Walz Accepts Democrats’ Vice Presidential Nomination

Happy Thursday! Drucker, Charles, and Mike seem to be having a great time in Chicago, which does lead us to consider, if only briefly, that Declan may have been onto someth—nah, forget it.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz accepted Democrats’ nomination to serve as their vice presidential candidate on Wednesday night, the third night of the Democratic National Convention. The night again saw a handful of Republicans and former Trump supporters—former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan and Olivia Troye, former homeland security aide to former Vice President Mike Pence—warn of what they considered former President Donald Trump’s unfitness for office. Former President Bill Clinton, television host Oprah Winfrey, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Govs. Wes Moore of Maryland and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania also spoke Wednesday. Walz, who has recently faced questions about the veracity of parts of his biography, delivered the keynote address. 
• The Department of Labor revised its employment numbers on Wednesday, finding that non-farm job gains reported in the 12 months leading up to March 2024 were overestimated by 818,000—a 28 percent decrease from the 2.9 million new jobs the agency’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported in April and the largest payroll revision by the BLS since 2009. The adjusted figures paint a picture of a softer labor market than previously understood and could prompt the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates more aggressively when it meets in September. 
• Russian officials said on Wednesday that Ukrainian drones attacked Moscow overnight, adding that the city’s air defenses shot down all the incoming weapons, which caused no damage or casualties. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin called the assault “one of the largest attempts to attack Moscow with drones ever.” Ukraine has not yet claimed responsibility for the drone attack. 
• The New York Times reported Tuesday that President Joe Biden approved a new classified nuclear strategic plan in March that focuses on China’s nuclear arsenal, which U.S. national security officials are concerned is growing even faster than anticipated. The plan—officially dubbed the “Nuclear Employment Guidance”—outlined the possibility that China, Russia, and North Korea may collaborate on nuclear projects posing a threat to the U.S. 
• In a study published in Nature Wednesday, scientists determined that the moon’s south pole was once covered in an ocean of magma—liquid molten rock. Data collected by India’s Chandrayaan-3 lunar rover suggest that the ocean formed about 4.5 billion years ago. The findings “show that the local lunar terrain in this region is fairly uniform and primarily composed of … a product of the lunar magma ocean crystallization,” the authors wrote. The Chandrayaan-3 rover landed on the moon in August 2023, making India the fourth country to land on the lunar south pole. 
• At least 28 Pakistani pilgrims died in Iran late Tuesday night—and 23 others were injured, including 14 in critical condition—after their bus overturned while en route to Karbala, Iraq. The passengers were heading to the central Iraqi city for Arbaeen, a two-day Islamic holiday.
• Democratic Rep. Bill Pascrell of New Jersey passed away Wednesday morning at the age of 87, according to his family. Pascrell—a veteran of the U.S. Army—had represented New Jersey in Congress since 1997, and prior to that was a two-term mayor of Paterson, New Jersey. Before entering politics in 1987, Pascrell had worked as a high school history teacher. Per state election law, Democratic county officials need to select a new nominee for the race to fill Pascrell’s seat by August 29.

Coach Walz Gives a Pep Talk

CHICAGO—Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz accepted the Democratic nomination for vice president Wednesday evening with an efficient, energetic 15-minute-long address that brought a packed United Center arena to its feet with paeans to the compassion and greatness of America.

“We’re all here tonight for one beautiful, simple reason: We love this country,” Walz said in his now trademark homespun style, echoing the dominant theme of the third night of the Democratic National Convention. “Freedom is a big part of what this election is about,” he added before taking a moment to acknowledge his wife Gwen, his daughter Hope, and his son Gus. “You are my entire world and I love you.”

It was a well choreographed coming-out party for the 60-year-old vice presidential nominee, though his address kicked off after prime time on the East Coast—nearly 11:30 p.m.—because the program, like the first two nights, went long and ran late. Walz, a former high school teacher, was introduced by former student Ben Ingman, who in turn welcomed to the stage alumni of the Mankato West High School football team he helped coach to a state championship a quarter-century ago. 

Walz, whom Vice President Kamala Harris selected as her running mate just two weeks ago, was the headliner, as is the tradition for the Wednesday evening of a four-day presidential nominating convention. A roster of VIP speakers preceded the governor, priming the crowd and viewers for his speech: political luminaries like former President Bill Clinton; entertainment industry celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and rising Democratic stars, like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.

