site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30584 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

So, Kamala Harris has her book tour with the election retrospective. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it blames other people for a few things. But what drew some attention is that apparently some of the digs at fellow Democrats were notable, actually giving some the impression that she must be retiring from politics, though she's since tried to unburn some bridges.

What's drawing possibly the most attention is her description of the VP selection process. She said Josh Shapiro was too ambitious and had started for asking details about the VP's residence. She said that Tim Walz was actually her second choice, which is a bit hurtful if you're Tim. Eyebrows have been raised at this, but even more so at her reason for not choosing her first choice, who was Pete Buttigieg - literally described as the "ideal partner", if not for this one flaw, she says.

He's gay.

"We were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man. Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let's just do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk. And I think Pete also knew that -- to our mutual sadness." (book excerpt per the Atlantic)

It did not really go over well. Buttigieg himself said he wished she had more faith in Americans. She was confronted about it by Maddow recently, here's a clip, asking her to elaborate, as it's "hard to hear."

"No, no, no, that's not what I said. That - that's that he couldn't be on the ticket because he is gay. My point is, as I write in the book, is that I was clear that in 107 days, in one of the most hotly contested elections for president of the United States against someone like Donald Trump, who knows no floor, to be a black woman running for president of the United States, and as a vice presidential running mate, a gay man. With the stakes being so high, it made me very sad, but I also realized it would be a real risk. No matter how - you know, I've been an advocate and an ally of of the LGBT community my entire life, so it wasn't about, it wasn't about - so it wasn't about any any prejudice on my part, but that we had such a short, we had such a short period of time. And the stakes were so high. I think Pete is a phenomenal, phenomenal public servant. And I think America is and would be ready for that. But when I had to make that decision with two weeks to go. You know, and maybe I was being too cautious, you know, I'll let our friends, we should all talk about that, maybe I was, but that's the decision I made - and I'm and I - as with everything else in the book and being very candid about that. Yeah. With a great deal of sadness about also the fact that it might have been a risk. (ed: Maddow's interjections removed. Maddow then just goes on and asks about running in 2028, response "that's not a focus right now")

I saw one twitter user summarize her answer as: "I didn’t not choose Pete because he was gay… I didn’t choose him because he is gay and I had 107 days."

This raises a number of questions. Was it right to be tactical like that? Was she correct about the tactics? Was it particularly absurd to say it out loud? Was this just an excuse, and there was some other reason? Is it hypocrisy by Harris? Is her point about having less time to run a campaign cope, or on some level a legitimate objection that such a short campaign must by nature adhere to different rules and strategies?

On the one hand I can see it. It was a short campaign, and the overarching philosophy was to play it safe. In retrospect, probably wrong. (And also an I told you so moment for me). In that light Harris is being perfectly consistent. On the other hand Kamala herself acknowledges that her own identity was potentially a barrier, is the concept of 'too much diversity to handle' a real thing, much less from those on the left? It is true that even Obama had his doubters about whether his campaign was doomed because of racism. Personally I don't buy that, I don't think it made much of a difference, but some people do think about it and still do think along the same lines. The flipside of that is also true, however: say she names Pete, would any alleged homophobia backfire onto Trump and his team, would it supercharge identity politics within the base, or is it a non-issue altogether?

My honest opinion? Again, like Obama: I don't think him being gay would matter. He's a great communicator, and would have been an asset. Although, he would need something of substance to explain, so it's not a full slam dunk, and I don't think it swings the election unless Pete gets to tack on his own new policies.

(There's other stuff to say about the memoir but I'll leave that for a different top-level post if people want to get into it.)

For what it's worth, I'd be very surprised if she personally wrote her book. She probably hasn't even read it. In my understanding all celebrity/politician books are written by ghost writers.

I'd imagine her writer took a few too many liberties here and that's what's caused the controversy.

Much as that might fit with your worldview, she’s a lawyer. She’s 100% going to be picky about the precise language in a few places. I think it’s true for some political books but nearly zero chance it’s the case here. And despite this particular excerpt, the book is allegedly supremely careful. Doesn’t say nearly anything of true substance about Biden, Gaza, her vision, etc.

I think that sometimes, the very same qualities which make someone a good vice president also make someone a lackluster president.

I think Biden is the only vice president who was elected president since the Bush senior in 1988. Al Gore lost. Cheney was not on the ticket. (Clinton was not vice but very much part of the Obama administration, and lost.) Biden won (with 4 years in between). Harris lost.

As a vice president, you want someone who is content to play second fiddle and does not want to outshine you. Someone who is no threat to you in the next primaries, should they decide to compete for the top spot.

You do not want someone as charismatic as Obama, or as narcissist as Trump. Instead, you might simply pick someone who will assure voters whose demographic groups the president does not share. For example, Pence was a good running mate for Trump because he assured more traditional R voters that the administration would not go completely crazy, and that there would be a person who was both a grown-up and a Christian in the room. Likewise, Harris was a good pick because she signaled that while Biden was very old, very white and very male, the Democrats still valued younger, female and non-white voters.

If Trump dies, I do not think there is any obvious candidate to inherit the MAGA kingdom. From Trump's perspective, that is sensible -- a designated successor is always a coup risk.

I think that sometimes, the very same qualities which make someone a good vice president also make someone a lackluster president.

That might be true, and is certainly true that the VP often doesn't become president. But then, why do they always seem to run for president if they're such a bad choice? Why does the party often choose them in the primaries? Just since the 80s we've had 5 out of 8 VPs run in the general election!

Walter Mondale - 1984
George H.W. Bush - 1988
Al Gore - 2000
Joe Biden - 2020
Kamala Harris - 2024

Quayle and Pence also ran but lost in the primaries.

If Trump dies, I do not think there is any obvious candidate to inherit the MAGA kingdom.

Is it not Vance? It seems to me that he is being groomed for the top slot in a way most VPs never are. Also, AFAIK he's in pretty good with the MAGA base.

I think Biden is the only vice president who was elected president since the Bush senior in 1988.

Interestingly, both served only a single term.

I think she's actually 100% correct here, and also it's silly to try to frame it as if she's being closed minded or bigoted or anything. She saw a very real risk and made a calcuation. Tim Walz was an ass pick, but they were attempting to get someone who would speak to men and masculinity, and the attempt at least makes sense.

Also, it's very clear that the left is constantly talking about demographics, representation and people seeing 'themselves' reflected. Well every time that choice is made, whether it's a casting call or a VP pick, it's equally a choice not to include someone else. It's fucking stupid to appeal to the logic of demographic representation in some cases, then gasp and act shocked about it when it's about literal choosing not to overlook a majority demographic for a minority demographic

"We were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man. Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let's just do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk. And I think Pete also knew that -- to our mutual sadness."

If we take her at her word... wouldn't it have made more sense for her to simply not accept the nomination at all? She has (by her own calculations) 3 risk factors, while Butigieg only had 1. She could have just stepped aside and let him, or anyone else, take the nomination. Hell, she was in a position where she almost could have picked whoever she wanted to get the nom if she was willing to step aside herself. I guess she thought 107 days enough overcome black/female/antisemitic prejudice, but not quite enough for a gay vice president.

No, a black woman will can get black men to vote for them while a gay man won't almost certainly can't.

Edit: fixed.

Evidently not.

I have certainly seen it claimed that if the candidate had been anyone other than Harris, they wouldn’t have legally been able to access any of the funding that had already been secured for the BIDEN-HARRIS ticket, thereby essentially obligating her to stick it out.

That money could be given to the DNC to spend on whatever they think is best. Such as a turn out the vote effort for whomever is running for president.

Couldn't they keep her as VP and have someone else take Biden's slot?

If we take her at her word... wouldn't it have made more sense for her to simply not accept the nomination at all?

Not necessarily no. If her goal was to become president, then not taking the nomination and a different democrat winning wouldn't have helped her goal.

I mean taking her at her word that she really did want to help the country and defeat Trump, not being cynical and assuming she just wanted power for herself. But her argument is not logically coherent.

I think she's actually 100% correct here, and also it's silly to try to frame it as if she's being closed minded or bigoted or anything.

This is true. It's also true that what you say matters zilch to the left. Harris is a spent hen. She has served, and failed at, her purpose. The only way she can provide further value is for her to be eaten, and the left has always found their own people to be very tasty. This is just an opportunity for greater purity spiraling and virtue signaling, to show how they need even more progressive people, because it's the current year, goshdarnit!

Note: I'm not saying this shift to cannabilism for her in this situation because she lost her value is a conscious choice. I believe it is likely something which happens because the powers that be have less incentive to guard her from those that would want to cannabilize everyone all the time.

I saw one twitter user summarize her answer as: "I didn’t not choose Pete because he was gay… I didn’t choose him because he is gay and I had 107 days."

This was roughly my immediate response upon seeing Harris's answer to Maddow. I found this disconcerting for a few reasons.

One is that other excerpts reveal that she's aware of the "word salad" criticism, and yet she clearly hasn't taken it seriously enough to polish up her interview/conversation/PR skills. Either she lacks the desire to improve, or she lacks the ability to improve, neither of which is a good characteristic to have in the leader of your party.

Two is that she presumably provided this answer with the expectation that the audience would go, "That is a reasonable response that properly negates Maddow's supposition." This either speaks to her having extremely low opinion of voters' understanding of logic or her lacking an ability or desire to engage in logic. Again, not what I want in the leader of my party.

Three is related to two, and it's that there was an OBVIOUS deflection RIGHT THERE! Just say that Pete polled poorly with blacks - which is a bloc we need to keep heavily shifted in our favor - for a variety of reasons. Truly, it's a mystery wrapped in an enigma, a question for the ages, something as hard to figure out as how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop (if you're not a snarky owl, anyway). And in 107 days, we simply didn't have time to do the deep analysis needed to figure out what was going on and how to fix it, and so we decided to go for someone who polled better among blacks. It's an invisible fig leaf, but for people who want to see the leaf, this could've provided them enough ammo with which to convince themselves that the leaf is visible and to bully others into loudly proclaiming that the leaf is visible. And Maddow herself certainly has the motivation for the former.

Three is related to two, and it's that there was an OBVIOUS deflection RIGHT THERE! Just say that Pete polled poorly with blacks - which is a bloc we need to keep heavily shifted in our favor - for a variety of reasons.

Lol, lmao even. The point is to accuse the American people as such of racism and sexism and homophobia, precisely because it's broad enough that anyone can duck the charge and it'll likely be read as an attack on your enemies.

