"That Trump loses this election is important. But how he loses matters. The Democratic Party’s first strategy for the 2024 election was..."

"... to try to force voters into an unwanted choice between Biden or Trump, with the president ducking interviews and news conferences along the way. Their second approach, at least so far, is to select a new candidate with no primaries and then shield her from taking questions from voters or reporters. I’ve spent much of the past nine years saying that I am against Trump because he constantly breaks with core democratic norms and values. Those aren’t just partisan talking points. So I’m frustrated that the main anti-Trump candidate has started her candidacy by breaking with the democratic values of treating the press as an important institution and answering questions from reporters and the public."

Writes Perry Bacon Jr. in "Harris should talk to journalists more. Particularly the wonky ones. Not talking to the media or taking questions from virtually anyone for weeks further erodes democracy" (WaPo).

Walz has the issue that tripped up Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries.

My son John just texted me this:

Here's the WaPo article, "Tim Walz is a bold, smart choice for Harris’s running mate/The Minnesota governor rightly argues that many progressive ideas are good and practical" by Perry Bacon Jr.

Did Bacon have a "Josh Shapiro is a bold, smart choice for Harris’s running mate" draft ready to go?

"Yes, I think Donald Trump should step down as his party’s presidential nominee. He is manifestly unfit to serve, both dangerously incompetent and clearly out of his mind."

Said Dana Milbank, one of 5 Washington Post columnists participating in an exercise called "If not Biden, who? Five columnists rate the field of potential replacements for the Democratic presidential nominee" (WaPo).

That's a gift link, so you can click over there and see them dream up the Whitmer/Booker ticket. Perry Bacon Jr. says:

Why pair Whitmer with Booker? He, like Kamala D. Harris, tried to run in between the left (Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) and the center-left candidates (Biden) during his 2020 presidential run. That strategy didn’t work in such a crowded field. But a candidate who is not a clear leftie or moderate could be a unifying figure. Booker remains very well-liked in the party. Diversity matters, so it’s important to have a non-White candidate. Booker (who is 55) combined with Whitmer (52) are a ticket that could address some of Biden-Harris’s current shortfalls among younger and Black voters as well as appealing to the majority of voters who don’t want a president in his 80s.

Diversity matters, that's why we're kicking our diversity-matters VP Kamala Harris to the curb and replacing her with a new repository of diversity. We'll split the diversity of Kamala in two and run with a white female presidential candidate and a black male vice presidential candidate. The young folks will love it. And besides, we can do what we want because Donald Trump is clearly out of his mind.

But the "out of his mind" man knows it's got to be Kamala:

HIGHER QUALITY VIDEO:

Trump says Joe Biden is “quitting the race"

"I got him out” he’s an “old broken-down pile of crap… Now we have Kamala. She’s so f—king bad”

(looks like Barron Trump in passenger seat 👀👀) pic.twitter.com/GXBZjxiP7p

— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) July 4, 2024

"I got [Biden] out of there, and that means we have Kamala. I think she's going to be better. She's so bad. She's so pathetic. She's so fucking bad."

***

There's much more at that WaPo link — so many crazy statements from people who smugly declare Donald Trump to be out of his mind. I could write 10 blog posts excerpting different quotes and riffing on them, but I need to spread the love around. Happy 4th of July!

Screenshots display confusion over whether Biden is popular or unpopular.

At WaPo:

 

At CNN:

I didn't read either column. I just laughed at the first one. As for the second one, I got absorbed comparing the looks of the 69-year-old Kennedy and the 80-year-old Biden. The relative smoothness is freaky.

"Asian, Black and Latino voters have flipped to the Republicans in such large numbers that the Democrats are in huge trouble, the story goes."

"The GOP could become the party of a 'multiracial working class.'... At the same time, voters of color have favored Democrats by more than 35 percentage points in every recent election. The news media and others who analyze politics shouldn’t emphasize the rightward shift so much that they obscure that these voting blocs remain very Democratic-leaning...."

Writes Perry Bacon Jr. in "'Voters of color' are shifting in complicated ways" (WaPo).

"In the 1980s and ’90s, the Democratic Party embraced big increases in police funding, longer prison sentences and greater use of the death penalty."

"Part of the rationale was a well-intentioned effort to fight crime. But part of it was also an electoral one — a desire to appease the conservative and anti-Black sentiments of some White swing voters.... In the 1990s, Democrats didn’t have the evidence that has since accumulated suggesting that many punitive criminal justice policies don’t reliably reduce crime, nor did they have a stream of videos displaying horrible incidents of police brutality. And back then, the political rationale was largely about keeping Republicans out of office. Now, some centrist Democrats are using alarmist rhetoric hyping America’s crime rates and misleading statements about progressive policies to undercut the party’s emergent left wing....  It’s clear, though, that two things did not cause this increase: 'reform prosecutors' like [Chesa] Boudin and the 'defund the police' movement. Few cities have actually reduced their police budgets, and homicide rate increases happened in many cities that increased spending. There is no correlation between more progressive prosecutors and homicide rates."

From "Centrists’ new war on crime is also a war on the left" by Perry Bacon Jr. (WaPo).

WaPo columnist lives in a partisan bubble and he likes it.

I'm reading "Opinion: I live in a Democratic bubble. Here’s why that’s okay" by Perry Bacon Jr. 

I live in a partisan bubble, according to an interactive New York Times feature that lets you enter your address to find out the political-party breakdown of the [1,000 voters closest to you]. Only 18 percent of my neighbors in the Highlands area of Louisville are Republican. There is an area only four miles away that is balanced between the parties. I ain’t moving there. Being “in a bubble” is generally considered a negative in our culture, while diversity is a positive.....

Only 18% are Republican? How terribly un-diverse. But I'm not going to pester you with the details of why Bacon likes where he is, thinks it's actually diverse in its own way, and doesn't need more input from the kind of people who think such things as Biden didn't really win the election. 

What I am going to do is, go over to the New York Times and find out what percentage of my neighbors are Republican. Maybe you'd be interested to know where I'm writing from when I say I'm in my remote outpost in the Midwest.

The percentage of Republicans in my neighborhood is... ONE!

"Obama did not tout himself as the civil rights candidate in either of his two presidential runs."

"But if gay marriage becomes commonplace throughout America by the end of his second term, something that seems entirely possible right now, that could become an important part of his legacy as president."

Writes Perry Bacon Jr., in a piece written a month ago, which I ran across as I was researching the demographics of support for gay marriage. It's often assumed that black people oppose gay marriage. There's a delusion that the GOP has an opportunity to appeal to black people by leveraging this opposition. How much would black people need to loathe gay marriage to abandon the Democratic Party over this issue?

By the way, those who don't like seeing Obama get credit for anything should hope that the Supreme Court — which has 2 pending cases on the subject — finds a constitutional right to marry a person of one's own sex, because if the issue is left to political decisionmaking, we will end up in the same place and same-sex marriage will be inscribed in Obama's legacy.