real Undecideds™ — who just hasn’t been able to figure this out — was asked what the fuck is her problem. And I don’t know how much Luntz paid undecided voter Pam Thistle to say this, but here was her message to both Harris and Trump:

“[S]top trashing each other. We don’t care. Stop trashing Trump. Trump, stop trashing the vice president. We don’t care.” 

So there may be something to this. But there’s a reason Harris is attacking Trump. She’s wooing Trump-allergic Republicans. To do that she’s leaning on Never-Trump Republicans like former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY). But Cheney’s strategic approach is influenced by two goals: Beating Trump but also rehabilitating the Republican Party.

So now Harris is fully on board the “fascist,” “Hitler” train, otherizing Trump so that voters won’t associate the Republican Party with him. It obviously has a factual basis, but who’s going to suddenly decide — after living through a Trump presidency — to ditch Trump based on this attack? No one, according to Luntz apparently.

The Hitler stuff, the Never Trump argument, may help 2028 Republicans, but it hurts 2024 Democrats. That’s because it reinforces the same dynamic that was dragging Biden down. He was the system. Attacking Trump as a threat to the system just signals to everyone that Harris is the system.

To be clear, there are two systems at stake here. There’s the Shitty System of rules and incentives and tax breaks and regulatory loopholes that has warped our society into one that aggressively funnels all our wealth to the top and extracts from us everything but financial anxiety. That’s the system people hate.

The other system, the First System, is the Constitution stuff, the underlying system that tells us how to change the Shitty System.

Harris et al. are running as defenders of the First System. But they haven’t made the case for why the First System benefits us. Which Democrats can’t argue without making the case that the First System is of value because it empowers us to ditch the Shitty System. Without making that case, Harris renders herself the chief spokesperson for the Shitty System.

And she validates the notion that Trump is a threat to the system. Which is the most powerful asset he has as a candidate.

But it’s not just attacking Trump that got us here.

Think about all the things media told Harris to do: Issue more policy, do more interviews. Stop laughing. She did. And she did. How’d that help her? Why isn’t she laughing?

All of those media prescriptions are Shitty System moves. She did them all. And here she is.

Every answer Harris gives that’s a word salad has System dressing slathered all over it. Why’d you drop your fracking ban? Cobb. Why do you support arming a conflict you think should end? Tuna Niçoise.

Sure, people should care that America’s top generals call Trump a fascist. But generals, too, are the system. People remember that Iraq and Afghanistan happened! Their warnings only reinforce Harris’s system-ness.

Look at Trump. Did Trump pay for refusing the system’s demand to do more than one debate? Ask Luntz. Or Pam Thistle.

Hell, the one time Trump did what you’re “supposed” to do, and debated Harris, what happened? Newsfucker, he got schlonged. The System, it turns out — the pundits and the media and the rich donors and the norm-guardians — is often wrong.

Let’s look at another metric: Donations. Here’s the number of donations every day to each candidate, per the Washington Post:

See that mid-September rocketship spike in Harris donations? In the trough before it, she rolled out small-bore proposals to help small businesses. The massive plummet and trough after the spike is the Harris campaign announcing its Opportunity Agenda for Black Men.

No. One. Cares.

And when it comes to big-picture stuff, Democrats have been hurting themselves, validating the narratives driving both Trump’s success and the scary American embrace of fascism and/or fascism-lite. People don’t just become fascist, they embrace fascism when it seems like the only protection against whatever they’ve been told to fear.

Instead of defending immigrants — with or without papers — Democrats have been acting and talking as if immigrants are a threat. No surprise, then, that almost half the country supports putting undocumented immigrants into militarized camps.

As you can see, courtesy of Axios’s chart, the people who support concentrating immigrants in camps include more than one out of five Democrats. (Which group is least in favor, even less than Hispanic Catholics? The religiously “unaffiliated.” Atheists for the win, y’all!)

Rising support for rising fascism shouldn’t be surprising when Harris is blaming Trump for not being Tough™ enough on immigrants (by torpedoing the Draconian immigration bill this year).

Harris could have offered policy proposals that attacked the Shitty System. Massive, sweeping proposals that went even farther/better than the ones that won Biden the election in 2020.

Instead, her timid appeals to the right have left gaping vulnerabilities on her left, which Trump has gleefully filled with populism — no matter how poorly thought-out — like ending taxes on tips. And hell, yesterday, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) — about as insanely right-wing as even MAGA can stand — got to Harris’s left calling for an end to funding Israel. “If Israel insists on destroying civilian targets in Lebanon, let them buy and build their own weapons. American taxpayers should not be funding this,” Massie said, the way Democrats would get destroyed (by The System) for saying but should say anyway because (a) morality, and (b) popularity. Instead, Harris may lose Michigan, home to Palestinian-Americans and unions.

