The View from Right Field

We Need a Landslide in November

We need a landslide in November, but I don’t think we are going to get one.  In August of 2020, I wrote this:

“I hope the election in November is a landslide.  In saying that, I’m not saying who I want to win (you can find that elsewhere).  I’m just saying I just hope it’s not close because I’m not sure we, as a nation, can handle another close election.”

In spite of my hope, 2020 was just as close as 2016, and we only barely got through it.  If we have another election like that, the aftermath could easily be worse than 2020.  If Harris wins, Trump and his supporters will say the election was stolen.  Who knows what they will do, but it won’t be good.

This Election Is All About the 1%

No, not that 1%, not the richest 1%.  I’m talking about the 1% who are going the decide this election: the truly undecided voters in the six or seven battleground states.  Say 7% of people in states with 15% of the electoral votes are honestly undecided.  That’s about 1% of American voters.  And those are the people who are going to decide this election.  And both campaigns know it, so whatever they are doing is aimed at convincing those voters to vote for them,

Some of that 1% are probably suburban women.  Others may be working class minority men.  Whoever they are, these are the people the campaigns, both of them, are targeting.  The rest of us don’t really matter.  So whenever you see one of the campaigns do something that seems silly or off-putting to you, consider how it might look to somebody in that 1%.  Because those people are the targets of those actions or statements – and those are the people who are going to decide this­ election.

Keep Them Hidden; Nominate Them Late

The party that gave us the current system of selecting presidential candidates (through the McGovern Commission, which came up with new processes for nominating presidential candidates after the 1968 election and which the Republicans also), i.e. lots of primaries and, almost always, early nominees for President, has apparently come up with a new idea for presidential elections: Nominate somebody at the last minute who has no clear political program and then hope to get them elected on the excitement of a new, fresh face before anybody has a chance to learn anything about them.

It’s not what the Democrats planned on doing.  Their initial idea was pretty much to keep Joe Biden hidden away for most of the campaign and get him re-elected before the voters realized that he really wasn’t with it anymore.  But the plan didn’t work, so they had to come up with a new one: nominate Kamala Harris and keep her hidden away as  long as possible.  The theory is that enough people would be so happy to get rid Joe Biden and not have to vote for Donald Trump, who has all kinds of issues of his own, that the Democrats could win before anybody realized they didn’t know what Kamala Harris believed or stood for.  And while we still have a long way to go before the election, it’s working so far.  And with much of the media not pursuing her to answer questions or do much more than read speeches off teleprompters, it may work – especially when the alternative is Donald Trump.

When Does Anti-Israel Become Antisemitism?

I have been thinking a lot about antisemitism lately.  I understand people can be opposed to some, or even many, of the policies Israel has pursued and is pursuing vis-à-vis Palestinians (both before and since October 7).  The issues between Israelis and Palestinians are difficult, and I don’t know the answers.  In this regard, I remember when I was a kid and I would go to my grandparents’ place in central Minnesota for two weeks each summer.  My grandparents had a little souvenir plaque on the wall that read: “Don’t judge a man until you have walked a mile in his moccasins”.  Which is probably a useful thing to keep in mind with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian question – for everybody.

But my concern is different than that.  I’m not talking about what Israelis and Palestinians think about each other.  I’m talking about people in America, and I’m wondering whether, at some point, if we’re not careful, anti-Israel views in America might turn into real antisemitism.

Who Is President? – Ukraine Edition

Ukraine’s strike into Russia has been amazing – not just for its success but also for its surprise.  What was particularly interesting, however, was not that the Russians were surprised, but that the Americans were apparently surprised, too.  Obviously, things like this need to be kept as secret as possible in order to work.

But I wonder if the reason the Ukrainians apparently did not tell the Americans was to maintain the element of surprise – or because they figured that, if they told us, we would have told them not to do it – for fear, once again, of provoking Putin.  Putin invaded Ukraine, and yet the Biden administration seems more worried about the Ukrainians somehow provoking Putin than what Russia does

Which makes you wonder, as I asked in this post, who is running American foreign policy?  And whether anybody really cares that much about what the people running American foreign policy say or think?

What’s Going to Happen in the Middle East?

Obviously, if I knew the answer to this, I would go to Las Vegas and get rich.  But here is one possibility with respect to how Iran/Hezbollah may react to the killings of Hezbollah military commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut and Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran:

1. Remember that Iran did basically nothing when the U.S. killed Qasam Soleimani in January of 2020 in a drone attack on Baghdad airport when Soleimani was visiting Iraq.  Soleimani was  commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC group responsible for Iran’s extraterritorial and clandestine military operations.

2. Iran follows U.S. politics.  They know about the Biden-Trump debate.  Like everybody else, they have to wonder how competent Biden is and who is running U.S. foreign policy.

Who Is President?

I realize the technical answer is Joe Biden, but the question I am asking is somewhat different.  I’m asking: who is making the decisions, who is running the place?  When the media reports on U.S. efforts to get a ceasefire in Gaza, who is doing that?  Who is deciding the policy on that?  After the failed debate with Donald Trump in June and the interview with George Stephanopoulos that lasted only 22 minutes, it seems pretty clear it is not President Biden.

I don’t know when this happened, or started to happen.  President Biden’s staff has been limiting his public exposure for quite a while and much of the media was not talking about it or trying to figure out why.¹  His condition may have been getting worse for some time.  But regardless of how long it has been, what do we do now?

Tim Walz and the Swift Boat Veterans? Baloney.

Apparently, J.D. Vance is going around trying to tie Tim Walz with a Swift Boat Veterans-type charge, like the one that was so damaging to John Kerry in 2004.  That is just baloney.  This blog did not start until 2006, but I have written about the Swift Boat Veterans before (here and here).  They were good people making a valid point about John Kerry returning from Vietnam and “slandering” (in the words of The Wall Street Journal) his fellow veterans as war criminals, and worse, in testimony before Congress.

John Kerry’s testimony against our forces in Vietnam was false and self-serving.  To then, 30 years later, try to use his service as part of his political campaign for president was wrong and he served to be called out on it.

Biden? Trump? Nope, It’s Harris - Trump

But it doesn’t make any difference to me.  I’m not sure what Vice President Harris’s positions are on a number of issues given her recent statements.  Are they what she said in 2019/20 when she was running for president or are they what she says today, when she is running for president?  Actually, it doesn’t matter because I wouldn’t vote for either set of positions. 

In any case, regardless of what she says, her domestic policies will be about what Joe Biden’s were; i.e., pretty much what the progressive left wing of the Democratic Party wants.  Which isn’t good.

Will Conservatives Be Happy With the Supreme Court Overturning Chevron If Trump Wins in November?

The following appears in the Letters section of today’s Financial Times under the heading “US courts vs. agencies is not a left-right problem”:

"Brooke Masters is quite right in saying that U.S. businesses may come to regret at least some aspects of the Supreme Court’s Loper Bright decision overturning the “Chevron deference” doctrine that held judges should defer to the decision of government agencies when laws are ambiguous (Financial Times, Opinion, “Red-tape win for US business may backfire”, July 12).  This may also be true, when political winds change, for conservatives who applauded the decision.  Progressives, on the other hand, may come to love Loper Bright.