J.D. VANCE: IF NOISY KIDS ON A PLANE ANNOY YOU, YOU'RE A SOCIOPATH

I haven't watched Lulu Garcia-Navarro's New York Times interview of J.D. Vance, but I've read the transcript. I have many thoughts about it, but for now I'd like to talk about Vance's attempts to clarify his earlier slanders of childless people.

The interview reminds us that Vance really doesn't like taking responsibility for his own words and deeds when they're criticized. Garcia-Navarro asks him about his frequent past references to ideological opponents as "childless cat ladies," and he apologizes half-heartedly, implying that anyone could have done what he did:

... look, they were dumb comments. I think most people probably have said something dumb, have said something that they wish they had put differently.

But most people aren't mega-best-selling memoirists contemplating a high-level career in politics, as Vance was when he said these things. Under those circumstances, he should have been more careful when speaking to the media. (Most people never speak to the media.)

Garcia-Navarro asks him about Kamala Harris:

We don’t know why Kamala Harris did not have children, but do you include Kamala Harris in the category of women that you’re talking about?

Vance decides to give what I call the Rob Corddry answer. Twenty years ago, when torture at Abu Ghraib was exposed, Corddry, then a performer on The Daily Show, said this in a mock defense of the Bush administration:

"Remember, it’s not important that we did torture these people. What’s important is that we are not the kind of people who would torture these people."

Here's Vance's answer regarding Vice President Harris:

No. Everything that I know about Kamala Harris, that I’ve learned about Kamala Harris, is that she’s got a stepfamily, she’s got an extended family, she’s a very good stepmother to her stepchildren. I would never accuse Kamala Harris along these lines.

I would never accuse Kamala Harris along these lines. Dude, you literally did accuse Kamala Harris along these lines, in 2021 on Tucker Carlson's show:

"We are run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too," Vance said.

"It's just a basic fact," Vance continued. "You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC. The entire future of the Democrats are controlled by people without children."

"How does it make any sense we turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it?" he asked.

It's not important that Vance did attack Harris this way. What he thinks is important for you to see is that he is not the kind of person who would attack Harris this way.

Vance goes to great lengths to let us know that he has nothing against childless people, really:

What I was trying to get at is that — I’m not talking about people who it just didn’t work out for, for medical reasons, for social reasons, like set that to the side, we’re not talking about folks like that.

I don't know what he means by "social" here, though I think he means "women who are too unpopular to attract a man who'll marry and impregnate them." Because I can't think of any other "social" reason he'd accept female childlessness. (In other settings, he's criticized childless teachers even though his own Catholic Church runs schools in which many of the teachers are celibate nuns, priests, and brothers.)

Vance works hard to reassure us that he's tolerant. But there are limits. Did you know that if you've ever been annoyed by an unruly child on a plane or a train, your frustration is "pathological"?

What I was definitely trying to illustrate ultimately in a very inarticulate way is that I do think that our country has become almost pathologically anti-child. I put this in a couple of different ways, right? So, there’s one, it was actually when I was in law school — I was on a train between New York and New Haven, I think I was doing, like, law-firm interviews or something. And obviously I didn’t have kids then. And there’s this young girl who gets on the train. She’s probably 21 or 22. She’s a young Black female. I could tell by the way she was dressed, she didn’t have a whole lot of money; she had a couple of kids with her, and I remember just watching her and thinking, This is a really unbelievably patient mother. The reason I noticed her is because her kids, like a lot of kids that age, are complete disasters, especially on public transportation, they turn it up to 11. But she was being so patient. But then everybody around her was also noticing the kids being misbehaved, and they were so angry, and they were sighing and staring every time her 2-year-old made a noise. And that was a moment that stuck with me, and of course I’ve had similar experiences riding with my own kids on various modes of public transportation, and again it just sort of hit me like, OK, this is really, really bad. I do think that there’s this pathological frustration with children that just is a new thing in American society. I think it’s very dark.

So Vance admits that "childless cat ladies" was a bad thing to say, but he says that any person who is even mildly frustrated by a poorly behaved child has a belief system that's "pathological" and "dark." (And this is a new phenomenon -- apparently, no one was ever annoyed by unruly kids in Vance's imagined Golden Age, whenever that was.)

Wait, there's more:

I think you see it sometimes in the political conversation, people saying, well, maybe we shouldn’t have kids because of climate change. You know, when I’ve used this word sociopathic? Like, that, I think, is a very deranged idea: the idea that you shouldn’t have a family because of concerns over climate change. Doesn’t mean you can’t worry about climate change, but in the focus on childless cat ladies, we missed the substance of what I said.

So if you don't want children because you think the planet we're leaving to those hypothetical children will be unlivable -- remember, Vance is speaking after the back-to-back wallop of Hurricanes Helene and Milton -- you're "sociopathic" and "deranged."

This is too much for Garcia-Navarro.

Sorry, I just want to clarify something. So women who don’t have children because they’re worried about climate change, that’s sociopathic? I think that is a bizarre way of thinking about the future. Not to have kids because of concerns over climate change? I think the more bizarre thing is our leadership, who encourages young women, and frankly young men, to think about it that way.... if your political philosophy is saying, don’t do that because of concerns over climate change? Yeah, I think that’s a really, really crazy way to think about the world.

Let's toss "bizarre" and "crazy" into the mix, in addition to "pathological," "dark," "sociopathic," and "deranged."

And while Vance absolutely wouldn't attack Kamala Harris on this subject (even though he did in 2021), he might attack her if it were revealed that she'd crossed his uncrossable line in the sand:

I would never accuse Kamala Harris along these lines. What I would say is that sometimes Kamala Harris, she hasn’t quite jumped over the “You shouldn’t have kids because of climate change.” But I think in some of her interviews, she’s suggested there’s a reasonableness to that perspective. But again, I don’t think that’s a reasonable perspective. I think that if your political ideas motivate you to not have children, then that is a bizarre way of looking at the world.

Sorry, ladies -- he's married!

J.D. Vance hates people who disagree with him politically or culturally. Given the fact that our political establishment believes he'll become our 48th president one way or another, that hatred scares me.

HOW NOT TO WRITE AN ARTICLE ABOUT HURRICANE DISINFORMATION, AS EXPLAINED BY AN ANGRY GOOSE

There's a popular internet meme that features a talking goose chasing someone who's (presumably) wearing goosedown outerwear:

This meme is often repurposed to criticize people who choose not to acknowledge something obvious while making their arguments. Here it's used to chide anyone who thinks it's a gotcha to say that Kamala Harris, the daughter of a Black man from the former slave colony of Jamaica, is descended from a slave owner:

I thought of this meme while reading a New York Times story about hurricane disinformation. Several times, I wanted the goose to ask the authors and editors of the story some obvious questions. I've generated these questions using Imgflip's Goose Chase Meme Generator.

The story begins:

Wildly improbable conspiracy theories about Hurricanes Helene and Milton have spread largely unchecked on social media. The storms were engineered to clear the way for lithium mining. They were sent to help the Democrats in next month’s election. They were formed by weather-controlling lasers.

Conspiracy theories "have spread"?

... The falsehoods, which have been circulating on X, TikTok, YouTube and other platforms, can resemble the conspiracy theories that plague modern American politics. Prominent figures are pushing them, citing unrelated, misleading or outdated evidence.