For convention delegates and guests, at least, Walz was worth the wait. The crowd waved signs that read “Coach Walz” and hoisted cutouts of the governor’s face. And Walz didn’t overstay his warm welcome. 

In just half the run time of nomination acceptance speeches delivered in July by Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio; and delivered in 2016 and 2020 by former Vice President Mike Pence; and delivered by Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, the 2016 Democratic vice presidential nominee, Walz told the story of his life. His whole family was at points during the speech moved to tears. In a touching moment caught on camera, Walz’s son, Gus, a high school student, stood, tears in his eyes and clapping before pointing at his father and saying: “That’s my dad.” 

In addition to highlighting his own biography—so much of why Harris picked him—Walz expressed the domestic ambitions and philosophy of a would-be Harris administration. 

“I think we owe it to the American people to tell them exactly what she’d do as president before we ask them for their vote,” Walz said. “If you’re a middle class family, or a family trying to get to the middle class, Kamala Harris is going to cut your taxes. If you’re getting squeezed by prescription drug prices, Kamala Harris is going to take on Big Pharma. If you’re hoping to buy a home, Kamala Harris is going to help make it more affordable.” 

He also proved his mettle as an attack-dog, taking a few partisan shots at Vance and former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee. “When I was teaching every year, we’d elect a student body president,” Walz said. “And you know what? Those teenagers could teach Donald Trump a hell of a lot about what a leader is.” 

Perhaps coincidentally—or perhaps not—there was another vice presidential nomination acceptance speech that was short and sweet, just like Walz’s. It was delivered in 2020 by Harris.

Battle Over Homeless Encampments Heats Up 

On the national stage, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is known for his slicked-back hair, liberal creds, willingness to pick fights with national Republicans, and a penchant for visiting Michelin-starred restaurants during pandemic lockdowns. 

He is not known for getting his hands dirty and picking up trash. But a high-profile visit to a homeless encampment in the San Fernando Valley earlier this month saw the governor clad in a ballcap and utility gloves, throwing away used tires and pieces of cardboard as state transportation workers cleared the site.

The incongruous scene was just one manifestation of the renewed debates over homelessness roiling cities across the country, especially in the West. In an unusual left-right alliance, increasingly fed-up liberals are seeking to take advantage of a recent Supreme Court ruling that took down a legal restriction on clearing homeless encampments, triggering a debate over how to tackle an issue that has bedeviled many American cities for years. 

Since a 2018 decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals—which has jurisdiction over the Western United States—cities in this area had been unable to enforce their anti-camping ordinances that would have given them authority to clear homeless encampments. In Martin v. Boise, the court held that to do so would amount to punishing people for their “status” as homeless. So long as there were not sufficient shelter beds to house the people cleared from the public space, the 9th Circuit said, based on a 1962 Supreme Court precedent, to remove them amounted to a violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment.” 

Many West Coast city authorities were stymied, as their homeless populations far exceeded shelter capacity. Los Angeles, for example, is estimated to have nearly three times as many homeless individuals—42,000—as available shelter beds, and San Francisco’s shelter capacity is under half of its estimated homeless population. It’s worth noting that this ruling did not not apply to all cities in the country—only those under the 9th Circuit’s jurisdiction—and that homeless encampments proliferated on the West Coast long before Martin. 

In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines earlier this summer, the Supreme Court overturned Martin in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson. The majority opinion, authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, held that an anti-camping ordinance passed by a small city in Oregon seeking to block homeless encampments in public parks did not violate the Eighth Amendment, as the law could be neutrally enforced. “Under the city’s laws, it makes no difference whether the charged defendant is homeless, a backpacker on vacation passing through town, or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest on the lawn of a municipal building,” Gorsuch wrote.

Though the judges broke on ideological lines, it was nevertheless the rare ruling that was celebrated by both judicial conservatives and the likes of Newsom. In a statement after the decision, Newsom said that the “decision removes the legal ambiguities that have tied the hands of local officials for years and limited their ability to deliver on common-sense measures to protect the safety and well-being of our communities.”

Newsom was joined by mayors from many deep-blue areas: Those asking for the Supreme Court to take up Grants Pass also included the cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Seattle, and Honolulu, as well as the National League of Cities, which represents more than 19,000 cities and towns.

Encampments have a long history in most Western cities with large homeless populations, but they have spread in recent years. The percentage of unsheltered homeless people—those who sleep in places not designed for continuous human habitation, as opposed to those who couch-surf or stay in shelters—has risen sharply. This increase can be attributed to the closure of many homeless shelters during the pandemic, as well as the rising cost of living. But Martin certainly did not help matters; cities in the 9th Circuit saw their homeless populations increase by 25 percent and also saw expanding numbers of homeless encampments.