The point is very much not to accuse a loyal - the most loyal - voting bloc of the same even if you could objectively prove it. That way has its risks (Dan Savage iirc got a ton of shit for basically stating the point out loud and criticizing black homophobia).

This is all progressive stack thinking: Kamala cannot fail so we'll say that the audience failed her due to bigotry. By the same logic black women cannot fail the Democrats.

By the same logic black women cannot fail the Democrats.

One definitely did.

The point is to accuse the American people as such of racism and sexism and homophobia,

This accusation is always leveled at the right in particular. It's inconvenient when it would point at blue voting blocs, so I'm not surprised it gets swept under the rug. See also what happened to "Stop Asian Hate", and much of the mockery of that Gillette commercial.

The point of the deflection is that it's not accusing blacks of homophobia. Again, this is an invisible fig leaf, an Emperor Has No Clothes sort of situation, but one of the biggest takeaways from the past couple decades of US politics for me has been that the least believable part of that story was that the crowd had to pretend to see the Emperor's clothing, rather than the crowd genuinely experiencing the qualia of seeing their Emperor wearing impressive clothing, because they were motivated to see such a thing by their superiors. And Maddow herself, along with the remaining audience of Maddow seem far more likely than the general populace to see that fig leaf if Harris points it out.

Instead, Harris came out looking homophobic to that same audience, and stupid to a wider, likely overlapping, audience. Which, perhaps doesn't speak to her incompetence as I had initially thought, but a rational calculation that, as a black woman, she has the privilege of copping to homophobia without being politically punished. Perhaps I ought to give her credit for taking personal responsibility for making a homophobic decision, unlike most of her other comments about her campaign, even if she probably did it unintentionally.

The audience is primed to just not be outraged when they hear claims about American racism. They are not primed to behave this way when faced with attacks on this allied group. That's all there is to it.

And yes, it is an attack. Being vague about it won't change it.

Even if they were ignorant of it, there's an entire other side of the political spectrum that reacts very badly to these sorts of claims. They just don't care (or even enjoy their outrage). The same dynamics aren't at play here.

And yes, it is an attack. Being vague about it won't change it.

This is where I disagree. I believe that being vague about it would have been more than enough to paper over it to not look like an attack. Perhaps an extra step of vagueness by excluding "blacks" altogether and just saying "Pete polled poorly in key voting blocs we needed," and then deflecting with word salad when pressed on the details would've been needed. But underestimating the ability of motivated voters to fill in vagueness from people on their side with good things for their side and bad things for the other side is something that has burned me too many times to fall for again.

excluding "blacks" altogether and just saying "Pete polled poorly in key voting blocs we needed," and then deflecting with word salad when pressed

This would almost certainly have averted controversy. Make it sound like you're working really hard to avoid saying "lots of black voters hate gay stuff" and someone like Maddow will undoubtedly help you accomplish that.

Has Trump ever done anything particularly homophobic? Like the quote above says that 'Donald Trump knows no floor' as if he was going to particularly go after her for being a Black Woman and Buttgieg for being gay when I'd argue he hasn't really done either. He makes fun of opponents but it's more the 'Crooked Hilary' kinda vibe than explicit Idpol attacks. I'm sure he's supported policies which make life harder for queer individuals (and I'd expect he were more Transphobic than anything but really the whole Trans association with the remainder of the Alphabet union is loose and silly at the best of times) but I can't really think of anything outright homophobic rhetorically.

Trump may not be homophobic but he seems very unlikely to shrink from taking advantage of an opponents homosexual orientation, regardless of his personal feelings around the subject.

The progressive idpol ideology that has been dominant in the Democratic party for the past decade+ groups all dimensions of anti-[demographic] bigotry into one, and more generally all dimensions of oppression into one. This is why AGW/climate change activist Greta Thunberg also happens to be a socialist who is pro-Palestine, and why mainstream journalism outlets publish opinion pieces about how "fatphobia" is rooted in white supremacy and misogyny.

As such, if Trump has ever said anything that could reasonably be construed as transphobic or sexist, then the people criticizing him over such things also genuinely, honestly believe that that necessarily means that he's also homophobic and racist and fatphobic and pro-fascist. So whether or not Trump ever said anything homophobic (or displayed any signs of having any particular antipathy towards homosexuality) is neither here nor there for determining whether or not he is a vile homophobe who would homophobically weaponize Pete's homosexuality against him for electoral gain.

True. I just don't get the particular accusation. Even the articles on 'Trump queerphobia' I could find were more of the 'Trump might reduce funding to medicare which might make it harder to get Gender Affirming surgery, therefore he is a transphobe therefore he is homophobic' which is just transparent 'cede to all of my group's demands or you are a whateverphobe'

which is just transparent 'cede to all of my group's demands or you are a whateverphobe'

Yes, yes it is. That you noticed this doesn't mean you have any ability to stop it from working, though.

Nah, but trans IS bundled into LGBTQ, so if Trump is running with 'She's with them, I'm with you', it'd hit extra hard with Buttigieg as VP.

From all the excerpts I'm seeing of the book and the Rachel Maddow interview, the only sense I can make of this is that Harris is angry about being dumped with all the blame for giving Trump a second term, so she's bound and determined to get her revenge on the Democratic party. She says she's not going for Governor of California, and she's being very coy about 2028, so maybe she is trying to burn Newsom in return for what she feels is his lukewarm and lacking endorsement of her in the 2024 campaign?

How else to explain things like "I thought the titans of industry would protect democracy"? That is as good as making the slogan "A vote for the Democratic party candidate is a vote for the oligarchs! The Democratic Party - the party of real billionaires!"

Everybody knew she picked Walz over Shapiro because she felt Shapiro was too ambitious while Walz knew his place as second fiddle to her. I have no idea what she is trying to do, dragging Buttigieg into this - I couldn't pick him because he was too much of a liability, but that wasn't because he was gay, it was because he was gay and I'm black and female - what? that comes across as "don't anybody pick Buttigieg except maybe as VP for a straight white guy, because otherwise he's unelectable" and again, only sense it makes to me is that she is trying to torpedo as many Democratic picks as possible because, as per her book, she thinks she was deliberately undermined by the Biden White House both while in office as VP and when running her campaign, and the party never stepped up sufficiently to have her back, and Certain People who she expected to endorse her and support her didn't do it sufficiently or at all.

Whoo, is all I can say.

I can make of this is that Harris is angry about being dumped with all the blame for giving Trump a second term, so she's bound and determined to get her revenge on the Democratic part

Which is kinda ironic because the only reason she was nominee is because she was the revenge Biden took on the Democratic party for being pushed out.

she thinks she was deliberately undermined by the Biden White House both while in office as VP

To be maximally fair, it really does seem like JD Vance is getting much more press coverage and airtime, and tackling higher-profile issues both at home and abroad, than Kamala ever did as VP. Maybe that’s because the Republicans are more serious about grooming (heh) JD to be Trump’s successor than the Dems were about Kamala, or maybe it just boils down to Kamala’s relative lack of gumption/competence.

I do get the impression that Biden wasn't all that enthusiastic about Kamala, mostly because she was sort of imposed on him. He'd shot his mouth off about making a woman his VP, and then the black Democratic leaders wanted their pound of flesh in return for all the support, so it had to be a black woman. And it does look like Kamala got chosen as "nobody wants her but everyone will take her instead of the other choice because they want the job themselves and don't want a rival to get it".

So all the leaks about problems in the VP's office etc. that were trickling out were, I think, part of the Biden staffers strategy to keep her in her lane if she showed signs of trying to grab the reins herself. In contrast, Trump seems to like Vance just enough, or not be threatened by him, that he lets him do a more public job as VP.

nobody wants her but everyone will take her instead of the other choice

Who would "the other choice" have been at that point? Biden kind of painted himself into a corner there. Michelle Obama might have worked but I don't think she wanted the job.

Several pundits and outlets liked making little lists of "possible VP picks".

Politico's list included a gay woman (if we're talking about why Kamala felt she couldn't pick Pete), so I do think picking Kamala was due to some internal politics in the party. For example, again from Politico's list:

Bass, 66, has said it is “very important” that Biden pick a woman of color for the VP spot. She was the first Black woman in the country to lead a state legislature after being chosen as speaker of the California state Assembly in 2008, after serving as an assemblywoman for three and a half years. Before entering public life, Bass was an emergency room physician assistant at the outset of the AIDS crisis and a civil rights activist.

Hmm, that wouldn't be you throwing your hat in the ring as "I will serve my country if selected", now would it, Karen?

Stacey Abrams, might've been even worse than Kamala. According to wikipedia Val Demings was one of the alternatives, but didn't get picked; maybe due to Kamala's higher name recognition from her failed primary run?

Reading between the lines of the info and reporting we have, Biden did choose Kamala and felt pretty OK about it. He chose her because she convincingly assured him that she would stay loyal. And she basically did, to her and his 'credit'. That's on a personal level between Joe and Kamala. So in that respect I don't think that's right, he trusted her just fine. Was it enthusiasm? No. She wasn't a social friend, and I don't think ever became one, although I'm pretty sure at least some of the bigger decisions he let her in the room for.

However, and this is the huge caveat - Biden's staffers did not get converted to Kamala. I think it's even been explicitly reported that several of Biden's inner circle literally never forgave her for the bussing accusation during the primaries, implying that Biden was a segregationist sympathizer. So yes, on a lower level, her staff was often iced out, I think that's pretty clear. (It's also clear that her camp has always been chaotic, and although Biden's staff didn't ever push back on those allegations, unlike Kamala I don't think that was the Biden staffers' fault, just her own).

Vance? Well, for one, even though staffers are rarely super visible, Vance's keep pretty quiet as far as I know. I'm pretty clued in politically, and I can't even name one. While by contrast I can name drop Susie Wiles, Chris LaCivita, Stephen Miller, and a few other close-orbit Trump team people easily (to be fair not all of them are attention-seekers, but there plenty of others who are). Looking at the list, most of them don't seem to be super frontline warriors, other than maybe his Senate buddies Mike Lee (ugh), Josh Hawley (ugh), and Tom Cotton. Plus, he adopted some Don Jr. people and so there's some bridges in place. And you know Trump is still absolutely glowing after Vance attacked Zelensky for disrespect a few months back on Trump's behalf.