If you click the links, you see that the "prominent figures" include Donald Trump and Elon Musk. But many readers won't click the links. And the 80-year-olds in my neighborhood who still get their news from the print Times won't know who the prominent figures are.

... On TikTok, millions of users were exposed to conspiracy theories about the storms, according to research from the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America.

... false narratives spread in ad-supported YouTube videos with tens of thousands of views and in X posts with millions of views, voiced by public figures including a Christian nationalist podcaster, a former Trump administration official and a Republican congresswoman.

You can find the names if you go to the Media Matters link:

Christian nationalist podcaster Lance Wallnau questioned, “Is the government trying to learn how to manipulate weather” as a way to “stop Trump ... from being elected.” Wallnau also suggested Milton was created by the government in a separate post, writing: “In light of our discussions about the question ‘can the government control or manipulate weather?’ If storms are not caused by nature, why is Florida the usual target? To what extent can weather really be manipulated? Why does the State Dept not use this against Russia?” [Twitter/X, 10/6/24, 10/7/24]

Former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn shared a video claiming that “Hurricane Helene was an ATTACK caused by Weather Manipulation,” and wrote, “Another ‘conspiracy theory’ about to be exposed for the truth behind weather manipulation?” [Twitter/X, 10/7/24] ...

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) blamed Hurricane Helene on “lasers controlling the weather,” a conspiracy theory she has repeatedly espoused. Greene wrote on X, “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” Greene followed up with another post that said, “Lasers.. CBS, 9 years ago, talked about lasers controlling the weather.” Greene also blamed a deadly fire in 2018 on space lasers. [Twitter/X, 10/3/24, 10/5/24; The Daily Beast, 3/6/24; Media Matters, 1/28/21]

Wallnau, as you may recall, previously said that Kamala Harris practices "witchcraft." Last month, J.D. Vance made a campaign appearance at a rally sponsored by Wallnau. The Times reported on this at the time, so it would have been nice to see it mentioned in this story.

(The Media Matters piece also names several other disinformationists who are spreading hurricane lies, including former CBS newswoman Lara Logan and former Bill Clinton accuser Juanita Broaddrick.)

Only in the twentieth and final paragraph of the Times story do we see a disinformation purveyor named:

Mr. Trump ... has made several false claims about disaster-relief funds and Democrats’ support for hurricane recovery efforts. On Wednesday, President Biden accused his predecessor of undermining confidence in rescue and rebuilding work, saying he contributed to the “reckless, irresponsible and relentless promotion of disinformation and outright lies.”

Why not name and shame these people, the way former Timesman Charlie Warzel does in this Atlantic piece?

... Alex Jones ... claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were “weather weapons” unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government....

Some of the lies and obfuscation are politically motivated, such as the claim that FEMA is offering only $750 in total to hurricane victims who have lost their home. (In reality, FEMA offers $750 as immediate “Serious Needs Assistance” to help people get basic supplies such as food and water.) Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and Fox News have all repeated that lie. Trump also posted (and later deleted) on Truth Social that FEMA money was given to undocumented migrants, which is untrue. Elon Musk, who owns X, claimed—without evidence—that FEMA was “actively blocking shipments and seizing goods and services locally and locking them away to state they are their own. It’s very real and scary how much they have taken control to stop people helping.” That post has been viewed more than 40 million times. Other influencers, such as the Trump sycophant Laura Loomer, have urged their followers to disrupt the disaster agency’s efforts to help hurricane victims. “Do not comply with FEMA,” she posted on X. “This is a matter of survival.”

That's the way you do it. It's not difficult.

THE PARTY THAT BROUGHT YOU THE BIG LIE IS HERE WITH THE BIG BRAG (AGAIN)

I see we're at this stage of the election:

Republicans believe the 2024 race is already over and that former President Donald Trump will be elected back to the White House, according to political analyst Mark Halperin.

A significant number of Republicans have declared the presidential race "effectively over," agreeing with Halperin that Trump will "checkmate" Vice President Kamala Harris with a combination of four to five swing states, the analyst said Tuesday on independent streaming platform 2Way.

"Trump is going to lock up the Sun Belt states, probably all four, but at least three. And then he's going to win Pennsylvania, and that checkmates [Harris]," Halperin told the platform. "They may be wrong. But there's a not insignificant number of them who are quite confident of that. And the data they've seen on the absentees and the early votes and the voter registration ... makes them more confident."

Another reason for all this confidence? Private polling, says Halperin.

“... if you want to understand what’s actually happening, we’re here to tell you,” he said. “I just saw some new private polling today that’s very robust private polling: She’s in a lot of trouble.”

This might be true. On the other hand, it sounds a lot like what we heard from unnamed GOP braggarts two years ago. In 2022, the Republicans' stenographer was Benjamin Wallace-Wells of The New Yorker. He wrote:

Why Republican Insiders Think the G.O.P. Is Poised for a Blowout

... The consensus among a number of G.O.P. pollsters and operatives I spoke to this week is that in the Senate races that are thought to be competitive, Republican candidates are heading for a clean sweep.... The word that kept coming up in these conversations was “bloodbath.”

Specifically?

On Wednesday afternoon, I spoke with a leading Republican political consultant about the Senate campaign in Georgia.... The Republican consultant told me that [Raphael] Warnock’s prospects were even bleaker than many recent public polls suggest. “There isn’t a single private poll in America that has Herschel Walker anything but ahead,” the Republican consultant told me. “Not one.”

Warnock won the general election by 1 point and won the runoff by 3.

And the specifics of that predicted "clean sweep"?

Mehmet Oz will beat John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, and not just by a point or two; Adam Laxalt looks pretty certain to defeat the incumbent Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada; even less regarded candidates such as Blake Masters in Arizona will be carried into office by a predicted wave. “He won’t deserve it, but I think at this point he falls into a Senate seat,” one Republican strategist told me.

Fetterman beat Oz by 4 points. Cortez Masto beat Laxalt by nearly a point. Mark Kelly beat Blake Masters by 5 points.

And why was this blowout supposed to happen?

... according to the insiders, Democrats were too trapped in issues—abortion and the threat to democracy—that appealed to their most devoted and best-educated supporters, and had not done enough to reassure voters that they were addressing material concerns. The Republican pollster, who has been regularly surveying Pennsylvania, told me that, when it came to the Democratic focus on abortion, “there just doesn’t seem to be any specificity. You’d want to do it with high-education, high-income supporters. It’s, like, no, they’re running on abortion constantly in, like, Scranton.”

Scranton is in Lackawanna County. Fetterman won Lackawanna County by nearly 16 points. (In 2020, Joe Biden won it by 8 points.)

This is what Republicans do. They tell reporters that they have the real inside skinny and it says that Democrats are doomed. Eventually, a reporter swallows the bait and reports it as fact.

Look, Kamala Harris might be doomed. I wasn't happy to see that Quinnipiac poll yesterday that showed Harris losing Michigan and Wisconsin, while leading in Pennsylvania. (Whether Harris wins or loses, it would be ironic if Pennsylvania is her best swing state, after all the pundits told her she was a fool not to pick the state's governor, Josh Shapiro, as her running mate.) I know we're not supposed to look at crosstabs, but that Quinnipiac survey has Harris losing 18-to-34-year-olds by 8 points in Michigan and winning them by only 4 points in Wisconsin. By contrast, last month's Harvard youth poll showed Harris beating Trump among 18-to-29-year-olds by 31 points.

