"We don’t need presidents who have weird obsessions."

Said Kamala Harris, back in October 2020, blogged at the time, here.

I know that at the time I thought I bet all the Presidents have had a weird obsession. I know because I said that in a podcast at the time. 

That post and podcast predated access to Grok, so I didn't have the chance to use this prompt: Accept the hypothesis that every U.S. President had a weird obsession and to list all the Presidents with their weird obsession. I did use it today, though. Some of my favorites:

Things I found when I created a new tag — "Trump and Venezuela" — and went back into the archive to add it to old posts.

From the Althouse archive:

August 2017: Trump said: "I’m not going to rule out a military option.... Venezuela is a mess. We have many options for Venezuela, including a possible military option if necessary."

March 2018: When anti-Trumpers were interpreting Trump's handshake with baseball hero Jose Altuve, I wrote: "I don't know if Altuve talks about politics, but I don't think he's even an American citizen. He's Venezuelan. If I were Venzuelan, I'd be most worried about Venezuela, and looking at Trump, I'd be thinking, is there some way he can help Venezuela?, or, if I was inclined to the hostility anti-Trumpers are seeing in his face — Why hasn't President Trump done something yet about Venezuela?"

February 2019: When Trump was pleading with the Venezuelan military to support Juan Guaido, I wrote: "I was surprised that on the channel I was watching — Fox News — the analysis after the speech was about the 2020 presidential campaign.... People in Venezuela are suffering. They're starving. We need to help. I thought Trump was trying to get something done, but the news folk rush to talk about the damned campaign, as if that's what sophisticated, savvy people do. I found it offensive."

April 2019: Quoting a Swedish journalist in Venezuela: "Two months have passed since I got here and in that time, the possibility of an American intervention in Venezuela has been on everyone’s mind.

"When Donald Trump’s megabill passed the Senate, consummating nearly a half-year of aggressively reactionary policymaking by the 47th president, a colleague commented that 'it’s like the Biden presidency never happened.'"

"That’s true in the sense that between Trump’s executive orders and the megabill, it’s hard to find a single stone unmoved from where he found it when he took office in January. But on reflection, it might be quite literally true. The country, and even the Democratic Party, would very likely have been in better condition today had Trump been reelected in 2020 over Joe Biden...."

Writes Ed Kilgore, in "America Would Be Better Off If Trump Won in 2020" (Intelligencer).

How many of you are getting ready to comment: What do you mean if?!

Anyway... Kilgore plunges into his fantasy. Excerpt:

"If he wants to run, I think everybody will be 100 percent unified behind him. I mean, maybe 99.9999, but we’re the most unified we’ve been in a very long time."

"Eventually, the party’s going to have to move to younger people being in more control, and that’s natural, but this doesn’t feel like the moment yet."

Said Jon Bauman, a California DNC member, quoted in "Biden or bust: Democratic insiders are all in for Biden 2024/Despite lackluster approval ratings and the classified documents scandal, Democratic power brokers are chanting "four more years!" 

That is so terribly depressing, but I was cheered up substantially by reading that Bauman is Bowzer from Sha Na Na!

Anyway, we seem to be hurtling toward a rematch of Biden versus Trump. Neither party seems able to break out of the spell cast by its ridiculous old man. On the Democratic side, they've got the incumbent, and they've got the problem of Kamala Harris waiting for her turn. They are locked in. 

You'd think the Republicans have more hope of breaking out of the predicament. But the Republicans have Trump, a unique and perplexing problem. And the recent polls show Trump beating Biden:

"Our country’s going to hell. Our country is going to hell," said Donald Trump in his 2-hour Wilkes-Barre speech.

I found a transcript. So let's see if I can find some things to quote.

Our country’s going to hell. Our country is going to hell.

What a theme! We just saw Biden speechifying from what looked like hell (what with that red light), demanding that we join him there, and now here comes Trump, with his own hell theme.

This election is a referendum on skyrocketing inflation, rampant crime, soaring murders, crushing gas prices, millions and millions of illegal aliens pouring across our border, race and gender indoctrination perverting our schools, and above all, this election is a referendum on the corruption and extremism of Joe Biden and the radical Democrat party....