More the later. Kamala was given high-visibility opportunities to act in areas of high public interest, such as her time as Migration Czar, but preferred to ditch publicity with anything that might be controversial. Keeping her profile low was part of her VP strategy, so that she could present herself as heir apparent when Biden would move off the stage, though likely not intended in the way it ultimately happened.

Or maybe Harris is just making another baffling decision? She’s made lots of those.

Putting aside any partisan feelings, I think she’s probably the clear front runner for the dumbest presidential candidate of my entire lifetime.

I don’t think it’s recency bias either, I’ve been wracking my brain for a while trying to think of a counter example and I’m coming up empty.

I understand why people voted for her even though I staunchly disagree, but she’s like the real life version of Veep with about a standard deviation less IQ. Whenever I hear her talk I think about that H.L. Mencken quote.

I only know Harris from recent years, but she doesn’t seem super ambitious and I wouldn’t be surprised if she rode off into the sunset. She’s happy to play the role of the party’s anointed, but she’s not going to Bernie Sanders her way against the Democratic Party

I’m surprised at the controversy.

It seems like this was a tactical choice. I think this also reflects exactly in how I see Buttigieg, as the absolute stereotype of the political striver.

It’s clearly not a good choice to run a gay man in 2024, especially when the effective ad from Trump they keep talking about is “I’m with you, she’s with they/them”. Pete does not deserve the presidency for running through the gauntlet correctly. It’s not a crown. People actually have to vote for him.

I think this also reflects exactly in how I see Buttigieg, as the absolute stereotype of the political striver.

Yeah. He comes across as having been grown in a CIA laboratory tank. He's a striver with insufficient charisma for a big-time role. And it's unclear if he and his husband got their kid via adoption or surrogacy; if the latter, that's probably not helpful in a presidential campaign.

Plus, the Kamala campaign couldn't have run their brilliant "weird" attack on Vance if the Dem VP candidate ate cinnamon rolls like chicken wings.

I really want Pete to run, because he's clearly a smart guy - so I'm curious if we can finally prove that voters actually don't want someone too smart in the role (or plain don't like smart people). Cases like Al Gore and, hell, you know, even: Dukakis, Kerry, maybe Hillary, Gingrich, Romney, etc. Although Pete seems like he is slightly better at being relatable, he also has a kind of too-clean vibe that might make people unsettled. Voters actually do want a human-feeling flaw or two. The anti-intellectualism is a strong thesis but if Pete ran and lost I think I might finally be able to conclude that it's a rule, not just a trend.

In that sense, Vance vs Buttigieg would be extra fantastic TV. Would love to see that debate, actually.

Being fair to Pete, there's a long tradition of mocking photos of politicians trying to eat in public. And, not to be too crude about it, if you're a gay guy who is known for being gay, then putting a phallic-shaped object near your mouth while there are photographers about is risky business. Better to apply it horizontally than vertically, just to be on the safe side.

I have to quote the Miliband story, it's too good not to share:

For a party leader anxious to avoid any more gaffes, what could go wrong buying flowers for the wife?

Plenty, it turned out, as an immaculately suited Ed Miliband turned up at New Covent Garden flower market at the ungodly hour of 6.30am to bag London’s freshest roses for wife Justine.

First came the delicate issue of his bacon roll, a vital accessory when meeting the working classes at breakfast time.

Mr Miliband’s battle to consume the greasy treat alarmed his media minders, who tried to stop photographers taking close-ups of butter oozing between his teeth. After a few bites, the Labour leader appeared defeated, and the snack was put into the custody of Lord Wood, a senior shadow cabinet member.

I think it would make sense for Buttigieg to respond that she's right, the handicap was for anyone running with her. And let the implication be "not because she's a black woman, because she's Kamala Harris and couldn't govern her way out of a wet paper bag".

I don't think Mayor Pete is a possible president, but if we have to pick a gay guy, he's about as inoffensive as you can get (remember the criticism for him being the wrong kind of gay? not gay enough in the queerest possible sense for representation? too white picket fence?). So Kamala is definitely slipping the knife in, and I do have to wonder just what exactly went on that he offended her in some way.

Pete Buttigieg could have done Joe Rogan and come out looking good. He has real charisma and he is good at communicating his values.

People fixate on the they/them part of the ad, but the important pronoun is you. You don't get people to support you by convincing them that you deserve their vote, you get people to support you by convincing them that you support them. The message of the ad is this: 'Kamala Harris isn't for you, she's for minorities and Groups and special interests and the sacred cows of her weird San Francisco Progressive ideology. If you're just a regular person she doesn't give a crap about you.'

It landed because Kamala Harris is bad at acting like she cares about regular people. That's something Pete Buttigieg excels at. Obama had the same talent.

Before Obama won, lots of people said a black man couldn't be President. Now a bunch of people are saying a black woman can only be present if her running mate isn't gay. It feels like a god of the gaps fallacy to me. The better explanation is that charisma is real and more important than identity checkboxes.

Seriously and unironically, how often do you talk about culture war topics with blue collar black people who don't have any particular reason to worry about your judgement? Because in my experience they're at least as anti-gay as blue collar white Trumpers but way more vocal about it. There's just zero chance him being gay doesn't cost his ticket more black votes in key places than he's worth.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, but then this is the world where the Dems had a drag party on the White House lawn for Easter and then stood around eight months later going "duh what happened to our Hispanic votes?" so I don't even know.

There's a difference when you say the quiet part out loud, though. And Kamala pulled all this down on top of her head by putting it in the book that she'd considered Pete but then dropped it because too risky. Nobody needed that level of kiss'n'tell, except for publicity purposes ("buy the book for more spicy revelations about insider goings-on!")

She seems to have no idea that this would ever come back to be something she would need to deal with, and even someone as sympathetic to her as Rachel Maddow had to ask it, and she fumbled the answer ("it wasn't because he was gay, it was because he was gay").

This seems to be all too common with her: says/does something, has no idea that it won't fade with the moment but will be brought up again later (see the "yes for transgender surgery for illegal immigrants in prison" bit of an interview which was just lagniappe for the Trump campaign - i.e. 'spend taxpayer dollars coddling criminals, and not even our own native criminals'). She seems to have no forward planning skills, which is something you would like to have in a president.

That's something Pete Buttigieg excels at. Obama had the same talent.

I don't think I get that from either of them. Pete's always struck me as a soulless striver lizardman type. Like Beto, he can ape the motions, but he lacks the Trump/Bill Clinton knack for leaving the people he talks to with the impression that he's personally invested in them.

And Obama's utterly unique trait was the way people would project onto him whatever they wanted him to be. Even the man himself seemed bemused by the phenomenon. But even then, the projection wasn't "Obama cares about me personally", it was as a totem for All Good Progressive Things, but especially technocratic expertise elevated to a messianic level.

Pete did pretty decent at Surrounded even though that's not perfectly representative. The funny thing is, though, that his worst answers were always about something specific to Harris: 14:14, an undecided voter said that her debate performance was shit, and asked Pete about if her character is so good, why didn't it come through? 31:22ish, another one asked why Harris said something about censoring social media if it contained misinformation as an attack on free speech (although very, very interesting: Pete called the Trump TV license campaign trail threat out as not just a free speech threat but a real threat, not just a Trumpian bluff. This was 10 months ago; he was 100% correct). Still, Harris feels like a millstone around the campaign's neck in most of these questions, and that's not good considering she was the campaign.

And most painful, 37:17, a voter outright says it.

Why can't Kamala answer some of these questions that you're able to answer? ...Why? [most of the people in the circle start clapping] And it's an oversimplification of a concept, but I feel like when I listen to her, I don't get, it's almost jumping back to character. When you talk, back when you were running, I hear genuine interest and feelings in your voice, I know what you want and know that when you say something you really mean what you're saying. I don't ever really get that sense, there were some times in the debate with Kamala where I got a sense of that, but uh, since then, especially with some of the not so great - you know the town hall and the CNN stuff... I don't know. I dunno.

Damning. Pete responds with some (true) stuff about how, ok she's a sitting VP, she's paranoid about the media jumping on a gotcha line. Then he says, well, people have their strengths and weaknesses, and she'd be a good president - which is straight up conceding the point about her bad communication, if you look past the tact. But people can tell. That voter sure did. People just say these things, it's not like they hide it, the Harris campaign really should have known this was an issue. Anyways, I think Pete would do just fine on campaign if he's the one driving the bus, I think you're a little too down on the communication, even if it's not, admittedly, an effusive personal charm kind of thing. If there's one thing holding Pete back, it's probably that he feels the need to try and appease the Democrat sacred cow talking points at times, which would be less the case if you're behind the wheel.

So I shared many of your feelings about Buttigeig, and felt that he would have done well at the top of the Democrat ticket, and then I had to deal with his office and him professionally as the secretary of transportation, and now I have to disagree in the strongest possible terms. While he has charm and charisma, as a professional executive head of a functional body, dude is fucking incompetent. In my experience he was totally unable to make an independent decision without 17 layers of ass-covering consultation, totally unable to tell when brown-nosing subordinates might be completely full of shit, and worst from a political perspective, totally unaware of when optics might demand his presence or at least general visibilty, such as when a major transportation disaster has occured, and the Secretary of Transportation might plausibly be expected to have input.

If the DNC wants to lose badly in 2028, I can think of few better ways that having Buttigeig be the nominee.

I had to deal with his office and him professionally as the secretary of transportation

If you don’t mind my asking, how/why did these interactions happen? How high up in the office were you dealing with, or did you literally deal with him personally? Had you dealt with other secretaries of transportation?

Well, without doxing myself too much, its mostly aerospace related matters, specifically involving certification of new aircraft, new rules for airports and air traffic controllers, and how the US would harmonize its regulations with other national and supranational regulators (like EASA... okay mostly EASA). The list of sins is long- it was never clear who was actually making a formal decision (lots of 'here's what i think, but xyz all need input'), despite a formal decision being requested. Some paperwork remained outstanding for 4 years. Certain statutory limits on how long the government has to respond to requests and filings were routinely ignored without apology or explanation, to the point we seriously considered suing the FAA and DoT. It also became obvious that several key administrators were completely AWOL and had delegated their entire function to assistants, and when this was brought up directly to him, we got an out of office (I believe it was his paternity leave stint, which is charming, but as a cabinet secretary the buck stops with you, respectfully you dont get to take months of paternity leave), our concerns about serious government malfeasance were never addressed in even a perfunctory manner.

My experience with the previous two secretaries of transportation, as well as the current one, are nothing at all like that. Night and day difference, and I know there are many other people in similar positions who have similar feelings.