(OTOH, former Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) just this morning endorsed Harris. He’s a big enough deal there that he might actually move some votes, or at least depress some Trump votes. Enough to make up for what Harris has lost in Michigan? Doubtful, but who knows.)

So, what now?

Harris reportedly will make the closing argument for her campaign on Tuesday, in a speech at the same spot where Trump on Jan. 6, 2021, sent his mob to go upfuck Mike Pence.

It is about as system-y as you can get.

Which might not be fatal. Polls are historically shitty this cycle. We’ve seen report after report about how shitty Trump’s ground game and get-out-the-vote operations have been. According to the Washington Post, Harris’s online donors outnumber Trump’s in every state there is.

What the country needs is policies that will change the system, not just ensure we survive it. That would boost the Harris campaign, too.

But who knows, maybe their number-crunchers are right and wildly popular policy proposals would scare off enough Republican Harris voters to cost Harris the race.

Either way, with or without policy, what the campaign needs is a return to those halcyon days of “weird” and laughing and vibes.

Remember the mid-September spike between the policy troughs? That was the Trump-Harris debate. The one where she launched a thousand memes with her incredulous-face responses to Trump’s unbound batshittery.

It wasn’t policy. It wasn’t small-bore Band-Aids™ to keep middle-class America just alive enough to serve as a food source for the wealthy. It was vibes. It was a throwback to that magnificent, joyous moment early in this campaign when the Song of the Summer was “Trump and Vance Are Weird.”

Calling them “weird” made them outliers not compared to The System, but compared to the people.

That’s why it worked. Everyone understands Trump and Vance are weird. 

But it wasn’t just carving those two off from the not-weird population that worked. Remember how the System’s sentinels, the media, made Harris’s laughing out to be a problem?

As your astute TFN astutely newsfucked back in July, the attack on Harris’s laughter backfired. It said more about Fox and the Republican National Committee than it did about Harris.

Laughing said I don’t care that you think I’m a communist. Dismissing concerns about communism/socialism and not giving a shit about those fears is rejecting the system! Not issuing policy proposals or doing CNN interviews is rejecting the system!

“Weird” and laughter together sent a message, true or not, that Harris didn’t give a shit about norms. Exactly the energy drink that fueled Trump, but without the bile.

“Weird” and laughter implied that Harris would do whatever she wanted to help the people and fuck the media and the system.

Harris entered the race seemingly all out of fucks to give. If she loses, it’ll be because some asshole bought her a lifetime supply. But there’s still time for Harris to stop giving them.

Four Quickies

• Russia’s targeting Vice Pres. Kamala Harris with deepfake videos while China’s going after Republican members of Congress who are going after China, according to a new report from U.S. intelligence agencies the New York Times Microsoft. China denies it and suggests that maybe the companies creating these posts might not like the U.S. Congress going after TikTok. Democracy’s ultimate defense against all of this, of course, is solid epistemology. The best investment for national defense isn’t tanks, it’s education.

• The Justice Department reportedly has warned recidivist CEO Elon Musk that committing crimes is against the law. Musk this weekend live-streamed his confession that he was handing out money to registered voters, in violation of federal law. The Justice Department has now written a letter to Musk’s political action committee warning him that he might be breaking the law, which is a crime. The letter is an obvious response to the relentless attention on this issue from The Fucking News. Of course, when most people break the law, they get a free ride downtown with complimentary head bang getting into the squad car. What does Musk get? Free legal advice.

• The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled yesterday that voters are allowed to vote even if they fuck up their first vote. Basically, if voters think maybe they fucked up their mail-in ballots, they can also vote in person on Election Day. They’re not voting twice. Their in-person vote is only counted if the mailed one is rejected. Republicans challenged the right to a second chance because let’s be honest Democrats are more likely to fuck up their mail-in ballots thanks to their incessant weed-smoking.

• HighLowlights from Tucker Carlson addressing Turning Point USA:

  • On Elon Musk: “People say, oh, he’s got F-U money. No, it’s just the opposite. There is no such thing as F-U money. The more money you have, the more vested you are. There’s only F-U poverty, actually.”

  • On misbehaving (metaphorical) kids: “Dad comes home. And he’s pissed. … You know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking.’”

TCB

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Go get ‘em, kids!