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This weekend, I witnessed the Vibe Shift firsthand.
When we met for lunch, my mother’s first topic was the DNC. Who spoke and how great they sounded. How excited she was about the whole thing. She corrected me on “Comma-lah’s” name, which I’d apparently been mispronouncing, and used that as a springboard to discuss Kamala t-shirts. She didn’t mention that watching the DNC had been inspiring enough to get her volunteering to write postcards and stuff mailers. It was clear that she was all-in on the program without ever discussing policy—or even Donald Trump.
Dad chimed in a couple times to note that the overall messaging was much more positive, except for Bernie Sanders, who sounded unchanged from the last ten years. He appreciated this. I’d say he represents a section of the populace with immense distaste for Trump, but a comparable disdain for politicians who spend too much time talking about the man.
I had been under no illusions that Mom would vote anything but Democrat. Dad, not so sure; I’d have given good odds of a protest vote if the Libertarian candidate wasn’t such a non-entity. More likely that he abstained. But the last couple weeks appear to have left him much more comfortable voting D. The same has to be true for Mom, too, as I never saw this level of enthusiasm for anything Biden did or said.
That’s the Vibe Shift: apathy to enthusiasm.
It doesn’t take a coordinated blitz of friendly op-eds, since my parents were getting this straight from the TV. It doesn’t take an iron grip on that TV presentation; the DNC herds their cats, but they can’t convince Bill Clinton to get off stage. And it doesn’t even take a winning policy slate. The Democrat base, the casual never-Trumpers, maybe even the grillpillers? They’re just glad to have a candidate under the retirement age.
This one is Kamala's to lose.
The biggest sign was how quickly the Trump assassination story died down. The second Biden stepped down, he overwhelmed the media cycle and wiped the slate clean on both sides. Ofc, getting the support of everyone other than the crazies really helps. Every institution (left and right) is aligned on putting her in power. Look at Trump's new twitter, it has fully morphed into the caricature that Hillary claimed it was in 2016. (https://x.com/realDonaldTrump).
Kamala has picked a golden retriever of a VP candidate and has managed to be in public life for decades without expressing a substantial opinion. This is useful. It allows a vibes based campaign to flourish. If you have said nothing, they can't attack you. One big scandal from Kamala or Tim can potentially turn the tides, but so far she's been doing well.
Trump camp seems clueless too. Kamala is happy to fight in the dirt with Trump, because she too can have a full debate without saying anything substantial. So much energy was expended painting Hillary, Biden and Obama as evil, that Trump doesn't have much novel angles of attack. On top of that, JD Vance is clearly a terrible VP candidate (as much as us Rationalist types might agree with him). Kamala has avoided the obvious landmines too. She has steered clear of supporting Palestine and immediately stopped talking about the new capital-gains-tax before it could turn scandalous. She was a harsh prosecutor, so the crime angle doesn't work. Kamala has lucked into a pretty defensible position, because she is an uninspiring candidate for democratic primaries. But, her track record is pretty centrist for the generals.
All that being said, the electoral college is surely going to make this one a lot closer than it actually is. (ofc a lot can change between now and nov)
There's a lot of passive voice here! Media outlets consist of actual people that make decisions about things. When we say that the Trump assassination died down, what we mean is that the media doesn't really have much curiosity about the shooter or why he putatively went unnoticed. Likewise, when we say that Biden stepped down and everyone rallied around Kamala, what we mean is that the media stopped being curious about what exactly Nancy Pelosi meant by doing things the "easy way or the hard way" and why it was that no one really mentioned that Biden was plainly senile.
It's hard for me to see how the Trump assassination attempt could have stayed in the news longer than it did. Two things that keep stories in the news are mystery, and continuing developments. There was no mystery as to the identity of the shooter, and the continuing developments were naturally limited. With a murder, there's an announcement, a police investigation, a suspect identified, an arrest, hearings, a trial, appeals, etc. With a missing persons case, like Natalee Holloway or the plane that disappeared, there's endless speculation on what may have happened, as well as updates from the continuing investigation. With this, there was nothing. The shooter was dead, and we didn't learn anything interesting about him other than that he lived a few blocks from where my grandparents lived (which was only of interest to people from the area). After a couple days we learned nothing interesting about the shooter, and nothing of note happened other than the announcement of the House investigation and some remarks by the various law enforcement agencies blaming each other (I probably heard more of this than most because local police talked to the news in Pittsburgh after the Secret Service threw them under the bus).
Now, it might still stay in the news if there's nothing more interesting to talk about, but two days later the GOP Convention started, kicked off by Trump's VP announcement, and that was inherently more interesting than an crime with no further developments. Then a week later Biden dropped out, and the Olympics started, and by that point it was hard to see what coverage they could have even run about the assassination without it being the kind of pointless drivel that causes people to reach for the remote.
The patsy was dead, and what about the other shooters?
More effort than this, please.
This is illustrative of the complete lack of interest being shown by the media. We have many eyewitnesses saying multiple shooters. We have audio from all over with bullets sounding, and we can count them, and it doesn't match what the patsy allegedly did.
But if you don't know there were other shots, and don't know there were other shooters, because the media you choose has chosen to keep you uninformed of that fact, then what an I supposed to do? I can't choose for you.
Didn't it come out pretty quickly that local police returned fire, missed, and then the service ended the issue? That's multiple different guns right there.
The congress-dude who's independently investigating (see gattsuru's link) says that the local SWAT guy ran across the open field towards the action, engaged with his AR-15 and got one round off hitting the butt of the guy's rifle (ie. pretty near his face and a good shot all things considered) causing the shooter to pause his activities and possibly jamming the gun by fucking up the buffer tube -- pretty interesting stuff, and the fact that you or I (who are presumably more interested than average, given our current venue) didn't hear about it on the news is indeed kind of... weird.
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