I never met with him personally, but the issues i was involved with were the kind of things that would require his approval, or st least input, and that really never happened. In contrast, i have emailed Secretary Chao before and recieved a personal response about three hours later. Secretary Duffy appears to be much the same.

Completely forgot to respond to this— thanks for the informative reply. Sounds like you have an interesting job! The substantial difference with previous secretaries is definitely concerning, as is the general sense of dysfunction you’re describing. Maybe he was a good politician but a not-so-good administrator, appointed above his level of competence? I’ll certainly keep this in mind about him.

More comments

Most of the better-publicized examples tend to be culture-warry and tied to emergency response stuff that's hard to measure directly, but there's a lot of stuff in this class, too. For a well-documented-if-poorly-known one, I'd point to checkrides.

Pilots are required to pass a checkride for their pilot's certificate and for a variety of add-ons after that point. These exams are lengthy processes that can only be provided by FAA examiners directly, or by FAA-approved examiners called Designated Pilot Examiners (DPEs). FAA Examiners offer the service for free*, but have become increasingly unavailable over the last twenty years; in the modern era, >95% of exams are operated by DPEs, amounting to tens of thousands of exams per year. Because of the exam's complexity, it's very rare for a DPE to do more than one exam per day, there are a wide variety of practical constraints due to weather and other environmental conditions, and there are less than a thousand DPEs in the entire US. That was in an awkward but plausible equilibrium for most of the 2010s, but post-COVID, there was both a glut of new pilots and a lot of DPEs who had drastically reduced availability (it's very difficult to make a full-time job, so you get a mix of retirees and weekend warriors), along with other constraints getting baked into the system that made it hard for remaining DPEs to maintain the same velocity as before.

As a result, if your flight school did not have a staff DPE (technically against the rules, but largely tolerated), it could take months and cost over a thousand dollars to run the test for your initial pilot certificate, and if you failed -- or even if you had to cancel because of weather! -- you'd have to pay it a second time later. Most students also had a maximum time between graduation from their flight school's internal tests and when they even attempt a checkride, so other delays could lead to even more costs. This was a very well-known problem in pilot communities to the point I'd heard about it by March 2022. By 2024, a law passed with a specific requirement to start an office specifically monitoring the problem and by 2024 Congress had sent the FAA a further letter asking what the fuck was going on. Complete mess, entirely an infrastructure and coordination problem, zero culture war politics...

And a lot of internal political problems. Flight Standards District Offices (FSDOs) manage DPEs in their geographic area, and while there's been a long waiting list for DPE applicants, FSDOs don't like actually certifying them or managing a large number, both because of the recurrent inspection overhead and for more interpersonal reasons. (I dunno if the DAR/DER stuff is any less bad, but I've heard stories.) And once you became a DPE, the gig was extremely renumerative while their shortage existed, and coincidentally the people who did get to become DPEs inevitably were or became well-known by the FSDO. Fixing this was, inevitably, going to ruffle feathers.

But allowing a snowjob of a biannual report to float through with a general Solving Inefficiencies was easy. Guess what we got? The first biannual report revealed that the FAA, six months in, still wasn't trying to collect data on how much DPEs were charging. Almost zero information about why FSDOs had so low a pass rate for DPE applicants, or why wait lists to apply as a DPE were so long. They did switch around a lot of individual DPE in and out in the local area (sometimes without even telling ex-DPEs why!), as if they only problem was the physical offices of those DPEs, and for a good year it actually got worse in our area. Modernized the search tool, and it's almost impressive how bad it is. Absolute epitome of following the streetlamp effect off a cliff.

Tbf, it's still early game for the current admin; I don't have great hopes.

To be fair, that sounds more like his presidency would be a disaster, rather than him having poor chances of winning.

Maybe, but he burned a lot of bridges with people who would make very good attack ads. Like 40 year career, apolitical professionals ended up hating his guts and can make a very good case for why he made Americans less safe, and would happily do so on national media outlets. Perhaps I'm underestimating the capabilities of the DNC propaganda arm, but especially with his, erm, demographic disadvantages with certain key voter segments, I dont think he would stand a chance.

In 2023 the Dallas Cowboys faced the San Francisco 49ers in the divisional round of the NFL playoffs. It was probably the career-best year for QB Dakota Prescott, they had a strong team. Unfortunately the niners were having a better year, behind Mr. Irrelevant Brock Purdy's establishing campaign, and in the 4th quarter the cowgirl's season was on the brink: they were down a touchdown with just six seconds to go 76 yards. So the Cowboys draw up a hilarious trick play involving putting their running back at center and everyone else out wide, including the rest of the offensive line, and the plan appeared to be to try and lateral a series of hook-and-ladder runs up the field for the touchdown. It, of course, didn't work. Elliott got steamrolled, the pressure got to Dak and he threw it like seven yards for a short gain that accomplished nothing. They looked silly and everyone around the NFL mocked it for a while.

Now as much as I love mocking the cowgirls, realistically their win probability from that position was less than 2.5%. There was a 97% chance that the 49ers were going to win, and the play they called in that situation was unlikely to work. So I always thought mocking them in that situation was a little silly, they just didn't stand much of a chance to begin with so you gotta try something.

In the same way, mocking Kamala for her electoral results for not winning the election is kind of silly, like mocking Ezekiel Elliott and Dakota Prescott, a fun thing to do if you hate their team but ultimately not really the fault of the players on the field. She focuses on the 107 days, but the bigger problem was being tied to an unpopular incumbent president without the advantage of incumbency. If TPTB had the chutzpah to just kill Biden, Kamala would have had a chance: she would have been the first female president, she would have had the advantage of being in power. But running as an incumbent vice president of a clearly failed (because not-running) president, she had all the disadvantages of a failed admin attached to her while having none of the advantages of having concrete accomplishments to point to. She couldn't avoid blame for any of the failures of the administration eg Gaza and Inflation; she couldn't claim credit for any administration successes, eg the economy not cratering post Covid. The Democrats were doomed in 2024 when they nominated Biden and picked Kamala in 2020. Biden was always going to get old, Kamala couldn't be skipped over without pissing off too many people. The result in 2024 was pretty much set in stone, and confirmed when Trump turned left in Pennsylvania.

Pick Pete, don't pick Pete; you were losing either way. Accept what happened and move on, don't try to blame others.

Now if we want to play "How did Kamala manage to lose so badly?" then there's room to analyze performance. But losing was always her fate.

I always felt, and said so loudly at the time, that just like you say if you're in a losing position you might as well try a trick play or a Hail Mary pass. It felt like an obvious mistake to bet on anti-Trump sentiment alone. Biden didn't beat Trump's re-election because he was someone other than Trump (or Clinton) - he won because people thought he seemed at least a halfway decent bet, even if nothing too special. The wrong lessons were learned... again. Crazy.

It depends on your goals. Kamala's realistic goal was always to lose the electoral but win the popular vote and provide enough support to hold onto at least one house of congress. She failed at these minimal goals as well, because she was a bad candidate and faced constraints on maneuver (can't go against Israel). Wild moves might increase your odds of winning the white house marginally, while costing you seats in congress or require touching third rails (Trans, blacks, olds, Israel).

If TPTB had the chutzpah to just kill Biden, Kamala would have had a chance: she would have been the first female president, she would have had the advantage of being in power.

If only there were a role given the power, nay the responsibility, to, under the 25th amendment to assemble a majority of the cabinet and compel a Congressional vote of confidence in the President. Not saying that wouldn't have been a long and potentially-destructive option, but the lack of motion there wasn't IMO a compelling story once Biden stepped aside.

If TPTB had the chutzpah to just kill Biden, Kamala would have had a chance: she would have been the first female president, she would have had the advantage of being in power.

The problem is, that is a double-edged sword: give the masses the chance to see President Kamala (as she takes over from Biden and finishes out his term) and maybe we all see how badly she does when given power. See Ford versus Carter for how being the VP who took over as President wasn't any advantage.

But maybe she does okay, or at least can shuffle off any blame onto the first half of the term when Biden was still in power. Faced with Trump, maybe the Democrats rally behind her as "well, no point changing horses in midstream".

Or maybe there is enough of a run-in to let them have an open primary and choose a different candidate. How gruntled will Kamala be then? Will she get behind the new choice for the sake of the party, or will there be splits and rival camps?

The problem is, that is a double-edged sword: give the masses the chance to see President Kamala (as she takes over from Biden and finishes out his term) and maybe we all see how badly she does when given power. See Ford versus Carter for how being the VP who took over as President wasn't any advantage.

The difference with Ford is that Ford succeeded (as Speaker of the House, not VP) from a disgraced Nixon admin. Kamala, succeeding a dead Biden, would not have been concerned with those disgraces. Witness St. Charles of Kirk; we still avoid speaking ill of the dead. Still moreso a dead president, still more a dead president who was mediocre but ultimately started no wars and kept unemployment under 4.5% for effectively his entire term. She would have basked in the twin glows of succeeding a martyred president, and being the first woman in the white house.

Or maybe there is enough of a run-in to let them have an open primary and choose a different candidate.

The dems could never choose a different candidate after they picked Kamala for VP. They picked Kamala to be a BLACK WOMAN, and they couldn't be seen to skip over a BLACK WOMAN.

Just to correct the record (reference not intended), Biden only committed to picking a woman, not necessarily a Black woman. Two of the four on the shortlist were white. I know it's a punchier line to say, but it's not true.

Beyond that, it's true that passing over Kamala as the replacement would be a bad look, but that would be (not equally, but mostly) also true even if she were not. Vice Presidents are quite literally successors. And Biden in particular had bad personal feelings about not getting Obama's full support in the primary for 2016, so it seems extra unlikely that Biden would actually backstab Kamala in the same way, even on just a purely personal level (even if he was tempted).

Biden only committed to picking a woman, not necessarily a Black woman. Two of the four on the shortlist were white. I know it's a punchier line to say, but it's not true.

I don't know that they committed in advance that "it must be a Black Woman" but I do know that during the Summer of George they picked a Black Woman, and that they absolutely thought about her status as a Black Woman when doing so. I don't think it makes any difference. Passing over the Black Woman who was his natural successor would have been a bad look with significant IdPol portions of the Democratic base, in a way that passing over Joe Biden wasn't.

Biden in particular had bad personal feelings about not getting Obama's full support in the primary for 2016, so it seems extra unlikely that Biden would actually backstab Kamala in the same way, even on just a purely personal level (even if he was tempted).

