Minnesota Dispatch: The Joy of Winning

All this discussion about “joy” and “nice” could be contagious.

Minnesota Nice

After years of hearing about how the Trump campaign and its components have painted themselves into a corner, it’s finally happened.

They’ve built a brand around expressions of toughness and a vaguely defined Other, threatening (every “normal”) citizens’ personal and community safety. Gays were grooming. Immigrants were dangerous beasts. Marxists were infiltrating. Yada, yada.

The MAGA script for the 2024 general election was for the incumbent president to be characterized as weak in as many ways as possible; Donald J. Trump was going to save America.

This scenario ended when Joe Biden decided to leave the race for re-election. The framing carefully built to minimize the impact of Democrats’ advocacy and accomplishments collapsed.

It was perceived as a no-brainer for the GOP’s marketing geniuses to come up with a way to keep Democrats on the defensive by portraying Vice President Kamala Harris as weak. After all, she was a woman, with vague (but still not white) ethnicity, and slimed by her association with President Biden.

This hasn’t worked out. And although the messengers of the Reich have tried their best, people weren’t buying it. For one, election fatigue undermined enthusiasm; who wants to watch reruns when a new season has dropped?  The ageism pervasive in Biden bashing remained as an undercurrent and only one remaining candidate was capable of being caught up in that flow.

There was a moment of silence from Republicans as they mulled over campaign messaging options, and it lasted long enough for the screaming meemies for democracy to get their anti-Project 2025 payload into the zeitgeist.

At last, here was something Democrats could organize people to be against beyond having to watch a scary clown stumble about the White House. And Project 2025 has been the gift that keeps giving. A photo of Trump on a private plane with the head of the project has surfaced, belying earlier attempts to distance the candidate from its proponents.   

A pushback public relations effort by the Heritage Foundation listing all the “false” accusations about Project 2025 has fallen flat, in large part because people realized its true nature was to enable assholes to do the assholish things promised on the campaign trail. 

Vice President Kamala Harris isn’t the kind of candidate who personifies a specific agenda, even though she brings one to the table. Unlike the candidate with the biggest brand (and ego), Harris smiles warmly on the campaign trail.

She’s also made a smart choice with Ted Lasso, er, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, as a running mate. His perceived record of compromising while not compromising his principles while telling Dad jokes and fixing your flat tire just oozes… “joy,” the word used to describe the campaign at rallies. 

The GOP’s “un-joy” PR campaign is throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the dems’ vp pick, from misrepresenting his military record to attacks on Walz’ hometown church and its Lutheran affiliation. It ain’t working.

As reporter Jane Mayer noted on Xitter, we’ve seen this song and dance before:

• Remember when John Kerry was Swiftboated by Chris LaCivita who is doing it to Tim Walz now? Guess who funded it? Harlan Crow, the billionaire who has been lavishing freebies on Clarence Thomas.

Presently, the only option for the GOP Presidential campaign is to brand both Democratic candidates as extreme lefties. The problem here is disinformation campaigns need to be built around a kernel of truth; all the ex-Republicans and public figures endorsing Harris-Walz are proof positive of the ineffectiveness of this message. 

From Dan Pfeiffer at Message Box, talking about recent reforms in Minnesota:

• These policies are all broadly popular (including with sizable swaths of Republican voters). Republicans think that anyone to the left of Donald Trump is an out-of-touch liberal, but that’s not how the public sees it, and that’s certainly not how they will see Walz.

• The GOP focused on a critique of Walz’s response to the 2020 protests over the killing of George Floyd. Using this as an example to show that he is in the thrall of liberal activists, but less than a day into this attack, they ran into a stumbling block.

• Yesterday, the Harris-Walz campaign released a video of Trump praising Walz for his handling of the protests.

• Oops.

Polling, schmolling… The New York Times has an article today describe Gov. Walz’ rise to the national stage as part of a carefully crafted plan… by being… nice.

• Some of his actions amounted to the political equivalent of shoveling the neighbor’s driveway in the middle of a Minnesota snowstorm.

More dangerous for Democrats than the GOP bullshit machine is the pernicious press and pundits, especially those who think they’d somehow be spared in an authoritarian regime. Showing up with “both sides” reporting while ignoring the truth of a situation and headlines framed by misinformation are the tools of the trade for the servants of the billionaire class.

There is plenty of evidence suggesting that the new Democratic ticket has moved the needle in their favor. But, as everybody should be saying, there’s plenty of time for Republicans to come up with something to stop the momentum.

Many observers have noted Donald Trump’s apparent journey into poor mental health, but those who are hard-core MAGA see his actions as part of an act, just like so-called Christians believe he’s an “imperfect messenger.”

While the Democrats have been barnstorming in swing states, Donald Trump has only one appearance scheduled this week, in deep red Montana. His late night social media messages have ranged from angry to incomprehensible, as in one missive where he (apparently) fantasized about Joe Biden getting back into the race.

By the time this column is published Trump will have staged a press conference at Mar a Lago demanding a debate with the Democratic candidate. He’s already backed out of a pre agreed matchup made with the Biden campaign on ABC, tried suggesting a Fox News hosted debate in front of one of his campaign rallies, and added to the perception that he’s afraid to debate an agile and intelligent opponent. Perhaps that’s why he keeps projecting, calling Harris “low-IQ”, but it’s also possible that’s how he views all people of color.

