The Rubber Meets the Road

Both major party conventions are now in the can, so it really is Game On. But of course, we are not talking about a game. The stakes are too high for that term.

To add to the cliché festival here, though, the stars are aligned for Kamala Harris. President Biden moved the big one into place by declining to seek re-election and endorsing her. But contributing to the alignment is the fact that Harris is fortunate to simply be facing a bad candidate. Trump is now the old guy with an old act and incapable of carrying the baggage he has accumulated.

Harris is not a socialist, but she is a liberal, and must be careful about what she seems to be promising. For example, alleging price-gouging by supermarket chains and proving it are two different animals, which I’m sure she understands as a former prosecutor. As for doubling the child tax credit and giving first-time homebuyers $25,000 toward a down payment, those may be worthy ideas, but she will have to be clear about where the money is coming from. And soon, she will have to face the media and start answering hard questions during interviews, town halls, and debates.

While I welcome Harris’s entry and share many of the positive feelings of her fans, I have been wondering about what might have happened if the stars had been aligned another way. I think that if she were facing a seasoned, literate, and more sensible Republican conservative, she would have a much harder time. Suppose the party had decided to replace Trump with Nikki Haley after all, or Harris were facing Larry Hogan or even Liz Cheney? A different kettle of fish (oops). Anyway, she isn’t.

If Harris and Tim Walz do win, as many expect, will they be there for two terms or just one? Another question perhaps silly to speculate about. But that will depend on whether the Republican Party can dump its current clichés, reframe itself, and return to the best principles of its past. It would be nice if the party included more politicians capable of, and interested in, actually governing.

To start with, MAGA should be replaced by MGOPGA – Make the GOP Great Again. Yeah, it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. But by the next election, it could.

Play It Again, Kam

 

Just having a little fun, but here’s where I’m going with this: I watched Vice President Kamala Harris’s first speech after President Joe Biden bowed out of the November election race and endorsed her in her bid to become his successor. Harris talked about her experience as a prosecutor and allowed as how she had seen Donald Trump’s type before. Later, she used the same line about Trump’s type in Pennsylvania, where she introduced her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

Walz delivered a spellbinding address with many memorable moments, including the Minnesota Golden Rule: Mind Your Own Damn Business, challenging the Republicans to stay away from regulating women’s healthcare. He repeated that line, and many other offerings from his earlier speech, at a rally the next day. The speech was almost identical

At first, I thought, “Hey guys, you did that bit yesterday!’ And then I said to myself, calm down, you’re being too tough a room! This is an election campaign, in which candidates will travel to many different places and will deliver basically the same speech over and over again, perhaps with a couple of adjustments to respond to current campaign developments.

Stump speeches, as they are called, are fixtures of American politics. In the old days, before continuous live media coverage, this worked, because the folks in Cleveland obviously had not heard what was said earlier in Peoria.

Then I thought, we don’t complain about comedians doing the same show while touring the country, as long as we see them when they arrive in our city or on TV. And if Taylor Swift wants to introduce new songs, that’s fine, but the audiences also want to sing along with the old ones. No complaints about repetition there either.

It reminds me of a really old story about the banquet show at a comedians’ convention. Everyone in the audience knew everyone else’s jokes, so it was decided to assign a number to each joke to save time. A comic on stage simply said 3, and there were gales of laughter. Then he called out 10, and got the same response. Finally, he  tried 12. Nothing. Since all the people there were colleagues, he asked them from the stage, “What’s wrong? That wasn’t funny?” Someone in the audience stood up and said, “That wasn’t it, it was your delivery.”

But hey, it’s not like Harris’s opponent in November never repeated HIMself, right? It’s election season, so let’s just roll with it.