It wasn't really Joe's call to make, once he had dropped out. The Democratic party circa July of last year isn't beholden to him on this.

Stop saying “I don’t know that they committed in advance to a Black woman”. This is factually wrong. Biden did not. Pointing to being aware of her being Black after the fact is backwards logic.

“They” did not pick her either. This is also wrong. Picking a VP (for the 2020 campaign) is one of the few decisions that voters and party insiders have remarkably little influence in. Yes, they sometimes run little low key pressure campaigns, but ultimately it’s an individual and personal decision. There’s no election. The nominee picks someone, and the party sucks it up. At least this started to be the case especially after 1944 when FDR rejected the party choice, and this solidified in the two decades or so after. In one single case way back in 1972, McGovern’s pick was partially forced out because he had undergone electroshock therapy so there was concern about fitness. That’s it. That’s the whole modern history. Otherwise it’s a rubber stamp.

Regarding the Biden dropout, an event you seem to unnecessarily conflate, Biden could endorse someone, or he could call for a mini primary. Most people seem to agree those were his only two options, and endorsing anyone other than Kamala was basically unthinkable (as I’ve argued on more than a merely idpol basis), so it’s at most three options: endorse Harris, call for primary while pushing Harris, and call for primary while sitting it out. Remember that as sitting president, guy with his name on the PACs and war chests, and effectively party leader, Biden did have the leverage to enforce his decision on a practical basis.

The difference with Ford is that Ford succeeded (as Speaker of the House, not VP) from a disgraced Nixon admin.

And pardoned Nixon, which was extremely unpopular at the time.

If Biden had dropped dead, sure. But the more likely path for President Kamala would have been Biden having to step down, so he would still be around while she finished out the term. Much more difficult to navigate that; a dead Biden would have meant "don't speak ill of the dead" and would have won her more time to distance herself from any unpopular decisions, but if Joe is still alive and kicking (and the Bidens every bit as bitter about power being yanked out of his grasp as they were this time round) then trying to go "no, that unpopular policy belongs firmly in the lap of my predecessor" would evoke "oh yeah? funny how you said nothing against it at the time, traitor!" from them or loyal ex-staffers.

If Biden had dropped dead, sure.

That was the point of the hypothetical.

The difference with Ford is that Ford succeeded (as Speaker of the House, not VP)

Ford was never Speaker (he had previously been the house minority leader) and he was indeed made VPOTUS after Spiro Agnew resigned.

You're correct, I had forgotten this fact.

I'm not really pulling back on the point though. Ford was appointed VP during the Watergate process, he was never really part of a functioning Nixon administration.

That election was winnable. First of all, 107 days is plenty of time for an election - fellow non-Americans, back me up on this. The last 7 days are more important than everything else put together. Secondly, Kamala Harris made a lot of unforced errors in that campaign. She basically hid from the public and she had no iconic or easy-to-understand policy goals. Compare some policy ideas from better politicians, like Build the Wall and Medicare for All. Iconic, bold, and yet emblematic of what the politician stands for. Inseparable from the personality of the originator. Give me a policy goal that fits in 3 words and you've got a shot at winning.

I don't think you can really say she had no chance considering how out-of-touch the campaign was. I think if Justin Trudeau (slightly slimy former PM of Canada) was zapped into Kamala Harris' body Freaky Friday style he could have won that election pretty easily. Trump is an unpopular, divisive figure and he's never won an election against an opponent who wasn't historically unpopular. He is not a strong candidate. The Democrats lost by being even weaker, not because the contest was impossible.

The last 7 days are more important than everything else put together.

Eh? Do American voters really have no attention span, they forget about inflation that happened a couple years ago?

Biden and Kamala should've just done proper economic management and they could easily win. Don't talk about building/repairing infrastructure, build it or at least seem to be building it. Lower the price of energy and make people feel richer. Make them be richer.

Don't let in millions of people through the Southern Border either.

But they couldn't do that because the structure of US governance means the govt struggles to do anything correctly, plus the nature of Democratic policy and staffers means they can't focus on easy wins or implement them if it means compromising on climate, DEI, mass immigration and so on... DEI is how Kamala got into power at all.

Eh? Do American voters really have no attention span, they forget about inflation that happened a couple years ago?

Voters can have a long memory for things that actually happened, and a shorter memory for campaign messages. Conventional wisdom among both professional politicians and academic political scientists is that voters look back 1-2 years, but not a full term, when evaluating incumbents' record on the economy (and, presumably, other real issues like crime).

One interesting and afaik formerly unstudied possibility that emerged from the 2024 election is that voter anger about inflation can persist a lot longer than voter anger about other bad economic outcomes (in particular, temporary high unemployment) because "prices are higher than I think they should be" is something voters feel in the present even if the inflation has stopped.

Part of the point Cummings was making about the Brexit campaign is that the nature of paid online advertising allows you to back-load your campaign into the last week in a way which was impossible with a campaign involving a lot of activist effort, and difficult with paid MSM advertising because the media is already saturated with political ads the week before the election.

One interesting and afaik formerly unstudied possibility that emerged from the 2024 election is that voter anger about inflation can persist a lot longer than voter anger about other bad economic outcomes (in particular, temporary high unemployment) because "prices are higher than I think they should be" is something voters feel in the present even if the inflation has stopped.

Indeed, more studies are necessary to explore scenarios like "people see with their own eyes that they can now afford less than they used to", which flabbergasted the academic political scientists. Why aren't they satisfied with the rate of decline of their purchasing power slowing down? It is difficult to tell, but probably has something to do with right-wing propaganda.

I mean that the claim "voters respond to price levels, not to inflation rates" is a claim that could be empirically tested using the standard methods of political science research, and has not been.

"people see with their own eyes that they can now afford less than they used to"

The voters who swung hardest against Biden in 2024 were working class non-white voters - roughly the group who were most likely to see their incomes keep up with Bidenflation. Historically, voters were pissed off with inflation even when wages were rising faster than prices economy-wide, which is why Nixon felt the need to promise to "Whip Inflation Now". The "voters punish incumbents for inflation" effect appears to be distinct from the "voters punish incumbents for falling living standards" effect. Conventional wisdom among both politicians and political scientists (backed by empirical research which you may or may not believe) is that the electorate as a whole evaluates "falling living standards" based on the first derivative over the 1-2 years before the election. (Voters who personally suffer a large drop in living standards will sometimes turn against the party that was in government at the time for the rest of their lives - one of the advantages Reform have over the Conservatives in the UK is that voters in the North of England don't blame them for Thatcher). It is therefore a surprise if voters evaluate "inflation" based on the price level.

The voters who swung hardest against Biden in 2024 were working class non-white voters - roughly the group who were most likely to see their incomes keep up with Bidenflation.

Reaction to inflation is less "a carton of eggs continues to be 0.1% of the monthly food budget tacked to X% of the total budget tacked to my current income, and so the increase in price is irrelevant to my increased income" and more "holy shit eggs $10 a carton and not $2.50." Much of that was bird flu culling, not inflation, so prices have come back down... but some of it was inflation, so they're still higher than a lot of people locked onto as "the reasonable price of eggs." And since the culling was happening at the same time as the inflation, it gets conflated in the brain for a lot of people.

Orange juice shrinkflation annoys me more, though, and I would suspect that plays a role too. "I'm visibly getting less for my money" is more instinctive than a budget calculation.

When the fuck did Oreo packages get so small?

I mean that the claim "voters respond to price levels, not to inflation rates" is a claim that could be empirically tested using the standard methods of political science research, and has not been.

I don't know if this is a wise way to investigate hypotheses in political science. Even in psychology, medicine, and biology, where metrics are much easier to measure, and conditions are much more controlled, study replication rates are dismal. If you want to measure something this aggregated with no controls, godspeed.

The voters who swung hardest against Biden in 2024 were working class non-white voters - roughly the group who were most likely to see their incomes keep up with Bidenflation.

What do you think you're proving with that?

Let's take an analogy, like the ol' race vs crime that comes up here. When you look for things like "crime by income and race" you get things like this that, for some mysterious reason, talk about the correlations of wage gaps and crime, and it's not until you go to advanced internet racists that you see a straightforward presentation of the relevant data. Same thing is happening with your proposed relationship with Bidenflation and increasing wages. And this is before you start taking into account things like "there was more than one issue that swung the election.

Historically, voters were pissed off with inflation even when wages were rising faster than prices economy-wide, which is why Nixon felt the need to promise to "Whip Inflation Now".

Politicians communicate to voters is not the same way that economists communicate with each other. You can't bring up an old campaign slogan to prove that ackshully the voters were angry about about (the wrong) line go up. Again, you'd have to show that the people he was targeting did actually see the wage increase, and even if they did, that does absolutely nothing to address the issue we're discussing. Is it really so hard to believe that "I can't afford as much stuff as I used to" would be a compelling electoral issue?

Conventional wisdom among both politicians and political scientists (backed by empirical research which you may or may not believe) is that the electorate as a whole evaluates "falling living standards" based on the first derivative over the 1-2 years before the election.

I will again point out that you have absolutely no controls in this attempt to measure correlations.

It is therefore a surprise if voters evaluate "inflation" based on the price level.

If, and only if, you are having Managerialism injected directly into your veins. Like how in Jesus' name do you expect people to forget "I used to be able to afford a lot more with the same salary > 2 years ago"?

Avoiding inflation was structurally impossible when Biden entered office, at best he could’ve kicked the can down the road a bit, but not enough to save his regime. He still would’ve gone senile, had a migrant crisis, etc.

He didn't have to have the migrant crisis; he could have done what Trump has done. Nor did he need to fight for Build Back Better.

Eh? Do American voters really have no attention span, they forget about inflation that happened a couple years ago?

I don't know how well-supported this is (and it's obviously impossible to conduct double blind laboratory studies on election phenomena) but one of the things Dominic Cummings advocated for with the Brexit campaign was to save their money for a massive ad blitz in the week leading up to the vote. The logic is that the effect of an ad mostly wears off after a few days. You only need people to agree with you on the day of the election, so the best time to buy ads is right before.

They won, and AFAICT the British people really did support Brexit on election day and not a moment longer, so it's hard to argue with the results.

She basically hid from the public and she had no iconic or easy-to-understand policy goals.

