"A lot of people have asked me what the exact moment was at the DNC that made me realize I wasn’t on board with the party I’d worked for nearly half of my life."

The truth is, it was everything. The crowd that mindlessly chanted 'joy,' the vasectomy van offering free tacos, the coronation of a candidate with zero policies or platform available, and the final straw: Oprah Winfrey. Her tone deaf lecturing turned me off so much, I left the building, getting an uber straight to my hotel, where I booked a flight home a day early, not even staying for Kamala’s acceptance speech...."

Writes Evan Barker, in "One Year Ago Today I Ruined My Life" (Substack).

"In the past year, nearly all of my old political friends have stopped speaking to me. One of them said: 'fascism doesn’t look good on you'....  I’ve lost friends I’ve known for fifteen years. My toddler stopped getting invited to birthday parties. He was rejected from preschool. We even had to move to a new town."

Adding tags to this post, I had to stop a while to remember what was my tag for the inane nonissue of Kamala's joy. It was "how does Kamala feel." Let me publish this post with that tag so I can click on it and see what that looked like in real time. In retrospect, it looks awful.

Don't say "Christmas." Don't even say "joy."

A Grok summary, at X:

During a recent event at the White House, Jill Biden mentioned the need for 'joy' during the holiday season, a comment which some interpreted as a subtle mockery of Kamala Harris's previous campaign slogan 'sense of joy.' Jill Biden later clarified that her remarks were not meant to be taken as an insult, emphasizing that the audience was reading too much into her statement. The incident has sparked discussions about the dynamics within the Biden administration. This story is a summary of posts on X and may evolve over time. Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs.

Here's the relevant video clip.

🚨 JUST IN: Jill Biden is now OPENLY MOCKING Kamala Harris’ “joy” line

The audience even knows what’s going on, and breaks out into laughter 😂

Anybody still think Jill Biden DIDN’T vote for Trump? 🤣 pic.twitter.com/8ePBuLQVKD

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) December 11, 2024

"Joy" is a Christmas word: "Joy to the World/The Lord is come"/"Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring." It's a word that might be selected by someone who wants to avoid limiting her message to Christians. It seems more general, even as Christians hear it as specific to the Christian religion.

Jill also says "peace" and "light": "I hope that you all feel that sense of, you know, peace and light." 

"Peace" and "light" are also words that, for Christians, call to mind Jesus Christ. Jesus is "the light of the world" — "While I am in the world, I am the light of the world." Jesus is the "Prince of Peace" — "For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace."

But Jill's audience, hearing "joy," thinks not of Jesus Christ but of a worldly power-seeker who used "joy" as a political brand that worked for a couple weeks and then was recognized as idiotic emptiness. Now, it's a laugh line.

Jill hears the laughing and flaps her arms about. Instead of holding steady and conveying the beauty and seriousness of the hope for peace and light and joy at Christmas, she emits a scoffing laugh and acknowledges that she too can hear what they hear, a reference to Kamala Harris.

"And Jaguar’s answer to the crapness of a car they can no longer persuade middle-aged, middle-class, professional family men to buy?"

"Improve the car? Persuade the men? Or, wait, try to sell it instead to anorexic, teenage, intersex manga fans of colour, because they might just be stupid enough to fall for it? Except the ad’s not for them, is it? Like most adverts now, this is a story of rich white heterosexuals selling stuff to other rich white heterosexuals, using images of multi-ethnic, pansexual, differently abled humans in order to appear progressive, without actually doing or changing anything.... The ads stand for NOTHING.... They are born of a contempt for the middle of society, which is conceived at the top with the imagined complicity of the bottom. It’s pure Kamala Harris. It’s 'joy.' It is the sort of thing that got Trump elected: a small number of ivory tower wokeists alienating the middle class and pushing nice people further and further to the right. It’s happening to me even as I write this column!... I need to go and shout expletives into a pillow for a bit and then dig out my Maga hat."

Writes Giles Coren — who is British — in "I take Jaguar’s woeful woke rebrand personally/From heritage British cars to classroom lessons, there’s always one demographic under attack — the middle classes" (London Times).

He's talking about this crazy commercial (that somehow I've avoided blogging about until now):

Why haven't I blogged about it? Not just because everyone was already talking about it. It's a bid for attention, so I don't want to give them what they want. But my depriving them of attention is, at this point, meaningless. Jaguar got the noise it wanted. 

Getting testy.

“Testy” is this week’s “sharp as a tack” https://t.co/DoQgTOxKRN

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 17, 2024

 

Why "testy"? Of course, I don't believe these writers independently arrived at the same word. I presume they got the same message. But still, the message-writer chose that word, so the word is important, albeit not as important as it would have been if these characters had all determined on their own that "testy" was the mot juste.

"Testy" might make you think of testicle, but the etymology is a word for head — "teste." Think "headstrong." An obsolete meaning — I'm reading the OED — is "Of headstrong courage; impetuous; precipitate, rash." But the current meaning is: "Prone to be irritated by small checks and annoyances; impatient of being thwarted; resentful of contradiction or opposition; irascible, short-tempered, peevish, tetchy, 'crusty.'"

That's not very presidential! 

Not everyone decided she was testy.

"What is drama? Mamet says it 'is the quest of the hero to overcome those things which prevent him from achieving a specific, acute goal.'..."

