I didn't watch the Kamala Harris convention speech — way too late for me — but how can I catch up now?

When things are happening live, you sit through them as they happen, including long breaks, such as the one that impelled me to switch off the TV last night. The stage was empty, music was playing, the conventioneers were waving American flags, and the voice-over commentators were enthusing inanely about how wonderful it was to see such a large crowd waving flags. 

I knew that in the morning, all the speeches would be on YouTube, but when you have recorded speeches, are you really going to watch them through? I'd like to, just so I could write about the effect. Did Kamala do what she needed to do with this speech? We went for a long walk yesterday, and one topic was predicting how well the speech would go. I had a scale from 1 to 100 — 1 being the worst possible speech and 100 the best possible. Think of the absurdities. 50 was just: She did what she needed to do, nothing wrong, nothing special. Meade predicted 51, and I took the "under" bet. 

So there's a vague need to figure out where she did on my scale. I've skimmed the headlines and the text of the speech, but I'm disinclined to watch the whole YouTube. Can I just rely on Mickey Kaus?

Haven't read anyone else's comments on Kamala speech. Here are mine: 

High point: "out of their minds" 

Other effective themes: Caring for one another, non-Dem outreach, Project 2025 attacks (however disingenuous); not a series of ethnic or interest group panders--represents broad American interest. 

Low points: All that family stuff, all the furrow-browed pleading ( joy?), general blandness of text; oratorical Olestra. 

Bottom line: Job of speech was to make her plausibly presidential. Mission not accomplished. I doubt this will hurt her campaign but a big missed opportunity. Hollywood trainers could not transform her (which is kind of reassuring).

ADDED: The "out of their minds" bit was this:

And get this. Get this. He plans to create a national anti-abortion coordinator, and force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions. Simply put, they are out of their minds. And one must ask — one must ask, why exactly is it that they don’t trust women? Well, we trust women. We trust women.

Language tip: It's better to say "They are out of their mind," singular, because each person only has one mind. 

"Donald Trump, who relentlessly undermined the justice system while in office and since, is enjoying the same protections and guarantees of fairness and due process before the law that he sought to deny to others during his term."

So says the Editorial Board of the New York Times, in "Donald Trump and American Justice."

That's a free access link, in case you want to search for details about that relentless undermining. 

I got there via Mickey Kaus, who tweeted, "@NYTopinion gives zero (0) examples of Trump denying due process to others during his term."

According to the Editorial Board:

[Trump] portrays himself as a victim of an unfair and politically motivated prosecution. That defense is built on lies. Mr. Trump is no victim. He is fortunate to live in a country where the rule of law guarantees a presumption of innocence and robust rights for defendants.

I don't like how the Board is conflating the prosecution and the court and the rule of law. The rule of law is an abstraction. Rights exist within the abstraction, but rights can be violated. The abstraction doesn't guarantee the rights. People exercising power must ensure that those rights are protected, and they may deviously hide behind the abstraction... perhaps with the help of elite onlookers who make abstract pronouncements in print. 

Out there lying about what is outlying.

When was the last time a major paper declared its own poll an "outlier"? https://t.co/1rOPfmuBYl

— Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) September 24, 2023

From the WaPo article:

The Post-ABC poll shows Biden trailing Trump by 10 percentage points at this early stage in the election cycle, although the sizable margin of Trump’s lead in this survey is significantly at odds with other public polls that show the general election contest a virtual dead heat. The difference between this poll and others, as well as the unusual makeup of Trump’s and Biden’s coalitions in this survey, suggest it is probably an outlier....

We're told in the second paragraph, that "more than 3 in 5 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say they would prefer a nominee other than the president."

"If Biden declines to run again, and Harris declares her candidacy in 2023 or even 2024, it will be very hard to stop her without being accused of racism and/or sexism and/or disloyalty."

"Biden himself will be put on the spot — endorse or not endorse? The time to short-circuit Harris is now, before she begins her run. Signal that you’re giving potential opponents time and political space to build up their reps and their networks. This is what the Biden team, worried that Harris will be a loser, seems to be diligently doing. I suppose that's obvious.... The Republicans’ equivalent dilemma — the Trump Dilemma — seems completely insoluble.... Could Trump perhaps be.... bribed...."

 Writes Mickey Kaus.

"Republicans seem to be coalescing around a delusional midterm strategy: The idea that they can get through the 2022 election while more or less ignoring Trump."

"Hey, they have all these great issues: Crime! Immigration! Inflation! Wokeism!... All they have to do is have their candidate in each district adjust those issues to suit his or her constituency.... Even if GOP candidates don't make Trump an issue in the midterms, and the Democratic candidates don’t make Trump an issue in the midterms, Trump will make Trump an issue in the midterms.... If Trump wants 2022 to be a referendum on Trump -- well, the race is going to be nationalized about something and the Trump-obsessed MSM will be all too happy to oblige him, knowing it will hurt the GOP. Even if Trump initially seems to be fading -- if, say, he fails to turn out the crowds at the summer rallies he's planning -- the established press won't be able to ignore him. They'll write and broadcast their 'Ha, ha, Trump's lost it' pieces, which will predictably rile up his voters and keep him in the news. This will happen no matter what Kevin McCarthy and his brain trust want. We've seen this scenario before -- in the Georgia runoffs, where Trump's solipsim [sic] managed to elect a pajama boy to the Senate and open the door to Democratic control of Congress."

Writes Mickey Kaus. 

Everyone always talks about Trump's narcissism. Would it be more accurate to talk about Trump's solipsism? 

"The give-them-cash solution to poverty is nothing new. It was conventional wisdom in Democratic Washington toward the end of the Johnson Administration."

"In 1968, a petition signed by 1,300 economists (including James Tobin and John Kenneth Galbraith) urged a 'national system of income guarantees.' LBJ didn't like the idea, but when Richard Nixon became president Democratic holdovers in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare served him up a no-work-requirid cash-dispensing scheme that became Nixon’s 1969 Family Assistance Plan. It almost became law, failing after a fringe West Coast politician named Ronald Reagan called it a 'megadole.'"

That's Point #2 in Mickey Kaus's "Five (5) quick points on the new Biden Dole" (Substack).

Kaus goes on to contemplate whether there's any Republican around these days who's capable of playing the Ronald Reagan role.