Biden characterized the MAGA Republicans as extremists, and Trump is throwing the "Extremist!" accusation right back at Biden and his party.

"Democratic Party officials earlier this year approved a plan which requires any state that wants to hold a nominating contest before the first Tuesday in March..."

"... including the traditional early four of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina — to apply for permission. Last month, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, Texas and Washington made presentations to the Rules and Bylaws Committee detailing why they should be among the first states to hold presidential nominating contests in the next presidential election. At the time of the presentations, the focus was especially on Iowa, which was proposing dramatic changes to its complicated system as it aimed to maintain its 'first in the nation' status in the face of criticism of the caucus process and of the state's lack of diversity and competitiveness at the presidential level."

 
From "Democratic National Committee to delay rules committee vote on early state calendar" (CNN).

They're putting off the decision until after the midterm elections, perhaps mostly to keep the focus on the midterms, but maybe something about the midterms will be useful in deciding who gets to go first. Is it hard to understand why Iowa and New Hampshire have held onto their position for so long? I've always assumed that it's a deliberate effort to reduce the power of black voters. The broad field of candidates must pass first through a process dominated by white voters.

I googled "percentage of black voters at iowa caucus" and the first hit was a 2020 article in The Guardian, "The real outrage about Iowa? The Democratic party silencing black voters/If Democrats want to dismantle white supremacy, they can start right now by dismantling a caucus system that ignores black voters."

That article was written by Karine Jean-Pierre, who is identified as the chief public affairs officer for MoveOn and a political analyst for MSNBC. Of course, she is now the White House press secretary.

She wrote:

"[Trump] seemed particularly ebullient before watching the film, saying he was looking forward to its screening more than 'Citizen Kane,' 'Titanic' and 'Gone with the Wind.'"

"'Would you like some Trump wine?' a Mar-a-Lago employee cooed to every guest as they entered the patio. Guests walked past Trump’s private quarters as they moved from one small, crystal-chandelier-packed ballroom for dinner through an outdoor concourse, past Trump’s private residence, to another crystal-chandelier-packed, larger ballroom for the movie screening.... Trump spoke both at the dinner and before the premiere — repeatedly telling the crowd that Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if he was president, that there would be fewer civilian deaths, and that inflation and gas prices would be lower if the election was not 'rigged.' 'It just would have never happened,' he said, after describing grim civilian deaths in Ukraine that he had seen on television and saying the 'rigged' election fueled it.... Trump repeatedly signaled to the crowd he might run for president again, and they whooped and hollered. 'We'll make America great again, again,'"

From "2020 election claims dominate lively night for Trump, allies at Mar-a-Lago" (WaPo).

Below is the trailer for the movie (and I think you can watch the whole thing here).

"What the Trump Documents Might Tell the Jan. 6 Committee/Following last week’s Supreme Court ruling, the House panel has received material that it hopes could flesh out how the attack on the Capitol came about."

This is an article in the NYT, which I'm reading because what I hope is that the material will show that Trump wasn't involved in planning or promoting breaking into the Capitol or committing any illegal acts. And isn't that what everyone should hope? 

So I'm reading this article and setting to the side everything that is about Trump's belief that he really did win the election, his search for a legal path to victory, and his desire for a big, exciting rally showing strong support for this cause. 

So, what does the NYT list? I've copied and pasted the whole text into my compose window, and I will now cut out everything I just said I was setting to the side:

 

 

 

Okay. Now that I've done that... feel free to check my work. Maybe you'll say that the talk of seizing voting machines indicated a willingness to pursue a path that wasn't clearly legal, but it was only considered and then not done. Wasn't it part of brainstorming about what could be done if an election actually were being stolen? 

Let's consider the question hypothetically: What if an American presidential election were stolen? What could be done? What if it looked about like the 2020 election, but it really was a fraud? 

One answer might be: In the event of such a calamity, it would be best to go forward and treat the ostensible winner as the winner in order to maintain confidence in the system and to avoid the trauma of revealing and delving into the chaos beneath the surface. The true winner of the election should see the profound national interest in moving forward with a new President in office and fully in power — free of any cloud of uncertainty. The true winner should do nothing more than to offer strong support to his erstwhile opponent and to celebrate the beauty of democracy.