That Quinnipiac poll is a concern, as are reports that a Democratic internal poll shows Harris trailing by 3 in Wisconsin. On the other hand, I know that new voter registrations have skewed very Democratic since Harris became the Democratic candidate. I know that early voting is skewing very Democratic and female so far (scroll down here). It's anecdotal, but I like seeing the enthusiasm suggested by this short video taken in a blue city:

📍 Tucson, AZ

It’s the first day of early voting and Arizonans are fired up to welcome @Tim_Walz and cast their ballots for Vice President @KamalaHarris! 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/B6DHseN2c8

— Daisy Martinez (@sdaisymartinez) October 9, 2024

And even in blue Cleveland, which is in a state Harris won't win but Senator Sherrod Brown can win:

Pretty incredible display of democracy in action. PACKED line in Cleveland at the Board of Elections for the first day or early voting.

Visit https://t.co/pBBQFYWwUN for voter resources! #VoteToLive pic.twitter.com/n12g8e6PQu

— Quentin James (@QJames) October 8, 2024

This seems significant:

In Pa’s hotly contested 10th Congressional District, our poll out later today shows Harris leading Trump in this GOP-leaning district 46:41. Trump won this district +4 in ‘20. This is not a good trajectory for GOP incumbent Con. Scott Perry. More tweets to follow shortly.

— SP&R (@SusquehannaPR) October 9, 2024

I hope Jamelle Bouie is right about some of Donald Trump's weird campaign tactics, like focusing his get-out-the-vote effort on turning out infrequent voters rather than solid supporters, and his decision to deliver speeches at Madison Square Garden and Coachella, both located in states he'll lose:

everything the trump campaign says its doing — trying to turn out secret trump supporters and campaigning in places he can’t win — looks and sounds like the actions of a losing campaign www.nbcnews.com/politics/202...

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— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) October 9, 2024 at 3:38 PM

Wouldn’t surprise me if he’s going just to go someplace where he’ll get a big crowd again. NY metro area doesn’t have enough Republicans to matter for the EC, but it’s got more than enough to fill an arena.

— CeeEmEss (@ceeemess.bsky.social) October 9, 2024 at 3:54 PM

It might be a mistake for Harris to spend so much time wooing moderates and disgruntled Republicans, as Oliver Willis argues (although Reuters says she's now running strong among suburbanites). It might be a mistake for Harris to do interviews at "non-traditional" media outlets while blowing off The New York Times, which just makes the Times angry and therefore skews Harris coverage elsewhere in the media.

Or it might be that Harris's people are successfully turning out the vote and have generated all the excitement needed for a win that, by next month, might appear to be an upset.

I don't know how this election will turn out. All I know is that reporters shouldn't assume Republicans in nice suits know something the rest of us don't when that something just so happens to make Republicans look unbeatable.

YES, BUT THAT INTIMIDATION OF CITIZENS HAPPENED OUTSIDE THE ACELA CORRIDOR, SO WHY SHOULD WE COVER IT?

So far, neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post thinks this fascist act by Florida's authoritarian governor, Ron DeSantis, is worthy of a full story:

In a move that critics are calling a flagrant abuse of power, Florida’s Department of Health is threatening to bring criminal charges against local TV stations airing a campaign ad to overturn the state’s six-week abortion ban signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

That quote comes from a CNN story. Popular Information has more:

On October 3, the Florida Department of Health sent a letter to Mark Higgins, the General Manager of WFLA, Tampa's NBC affiliate. The letter, sent by Florida Department of Health General Counsel John Wilson, claimed that airing the ad violates Florida law. Wilson cites Florida's law against "sanitary nuisance," which prohibits "the commission of any act... by which... the health and lives of individuals... may be endangered." Wilson argues that WFLA's decision to air the ad could "threaten or impair the health and lives of women." Wilson advised Higgins that ... WFLA must stop airing it within 24 hours. Failure to do so, Wilson writes, would be a crime punishable by up to 60 days in prison under Florida law.

So what is this alleged "sanitary nuisance"? It's

a first-personal narrative of a woman named Caroline who was diagnosed with brain cancer while pregnant with her second child. "The doctors knew that if I did not end my pregnancy, I would lose my baby, I would lose my life, and my daughter would lose her mom," Caroline says in the ad. "Florida has now banned abortion, even in cases like mine." Caroline urges voters to support Amendment 4 to "protect women like me."

Is banning political ads the purpose of the law?

The statute deals with issues like "untreated or improperly treated human waste," "[t]he keeping of diseased animals," and the "causing of any condition capable of breeding flies, mosquitoes, or other arthropods capable of transmitting diseases." While the statute includes a catch-all for "any other condition determined to be a sanitary nuisance," there is no mention of political ads.

There's no story on this at the Post. The Times provides a brief mention of what the DeSantis administration is doing starting in paragraph 13 of this story, which is primary about whether the referendum will get the 60% supermajority vote it needs to pass. The Times provides a link to a full story, but it's from MSNBC.

For years, Republicans have used many techniques, primarily gerrymandering, to effectively end democracy at the state level in red and purple states. In many states now, Democrats would need huge majorities to reach parity in the makeup of state legislative bodies.

Our most important newspapers don't think that's a story. To some extent, I think this is because they don't want to offend Republicans -- but I also think it's because they don't really care what happens outside the Acela Corridor (D.C. to Boston, or, more precisely, D.C. to Cambridge), and possibly L.A. and Silicon Valley. They send reporters on safaris to diners and say they're trying hard to understand "flyover country," but they don't send reporters to Republican-controlled state legislatures where deomocracy is being killed.

The Post has been better on this. A month ago, it ran a story about DeSantis's deployment of his election police to the homes of people who signed the petition to get this referendum on the ballot. So maybe the Post will eventually cover this threat to WFLA in a serious way. (The Times reported on DeSantis administration attempts to challenge the validity of the ballot petitions but didn't mention the home visits by DeSantis's election goons until paragraph 14 of this story. There was a further mention in an op-ed.)

The Times is covering DeSantis's hardball tactics, but totalitarian threats to individuals by GOP officials need to be seen as a five-alarm fire in every newsroom in America. Unfortunately, that goes against the long-ingrained habits of most high-level reporters and editors, who mostly care about how politicians battle fellow politicians and other political agents for power. (Even the CNN story cited at the beginning of this post falls into that category -- it's primarily about the response to DeSantis's threat by the Democratic chair of the Federal Communications Commission.)

A governor's threat to jail someone for running a political ad ought to be front-page news in every news outlet in America.

One more point: DeSantis is running. He still wants to be president, and you shouldn't underestimate the odds that he can win the 2028 GOP nomination. Yes, he crashed and burned in the 2024 primaries, but that was mostly because most GOP voters who liked his authoritarian style liked Trump a lot more. In polls of Republicans taken during the primary campaign, his favorable/unfavorable numbers were 62%/22%, according to FiveThirtyEight; Nikki Haley's were 43%/40. He didn't refuse to take Kamala Harris's calls about the last hurricane for no reason. He's planning a comeback -- and because he's both authoritarian and seemingly "mainstream," at least according to the media, he has a shot at winning the primaries. And every Republican presidential nominee has a shot at winning the election.

