I am indebted to an unlikely source, YouTube, for solving a mystery that has been bugging me for weeks. How come Kamala Harris has so comprehensively wrong-footed Trump when Trump had asked for, and got, a new opponent,
The answer goes beyond be careful what you wish for. (You just might get it!)
The serious pros in the Trump camp had apparently prepared their Dear Leader for a quite different campaign. There would be at least a few days, maybe running to weeks, while Joe Biden hummed and hawed and weighed up whether or not to give up the race. This would be followed by further days of confusion as the Democrats cobbled up some kind of primary vote, during which top Dems would knock chunks off each other, to be picked up and chucked back by the Dear Leader on TV. None of this happened, of course.
As I write, it’s a mere three weeks since Joe Biden stepped aside. What Trump’s team failed to anticipate was the speed and aggression of the Harris team. No sooner had Biden made his announcement than KH was shouting: ’Me! Me! Me!’ from the rooftops. She quickly picked up endorsements to the point where no Democrat challenged her. So no humming and hawing, no cobbled up primary, and above all no Democrat chunks to be enthusiastically picked up and hurled back. No wonder the elderly Dear Leader has been wrong-footed.
Meanwhile why all the nonsense about crowd size? This time it was The Economist which let the cat out of he bag. Remember the 2020 election when Joe Biden was accused of hiding in his basement while Donald Trump fronted HUGE crowds at rallies. This was quoted as ‘irrefutible evidence' that Trump must have won the election. Well, not this time. To suggest that Trump’s attendees outnumber those of Martin Luther King Jr or Taylor Swift is so transparently absurd that nobody listens, let alone agrees. Ditto for other assertions about crowd size.
I have only one cautionary note in all this. My pick for the Harris vice-president was Pete Buttigieg, not Tim Walz.. My reason? Mayor Pete is, in my observation, the best politician I’ve ever seen. Apart from being articulate and pleasant, he doesn’t preach to the choir. He’s happy to march into Fox News and humiliate the interviewer by knowing his facts.
Maybe Ms Harris decided that asking Americans to elect their first woman president, and only their second black president, was enough for the voters to be getting on with. On top of this, it might have been a bit much to ask the electorate to vote for the first openly gay VP.
Whatever the reason, I was wrong. Tim Walz is amazing. I see that he is now being referred to as ‘America’s dad’. The last time I heard anything like it was in Australia in 2018 when right-wing political ads featured a balding dad in too-long shorts turning sausages on the barbie. He was portrayed as ‘daggy dad’, meaning something like ‘untidy’ or ‘badly dressed’ dad. The daggy dad in question was Scott Morrison, and he went on to win the election. He also became Prime Minister of Australia.
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