Homeless people are sometimes drawn to tent encampments because they offer a sense of insulation from social pressures that would discourage or inhibit drug use and addiction. “Even if you’re not a member of the community, it becomes a place where you know you can find drugs,” Stephen Eide, a homelessness policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute, told TMD. One notorious example was “the Zone” in downtown Phoenix, which has grown over the last several years to a population of almost 1,000 people, before it was dismantled by court order in late 2023. 

As each new person joins an encampment, building social networks, sharing advice, and aiding others in finding drugs, some encampments assume a kind of momentum, growing quite quickly. “You create a community out of people who … check every single box for the root causes of crime,” such as mental illness, addiction, and poverty, Eide told TMD. The results are predictably grim: Citizens of Phoenix were horrified to discover that multiple burned bodies were discovered on the streets of the Zone in late 2023, including that of a premature baby.

But other places, like San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, have been struggling with homelessness for decades. Tenderloin is invariably portrayed as one of the worst hotspots of the West Coast’s homeless crisis. But the neighborhood is also home to 35,000 residents, many of whom are immigrant families, who stay for some of the only affordable housing in San Francisco. Azalina Eusope, who came to the U.S. from Malaysia and runs a restaurant in the neighborhood, said operating in the Tenderloin was “so challenging.” When she first opened for business, residents, especially those who owned businesses, were in the dark about how to handle the crime problems in the neighborhood: “If you get spat on by an addict, and you ask them to leave from your front door, what do you then do?” she asked. 

The building sense of frustration among California residents is why Newsom, in particular, has doubled down on the issue as elections approach. Following the Grant’s Pass ruling, he issued an order for state agencies to identify encampment sites and take steps to clear them. 

While the exact methods vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, people pushed out of the encampments rarely face arrest or jail time. Usually authorities ask people living on the street if they would accept housing or shelter, although this is often “triaged,” depending on the number of shelter beds available and the hazard posed by a given encampment. Seattle, for example, prioritized clearing encampments with high levels of violent crime.

If they refuse shelter, homeless people are often cited for a misdemeanor, although governments can simply choose to dismantle campsites after a warning, in which case they may or may not store homeless peoples’ possessions—though activists and city officials often debate how often promises of storage are actually kept.

Refusing shelter is quite common, whether motivated by addiction, mental illness, an aversion to conditions in shelters, or a general distrust of government services. During operations to clear encampments in the month of July, San Francisco city officials recorded 114 shelter placements against 355 denied referrals. Often, homeless people simply pack up their belongings and move a short distance away, until law enforcement locates them and begins the process again.

When Los Angeles County’s Board of Supervisors appeared to push back on Newsom’s order to pursue encampment removals with more urgency, the governor personally arrived with state transportation agency workers at a campsite in Southern California, and helped to clear trash from an encampment on state-owned land.

It was a viral moment, but will there be follow through? “There has been this lurking question of whether homelessness is a state or local responsibility” in recent debates over homelessness, Eide said. If the governor attempts to take personal responsibility for the issue, he runs the risk of “people who don’t follow it as closely … [blaming] him, for problems that may be the mayor of L.A.’s responsibility.”

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has pushed back on the Grants Pass decision. “This ruling must not be used as an excuse for cities across the country to attempt to arrest their way out of this problem,” she said. “[The] only way to address this crisis is to bring people indoors with housing and supportive services.”

Bass’ approach, known as “housing-first” in policy circles, has long been the mainstream view of liberal politicians and policymakers. Citations and fines that result when authorities clearing tent encampments “can make it way harder for people experiencing homelessness to be placed in either short term or long term housing,” said Hanna Love, a fellow at Brookings Metro—a Washington, D.C., think tank—who studies homelessness policy. “It also increases their likelihood of being arrested and becoming involved in the criminal justice system in the future, which also has a significant cost to taxpayers.”

In this view, using law enforcement methods to deal with encampments are not effective, if they are not accompanied by access to services and supportive housing. Love noted that the costs of incarceration can outstrip the costs of providing homeless people with subsidized housing, drug treatments, and other services. 

The question of whether policymakers focus on “housing first,” or on clearing encampments and enforcing public order, will be an important one in many Western elections this fall. Homelessness is a top issue for voters in California, Oregon, and Washington; Newsom, at least, is staking his political credibility, and potential 2028 hopes, on tackling the issue. 