WERE WE UNABLE TO GET TRUMP OUT OF AMERICAN POLITICS BECAUSE HE HATES TO SLEEP IN UNFAMILIAR BEDS?

Here's a Reuters story from early in the 2016 campaign:

U.S. presidential candidates are spending long days on the campaign trail and their nights in a succession of budget hotels, often in small towns. Not Donald Trump.

After nearly every rally, the billionaire real estate developer hops into one of his planes or helicopters and returns to New York so that he can sleep in his own bed in his marble-and-gold-furnished Trump Tower apartment in Manhattan.

Here's an AP story from 2018, when Trump had been president for nearly two years:

Known for relishing routine and preferring his own bed, Trump has largely eschewed marathon trips during the second year of his presidency....

For a man who’s owned a private jet for decades, Trump has always shown a reluctance to sleep in unfamiliar places. He has stayed overnight at properties he does not own only a handful of times since taking office, and he has on at least one occasion laced into staff over his accommodations.

Three current and former White House officials said Trump has at times expressed frustration about travel overseas, and they have curtailed trips to his liking.

Trump is a millionaire's son who became a billionaire, and his name is on buildings all over the world, but he clearly hates to travel overseas. Trump was the president of the United States and wants to be president of the United States again, but he doesn't seem to like being in most of the states for very long, because only a few states have properties he owns.

I thought about this when I was reading today's news:

Former President Donald J. Trump has secretly spoken with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as many as seven times since leaving office, even as he was pressuring Republicans to block military aid to Ukraine to fight Russian invaders, according to a new book by the journalist Bob Woodward....

The book also reports that Mr. Trump, while still in office early during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, secretly sent Mr. Putin what were then rare Abbott Point of Care test machines for the Russian’s personal use. Mr. Putin, who has been described as particularly anxious about being infected at the time, urged Mr. Trump to not publicly reveal the gesture because it could damage the American president politically. “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me,” Mr. Putin reportedly told him.

Trump has remained quite cozy with Putin. Remember when many of us used to say that if Trump were indicted for his many crimes, he'd flee America and get asylum in a country that doesn't have an extradition treaty with the U.S.?

I know most of you want nothing less than a long prison term for Trump, but I would have been fine with just getting him the hell out of our lives forever. If he wins another election, he'll end the federal cases against him and probably find ways to avoid accountability in the New York and Georgia cases. Even if he loses the election, the Supreme Court has already shredded the constitution in order to give him immunity for many past crimes, and it will probably hand him another Get Out of Jail Free card as soon as it decides to review Jack Smith's latest brief.

An ordinary criminal head of state would have gladly sought exile. I think Putin might have provided it. It would have been an easy quid pro quo, and a thumb in the eye for Trump's Democratic successor.

I wonder whether Trump chose not to pursue exile simply because he doesn't like sleeping in an unfamiliar bed.
He couldn't bear to be away from familiar comforts, so he ran for president again. I would have been happy to see him go.

J.D. VANCE IS FETCH, AND OTHER DELUSIONS FROM THE RIGHT-WING ALTERNATE UNIVERSE

On social media over the weekend, I saw this headline:

This is from Evie Magazine, a right-wing women's magazine with links to Peter Thiel. The article is paywalled -- imagine actually paying for content like this -- but you can read it free here.

Vance is not a heartthrob, but Evie's Mia Miller really wants you to believe that other women think he is:

Enter JD Vance with his blue laser beams for eyes that sent women swooning across the internet....

After years of being told that “strong” men are toxic, that rizz comes from being weird and ironic, and that fashion-forward masculinity is defined by dressing and acting like women, seeing a guy who looks like he could fix your car and debate on stage with Ivy League confidence is a revelation.

There was only one candidate on that stage who looked like he could fix your car, and it wasn't the dead-eyed preppy cyborg concealing his anger management issues.

This story is part of a Republican propaganda wave that's trying to make fetch happen -- fetch, in this case, being the belief that Vance is a stud. These Republicans won't let reality get in their way:

Amazingly, a sitting Congressman - Georgia’s Mike Collins - has posted a doctored photo of JD Vance to make him look more attractive (pic 2 obvs.). 1/

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— James Withers (@jameswithers.bsky.social) October 2, 2024 at 12:09 PM

(The Collins tweet is here.)

They know that single women largely vote Democratic, especially single women who aren't racing to get married. (Kamala Harris knows it too, which is why she was trying to reach these women by going on the popular Call Her Daddy podcast, which I'll get to shortly.) Republicans think they'd do better electorally in a country with pre-sexual revolution romantic mores, so they're telling women that they crave marriage to a 1950s hunk in a gray flannel suit, whether they'll admit it to themselves or not. The hunkiest guy they've got is Vance, but they won't let that stop them:

The funniest thing about single, left wing women is that secretly they all want to marry someone like JD Vance: six feet tall, makes six figures, likes and wants kids, loves his wife, he’s their dream. And most can’t find it. So they pretend to hate him.

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) October 3, 2024

You might imagine that a political party would try to meet voters where they are and base its pitch on what those voters actually believe. That's not how the GOP works. The GOP wants voters to change. They should be what the party wants them to be. The party tells them not to believe what they actually believe.

The author of the Evie Magazine story also claims that Sydney Sweeney, by her very existence, is smashing politically correct taboos:

Thanks to the woke hellscape (that thankfully seems to be dissolving, little by little), men had been starved of seeing a classically beautiful woman who actually seemed to like men. She embodies the kind of natural, effortless, "normal" beauty that’s become a rare commodity in modern America.

In this passage, "normal" means "blonde," of course -- we can't have all these woke race traitors running around thinking Zendaya is hot! And it means big boobs, as a recent Newsweek article explained:

It all began with Sydney Sweeney's cleavage.

In March, the 27-year-old actress hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time, wearing low-cut outfits during the start and close of the show, which featured a number of jokes about her physical appearance, including a sketch where she played a Hooters waitress....

Following Sweeney's appearance on SNL, right-wing political commentator Richard Hanania shared a clip of the actress on the show in a low-cut dress, with the caption: "Wokeness is dead."

Yup:

Wokeness is dead. pic.twitter.com/ei53Worgjx

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) March 3, 2024

An opinion piece in Canada's National Post asked, "Are Sydney Sweeney's breasts double-D harbingers of the death of woke?"

The author of that piece, Amy Hamm, wrote that Sweeney knows she's admired and owns "her sex appeal with zero apologies," arguing that "today's diversity, equity, and inclusion" advocates have discouraged admiration of beauty due to its exclusivity, implying that exclusion equates to hate.

"We aren't supposed to admire Sweeney's beauty; but we've done it anyways," she added.

Fight the power -- ogle Sydney Sweeney's boobs!

These folks are convinced that "woke" people think it's wrong for straight white men to find a blonde with big breasts physically attractive. They believe this because they assume "woke" people think the way they do. Right-wingers want everyone to believe what they believe and live the way they live. Right-wingers despise people who believe different things or want different things or live in a different way -- and they assume "woke" people feel the same way.