BREAKING: Donald Trump announces he’s accepted ABC News debate for Sept 10. Harris has announced she will be there previously.

The GOP Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance keeps trying to impress his boss. Is he really stalking Kamala Harris as it appeared he was in Eau Claire, Wisconsin this week? His “likeability” polling numbers have descended from minus nine to minus fifteen since he joined the ticket. 

The Veep candidate seems to have a knack for attaching himself to unsavory books. The latest example comes via his endorsement (blurb) of an extremist screed, as described by Gil Duran in ‘Unhumans’: J.D. Vance and the language of genocide:

• In the latest example of his dangerous extremism, J.D. Vance has enthusiastically promoted a book that uses genocidal language to stoke hatred toward both liberals and progressives.

• Unhumans, by right-wing conspiracy theorists Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec, offers a sinister thesis: Progressive-minded Americans are not humans. Instead, they are "communists." In turn, the authors define communists as bloodthirsty "unhumans" hellbent on the destruction of civilization.

• Right-wingers, they write, must stop these unhumans with a policy of “exact reciprocity.” This means doing exactly to these so-called unhumans what the authors claim the unhumans are planning to do to them.

While I think policy differences are important, I don’t think they are always the deciding factor in electoral contests. Our entertainment-oriented culture makes it easy to judge too many things by subjective impression rather than reality.

Trump, perhaps for the first time in his life, is coming out on the short end of that stick. Vance is a walking public relations disaster.

It’s far from over, but I’m starting to think –in addition to being a referendum on democracy– this election has the potential to begin the process of upending politics as we know it. All this discussion about “joy” and “nice” (I just returned from Minneapolis, and they really are agreeable) could be contagious.

A woman at the top of this Democratic ticket may be much more than its historic/symbolic value. 

Here’s Lyz, writing in an essay entitled Ambition, the Midwest, and men

• I am fascinated by the images of Doug Emhoff and Tim Walz, who both offer competing visions of masculinity to the opposing ticket — one where men are the cheerleaders for women, rather than the other way around.

• A CNN story noted that, in interviews of potential VP picks, Walz expressed his commitment to doing what Harris wanted. He was there to “be a partner.”

• Normally, it’s women who are criticized for their ambition. The usual narrative is about a woman putting aside her ambitions for partnership with a man. Here, the narrative is reversed.

 

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(I’m back for a momentary stopover in my vacation. My official return will be August 13.)

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Thursday’s Noteworthy News Links

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NBC’s Olympics Broadcast Isn’t Just Addictive. It’s a New Era of Streaming by Brian Stelter at WIRED.

• Peacock’s editorial team has adjusted and reorganized video content on the fly. Viewers and reviewers have been buzzing about Snoop Dogg’s segments, so the team set up a scrollable playlist of Snoop clips. Users have been looking for videos of the medal ceremonies, so now there’s a collection of those too.

• Some of the new formats are fundamentally different ways to "watch TV." With Multiview, for instance, the Olympics wash over you—less like a show, more like a state of being. Campbell says about half of Multiview users click into a specific sport, so they're using the split screen as a "discovery tool," while the other half stay in the control-room-style experience.

• Control is the operative word; we're all growing increasingly comfortable with multiple screens and data sources in our faces at all times. YouTube TV, which has been offering a make-your-own multiview function since last year, has been promoting preset Olympics versions this summer. DirecTV has its own version. People are growing more accustomed to “using more than one screen at one time,” Campbell says.

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Do We Need a Labor Party? (Not Exactly) by Hamilton Nolan at How Things Work

• Rather than storming out of the Democratic Party and forming a new party and then toiling on the margins of the power, it makes infinitely more sense to first reform our system so that a third party could actually have power, and then go make your new party. Instead of rushing off to form the Labor Party, make “passing the Fair Representation Act” a pillar of organized labor’s political agenda. It would be a healthy step towards getting unions to focus their political capital not just on bread and butter issues for their own membership, but on improving our democracy. Unions are inherently democratic institutions that can and must be the backbone of improving democracy in our political system. 

• Structural issues are just as important as wages and working conditions. Consider the filibuster: the PRO Act, labor’s biggest legislative priority, will never pass as long as the filibuster is in place. Therefore the filibuster is a labor issue. Consider the Electoral College: unions may go all out to ensure that Trump does not get the most votes in this election and still watch him “win” because of our antidemocratic Electoral College system. Therefore the Electoral College is a labor issue. Winning proportional representation is very much in line with these things. 

• Our system is riddled with flawed, dangerous, and undemocratic structures and processes. Clearing them away and rebuilding something better is part of the responsibility of living in a democracy.

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Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual by Thomas Ultican at Tultican

• Currently schools are asked to do the impossible and blamed for failing. Literally billions of dollars are being spent to destroy public education, the foundation of Democracy.

• The Education Wars is a handbook to help parents and citizens recognize feckless attacks and defeat them.

• America’s public education system is a treasure and if lost, will never come back.