And Now, Dump Harris

Of course Kamala Harris should be the next president. I endorse her without hesitation. She wouldn’t be the first African American in the position, and so we won’t have to endure that “making history” speech we’d otherwise get. And, besides, Michael Drake has already been in the job for four years.

President of the University of California, I mean. What in the hell did you people think I was talking about?

Here’s me writing back in the dark ages of 2023:

Democrats probably could buy off Harris. … They could make her a university president or the dean of a prestigious law school, help her find her way onto a few corporate boards or highly paid advisory positions, and put her on MSNBC—not hard stuff to do, all in all. Harris is 59 years old, and while she and her husband are pretty well off, making a big pile of money in your 60s has its attractions, too. And she might even be able to salvage something of her political reputation in case the political scene changes—and it does change—in a way that favors her future ambitions, whatever those may be. … In a spiritually and politically healthy society, Democrats could trade in Joe Biden for the same reason they’d trade in a 1999 Buick Park Avenue with 355,004 miles on it—because the vehicle in question probably isn’t going to take them where they want to go, and there are better options on the market.

To abuse the metaphor: It’s no good trading in the 1999 Buick Park Avenue with 367,000 miles on it (the mileage creeps up on you, every day!) for a 2007 Chevrolet Uplander with 289,000 miles on it and a failing transmission. It wasn’t a very good model to begin with—a half-assed minivan pretending to be an SUV—and there is a reason its career came to a quiet end.

The question for Democrats now is: Which university or law school should Kamala Harris be president of? Which MSNBC time slot does she want?

Harris may have enjoyed a little bit of a bump after Joe Biden’s somnambulant debate performance, one in which he pulled off the incredible feat of making Donald Trump look like the (very, oh very, relatively) with-it and squared-away guy on the stage. But she is very likely to lose to Trump. An Economist/YouGov poll running from July 13-16 had her securing under 40 percent of the vote against him. She might have been a fine prosecutor once upon a time, but she has been a catastrophically incompetent vice president, a veritable Chopt franchise when it comes to producing word salad by the long ton and the metric boatload.

If Democrats really want to put the Biden administration’s border czar up against Donald Trump, whose main issue is the border and illegal immigration, then I suppose that’s their prerogative. But they’d be putting her up in front of an electorate in which 77 percent of those polled tell Gallup that the situation at the border is either a “major problem” or a “crisis”; in which the vast majority of voters favor more enforcement measures such as hiring more Border Patrol agents; and in which a majority favor more wall-building, etc. If that’s what they want to do, it isn’t obvious to me that having gone through the trouble of driving out an incumbent president was worth it.

As with the attempted shooting of Trump, the events in question are dramatic but not all that unusual. Democrats know how to dump an incumbent (ask Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, that other Johnson, or Franklin Pierce). You think being Joe Biden or Joe Biden’s VP gives somebody some sacrosanct status?

Truman was Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president before he was president. Truman presided over the victory in World War II, oversaw the Berlin airlift, recognized Israel, continued FDR’s agenda—and by the early 1950s, the country was sick of him. He was getting on in years, his abilities were clearly in decline, and he was polling like flat beer. He lost the New Hampshire primary and announced that he wouldn’t run in the 1952 election, which was probably smart; Dwight Eisenhower was not going to lose in 1952. (Ike won 39 states and 55 percent of the total vote.) But replacing Truman with Adlai Stevenson II (no, not junior; Adlai Stevenson I was his grandfather and vice president under Grover Cleveland) gave the Democrats a better shot than they would have had with the unpopular and wobbly incumbent president. (Back when we had normal political parties that could do things, one of the things they did was try to put forward the candidates they thought most likely to win and to do their party some long-term good.)

All the Democrats really need to have a real shot at beating Trump (again) is to nominate someone halfway normal and competent. They have many promising options from which to choose. Kamala Harris, whatever her virtues as a human being, is not one of them. She’s damaged goods from an unpopular administration that effectively has just come to an early end, a California weirdo who talks like some weird mix of yoga instructor, horoscope, and vice principal. Biden’s withdrawal is one piece of evidence that at least some Democrats really believe what they say they believe: that Donald Trump is a unique threat to the republic. If it is really the case that Democrats sincerely believe that, then they should act on that belief. 

And that means dumping Harris, too. 

Harris, if she were smart, would save them the trouble. California has a governor’s race coming up in 2026. And who knows, Harris might actually turn out to be good at that job. But she could do her party, her country—and, realistically, herself—a favor by following the boss’ lead one last time and getting out of the way.