But that's not how it works. Trans pansexuals who like fat people of color don't care if you like conventionally hot blondes, as long as you don't encroach on their lives and don't demean their choices. Right-wingers don't understand that.

Right-wingers really do want everyone to live the way they do -- which gets us to Kamala Harris's appearance on the Call Her Daddy podcast. Remember this?

Last month, [Arkansas governor Sarah] Huckabee Sanders, who served in former President Donald Trump's administration, told attendees at a town hall: "My kids keep me humble. Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble."

On the podcast, Harris addressed that:

"I don't think she understands that there are a whole lot of women out here who, one, are not aspiring to be humble," Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, told "Call Her Daddy" podcast host Alex Cooper.

"Two," she added in the taped interview, which aired Sunday, there are "a whole lot of women out here who have a lot of love in their life, family in their life and children in their life, and I think it's really important for women to lift each other up."

“We have our family by blood and then we have our family by love. And I have both,” Harris, who is a stepmother to her husband Doug Emhoff’s two children, told Cooper, adding, “And I consider it to be a real blessing.”

This is where J.D. Vance's remarks about "childless cat ladies" come in. Vance is in a heterosexual marriage with children and believes that people who don't live the way he does are psychologically unhealthy and miserable -- and want to spread that misery to everyone else, as he told Tucker Carlson in 2021:

"These people recognize that they're unhappy. They live in one-bedroom apartments in New York City. They've played their entire lives to win a status game. They are obsessed with jobs. They are obsessed with their wealth and their fortunes and they look at middle America, people who are pretty happy with their lives and the choices they've made. And they hate normal Americans for choosing family over these ridiculous D.C. and New York status games."

"I think because of that they just get so angry when somebody calls it what it is," he said. "It's acceptable if they ignore that it never happens but if someone calls out that, look, if you are a miserable cat lady you should not force your misery on the rest of the country. They just get really upset about it."

But J.D., you're the one who wants to force your choices on everyone. We just want people to have the freedom to make choices other than the one you made. If you had any common decency, you and your allies would accept people's differences and stop trying to turn us into you -- whether it's by propaganda or by force.

I MADE AN AD ATTACKING DONALD TRUMP WITHOUT ALL THE OBVIOUS STUFF

A couple of days ago, NBC News reported this:

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign is planning to more aggressively attack former President Donald Trump in the remaining weeks ahead of the November election, a new phase aimed at trying to move the small number of undecided voters her way, according to five Harris campaign officials.

The change is driven, in part, by internal campaign data showing that sharper messaging against Trump could persuade some still-unsure Americans to support Harris, according to three of the campaign officials. The effort is set to include new ads and harsher language on the campaign trail that highlights Trump’s past actions and rhetoric that Harris officials hope will tip these voters away from backing the former president.

Yesterday, Politico interviewed pollsters John Anzalone and Greg Strimple. Strimple, who works for Republican candidates, praised Harris as a campaigner but was also critical of her ads. He endorsed this approach:

... Donald Trump ... is out there reminding everyone why they have PTSD from his four years as president. So if you took Donald Trump out of the picture and sent him to an island, I think you would actually win. The flipside to that is, Kamala Harris is doing a very good job of being the face of the campaign. Her campaign ads are terrible and the Democrats are talking about issues when they should be talking about the fact that Donald Trump is irrational, erratic, out of control, January 6th, all these things — and they’re not doing it. So they’re not focusing on Donald Trump’s negatives. And to the extent they are, they’re implicit, not explicit. I don’t think subtle contrasts work in American politics. Unless you’re taking a two-by-four to the other person’s head, you’re not going to be advancing.

I think the Harris/Walz campaign should be reminding us of Trump's awfulness -- but I'm not convinced that focusing on the usual horrible moments of Trump's political career will get the job done. Even low-information voters have seen it all before: January 6, the attack on John McCain, the Access Hollywood tape, "very fine people on both sides." Maybe a new round of ads like that can work. But I have my doubts.

I'd like to see the Harris campaign remind voters of the everyday obnoxiousness of Trump. He gave us migraines, day in and day out, with his rudeness, his ego, and his whining. The undecideds tend to be people who don't think much about politics. Maybe they need to be confronted with this question: Do you want this again every day for the next four years?

So I roughed out an ad. It has technical flaws, but I think it conveys a message that could reach voters who vaguely remember the Trump presidency as unpleasant but have forgotten just how exhausting it was. (And obviously it was far worse than exhausting for the victims of Trumpism, but I'm trying to reach voters who don't think they were harmed by Trump during his time in office.)

Here's the ad. I uploaded it to YouTube. What do you think?

EXTREMIST REPUBLICAN DERANGEMENT HAS MANY FACES, NOT JUST ONE

In a presidential election year, it's understandable that Democrats are focused on everything that's abhorrent about Donald Trump. But even before the campaign, Democrats and many liberal pundits were telling us that America has a Trump problem, not a Republican problem. That's wrong. The Republican Party is rotten to the core. It's full of deranged extremists, and it will still be full of deranged extremists even if Kamala Harris wins a decisive victory next month. A few stories that appeared this week make this clear.

First, there's Michele Morrow, who's the Republican candidate for supervisor of public instruction in North Carolina. A higher-profile Republican extremist, Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, appears likely to lose that state's race for governor by a wide margin. But Morrow trailed her Democratic opponent, Mo Green, by only 2 points in an early-September poll. As Dana Milbank told us this week, she's a dangerous wacko:

As if the good people of North Carolina haven’t suffered enough lately, they also have to worry about this: a network of child traffickers and pedophiles that tortures and kills children to harvest their blood for an anti-aging elixir known as adrenochrome.

Or so believes the Republican candidate to be the state’s superintendent of public instruction, Michele Morrow.

“The evil, demon-possessed people who worship Satan have been using this to try to keep their youth,” Morrow said in a video she posted on Facebook in 2020. “They’ve been using it as a drug that is more powerful than street drugs. ... It is gotten through children who are being tortured and know that they are about to die. Guys, this is deep, it is evil, and it is real. It is truly happening, and we have got to stop it.” Among those she has identified as adrenochrome users is the actor Jim Carrey.

She previously proposed a “Pay Per View” of Barack Obama “in front of the firing squad” because “I do not want to waste another dime on supporting his life. We could make some money back from televising his death.” She also called for the executions of President Joe Biden, Bill Gates and several others....

She has asserted that the World Health Organization has been using vaccines to sterilize people and kill children, which is “their intention, because that is who Satan is.” And she argued that Satan is “in cahoots” with Democrats, globalists, the “one world order,” the United Nations, China and Russia “to take down the United States of America.”

Even though Morrow was at the Capitol on January 6 and urged Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, much of this isn't coming from Trump. Trump sometimes gives shout-outs to QAnon, but he doesn't talk about adrenochrome. And while Trump is now hanging out with the pope of the anti-vaxx movement, Robert Kennedy Jr., he used to brag about the development of the COVID vaccines.

This madness is independent of MAGA, and it still has the potential to win elections. In Indiana, Republican Mike Braun is in a gubernatorial race that's surprisingly tight, though he still seems almost certain to win. If he's struggling at all, it seems to be because of the inflammatory rhetoric of his running mate, Micah Beckwith, who recently said that the Democratic ticket in Indiana represents "the Jezebel spirit" and exhibits a "boldness for immorality." As I told you in June, Beckwith is a Trump supporter and election denialist, but he also thinks the enemy consists of "super-wealthy totalitarian warmonger pedophiles." Again, this is QAnon talk -- but in all likelihood it won't prevent Beckwith and Braun from winning.