In the most prominent local election of the 2024 cycle, San Francisco’s mayoral race, incumbent Mayor London Breed is pledging to embrace a “very aggressive” approach toward homeless encampments and personally accompanying some sweeps. Her opponents on both the left and right are calling it an election-year gimmick. 

As the 2024 elections approach, voters out West will be faced with a starker choice on homelessness than has been available for years. As Jenny Lu, a San Francisco resident who has lived blocks from the Tenderloin for two years, told TMD, how mayoral candidates pledge to tackle homelessness will be a major factor in her vote: “I love living in this city and wish that every part of it can be clean, safe, and liveable,” she said.  “I’d want someone with the same values to be elected and to take action.”

Worth Your Time

• Different times call for different foreign policy approaches, but which foreign policy tradition is best equipped to guide U.S. foreign policy today? “Although Jacksonian national populism and Jeffersonian isolationism have their legitimate place in American foreign policy debates, neither can fully address today’s challenges,” Walter Russell Mead wrote in Foreign Affairs. “Another historical school of U.S. foreign policy, Hamiltonian pragmatism, is better suited to the crises of the contemporary world. … The driving force behind the Hamiltonian renewal is the rising importance of the interdependence of corporate success and state power,” he wrote. “Both business and government leaders are today discovering something that Hamilton could have told them has long been true: economic policy is strategy, and vice versa. The combined effects of the information revolution, the massive mix of investment and regulatory activism by governments in the energy complex involved in the fight against climate change, and the continuing impact of the regulatory changes introduced in the wake of the financial crisis have brought the corporate world and the American state into intimate contact.”
• Writing in his Governing Right Substack, Andy Smarick asked, “If the American people give Donald Trump a second term, who will work for that administration?” Of course, that depends on the type of staff Trump wants in the White House. “Usually, a new president has a clear political ideology and a set of strongly held policy positions,” Smarick wrote. “That sends signals to the field about who is wanted. But as I’ve written, Mr. Trump doesn’t have a discernible approach to policy (apart from maybe immigration). For sure, he has a persona, an affect. But he doesn’t have an explicit philosophy of governing. He also changes his mind routinely. So, unlike most other administrations, buying policy talent is not the dominant theme of a Trump II vision board. What is? Probably loyalty. Now, all new administrations like loyal candidates. But Mr. Trump takes demands of loyalty to a new level. And since he seems to believe his first administration was undermined by hires who were insufficiently loyal, we should expect even greater demands of devotion.”

Presented Without Comment

The Bulwark: Donald Trump: ‘I Hate My Opponent’

“This is just the way I am. I hate my opponent. I hate my opponents,” Trump told a confidant who advised the former president to consider backing away from calling the vice president “stupid” or “dumb” at their high-profile standoff in a few weeks, which he has done repeatedly.

Trump explained to the confidant that he’s treating Harris the same way he did Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. “Hillary, Joe, Kamala. It doesn’t matter. I just hate them.”

Also Presented Without Comment

New York Times: Thai Politician Is Under Fire After Slapping a Journalist on Camera

In the Zeitgeist

We asked Declan if there was anything going on in the baseball world worth including in this section and, the Cubs being five games out of a playoff spot, he sent us this song instead. Singer Theo Kandel sounds like a long-lost Avett brother.

Toeing the Company Line

• In the newsletters: The Dispatch Politics team reported from the Democratic National Convention on former President Barack Obama’s speech and Tim Walz’s history of embellishments, Scott panned both (🔒) Harris’ and Trump’s economic policy agendas, Nick explained why (🔒) the Squad’s revolution within the Democratic Party failed, and Jonah dove into (🔒) Vladimir Putin’s new decree in a way only he can.
• On the podcasts: Sarah and David are joined on Advisory Opinions by David Lat to break down the latest Supreme Court trends and discuss Lat’s legal fiction novel, Supreme Ambitions, and Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute joins Jonah on The Remnant to discuss Ukraine’s operation in Russia.
• On the site: Charlotte reports on Hezbollah’s growing military capabilities, Kevin pans the Democratic trope that blue-collar rural voters aren’t voting in their “own best interests,” and John Gustavsson argues that politicians should have been honest with Americans about inflation during the pandemic.

Let Us Know

What is the best way forward on homelessness policy? Is Gov. Gavin Newsom right to back the clearing of encampments or is there something to be said for the “housing-first” philosophy of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass?