I'm back -- thank you, Yas and Tom, for some exceptional posts. I'm still thinking about the concept Yas discussed on Monday -- "afterwardsness" -- and wondering whether Kamala Harris's campaign has gotten us there yet. I think she may have persuaded voters to believe that we're turning the page on Trump, though I wonder whether some voters still feel they can't move to a period "after" the inflation of President Biden's first two years. (Compound interest is a bitch.) Maybe Harris can give voters more hope.
I'd also like to talk about Tom's last post. Marc Thiessen is an old-school GOP propagandist and rarely worth taking seriously, but it's true that, as he says, only one sitting vice president has won a presidential election in the past 188 years. That was George H.W. Bush in 1988. VPs tend to look passive and weak when they're in office, and Bush was no exception. He trailed badly just after the Democratic convention in '88. So why did he win?
He won because his campaign made the '88 election a referendum on his opponent, Mike Dukakis, rather than on his own administration. If you remember that election, what do you remember? Mike Dukakis in a tank wearing a helmet that made him look like a dorky alien. Dukakis giving a cold, clinical answer to a truly horrifying CNN debate question about whether he'd support the death penalty if his wife were raped and murdered. (The "liberal" media was known to amplify right-wing talking points during presidential campaigns long before Donald Trump.) And probably the most easily recalled image of that campaign was a still of Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who committed further violent crimes while on furlough in Dukakis's Massachusetts.
Buash won because the entire general election campaign was based on Republican messaging about Dukakis: that the cerebral Massachusetts governor had no foreign policy experience and would be no match for foreign foes, and, especially, that he was too liberal on crime. Only a small percentage of the country had lived in Massachusetts under Dukakis, while we'd all lived under Ronald Reagan and George Bush, but America voted based on Dukakis's record, or at least the GOP's narrative of that record, not on Bush's.
What Republicans did to Dukakis that year will be relatively easy for Harris to do this year. Trump has been president. He's associated with genuinely radical policies and appalling ideas about how to govern that we've seen in some form.
As Tom says, Josh Marshall is right: Trump struts around as if he's never stopped being president, and much of his agenda is retribution for what he regard as mistreatment he suffered when he was president.
But there's more than that. On abortion, we still live in Donald Trump's America. The attacks on school libraries and the backlashes against trans people, workplace diversity, and school curricula that are honest about America's racial history are all the work of Trumpian Republicans -- and they're happening now. We know that America became a meaner and more bigoted country when Trump was president, and the rage and bigotry haven't gone away. We also know that Trump plans to make America even meaner and nastier. So in many ways it still is his country. In many ways he really is the incumbent.
So Harris can make this election a referendum on Trump -- and she can win that way.
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