And then there's Michele Fiore. You may have heard that Fiore, a justice of the peace and former Las Vegas city councilwoman and state legislator who has also been a national committeewoman for the Nevada Republican Party, was convicted on charges that she used money collected for a slain police officer's statue on rent, plastic surgery, and the wedding of her daughter. You might remember Fiore: She was a highly visible apologist for Cliven Bundy and his supporters when they engaged in armed standoff with law enforcement over his failure to pay fees for grazing his livestock on federal land. In 2016, she told interviewers that it was perfectly appropriate to point weapons at federal agents:

When the federal government feels they're going to govern Americans by gunpoint, I'm sorry. If government is going to point a gun at me, I'm going to point my gun right back. If you're going to shoot me, I'm going to shoot you back. I ain't going to shoot first, but I ain't going to let you shoot me. It's just not going to happen.

She later explained that she was referring not to local police, but to Bureau of Land Management agents, who are from the federal government and therefore presumably illegitimate.

Oh, and Fiore was also one of the first Republican politicians to release an armed-family Christmas card, the kind of card that's now ubiquitous in the GOP:

This was in 2015. Fiore was a Republican extremist when Trump was just getting his footing as a GOP presidential candidate.

And I haven't even mentioned Royce White, the Republican Senate candidate in Minnesota, whose 2022 assertion that "The bad guys won in WWII" just came to light. White was already trailing incumbent Democrat Amy Klobuchar by double digits before this revelation, in all likelihood because of his past anti-Semitic statements, his support for Alex Jones (whose show he's guest-hosted), and his assertion that “Women have become too mouthy.” But he'll still get 40 percent of the vote -- and if he were running in a redder state, he'd probably remain a viable candidate. For that matter, who knows how well Mark Robinson would be running now if he we were in South Carolina rather than North Carolina?

These Republicans talk like Trump and back Trump, but they're doing this independently of Trump. Trump endorsed Micah Beckwith's primary opponent. Royce White was endorsed by Matt Gaetz, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, Kari Lake, and Mike Lindell, but Trump didn't endorse him.

The Republican Party was full of deranged extremists like Michele Fiore long before Trump entered politics, and there's a hunger for deranged extremist candidates in the party that will continue even if Trump drops dead. Democrats need to portray the Republican Party as the party of these people as well as the party of Trump. It might have been easier to beat Trump this year if more voters realized that most of his party is like this.

THE "LIBERAL" MEDIA IS MEASURING THE WHITE HOUSE DRAPES FOR J.D. VANCE -- AGAIN

Pay no attention to J.D. Vance's vicious, mean-spirited, slanderous, and conspiratorial pronouncements -- he had one good debate performance (emphasis on "performance"), so now he's a future president again, according to the "liberal" media.

Here's Tara Palmeri, writing for Puck:

Not long ago, of course, J.D. Vance was widely considered a drag on the ticket (cat-ladygate, that interminable convention stemwinder, the whole “America’s Hitler” thing) with a bionic billionaire sugar daddy. (It’s hard to imagine Vance’s political rise without Peter Thiel’s checkbook and Tucker Carlson’s lobbying.) But whether or not his nimble debate performance has any impact in the polls, it certainly restored his standing in the premature but inevitable 2028 conversation. “It was a moment for him to come out of Trump’s shadow,” said one Vance ally.

Tuesday night was clearly a reset for Vance. He proved that he’s capable of turning on the folksy charm that eluded him on the campaign trail, and that he could appeal to middle America as a potential leading man against future primary adversaries like Ron DeSantis or Glenn Youngkin. CNN’s snap poll showed his likability shooting up 19 points, from negative 22 points to negative 3—still underwater, but a sign of palatability. “He did himself a lot of good beyond that one night,” said a Republican consultant. “If he can pull off the MAGA banner in a non-offensive style that sells, then he could be the natural heir apparent, and that’s what you’re seeing start to gel here.” Another Republican operative noted the electoral value of Vance’s hybrid, country-club friendly MAGA approach that was once considered DeSantis’ lane. “This is the party. Get on board, or get the fuck out of the way,” this person said. “They think we’re all knuckle draggers and Neanderthals. J.D. Vance can debate any part of the establishment and can whip their ass.”

Debate watchers gave Vance's far worse ratings than Tim Walz, but the East Coast press doesn't care -- one good night and he's a "potential leading man" and a 2028 favorite again. And that's no surprise, because the "liberal" media made Vance, and any pause in its cheerleading for him is only temporary.

Here's an excerpt from a Jamison Foser piece on how The New York Times, in particular, helped make Vance famous. I present it with a comment from Tom Tomorrow:

I don't know if Yale is really the key to all this, but the larger point is correct: the elite media likes Vance because he joined the club. Many strings were pulled for him by Amy Chua, a Yale professor who's also a bestselling author (The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother), Foser writes:

... Chua took [Vance] on as her protégé, and almost single-handedly turned him into a bestselling author: Chua talked Vance into writing a memoir, introduced him to her agent, wrote a blurb for the back cover of his book, and “probably emailed every single television producer and personality in the United States of America” to promote the book, according to Vance. (Chua: “It’s true, I emailed everybody. They were these creepy emails to people like Tom Brokaw.”)

The New York Times raved about the book and eventually put Vance on the payroll:

By September 2016, the New York Times made it official, adding Vance as a “contributing opinion writer”; his first piece in that role an attack on Hillary Clinton over her reference to some Trump supporters as “deplorable.” By March of 2017, Vance was using the platform — and fame — the Times had given him to tout his move back to Ohio as a selfless act of public service, virtue-signaling his intention to found an organization “to combat Ohio’s opioid epidemic.”

That was in 2017, and I wrote a response that I'm proud of. I called Vance's move "relocation as virtue signaling," noted that he wasn't moving to his former hometown of Middletown, or even to Cincinnati, the big city closest to Middletown. Vance moved to a tony neighborhood in Columbus and, as I predicted, became a fake do-gooder.

It should have been obvious that he was doing this to set up a future political career, but the media fell for it. Then, in 2021, when Vance announced that he was runnung for a U.S. Senate seat in Ohio, he was immediately declared a potential future president by Axios's Mike Allen:

Why he matters: Vance, 36, last week joined a crowded GOP primary field to succeed retiring Sen. Rob Portman. If Vance won the primary (no sure thing), he'd be the favorite to win the seat — and instantly would be talked about as a presidential possibility.

Vance needed Donald Trump's endorsement to make it to the general election ballot, then needed Peter Thiel's money to win as a Republican in a Republican state -- and yet the media saw him as presidential timber from the early days of his campaign.

I know that many of you think that "liberal" news organizations want Donald Trump to win the 2024 election. I think he has some appeal to the journalists covering him, and they're also somewhat appalled by him. I think what they really want is a mythical moderate Republican (or Republican-lite Democrat) who looks like them and talks like them, someone with Ivy League airs. (That's why they love Josh Shapiro, by the way.) They want a candidate who's economically corporatist but (We have gay friends!) socially moderate. They see polished politicians like Vance and Youngkin taking on MAGA positions and think, They can't really believe all that nonsense, can they?