All of these things were baked in by that point. Kamala had no policy because as VP she couldn't walk away from Biden, especially taking his people and endorsement. She had no policy because she ran away from the only thing she could have been said to be successful at (being a prosecutor) due to George Floyd and she couldn't flip flop again. She couldn't escape the things she did in that time like the quote that gave us the they/them ad.

She was simply an awful candidate, notwithstanding her (justified imo) insecurity and incompetence in the social realm.

First of all, 107 days is plenty of time for an election

I never blame it on the timeline. Rather the major problem is that she can't have

iconic or easy-to-understand policy goals. Compare some policy ideas from better politicians, like Build the Wall and Medicare for All. Iconic, bold, and yet emblematic of what the politician stands for. Inseparable from the personality of the originator. Give me a policy goal that fits in 3 words and you've got a shot at winning.

Because she was VP for four years and didn't try to do anything. She can't have policy goals separate from the Biden administration's policies. It just doesn't make any sense. She can't escape the questions of "Why haven't you done this already?" She's on the horns of the dilemma, she can be gored by "So you were powerless to advocate for your positions for four years?" on the left and "So you're saying Joe Biden was a bad president?" I don't see how you make any bold policy proclamations as Kamala Harris circa July of last year that don't fall victim to one of those two criticisms.

She could claim none of the Biden administrations' accomplishments, such as they were. She couldn't claim to be a steady hand, who had kept the country safe and the economy humming. She also couldn't claim to be a voice for change. Where did that leave her messaging-wise? What bold policy slogan could she have used?

What bold policy slogan could she have used?

In this alternate universe she would have some kind of sincere belief to advocate for. Obama clearly believes in socialized medicine or he wouldn't have fought for Obamacare. Trump clearly believes in barriers that separate the nation from the outside world or he wouldn't be so consistently interested in walls and tariffs. Kamala Harris doesn't seem to actually believe in anything, and that's the problem.

I think it's a lot harder to be a charismatic leader if you don't actually believe in anything.

That being said: Just pick one! Pick a direction and start directing people! She was running for President, people must have been beating down her door to give her policy proposals. She was VP for four years! Did she not have a single idea in four years?

She can't escape the questions of "Why haven't you done this already?"

To be honest, I don't think that would stick to a VP who was trying to spread their wings and fly in a new direction. The answer to that question is obviously "Because I was the Vice President, not the President." Everyone watching that clip would know that's what the answer is. This isn't an obscure point of political minutia, everyone knows the VP isn't allowed to go behind the President's back like that. It's an empty gotcha and I doubt it would resonate.

If- and this is the sticking point- if she actually stood for something, if Harris had hit the floor day 1 advocating for Medicare for All in a clear departure from Biden's policies, I think people would respect her for that. The problem is that she actually doesn't have any policy differences from Biden. My read on Kamala Harris is that she wanted to be President because she likes to be the top banana, not because there's something in particular she wants to do with the most powerful office in the world.

Did she not have a single idea in four years?

I think it was much longer than 4 years where she didn't have a single idea.

Kamala Harris doesn't seem to actually believe in anything, and that's the problem.

She believed in what can be, unburdened by what has been 😁

To be honest, I don't think that would stick to a VP who was trying to spread their wings and fly in a new direction. The answer to that question is obviously "Because I was the Vice President, not the President."

And what's the answer to the other question: "Was Joe Biden a bad president for not listening to you on Medicare For All/Free Palestine/Abolish Prisons/Annex Cuba?"

Kamala would never survive being disloyal to Biden. She would have been electorally doomed if she was perceived as disloyal.

Friendly media gave Harris easy opportunities to differentiate herself from Biden without being disloyal. The correct answer to "what would you have done differently?" is not "Nothing" - it is "With hindsight, we should have stopped the pandemic-era emergency spending as soon as everyone who wanted to be was vaccinated and pivoted to controlling inflation."

"With hindsight, we should have stopped the pandemic-era emergency spending as soon as everyone who wanted to be was vaccinated and pivoted to controlling inflation."

"So why didn't you do it?"

The problem is that, while the VP has no formal powers, a politician good enough to be President should be the kind of person who exerts power just by existing in the space.

"Joe Biden was a great president, and we've worked together to achieve great things over the past four years. We delivered a great economy, we passed legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act and Build Back Better that helped millions of Americans, and (<insert third thing here, I'm having trouble remembering what Biden did during his term>). I consider myself privileged to have been given four years to learn from one of the great statesmen of our time."

"But there are so many more things to do. As your nominee for President of the United States, I'm ready to build upon everything President Biden and I achieved together over the last four years. To that end, I am proud to introduce a new piece of legislation for consideration of Congress (or whatever you say when you do that), the Medicare for All Act, co-sponsored by my good friend Bernie Sanders. I believe that America is the greatest country in the world, and I believe that we can deliver healthcare to every single citizen of this great nation."

"It won't be easy. Trump and his Republicans are going to fight us on it every step of the way. That's why I need your help, America. I need you to come out on election day and give me the Democratic majority I need to get this bill through Congress. I need you to give me four more years! If you choose me to represent you as your president, I promise I will deliver healthcare for every - single - American!"

(Hold for applause from friendly L.A. or New York studio audience.)

No personal offense meant, but any time you start writing a fanfiction speech for a politician, just realize that one is wrong.

  • -10

You are the one who asked. This is an answer to your question.

And what's the answer to the other question: "Was Joe Biden a bad president for not listening to you on Medicare For All/Free Palestine/Abolish Prisons/Annex Cuba?"

Step 1: Ask question.

Step 2: Get answer.

Step 3: Blue screen.

Step 4: Accuse interlocutor of writing fanfiction?

For what its worth, I agree with most of what you're saying. I think it would be trivially easy for a savvy politician to show that, while she respects Joe Biden and agrees with him on most things, there's still a few specific differences that she's going to focus on. Anyone who isn't completely brainrotted by partisan politics can handle that sort of nuance.

But... she was in sort of a unique situation where people were really unhappy with some things and Joe Biden was taking the blame. Covid, inflation, the fall of Kabul, and everything else bad, were all seriously tanking Biden's favorability ratings. I think it also could have been a valid campaign strategy to completely throw him under the bus, criticizing him strongly and presenting herself as a completely different president (even if her actual policies would have been pretty much the same as his). A savvy career politician like Biden would understand that winning elections is more important than being nice to him personally.

But in the end she did... nothing. "Nothing comes to mind." She just kinda floated along with the current and wasted the entire 107 days.

A savvy career politician like Biden would understand that winning elections is more important than being nice to him personally.

I don't think Biden would have stomached that. Throughout the process he was not willing to be a bullet magnet.

More comments

But in the end she did... nothing.

I think this sums it up. There are a lot of things she could have done, and if she had picked one of them and committed to it I think she'd have had a chance. But she didn't, so she didn't.

I think a gay candidate could win a presidential election and I think a woman, including a black woman, could too.

I feel strongly, though, that it’s a question of type. A woman president could be maiden, mother or crone (there are examples of all three winning elections in recent history), but she must across as kind, at least to her allies, and wise. Kamala seemed kind enough, but not wise, and Hillary did not seem kind.

Oprah would win a presidential election for the Democrats. A gay man in the Scott Bessent / Tim Cook mould (soft-spoken but assertive, not necessarily ultra-masculine but not really camp) could win, probably for both the Democrats and the Republicans at this time. I think a gay black man would struggle, although it isn’t impossible. I don’t think a lesbian could win.

See, I think America’s first female President is going to be to the right of Attila thé hun, it makes her look strong and masculine and aggressive. Maybe pickup-truck driving lesbian if the GOP gets more gay friendly.

she must across as kind, at least to her allies

Did Margaret Thatcher come across as kind? I think the traits a woman needs to overcome the gender barrier in politics are: tough without being bitchy, intelligent without being smug, passionate without being hysterical. It's a bit of a tightrope, but I think if you can manage those three you basically don't suffer any disadvantages for being female.

Is Trump a maiden, mother or crone?

Trump is a catty queen, which unfortunately only works in politics for men.

The term I usually hear applied to women (or men who can't perform machismo as well as Donald Trump) who talk like that is "whiny little bitch".

I think Kamala's problem wasn't in the realms of kindness and wisdom, but rather lack of any stable policy. She seemed to go with any wind that blew - see the disastrous 2019 attempt where she over-corrected for being 'Copmala' by going too far in the opposite direction, and gave plenty of hostages to fortune to be dragged out again in 2024 ("she's for they/them" being one).

To correct for 2019, she then tried tacking back to the centre, but the campaign mostly was a reprise of Biden's in 2020: "vote for me because I'm not Trump". What did she stand for, exactly? What were her policies? Balloon popping and brat summer coconut memes weren't enough.

Kamala's problem is that there does not seem to be a 'there' there. I think that based on her record, she's a local politician and becoming Attorney-General of California was as high as she could reasonably go. Yes, she became a senator, and with what result? Her name is linked with Jussie Smollett and that anti-lynching bill which ultimately failed, can anyone tell me of something substantial she achieved in her term? The fact that she's rejected running for Governor of California would indicate to me that she realises her limitations. Otherwise, that would seem like the logical next step on the career ladder - go for that, win that (it is hoped), get a term under her belt, position herself for a run for the presidency in 2032.

Like others I am struggling to see the "Kind" in Kamala's persona. This is colored by race and gender, but my impression was that she genuinely hates white men and was incredibly selfish.

my impression was that she genuinely hates white men

I loathe Kamala as much as anyone here and have said so many times, but this seems like an odd accusation given that she’s married to a white man.

It is unfortunately common for people to hate a group but still have friends/lovers/spouses in the group. There are certain race and gender combinations I like less than others but I wouldn't hesitate to marry the right person for any reason.

That gets into the whole "Are Jews White?" debate. Has Doug expressed a view?

It's basically only on places like the Motte that anyone considers American Jews non-white.

I'd disagree, by pointing to two Jewish employees as Stanford who objected to being lumped into the "white" group by the DEI program. From Inside Higher Ed:

Two Jewish employees of Stanford University’s Counseling & Psychological Services (CAPS) division filed federal and state complaints alleging a hostile environment for Jewish employees in a diversity, equity and inclusion program created internally for CAPS staff.

…

“There was a blind spot in this DEI program when it came to Jewish identity,” Lewin said. “It erased Jewish identity. There was no space for these Jewish employees to share their lived experience, to raise their concerns about anti-Semitism. When they tried, they were attacked.”