"10-month review of Wisconsin’s 2020 elections conducted by a conservative Milwaukee law firm... found no evidence of the kind of fraud being alleged by allies of former President Donald Trump..."

"... who falsely contend last year’s presidential election was 'stolen.' At the same time, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty found 'it is almost certain' that 'the number of votes that did not comply with existing legal requirements exceeded Joe Biden’s margin of victory.' With the country’s two major political parties sharply at odds over whether the 2020 presidential election was legitimate, the review, released Tuesday, walks a fine line in asserting there were serious problems with the way elections were run in Wisconsin in 2020, but that it’s very unlikely those problems denied a Trump a second term.... 'I don’t think that you instill confidence in a process by kind of blindly assuming there’s nothing to see here,' [WILL president and general counsel Rick Esenberg said]. The report also says questioning an election’s legitimacy is not a one-party affair, pointing specifically to questions raised by some on the left about the legitimacy of George W. Bush’s election in 2000 and Trump’s in 2016, as well as voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams’ refusal to accept her loss in the 2018 Georgia’s governor’s race."

From "Conservative law firm's review of 2020 election: No 'big steal,' but plenty of problems" (Wisconsin State Journal).

Here's the full report at the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty website.

"Democrats are winning more college-educated white voters and fewer non-college white voters, as pollster shorthand puts it, and Donald Trump supercharged this trend...."

"[T]he sorting that educational polarization is picking up... puts Democrats at a particular disadvantage in the Senate, as college-educated voters cluster in and around cities while non-college voters are heavily rural.... This is why Shor believes Trump was good for the Republican Party, despite its losing the popular vote in 2016, the House in 2018 and the Senate and the presidency in 2020. ... Shor has built an increasingly influential theory of what the Democrats must do to avoid congressional calamity.... To avoid it... they need to internalize that they are not like and do not understand the voters they need to win over.... Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.... [O]ne difference between 2016 and 2012 is that Romney was complicit in making economics the center of the campaign. Like Obama, he preferred to argue over tax policy and spending cuts and was plainly uncomfortable talking about immigration or race. He ran, self-consciously, as a former management consultant who would govern on behalf of America’s makers rather than its takers. Trump descended a golden escalator to call Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists. What was Clinton supposed to do?"

From "David Shor Is Telling Democrats What They Don’t Want to Hear" by Ezra Klein (NYT).

"Biden Ran on Competence and Empathy. Afghanistan Is Testing That. The chaotic endgame of the American withdrawal has undercut some of the most fundamental premises of President Biden’s presidency."

That's the lengthy headline for a "news analysis" piece by Peter Baker in the NYT.  

Had you been under the impression that the Biden presidency was premised on empathy and competence? I'd never gotten that impression, and I did a search of my blog archive for "Biden" and "empathy," and everything that came up was about the press shielding Biden from scrutiny, saying he's got empathy and (of course) Trump does not. I haven't done a search, but I'll hypothesize that running on competence worked the same way. The press touted Biden as a remedy for the disease they'd been scaring us about for years — Trump. 

And so Biden wasn't tested. He was promoted. Did we ever believe in his "competence and empathy"? Are anybody's "fundamental premises" getting undermined? That headline — however much it questions Biden — engages in the same unexamined touting of Biden that got him elected in the first place. He never demonstrated competence and empathy! People just hoped he had it, because they thought Trump didn't have it, and the press encouraged them to indulge in those beliefs and hopes. 

I'm questioning assumptions contained in the headline. The article itself is questioning Biden's competence and empathy, which I think ought to have been done when he was running for office. From the article:

At points, the president has evinced little sense of the human toll as the Taliban swept back to power. Asked about pictures of fleeing Afghans packed into planes and some even falling to their death after trying to sneak aboard, Mr. Biden interrupted. “That was four days ago, five days ago,” he said, when in fact it was two days earlier and hardly made less horrific by the passage of a couple of sunsets.... 