In 2028, the elite media will be rooting for Vance, Youngkin, Nikki Haley, and maybe Ron DeSantis, as well as, on the Democratic side, Shapiro, Pete Buttigieg, and Gina Raimondo. They want dull, well-spoken corporatists, and they think Vance will qualify.

In reality, Vance will need to be the slanderer of immigrants and embracer of Marjorie Taylor Greene he pretended not to be on Tuesday night in order to win the nomination. But even if Vance lets his fascist freak flag fly, the media will probably see what it wants to see.

PRO-CHOICE MELANIA? REPUBLICANS HAVE PULLED THIS STUNT BEFORE

Some people might think Melania Trump is going rogue, but this looks like strategy to me:

Former first lady Melania Trump said in a new video posted Thursday that she believes there is “no room for compromise” when it comes to a woman’s “individual freedom,” after The Guardian reported excerpts from her forthcoming book in which she says she supports abortion rights “free from any intervention or pressure from the government.”

“Individual freedom is a fundamental principle that I safeguard. Without a doubt, there is no room for compromise when it comes to this essential right that all women possess from birth, individual freedom. What does my body, my choice really mean?” the former first lady said in a video posted on X.

https://t.co/ZCTwZSqZND pic.twitter.com/Y9MT3uj97b

— MELANIA TRUMP (@MELANIATRUMP) October 3, 2024

Republicans muddied the waters in this way twenty years ago. Just before Labor Day 2004, delegates to the Republican convention approved a platform that called for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. President George W. Bush had announced his support for such an amendment in February. But a few days before the convention, Vice President Dick Cheney expressed support for same-sex couples.

At a campaign rally ... Cheney spoke supportively about gay relationships, saying “freedom means freedom for everyone,” when asked about his stand on gay marriage.

“Lynne and I have a gay daughter, so it’s an issue our family is very familiar with,” Cheney told an audience that included his daughter. “With the respect to the question of relationships, my general view is freedom means freedom for everyone. ... People ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to...."

... Addressing Bush’s position on the amendment, Cheney said: “At this point, say, my own preference is as I’ve stated, but the president makes policy for the administration. He’s made it clear that he does, in fact, support a constitutional amendment on this issue.”

That year, Republicans placed a referendum on the ballot in the then-swing state of Ohio calling for a state ban on same-sex marriage. Whether or not it actually helped Bush win the state -- there are differences of opinion on this -- it's clear that the referendum was intended to help Bush win the state.

But Cheney's well-timed statement probably assured some moderate voters that the party wasn't completely controlled by cruel fundamentalists. I assume that's what Melania's video is intended to do now. I don't think it's a coincidence that this was timed for just after the vice presidential debate -- J.D. Vance has been much more of an anti-abortion zealot than Donald Trump, and while Tim Walz hit Vance fairly hard on this subject, I imagine Republicans thought he'd bloody Vance a bit more. Vance has tried to sound reasonable on abortion during this campaign, but he's on record as an anti-abortion zealot:

From JD Vance's Senate campaign website. Up as late as yesterday. Since removed.

[image or embed]

— Bob Mann (@bobmann.bsky.social) October 2, 2024 at 10:17 AM

Maybe this will lose Trump a few votes in the evangelical community -- remember, those folks not only oppose abortion but believe husbands should do the talking in every couple. But I'm worried that it will further confuse moderate voters, some of whom are telling pollsters that they plan to vote for referenda that uphold abortion rights while also voting for anti-abortion Republican candidates.

My guess is that it won't have much impact either way -- but J.D. Vance's nice-guy act at this week's debate gave the party one victory in its effort to conceal how much Republicans hate the rest of us and want to compel us to live our lives their way. I don't want the GOP to get another win like that.

NO, J.D. VANCE DID NOT WIN LAST NIGHT'S DEBATE

Here are some divergent opinions about last night's debate. First, from media elitists at The New York Times:

And now ordinary people:

We shouldn't be surprised. Media elitists value poise, preparation, looking good in a suit, being well spoken in an emotionally beige way. Prior to the debate, J.D. Vance did the kind of prep you'd do if you were preparing for oral arguments before the Supreme Court. He was polished and ready. I'll admit that Democrats whose best debate performances have demonstrated this level of preparation and poise -- the Clintons, Barack Obama, and, yes, Kamala Harris -- have impressed me.

Tim Walz didn't impress the elitists at the Times -- but ordinary people who watched the debate liked him just fine. Vance was smart and slick, but Walz was smart and human. Debate viewers came away liking both candidates more than they did before the debate, but even after the debate, Vance's numbers were no better than break-even, while Walz's numbers were strong. From CNN:

Following the debate, 59% of debate watchers said they had a favorable view of Walz, with just 22% viewing him unfavorably – an improvement from his already positive numbers among the same voters pre-debate (46% favorable, 32% unfavorable). Debate watchers came away from the debate with roughly neutral views of Vance: 41% rated him favorably and 44% unfavorably. That’s also an improvement from their image of Vance pre-debate, when his ratings among this group were deeply underwater (30% favorable, 52% unfavorable).

It's just debate watchers, but 59%-22% is a spectacular approval rating in this political climate (41%-44% isn't). In CBS's poll of debate watchers, Walz's post-debate approval rating is 60%-35%; Vance's is 49%-47%.

And it's not just personal favorability:

A 65% majority of debate watchers now say Walz is qualified to serve as president if necessary, with 58% saying the same of Vance. Prior to the debate, 62% of the same voters thought Walz was qualified to assume the presidency if needed and 50% that Vance was qualified to do so.

And at CBS:

If you have an elite background, the rumpled guy whose sentences sometimes didn't quite parse seemed unprepared to be president. (Times op-ed columnist Megan Stack said Walz "often looked woolly and discombobulated, widened eyes suggesting panic.") But viewers had a different impression.

Maybe it's because Walz seemed more in tune with their views. CNN:

Debate watchers said, 48% to 35%, that Walz is more in touch than Vance with the needs and problems of people like them, and by a similar margin, 48% to 39%, that Walz, rather than Vance, more closely shares their vision for America.

CBS:

Walz has a strong advantage on the first two issues. The others are a tie.

I'm often unhappy when American voters choose folksy -- Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, even Trump, with his outer-borough accent and coarse language, which people all over the country seem to read as an economic class marker, even though Trump is the billionaire son of a millionaire. (Reagan, of course, was a wealthy actor married to a rich doctor's daughter, and the Bushes were old money.) But if that's what Americans want, it's good if a Democrat was the one who provided it last night. No matter how many times Vance talked about his past, Walz was the candidate on stage who seemed to know what it's like to lead an ordinary life.

As I wrote a couple of months ago, pundits used to complain that Democrats didn't want to appeal to "beer-track" voters anymore, but when Harris picked Walz over the obviously "wine-track" Josh Shapiro, the same pundits attacked her for it. Last night, Walz was clearly the beer-track guy. Vance was the wine-track guy. Debate watchers thought Vance was sharp, but they thought Walz was empathetic and relatable. That's why Vance didn't score the big win the pundits thought they saw.

