Let us start with a truth unfortunate to both Republicans and those in my vocation: Persuadable voters couldn’t care less when, within reason, Vice President Kamala Harris sits down for a “serious” interview or holds a full-dress press conference.
The news media is one of the least admired institutions in American public life, not as bad as Congress, but pretty awful given that our trade is based on trust and accuracy. When we rightly and understandably obsess over Harris laughing off our demands that she submit herself to our ministrations, normal, persuadable voters probably treat us with about as much sympathy as they would car salesmen complaining that not enough people are buying extended warranties and undercoating.
Journalists care very much if she does an interview and a press conference before or after the Democratic convention, with or without her running mate, on a fluffy morning show or with a buttoned-down reporter, etc. But if we think Americans, whom we can barely get to consume the news at all, are going to care about those differences, we are every bit as out of touch with reality as we are accused of being.
Republicans, though, have glommed on to the idea with both hands. Funny how a 5-point swing in the polls took us from the “enemy of the people” to essential guardians of the public trust.
François de La Rochefoucauld will never fail us in these matters: “Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue.” Which is a prettier way of saying that we in the press should welcome the Trump campaign’s newfound respect for the fourth estate. Enjoy it while you can, because if the polls flip again, we’ll return to the top of MAGA’s enemies list.
The thinking is pretty obvious: Harris is famously bad at speaking extemporaneously, and when she does her first interview as the Democratic presidential nominee, it will be the most consequential and intensely scrutinized such session in her 34-year career in public office. Republicans are desperate for something, anything, to change the trajectory of a race they are right now most certainly not just losing, but losing badly. Voters said for more than a year that they wanted someone else other than the retreads from 2020, and now that they have her.
In service of Republicans’ effort to smoke Harris out, former President Donald Trump held a rare press conference last week with the gaggle of reporters covering his campaign from his subtropical hermitage at Mar-a-Lago.
In another boon for journalistic accountability, the most significant news he made was crawling back into a September 10 debate he had crawled out of only the week before.
Aside from that, the big news was that Trump confused two black politicians from California and made up a story about Harris’ romantic past. So we’d call it not Trump’s worst press conference ever, but not likely to disrupt Harris’ splendid isolation.
More effective has been Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, who, after the worst launch of a vice presidential candidate since James Stockdale, has found firmer footing as the campaign’s spokesman. Disciplined and quick, Vance shows he is a far more formidable opponent than Democrats imagined he would be.
It is unlikely that Vance will ever become a broadly popular figure, but he is a far better flack than Trump or anyone else on the staff. And when he sat for a trio of interviews Sunday, he had a useful tool with which to try to get the Harris campaign off script.
Vance’s Democratic counterpart, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, was rightly regarded by the blue team as the “safe” pick. By choosing a candidate favored by progressive activists, it gives Harris more room to execute the gymnastic floor exercises of flip-flopping. Give the kooks what they want in a running mate, and you get more space to run to the middle. But Democrats imagined Walz would be more than just a way to cossett the left. He could appeal, they believed, to working-class white voters because of his earthy style and all-American résumé.
The style isn’t wearing so well, revealing yet again that the kind of snark and cruelty that delights the very online parts of the parties doesn’t play with the persuadables. But it’s the résumé that’s the real problem. Walz exaggerated his military service for political advantage, which, even in extreme circumstances, is not necessarily fatal, but is always bad.
Walz’s case was not extreme. He claimed a military rank that he never fully secured and at least once left the strong, false impression that he had been in combat. But he did not, for instance, fabricate a very specific war story. Walz seems more to have elided than to have lied.
The bigger problem is that some of Walz’s former comrades in the Minnesota National Guard artillery battalion seem very eager to tell America exactly what they think of the now-governor’s decision to quit in 2005 before the unit shipped off for the Iraq war, in favor of a run for Congress.
Trump, who went to great lengths to avoid service in Vietnam and instead preferred to face a different kind of danger at home, is perhaps not well situated to attack Walz’s otherwise meritorious 24 years of service. But Vance is. He was a public affairs officer in Iraq, reporting on what his fellow Marines were doing at about the same time Walz’s former unit shipped out.
Vance is zeroing in on a substantial weakness for Walz. If a politician’s brand is about humility and service, anything that points to exaggeration and self-interest is dangerous. It’s probably not enough to get Harris out of her shell, but will certainly be enough to force Walz to face some unhappy questions. The time to do an interview is when you need to change the story, and Walz most certainly needs to do that.
But right now, that’s about the best that Republicans have going for them.
For the first time this cycle, voters prefer the Democratic candidate on handling the economy—and the data suggest that it’s not without cause. Gas prices are down, and so are border crossings and crime rates. And best of all for the party in power, the challenger is unable to soothe himself, and therefore unable to apply steady pressure on the frontrunner.
Calling Walz’s record “stolen valor,” may be grasping at straws, but in a race that is rapidly getting away from the Republicans, it represents the only tool at hand right now to get the Democrats off their winning game plan.
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