…

The complaints allege that “the CAPS DEI program engages in intentional racial segregation through race-based affinity groups” and it “relies upon racial and ethnic stereotyping and scapegoating by describing all Jews as white or white-passing and therefore complicit in anti-Black racism.”

According to the complainants, CAPS staff were divided into two race-based discussion groups who met separately as part of the DEI program -- a “whiteness accountability” group and a separate group for people of color.

Albucher’s and Levin’s respective complaints allege that Jewish staff were “pressured to attend the DEI program’s racially segregated ‘whiteness accountability’ affinity group, which was created for ‘staff who hold privilege via white identity’ and ‘who are white identified, may be newly grappling with or realizing their white identity, or identify as or are perceived as white presenting or passing (aka seen as white by others even though you hold other identities).’”

“The DEI committee has also endorsed the narrative that Jews are connected to white supremacy, advancing anti-Semitic tropes concerning Jewish power, conspiracy and control,” the respective complaints allege. “By endorsing an anti-Semitic narrative that designates Jews collectively as ‘oppressors’ and responsible for systemic racism, while simultaneously denying the uniqueness of Jewish ancestral identity, the DEI committee fosters anti-Jewish sentiment and encourages hostility toward Jews (including Dr. Albucher and Ms. Levin).”

AFAIK it's a pretty minority position among American Jews to consider themselves non-white, and in practice, has largely the same impact as badly-passing trans women: the world continues to view them as men, regardless of how they self-identify.

In an American context, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews are white, have always been white, and have never been considered anything other than white. One silver lining of America having so many laws throughout its history clearly delineating who counts as white and who doesn’t (which was relevant for determining things like who got to marry whom, who got access to which parts of public infrastructure, and even at times who was considered for citizenship) is that we can see exactly who counted as white and who didn’t! In the South, for example, there is a very long history of Jewish businessmen and slave traders, as well as Jewish politicians (such as Judah P. Benjamin, a member of the Confederate States Cabinet) which could not have been the case in such a racially-stratified society if those men were not universally recognized as white!

I don't think I've ever seen being married to [x] as being genuinely interpreted as evidence against hatred against [x]. Because of limitless ability for people to practice cognitive dissonance and compartmentalization, and also because "hatred against [x]" never literally means "hatred against each and every last individual who belongs to [x] category, without one single exception even theoretically possible" (otherwise, the amount of accusations of "hatred against [x]" would drop by several orders of magnitude lower than it is now). In practice, one common trope is "one of the good ones," where "hatred against [x]" actually describes a bigoted negative affect one attaches to individuals belonging to [x] category, and "one of the good ones" is someone for whom whatever negative bigoted beliefs they have about [x] either doesn't exist or exists in small enough amounts to be overcome by their positive attributes.

I don't think I've ever seen being married to [x] as being genuinely interpreted as evidence against hatred against [x].

Sure you have. In fact it seems like a very strong piece of evidence against hatred.

You’re repeating a lot of progressive psychobabble, but the on-the-ground reality is that in the vast majority of cases, an individual who is motivated by a generalized hatred of a particular group is very unlikely to marry a member of that group. This is highly intuitive because of what marriage usually entails. You are not just marrying an atomized individual; you are marrying into a family, a social sphere, an inherited community, etc. By marrying a (Jewish) white man, Kamala committed to spending the next decades of her life surrounded by his white in-laws, his white friends, his white children from a previous marriage, the mostly white people who are part of whatever hobbies and social spaces he inhabits, etc.

Presumably Kamala Harris was not facing the binary choice of A) marry Doug Emhoff or B) die alone. She could have had her pick of plenty of well-placed non-white men. The fact that she chose Emhoff, knowing that by doing so she’d be inviting a large number of white men to become intimately involved with her life, is a pretty strong indicator that she does not in fact hate white men, does not want to limit the number of white men in her life, etc.

You're forgetting a critical point: white self hatred is far more widespread than for any other group.

White male and non-white female relationships are absolutely plagued with this dynamic. The wide can rail about ytppl as much as she wants. If Doug's family is a bunch of California leftists, nobody's going to even argue.

Nothing in your comment indicates that people actually genuinely believe the argument you're making, over the ones I pointed out. I don't doubt that somewhere, someone likely had a genuine reaction of "he's married to [x], therefore the likelihood that he has hatred for [x] is lower," if only for Bayesian reasons. But, I'll reiterate, I've never actually observed this happening anywhere. By my observation, people consider it exactly as discredited as the "My best friend is black/gay/trans/etc." explanation for why someone isn't racist/homophobic/transphobic/etc. in basically exactly the same ways (note that some people will say that this is discredited because it's a lie - this person's best friend actually isn't black/gay/trans/etc. - this is one form of discrediting it, but the more common one is that presuming that that statement were true, it still says nothing about whether or not that person has hatred for [x]). Because "hatred" is such a loose term that can encompass a near limitless range of behaviors and attitudes.

But, I'll reiterate, I've never actually observed this happening anywhere.

You are observing it right now, in this very conversation. And in fact you have observed it many times; the entire reason that progressives had to invent this galaxy-brain contrarian psychobabble you’re regurgitating is because so many normal people intuitively recognized that someone who hates X is actually pretty unlikely to form a long-term intimate relationship with an X. This view has not been “discredited”. It remains true, and you have let Social Science™️ enjoyers gaslight you into believing that “Oh, everyone knows that’s been discredited.” It has not! The contrarian critical theory take is actually just wrong!

Alright, fair enough. If you're saying you genuinely buy this argument and genuinely don't consider it discredited, then I have no grounds with which to claim that you are wrong. But, honestly, none of this is galaxy-brain contrarian psychobabble. The ability of humans to compartmentalize apparently-contradictory views is something that has been observed long before anyone ever came up with modern critical theory.

More to the point, the word "hatred" when used to describe someone like Harris "hating white men" is clearly meant to invoke the same kind of meaning as when someone claims that someone like Trump "hates women" or someone like Charlie Kirk "hated gay people." It's perfectly reasonable to complain that this re-definition of "hatred" in order to keep the negative affect and connotations while expanding its scope to include entirely loving and empathetic behaviors towards someone is dishonest. I consider that as a non-discredited way of arguing against accusations of hatred: my behavior only counts as hatred under your deranged, stupid re-definition of hatred, and I don't respect your deranged, stupid re-definition. But I do consider the argument that "this other behavior I engage is inconsistent with someone who hates [x]" as fully discredited, because it's neither engaging with the actual accusation nor engaging with the reality of cognitive dissonance.

More comments

But, I'll reiterate, I've never actually observed this happening anywhere.

Literally the only place I don't see it happening is in progressive strongholds like Reddit and so on. Most people, in my experience, assume that you don't hate (insert group here) if you freely choose to hang out all the time with a member of that group. Which is eminently sensible. The progressive argument for how someone can hate black people while being married to a black person is a terrible argument that doesn't align at all with how people actually behave.

She's married to a white man. I could believe she's indifferent to prejudice suffered by white men, but outright hatred seems a bit extreme.

Isn't there an old(?) joke about "Not asking a white supremacist the race of their significant other."

I've got no idea, I'll take your word for it.

Kamala may have been polite in public and even funny and personable in her best moments but I don't know about kind.

I think even in the primary there was criticism of her treatment of staff.

Kamala seemed kind enough

How did she show her kindness? She was not a nurse or a mom of large family or anything like that. Quite the opposite - she has no children of her own and she worked as a prosecutor. Not exactly a profession I would mark as kind. I also remember this video where she was invited for some talk with kids as part of NASA space week. At best she came out as cringe, at worst she had a vibe of slightly drunk and slightly unhinged childless auntie.

Is there something that I missed where she was very warm, loving and humane?

One of the comments: "Dear Lord she makes Hillary look sincere". Ouch. Gave me a laugh though. It's actually crazy that you get to be that age and you still genuinely think that deploying the voice normally used for 5-year-old kids on 11-ish-year-old kids (or somewhere in there, I dunno) is a good idea. No. It's a terrible idea. That's exactly the age where you use the adult voice, they freaking love it, it's not even hard.

It's actually crazy that you get to be that age and you still genuinely think that deploying the voice normally used for 5-year-old kids on 11-ish-year-old kids (or somewhere in there, I dunno) is a good idea.

Why? Kids are inferior- being older is considered a prestigious badge of rank (it's even easier to become old than it is to become a parent)- and that's how you talk to your inferiors. (What are they going to do, not vote for you? That's a problem for future-you.)

More seriously, a significant fraction of adults believe, conspicuously, that (like the rest of the world was) they were created last Thursday as a fully-formed adult. Thus, they can claim to have memories of childhood, but since they're also aware those are artificial, they have zero relevance to anyone they're talking to and can safely be discarded. So they might legitimately believe they remember, but since they're fundamentally unsullied by the experience, there's no implied responsibility to use the data in those memories (especially if it would require 5 seconds of mental effort or other similar impositions, or taking a risk for which you bear most of the moral hazard).

I have yet to fully figure out why this is, beyond it just being a power thing (and perhaps necessary in some cases) and most people having comparatively poor long-term memory (incapacity and malice being indistinguishable at the extremes, of course). That's why people think 5 and 15 are the same age- this is most apparent in people who are very slightly older than that for some reason. It's also a habit thing for parents, who tend to get really anxious and self-conscious about the tricks used to control 5 year olds no longer working as well on 15 year olds.

I meant it more in the sense that treating them older (or giving the appearance of it) works, so her failure to even try painfully indicates how little she’s been around children.

More largely, you’re correct. It drives me crazy for example when talking about the book wars in public schools how few people seem to truly grasp that there are some concepts that children at particular ages are almost physically incapable or grasping. Age appropriateness is not purely about, like, not showing them naked people or swearing, it’s about what types of ideas are presented and at what pace.

So I guess it’s possible I was too harsh, but it feels like a politician usually takes pains to figure out what “works” in communication, so it’s still strange to see a politician failing so badly and in such a sustained fashion.

so her failure to even try painfully indicates how little she’s been around children.

She couldn't do it around adults, much less children. As far as seeing it strange to see a politician failing to politician properly... well, Kamala was the diversity hire.

it’s about what types of ideas are presented and at what pace.

Yes, but that's the boring non-controversial stuff nobody really talks about. We want to fight over naked people and swearing for whatever reason, probably because it's flashy and it's something only adults care about. (Kids do not care about this, they'd rather get back to the interesting part rather than boring/gross adult nonsense- adults forget that on purpose, of course.)