AT THE NEW YORK TIMES, J.D. VANCE IS SEEN AS THE MAIN CHARACTER IN TONIGHT'S DEBATE

For several weeks after she entered the presidential race, Kamala Harris did something that no one else has managed to do: she became the main character in a race against Donald Trump. In every other contest -- the 2016 and 2024 primaries, the 2016 general election, even the race he lost in 2020 -- Trump was the main character. He was the candidate everyone talked about. His words and deeds set the terms of every debate. No one ever stole the spotlight from him -- until a woman who hadn't even planned to run deployed her intelligence, her understanding of the media environment, and her charisma to turn Trump into a supporting character. Even if she loses next month, Democrats should study what she did and learn from it.

Unfortunately, Trump is the main character again. He's regained the spotlight with increasingly dark, dishonest, and slanderous pronouncements -- but he's also benefited from the fact that Harris listened to the pundits and changed the focus of her campaign to wonkish policy pronouncements, as well as a trip to the border. Predictably, the media figures who demanded all this of her weren't satisfied. Even in the New York Times endorsement of Harris, there was continued grumbling:

Many voters have said they want more details about the vice president’s plans, as well as more unscripted encounters in which she explains her vision and policies. They are right to ask. Given the stakes of this election, Ms. Harris may think that she is running a campaign designed to minimize the risks of an unforced error — answering journalists’ questions and offering greater policy detail could court controversy, after all — under the belief that being the only viable alternative to Mr. Trump may be enough to bring her to victory. That strategy may ultimately prove winning, but it’s a disservice to the American people and to her own record. And leaving the public with a sense that she is being shielded from tough questions, as Mr. Biden has been, could backfire by undermining her core argument that a capable new generation stands ready to take the reins of power.

I agree with Oliver Willis that Harris can't satisfy the media and was building much more momentum when she was focusing on being a joyous anti-Trump warrior:

... I am in favor of political wonkery. We need policy wonks, we need leaders who either understand the wonky details of how to get things done or surround themselves with nerds who get excited about data and policy and making everything work. I’m not against wonking.

That said, Vice President Kamala Harris has to stop being as wonky as she was the last week of her campaign. If she keeps it up, she is in danger of simmering down the incredible momentum she has had since she became the lead in the presidential campaign.

... She could give a presentation with a mountain of PowerPoint slides and white papers from the world’s most prominent experts (aka what Hillary Clinton did, as well as Elizabeth Warren) and it won’t change the narrative.

... The candidate herself has encapsulated this concept in her statement, “When we fight, we win.” So, fight. Don’t wonk. And win. Please.

*****

It's understandable that Trump regained the spotlight. Getting media attention has been his life's work. But it appears that the media -- or at least the Opinion section of The New York Times -- would like us to regard J.D. Vance as the main character in tonight's vice presidential debate.

Patrick Healy has convened a roundtable of Times opinion columnists -- two conservatives (David Brooks and Ross Douthat), a conservative who doesn't think she's a conservative (Pamela Paul), and a liberal (Tressie McMillan Cottom). After a couple of general questions (for instance, "What are the biggest 'known unknowns' for you on each V.P. candidate?"), Healy begins asking questions about the two candidates individually. It's clear that he's far more interested in Vance than in Tim Walz.

Healy's questions include the following:

Rule No. 1 for vice-presidential debates is “first, do no harm” — don’t say anything that creates problems for the top of the ticket. JD Vance has the bigger burden here, because the moderators are likely to press him on his past criticisms of Donald Trump and his attacks on “childless cat ladies” and false claims about migrants eating neighbors’ pets. Millions of people will be watching. Do you think Vance will help or hurt the ticket by the end of the night?

Ross, you interviewed JD Vance for a long Q. and A. last spring, and you’ve known him for years. In Vance’s comments at rallies and in interviews, have Americans been seeing the “real” Vance, or is this a Trump-campaign-molded version of Vance? Would Vance be talking so much about Haitian migrants in Ohio if he was running with a candidate other than Trump?

David, how do you think Vance will try to take on Walz? Does Vance risk overdoing it?

In interviews and our Times Opinion focus groups, some voters have said they had a pretty positive impression of Vance when Trump picked him in July — mostly from his book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” and his Republican convention speech — but their opinions changed for the worse in the last couple of months. What if anything could Vance do to change that tonight? Or is he better off focusing on achieving something else at the debate (and if so, what?).

Can he do anything to help himself in the likability department?

Some of these questions are tough, but there's a subtext: Vance has alienated a lot of voters -- he can turn that around, can't he? You get the feeling that Healy is rooting for Vance to do that.

There's only one Walz-specific question:

Tim Walz has come under attack by Vance and Trump over his experience in the Army National Guard and his strong support for L.G.B.T.Q. rights and the rights of parents of transgender children. Republicans have portrayed Walz as a progressive extremist — and lopped in Harris with him. Do you see vulnerabilities for Walz onstage tonight?

Apart from that, Healy doesn't seem interested in Walz.

Douthat is part of this roundtable even though, as Healy says, he has a prior relationship with Vance, which means he can't possibly be objective. And we learn that this is also true of David Brooks:

Brooks: Like Ross, I’ve known Vance for a long time. In 2018, I gathered some friends at my house to help JD think through his life options. This route wasn’t the one we recommended! (And he didn’t think he’d have a career in politics, at least any time soon.)

So Healy is asking someone who served as J.D. Vance's life coach to offer opinions on his character and how he'll do tonight.

Brooks concedes that his mentee can be a tad unpleasant, but it's all liberals' fault:

I think the emergence of the angrier kind of Vance that Ross alludes to occurred when the “Hillbilly Elegy” movie came out. Many critics not only savaged the movie (I thought it was melodramatic, but pretty decent). They also savaged Vance as a man, in snobby and immature ways. I spoke with Vance at the time and understood that anybody would be affected by this coastal condescending scorn. It was a classic red-pill moment. So if Vance returns the nastiness, he is not faking it.

Which tells you everything you need to know about whether this panel can pass judgment on Vance without pro-Vance bias. Brooks even dismisses the questions surrounding Vance's 180 on Trump:

... I don’t think Vance is being totally opportunistic. Yes, he has totally flip-flopped on Trump’s character. But his life mission is pretty much the same: to upend the policies that have favored knowledge workers and, in his view, betrayed other kinds of workers.

So it's cool that he's running with the guy he once referred to as "cultural heroin."

Tressie McMillan Cottom pushes back a bit:

Cottom: I speak to very different people than Ross and David do when it comes to Vance. I speak to people from Appalachia, the very people that Vance supposedly wants to save from coastal scorn. I was in West Virginia and Kentucky this past weekend. The working-class Appalachians I speak to see Vance as a poser and very much a member of the coastal elite that Vance considers himself in opposition to. These working class Appalachians were just as scornful of Vance’s portrayal of them. Many of them reject his political rhetoric and policy approaches. I do not believe Vance is running for those voters. He is running on those voters. The question will be how much more mileage he thinks he can get out of that shtick.

These voters get it -- Vance is "a poser and very much a member of the coastal elite." Not only has he been mentored and bankrolled by half-mad tech billionaires like Peter Thiel, he also pals around with two of the best-known op-ed columnists at The New York Times, who then say nice things about him in print. Which is why the consensus view in this roundtable is that Vance and not the truly non-coastal, truly non-elite Tim Walz is tonight's main character.