Biden — or his handlers — knew he'd be asked about that, and he said something that was not only bluntly callous but wrong in the way that is most easily proved wrong — numerically. 

Meanwhile, American citizens are called upon to care deeply about things that happened over a hundred years ago and to work diligently on their psyche if they think it would be best to look optimistically toward the future and not dwell on the distant past. 

I want to read this Chris Cillizza piece — "Joe Biden is facing a crisis of competence" — at CNN Politics, but...

"... it begins with a premise I can't get my head around: "At the heart of Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign was a single word: competence." 

What I remember is continual doubt that he had even minimal competence. I searched my blog archive — and I scanned presidential campaign news every single day — to find anything about Biden and "competence" and the closest I came was a May 2, 2020 post where I was quoting something from New York Magazine about Biden campaigning from his home basement: 

[Biden is] largely staying true to the strategy that’s guided his campaign since early on, which holds that the winningest Biden is one to be imagined, not seen, heard, or even thought about too hard. His staff recognizes that the less its candidate speaks, the less opportunity his supporters have to neglect evidence that undermines their faith — in his competence, his election odds, and, increasingly, his innocence.

If competence was the heart of his campaign, then it was a campaign in negative space. Through his absence, the idea of his competence might survive in the minds of the people who maintain a spark of belief in it. And, really, that had more to do with the widespread and vehement belief that Trump was incompetent. For those in that mindset, almost nothing was expected from Biden. 

So what's this "crisis of competence" Biden faces now? As Trump fades into the past and those who believed in Biden look to him for performance, rather than mere nonTrumpness, it's a crisis for the vain fool.  

Oh, am I really going to read this Cillizza thing? 

After four years of Donald Trump's incompetence in, well, everything, the Biden argument was that the country badly needed a steady hand on the tiller -- someone who had been there and done that.

Ludicrous. Steady hand on the tiller... been there and done that.... Thanks for signaling that you're writing on autopilot.

"The assumption that Harris is a bad politician is largely based on her 2020 Democratic primary run. It’s true that Harris wasn’t the greatest candidate."

"That said, Harris, like Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) and Warren, never really had a chance to win. After the shock of Hillary Clinton’s loss, Democratic voters were committed to running a man against Trump. And there was really never a chance that Democrats were going to nominate a Black woman. But many Democrats were also never going to say any of that directly, forcing them to look for ways to ding Harris and the other female candidates — 'bad campaigns!' — to avoid citing their actual reason."

From "Opinion: We should rethink how we think about Vice President Harris" by Perry Bacon Jr. (WaPo).

"She can paint a compelling portrait of what the inside of the Democratic Party activist bubble looked like, but shows no awareness that there is anything outside of the bubble..."

"... or even that she was inside of one. Warren does deal extensively with campaign questions about her electability. But she treats these as largely, and even axiomatically, sexist.... But sexism alone has a hard time explaining why Warren took the lead in national polls of primary voters before collapsing in the fall of 2019. Surely, the reason many of the voters who were prepared to nominate her changed their mind is not that they learned her gender.... At the outset of her campaign, Warren staked her ground closer to the ideological center of the party.... [But] the competition with Sanders pulled her farther and farther left.... In February 2020, at a moment Biden’s campaign was bottoming out... the balance of power within the Democratic primary was held by voters with 'somewhat liberal' views. Warren’s campaign, though, has spent a year sprinting away from those voters, as if the party was actually torn between social democracy and democratic socialism.... [She should have learned] to treat the cadres of activists on Twitter and in academia as just one small yet vocal constituency within the party, not the party itself.... [T]he same misread of the electorate tripped up most of the field, with the famously Not Online Joe Biden being an exception."

From "Elizabeth Warren’s Book Shows She Has No Idea Why Her Campaign Failed" by Jonathan Chait (NY Magazine).

"Barr Worked to Keep Hunter Biden Probes From Public View During Election/The attorney general knew for months about investigations into Biden’s business and financial dealing?

The Wall Street Journal reports (and I got in without a subscription). 