And Furthermore …

As a culture and a country, we have forgotten how to handle the issue of seemliness. Some occasions and some public figures do not go together very well. Take Hulk Hogan’s recent speech at the RNC. It was an embarrassing, shameful, unworthy spectacle. Hulk Hogan deserved better than to be reduced to such a level. Does he need money or something? Should we organize a telethon?

(Wait—telethons aren’t a thing anymore, are they? A GoFundMe then.)

Economics for English Majors

At one level, free trade is reasonably simple: The Canadians have a lot of lumber, and we want to build a lot of houses. For various reasons (having to do with the relative predominance of private and public lands in the timber business), Canadian lumber often is less expensive than American lumber. They have a lot of wood, we have a lot of demand for it.

But here’s a question: Do we really need to build all those houses? 

In one sense, obviously, yes. In one sense, not exactly. 

Because the thing is, the United States does not have a housing shortage, on net anyway. We may actually have more housing units than we need, with more than a tenth of the housing units in the country sitting vacant, according to one study—more than 15 million units, enough to house every homeless person in this country 23 times over. One factor is seasonality, i.e., vacation homes, which is why you see high vacancy rates in places such as Sarasota, Florida. 

But the main problem from a public policy point of view is that so many of the houses are inconveniently located in places where the jobs and the people and the money aren’t. Dayton, Ohio, has the third-highest vacancy rate in the country, and it isn’t because of beach houses. Dayton isn’t an especially prosperous metro—it has less than half the household income and more than twice the poverty rate of Austin, Texas—and while the overall metropolitan area has seen some population growth, the city itself has been losing population since 1960. Moreover, the city has thousands of abandoned houses, as shown by a recent program that was launched with the goal of eliminating 1,100 nuisance properties. So, while much of the country is talking about a housing shortage, Dayton is going to spend $22 million to knock houses down. Many similar cities are in similar situations.

There are many cities such as Philadelphia that are getting by economically on public-sector and semi-public economic activity almost exclusively: government, education, health care, etc. That is not a sustainable economic model in the long term, though all of those enterprises can be important contributors to economic dynamism: a decently governed place with good health care and a first-rate university is a place that will have a good chance of attracting talented, creative people and the capital that they need to create new businesses, new lines of production, entirely new industries, innovative services, etc. For a very long time, California was able to coast by on being California, much as New York City was able to justify its period descents into urban dysfunction by being New York, but that won’t last forever. The same question people ask about cities such as Chicago and Philadelphia and Dayton—Why, exactly, is this city here?—will soon enough be asked about San Francisco and others if things get bad enough that the capital and the people flee. 

Dayton has plenty of housing. Who wants it?

In Other News …

There’s a reason everybody hates these people. 

I Have a Theory!

“Why Do So Many Food Documentaries Seem to Think We’re Stupid?”

Words About Words

This is punctuated correctly: 

“Wedding dress codes have never been weirder. Let’s decode them.”

But, probably because of the juxtaposition of code and decode, I read it “wedding-dress” the first time, i.e., not as referring to dress codes for weddings but codes for wedding dresses. Decode kind of pulled the code out of dress code and made it stand on its own, in my initial reading. If that’s the kind of thing you notice and bother to write down, then, welcome to my neurosis. 

People often get confused about when to hyphenate modifiers. The basic rule is that you hyphenate compound modifiers, meaning modifiers in which there are several words communicating one thing: e.g., there are color photos and there are black-and-white photos, black-and-white being a single modifier describing photos, whereas if something is in the newspaper, it is right there in black and white, no hyphens needed. 

There’s some judgment needed there: A police car is a black and white car (often), but it is not a black-and-white car. It is a car with some parts that are black and some parts are white, not a member of a specific category of cars called black-and-white cars. Sometimes, the hyphen is omitted when you are dealing with a proper noun that hangs together without the hyphen: I still would write “the director of African-American history is an African American,” but I increasingly see the hyphen omitted in the former case, in spite of its being a compound modifier. Some things have been going together for so long that the hyphen has disappeared of its own accord (steak and kidney pie) or was never there in the first place.

Sometimes, though, whether to use hyphens is an open-and-shut case.

In Closing

Enoch Powell said: “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.” Biden has not been cut off at a happy juncture, but, as any dedicated barfly could tell you, it is better to leave on your own locomotion than to be carried out limp. The effort to canonize Biden as a Great Man will be intense and, almost certainly, short-lived. But it is better that his final major political decision should be the right one, even if it was to some degree forced upon him. Death or failure—Biden is within easy reach of either. I wish him well as one of God’s children. As a politician, good riddance.