I think she has cringe but harmless wine aunt energy, a soft-ish voice, she’s not shrill, she seems somewhat befuddled, she doesn’t seem smart enough to screw you over. I felt sorry for her in some of the bad interviews, whereas I never felt sorry for Hillary.

Perhaps kind is too strong a word but unlike Hillary she didn't seem actively malevolent, which is within striking distance of as good as you're going to get with a politician.

she didn't seem actively malevolent

On one hand, yes, I agree.

On the other hand, good God we've set the bar low.

I think it's an indictment of Harris' political instincts. Buttigieg is the best communicator in the Democratic Party. Harris and Walz are both weak speakers and weak debaters who struggle to connect with the voters. She could have picked the person who shored up her weakness, but instead she chose someone who had the same weakness. She was so fixated on identity (Walz is a white male football coach therefore white men will vote for me?) that she missed the larger issue.

Her assumption that her greatest political weakness is being a black woman shows a lack of self-awareness. She didn't need a straight white man to shore up her weakness of being a black woman, she needed a charismatic speaker to shore up her weakness of being an uncharismatic machine politician.

she needed a charismatic speaker to shore up her weakness of being an uncharismatic machine politician

But the problem with that would be that her running mate would then overshadow her, and that was her exact problem with Shapiro, which is why she picked Walz instead.

Kamala is a little insecure, or rather she seems to find it hard to make decisions quickly and second-guesses herself and (allegedly) doesn't take advice well, but then blames staff around her when things go wrong. So picking someone who would be the Bill Clinton or Obama charisma-wise of the campaign, thus relegating her to second place, would be exactly the thing she would never do.

It also just doesn't work for the Veep to be the driving personality.

It's one thing if she was some grey eminence but she had a mediocre time as Senator, an awful time as a campaigner in 2020 and her record as a prosecutor was of dubious value. What does she bring then to balance the impression that her Veep should be President instead?

They were both the identity candidate. Being a straight white male football coach just means he was also picked for the color of his skin over his competence.

The more I think about it, the more I think you're right, no notes.

I don’t know whether Buttigieg as VP would have moved the needle. But the issue with what was in the book is that it’s indefensible by the current year democrat worldview. If she had actually chosen Buttigieg and lost, saying that his homosexuality was a detriment due to the bigoted American public would have been okay. By saying she couldn’t have chosen him because the bigoted American public wouldn’t accept a gay VP she’s using the same logic as a company saying they can’t choose a gay CEO because the shareholders are bigoted, or a retail store saying they can’t hire a black guy because their customers are racist. It’s a banal observation to note that insert politician is being hypocritical, but this little controversy is funny to me because I don’t think her ghostwriter caught the rhetorical bind this passage would put her in. I think it was intended to be uncontroversial in the same way as saying her loss was due to the voters being racist/sexist, but ended up backfiring

I mean, she's entirely happy to blame racism and sexism for why she didn't win, so as you say having a gay VP would be yet another ready-made excuse ("it's not because we ran a shoddy campaign, it's because the voters are racist sexist homophobes!")

Genuinely, the only sense I can make of what she's saying now (apart from 'gosh, ease off on the day drinking, girl') is that she wants to sabotage Buttigieg and as many others in the Democratic party as she can in revenge for what she sees as their betrayal.

It's one thing to say she had a problem making racists and sexists happy; it's quite another to say that she foresaw a problem making homophobes happy and so she solved it.

Unless her aim was to sprinkle some controversy into the book to generate publicity for her talk show tour, I have no idea why she mentioned Buttigieg in that context. This was answering a question nobody was asking until she went on about "well clearly I couldn't have a gay guy as my running mate".

"Why couldn't you?"

"Gimme a break, it was hard enough trying to persuade the American people to vote for me because duh, it's me, how the heck would I get them to vote for a gay on top of that? Er, not that there's anything wrong with being born that way! Just... nobody is gonna vote for you except those freaks in California, and there's not enough of them to swing it despite our best efforts".

I honestly think Harris's chances at becoming POTUS in 2029 would've skyrocketed (to single digits) if her book and her interviews had that tone.

This is why Newsom is trying to emulate Trump on social media. That tone, if you can pull it off, has a certain brash appeal. "Look, I know you're not dumb, despite how the rest of this shower talk down to you. You know and I know we politicians are a bunch of chancers. But lemme put my cards on the table here: you vote for me, I won't screw you over. Some shit won't fly, you gotta accept that, and I can't do it for you. But listen, bud. Those elites hate you and they hate me. So together, we can give those fancy-pants elites a poke in the eye, and don't you wanna see that happen? C'mon, I know you do!"

I actually did get a really good laugh out of his most recent Trump parody, which makes me hate myself just a little bit for liking anything out of Newsom's stupid mouth, but yeah, it works.

To me this feels like a totally fake controversy reminiscent of Romney’s “binders full of women” thing. As long as I have been alive this has been common wisdom, that if you have a more “edgy” candidate you need a normie to balance it out. That’s why Obama (young, black, inexperienced) went with Biden (older, white, long-time politician). Effectively you only have so many weirdness points to spend before you become offputting to the mainstream. Whether or not this is smart politics in 2024 is a separate question, but this strikes me as completely typical

The thing is, so far as I can see, nobody was asking "Gee, why didn't Kamala pick Pete?" The question was "why didn't she pick Shapiro over Walz?" and the answer was "she was scared he was too ambitious".

So this is coming out of nowhere (unless anyone has any information to the contrary) and the only thing it's doing is stirring up controversy. Why is she doing this now? is the interesting question.

he answer was "she was scared he was too ambitious".

Also too competent. Also too Jewish.

Jewishness would have hurt with the black vote, but probably less than gayness.

True, but it does fly against ALL of the messaging of the Harris campaign, which was that the only reason anyone wouldn't want to vote for Harris is because they are a bigot who should listen to their betters. If it's unacceptable to vote for Trump or not vote because you aren't feeling a woman president then it is similarly unacceptable to not vote for the gay vp. That kind of petard self-hoisting is very entertaining imo.

I think it wasn't nearly as bad as the Clinton campaign, that was the strongest of the vote-shaming, but it was there in part. I do disagree about the overall framing though. I don't think Harris tried that hard to put at the forefront any other argument beyond "Trump bad" and "Trump endangers democracy". Maybe "trust the status quo"? With a dash of "billionaires ruined your life"?

I think it wasn't nearly as bad as the Clinton campaign

I'm With Her was pretty bad, but I don't remember anything from Clinton's campaign was so bad as to top the infamous I'm A Man ad for incredibly cringe, absurd "listen to your betters" messaging.

Different vibe, but Madeline Albright introducing Clinton at a campaign event with "There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!" was also pretty disastrous, the less talked-about cousin to "basket of deplorables" in my eyes. It wasn't limited to single demographics, so hit broader.

I actually think the worst part of that ad (other than the bits that sound like an SNL skit) was casting a fat guy in a "I'm a man" ad, so it doesn't even work. Literally no man ever considers being that overweight to be particularly manly. If you're gonna pick a big dude, you have to pick at least a dude who has some muscles underneath. No offense intended to anyone, of course, I'm just talking about what people want to see in ads - obviously we have different standards for those, it's quite literally marketing 101. The poses are all wrong too, the gaunt old guy is very out of left field, and there's no suburban dad anywhere here, poor usage of beard stubble, and just guys giving off super-single vibes. It's just incompetent, holy yikes, even on top of the content.

Personally I think putting out cringey content is not as bad as actively alienating people. The I'm a Man ad is desperate, not aggressively shaming.

top the infamous I'm A Man ad

I had never actually seen that. Damn. That's pathetic.

Somebody assure me this was a parody. I cannot believe this is real, not even if it was some over-enthused and over-medicated squirrel somewhere who thought this was just gonna do it for Kamala and the elusive male vote.

"I eat carburettors for breakfast". You look like it, friend, and you definitely need to cut way back on them. Try a salad now and again.

(I can fat-shame, I am a Person Of Amplitude myself).

It's 100% real, it's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen in my entire life.

Black voters ain't got no time for no whitebread homosexual; dude literally polls at zero percent with them for 2028. He's electoral poison.

And you think they’ll vote Republican instead? Hitler with a D after his name would win the black vote by large margins. These are simply not malleable votes.

Trump did better among blacks because of young male defections against their elders. This isn’t something democrats can fix.

Hitler with a D after his name would win the black vote by large margins.

Blacks have no reason to dislike Hitler. On every edgepost about a modest austrian painter there are a lot of black guys commenting. Rarely disapprovingly.

Do I really need to sit here and explain why having little to no support or enthusiasm among one of your party's key voting blocs is a very bad thing, even if they don't outright vote for the other side? It really didn't even occur to you?

I find it hard to believe that most black voters would have an opinion about the VP nominee. Most people don't follow politics that closely. I recall trending Google searches about whether Biden was still running the day after the election.

Just don't send Pete to Chicago. Send him to do the Pride parade and shake hands with suburban moms. Send Kamala to talk to the brothas and sistas. (I don't think black voters like Kamala Harris either, but that's neither here nor there. They ended up sending Obama. With a bench that deep, who even needs the VP?)

Yeah so when your strategy regarding your VP pick is trying to keep one of your core constituencies from noticing that he exists, maybe there are better VP picks.

He's got zero percent of the first winner-take-all preference, yep. But his favorables are at +22 net, that's +39 and -17, with a whopping 45% "don't know" as I recently pointed out. So with actual polling data, it especially as VP it seems very tenuous based on the data to assume he'd be some kind of Black vote poison-pill, especially with a Black woman at the top of the ticket.

Edit: punctuation and clarifying:

That's favorables among Black voters specifically. The eventual nominee, Tim Walz? Among the same group of Black voters, +30 net, that's +49 and -19 with 36% DK. A little bit of daylight, but not an incredible amount - definitely not the kind of poison pill you describe. In fact, if my napkin math is right, assuming the same proportionality, if Pete had Walz's 36% "don't know", then his numbers would be +25 net, +45 and -20. That's only 1% worse (absolute) in negative viewpoints.

The numbers seem to clearly reject this idea, unless you make three very questionable assumptions: that massive numbers of Black voters didn't then know he was gay, and would also change their views unfavorably, and that this unfavorable swing would affect the entire Harris-Buttigieg ticket (in turnout or voting instead for Trump). Again, those seem very questionable assumptions.

Did Kamala have polling we didn't? Plausible. Seems unlikely.

Sure, whatever. Put him at the top of the ticket while you're at it.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats