I totally agree with my colleague The Moose in congratulating Nancy Pelosi and Charlie Rangel for their plain-talk trashing of Hugo Chavez’s latest Bush-bashing incursion into Harlem. This is pretty basic stuff. Yeah, I think Bush has been an unmitigated disaster for our country. Yeah, given the political capital he possessed on September 12, 2001, I think you could make a pretty good case that the debate over Bush’s exact status as one of the worst presidents of the last century is a bit of an insult to the memories of Warren Harding and Richard Nixon. And yeah, I have to remind myself of the dictates of Christian charity in foreswearing hatred of the man and his administration.But still, I do not think Bush’s American detractors need any outside help from the likes of Hugo Chavez. He is, as Pelosi pungently put it, an “everyday thug.” More generally, he’s a guy who would be universally dismissed as just another self-important ex-military caudillo if he wasn’t sitting on top of oil revenues that keep his regime from ruin, and enable him to strut around Manhattan showering goodies on low-income Americans. He’s pretty much Khadafy without the experience.I find it really odd and reprehensible that Markos took issue with Rangel for upbrading Chavez (missing the point, BTW, that Charlie was objecting to Chavez’s extracurricular appearances in Harlem, not his speech at the UN). But I also probably part company with The Moose in rejecting his particular identification of Harry S. Truman with the idea that partisan differences should generally be subordinated to the national interest.As it happens, I’m now re-reading Richard Norton’s Smith’s political biography of Thomas Dewey, whom Truman famously upset in his signature campaign of 1948. It certainly confirms my often-expressed opinion that George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign had an antecedent in 1948 as an incumbent candidacy based on eschewing the political center and pursuing a deliberate polarization of the electorate.Sure, Truman was pre-positioned in the center to some extent via his abandonment by the anti-Cold War “Progressives” backing Henry Wallace, and the anti-civil rights southerners backing Strom Thurmond. And there’s no question he was a resolute anti-communist, or that his overall record in building a post-war edifice of international institutions was worthy of all the praise that Democratic centrists have so often given him.But within those parameters, Truman ran one of the most polarizing campaigns in U.S. political history, suggesting repeatedly that Dewey was a front not only for the restoration of Herbert Hoover’s domestic and foreign policies, but for an actual American fascist movement determined to abolish democracy and impose an oligarchy of wealth. He ran a very Kos-like campaign, and most of the retrospective Republican commentaries concluded that Dewey (who in part was spooked by the conviction that he lost in 1944 by being too negative towards FDR), erred fatally in campaigning on a “national unity” message.On any issue other than foreign condemnations of an American president, nobody would much accuse Nancy Pelosi or Charles Rangel of insufficient partisan zeal. But that’s another example of the true HST legacy: keep the enemies abroad in mind, but domestically, leave no partisan attack behind. You don’t have to completely endorse this formula to recognize it as a template for what George W. Bush did in 2004, and for what Democrats feel driven to do today.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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July 26: The Obama Coalition Revisited
It’s pretty obvious Kamala Harris’s candidacy changes the 2024 presidential race more than a little, and I wrote at New York about one avenue she has for victory that might have eluded Joe Biden:
During her brief run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, Kamala Harris was widely believed to be emulating Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign strategy. She treated South Carolina, the first primary state with a substantial Black electorate, as the site of her potential breakthrough. But she front-loaded resources into Iowa to prepare for that breakthrough by reassuring Black voters that she could win in the largely white jurisdiction. She had the added advantage of being from the large state of California, where the primary had just been moved up to Super Tuesday (March 3). For a thrilling moment, after her commanding performance in a June 2019 debate, Harris seemed on track to pull off this feat, threatening Joe Biden’s hold on South Carolina in the polls and surging in Iowa. But neither she nor Cory Booker, who also relied on the Obama precedent, could displace Biden as the favorite of Black voters or strike gold in the crowded Iowa field. Out of money and luck, Harris dropped out before voters voted.
Now Kamala Harris is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for 2024 without having to navigate any primaries. But she still faces some key strategic decisions. Joe Biden was consistently trailing Donald Trump in the polls in no small part because he was underperforming among young and non-white voters, the very heart of the much-discussed Obama coalition. Can Harris recoup some of these potential losses without sacrificing support elsewhere in the electorate? That is a question she must address at the very beginning of her general-election campaign.
There’s a chance that Harris can inject a bit of the Obama “hope and change” magic into a Democratic ticket that had previously felt like a desperate effort to defend an unpopular administration led by a low-energy incumbent, as Ron Brownstein suggests in The Atlantic:
“Polls have shown that a significant share of Americans doubt the mental capacity of Trump, who has stumbled through his own procession of verbal flubs, memory lapses, and incomprehensible tangents during stump speeches and interviews to relatively little attention in the shadow of Biden’s difficulties. Particularly if Harris picks a younger running mate, she could top a ticket that embodies the generational change that many voters indicated they were yearning for when facing a Trump-Biden rematch …
“In the best-case scenario for this line of thinking, Harris could regain ground among the younger voters and Black and Hispanic voters who have drifted away from Biden since 2020. At the same time, she could further expand Democrats’ already solid margins among college-educated women who support abortion rights.”
Team Trump seems to believe it can offset these potential gains by depicting Harris as a “California radical” and a symbol of diversity who might alienate the older white voters with whom Biden had some residual strength. Obama overcame similar race-saturated appeals in 2008, but he had a lot of help from a financial collapse and an unpopular war presided over by the party of his opponent.
Following Obama’s path has major strategic implications in terms of the battleground map. Any significant improvement over Biden’s performance among Black, Latino, and under-30 voters might put Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina — very nearly conceded to Trump in recent weeks — back into play. But erosion of Biden’s support among older and/or non-college-educated white voters could create potholes in his narrow Rust Belt path to victory in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
These strategic choices could definitely affect Harris’s choice of a running-mate, not just in terms of potentially picking a veep from a battleground state, but as a way of amplifying the shift produced by Biden’s withdrawal. Brownstein even thinks Harris might consider following Bill Clinton’s 1992 example of doubling down on her own strengths:
“The other option that energizes many Democrats would be for Harris to take the bold, historic option of selecting another woman: Whitmer. That would be a greater gamble, but a possible model would be 1992, when Bill Clinton chose Al Gore as his running mate; Gore was, like him, a centrist Baby Boomer southerner—rather than an older D.C. hand. ‘I love Josh Shapiro and I think he would be a great VP candidate, but I would double down’ with Whitmer, [Democratci consultant Mike] Mikus told me. ‘I don’t think you have to go with a moderate white guy. I think you can be bold [with a pick] that electrifies your base.’ I heard similar views from several consultants.”
Whitmer’s expressed disinterest in the veepstakes may take that particular option off the table, but the broader point remains: Harris does not have to — and may not be able to — simply adopt Biden’s strategy and tweak it slightly. She may be able to contemplate gains in the electorate that were unimaginable for an 81-year-old white male incumbent. But the strategic opportunity to follow Obama’s path to the White House will first depend on Harris’s ability to refocus persuadable voters on Trump’s shaky record, bad character, and extremist agenda. Biden could not do that after the debate debacle of June 27. His successor must begin taking the battle to the former president right now.