Attorney General William Barr has known about a disparate set of investigations involving Hunter Biden’s business and financial dealings since at least this spring, a person familiar with the matter said, and worked to avoid their public disclosure during the heated election campaign.... 

On Thursday night, Mr. Trump tweeted his frustration about the Justice Department and the FBI’s failure to disclose the Hunter Biden investigation earlier. “Why didn’t the Fake News Media, the FBI and the DOJ report the Biden matter BEFORE the Election,” he wrote. Justice Department guidelines advise investigators against taking overt actions in a run-up to an election so as not to be seen as affecting the outcome....

AND: "Investigation of His Son Is Likely to Hang Over Biden as He Takes Office/Unless the Trump Justice Department clears Hunter Biden, the new president will confront the prospect of his own administration handling an inquiry that could expose his son to criminal prosecution" (NYT)("If [Biden] refuses to appoint a special counsel and his Justice Department opts not to prosecute his son, many will invariably suspect favoritism").

"California certified its presidential election Friday and appointed 55 electors pledged to vote for Democrat Joe Biden, officially handing him the Electoral College majority needed to win the White House...."

"The electors named Friday will meet Dec. 14, along with counterparts in each state, to formally vote for the next president. Most states have laws binding their electors to the winner of the popular vote in their state, measures that were upheld by a Supreme Court decision this year. There have been no suggestions that any of Biden’s pledged electors would contemplate not voting for him. Results of the Electoral College vote are due to be received, and typically approved, by Congress on Jan. 6. Although lawmakers can object to accepting the electors’ votes, it would be almost impossible for Biden to be blocked at that point." 

The NY Post reports.

"The swing towards Trump in Hispanic areas across the country is extraordinary. It was hinted at in the preëlection polls."

"The polls always showed the President faring better among nonwhite, and particularly Hispanic, voters than he did four years ago, but the magnitude of the shift was way beyond expectations.... I think it could easily be a double-digit swing in the President’s direction. I have not crunched these numbers conclusively, and it’s still too early to do that. But that would be my initial gut sense, yes. The most obvious reason for this, I would assume, is the education divide in our politics manifesting itself across racial lines.... And I think this was not an election on immigration. Immigration was a major theme of the 2016 election.... So it makes sense to me that if we stop talking immigration and Hispanic voters start assessing the President without that in mind, that they might begin to shift in ways that are fairly similar to demographically similar white voters, but four years later...."

Said Nate Cohn, in "Nate Cohn Explains What the Polls Got Wrong" (The New Yorker).

I'm also seeing this today in The Washington Post: "Why Texas’s overwhelmingly Latino Rio Grande Valley turned toward Trump." Excerpt: 

“Hispanics have been acculturated in Texas over many generations and because of that, their perceptions are much more like that of the Anglo population,” said Jason Villalba, president of the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation. 

University of Texas San Antonio political scientist Sharon Navarro said the conservatism of some Texas Latinos is nothing new, particularly in rural communities. The difference this year is that Republicans did the work to court these voters and tailor their message about the election around the economy and jobs. 

Republicans said they are convinced that the margins they won in the Rio Grande Valley and beyond is a sign that the region’s politics are trending in their favor....

Night falls... the election results should be coming in soon...

I will mark the occasion with a picture of the sunrise....

 

... perhaps by tomorrow's sunrise we will know the answer. I hope so! I'd like a crisply clear result to come into focus as soon as possible, and I'd like gracious winners and losers, all united in love for our beautiful country. 

Please use the comments section to discuss the election doings. We'll be moderating comments through quickly over the course of the evenings. I have seen a few requests to take moderation off, but you don't know what you are asking for. It's nice of you to have a positive idea of what could happen, but I have the real-life experience of seeing what the bad people will do. You'll have to accept the only substitute I have to offer — quick approval of comments over the course of the evening. 

Please don't talk about the moderation problem in the comments. Talk about the elections!

The important thing.

The important thing is that we all had fun, didn't we?

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) November 3, 2020

Look how the Pennsylvania polls ended.

Specifics here, but look at those lines:

I do think Pennsylvania will determine the outcome. 

Perhaps it all depends on how black people in Philadelphia feel today.