"That suggests that [Kamala] Harris needs to show the American people her strongest, most acute and controlling desire, the ruling passion of her soul. I know what Trump wants. He wants to dismantle the elites who he thinks have betrayed regular Americans. It’s unclear what Harris wants most deeply, other than the vague chance to do good and to be president. You don’t communicate your deepest desire when your campaign is run by a committee. Candidates who are not driven by a single, specific, compelling desire become reactive. They hedge and trim according to the polls. People can sense their cautious, calculating nature. On the other hand, those who are compelled by a single strong desire are obsessed with a well-defined problem, which touches the taproot of their soul. They are on the attack, on the move."

Writes David Brooks, in "How Harris Can Finish Strong" (NYT).

Why are we talking about drama? David Mamet's idea was about how to command the attention of the audience. If Harris is reduced to the level of needing to get us to pay attention, she is already falling far short of what it takes to become President. And somehow this brings us back to a topic that's annoyed me for a long time, which I mark with my tag "how does Kamala feel." The election is not about her feelings, and there has always been something insane about acting like it is.

The convention went so well, we were told, because the theme was joy, and Kamala was joyful. No, she wasn't, but they seem to have thought they could keep that bubble bouncing for her super-short run to Election Day. What about our feelings?

This is the article I've been wanting to see but — at this point — thought I'd never see.

"Kamala Harris and the Influence of an Estranged Father Just Two Miles Away/Donald J. Harris rarely speaks to his famous daughter, who lives nearby. But he helped shape who she became."

That's the NYT, and I'm giving you a free-access link.

Dr. Harris’s spectral presence in Ms. Harris’s life began when he and her mother separated in 1969, when Ms. Harris was 5. The couple divorced in 1972 after he lost a bitter custody battle that brought his closeness to Ms. Harris and her younger sister “to an abrupt halt,” Dr. Harris wrote in a 2018 essay. The sealed divorce settlement, he said, was “based on the false assumption by the State of California that fathers cannot handle parenting.”

He added that it was “especially in the case of this father, ‘a neegroe from da eyelans’” who “might just end up eating his children for breakfast! Nevertheless, I persisted, never giving up on my love for my children.”...

They're eating the.... 

The question is why Kamala Harris never found a way to connect to him. Did she not want to understand what happened in that momentous court case? Was her father discriminated against by the U.S. authorities? She is forefronting her genetic inheritance from her father (and making that her dominant racial identity over that of her mother), so shouldn't she want to make that connection to her father? Compare Barack Obama, who made an elaborate search for his father — recorded in "Dreams From My Father." And his father had not been there in his young life or fought to preserve the relationship the way Harris's father (apparently) did.

"... I’ve written pretty harshly about Vance.... But I thought he actually did himself and his ticket some good."

"Vance came into this debate with a mission, which was to make himself and his running mate seem more reasonable, less extreme and more respectful of women. He knew exactly what he wanted to achieve, and he was just really good at it. He calibrated his tone really shrewdly. Whereas, I don’t think Walz had an objective other than to answer the questions and talk a lot about Minnesota.... He didn’t seem to want to achieve any one main thing, and so he didn’t really achieve much of anything, other than to do no harm.... And I was very surprised that Walz didn’t... point to the pretty extreme things Vance has said about women. I guess he was waiting for the moderators to do it. But the first half-hour of a debate is when viewers are really locked in, and Vance has a serious vulnerability there. I think I would have made that my main objective. The phrase 'cat ladies' never even came up."

Says Matt Bai, in "Did Tim Walz miss a crucial moment at the VP debate? The governor didn’t seem to have a clear objective in his face-off with Republican JD Vance." That's a free-access link, so you can read the whole conversation Bai has with Megan McArdle and Gene Robinson.

At one point, Megan McArdle talks about watching the debate with the sound off. Vance looked "much more composed." What Matt Bai noticed with the sound off was "how deeply concerned Walz looked about everything, as if he feared bad news." Which is basically the same point. McArdle asks "At a visceral level, who wants a president who looks anxious?"

I did the opposite mostly. I watched without looking at them.

"Saturday Night Live" cold opens with lots of political impersonations — including Dana Carvey as Joe Biden.

Scroll ahead if you must — to 10:23 — but don't miss Dana Carvey:

 Also — beginning at 2:22 — Jim Gaffigan as Tim Walz.

Maya Rudolph does Kamala Harris well, but the show's urgent need for us to love Kamala makes it too hard to like what Rudolph is able to do. The show presumes we agree politically and will simple-mindedly experience fun as "Kamala" has "fun" (and that's how Harris's campaign feels to me). I resist feeling the candidate's emotions as enacted on the political stage. And, for political satire, I want to laugh at her. Speak to me as someone on the outside. Don't treat me like a willing guest at her party. 

Sample line, spoken by the Trump impersonator: "We had this in the bag, but then they did a switcheroo and they swapped out Biden with Kamala. And now everything is chaos. They're eating the dogs. They're eating the cats. They're taking your pets, and they're doing freak offs. They're doing freak offs with the dogs, and they're making the geese watch. It's very sad. It's very sad. They're doing a Diddy."

ADDED: Mixing the P. Diddy story with the Haitians-in-Ohio story: Is that racist? It would be considered racist if Trump did it. It's in the black-people-remind-me-of-black-people mode. But in the sketch they have the Trump character combining the 2 topics, so if it's racist, it looks as though the racist is Trump. Clever? That's how you (try to) get away with it.

ALSO: For clarification, I substantially rewrote first 2 sentences of the paragraph that begins "Maya Rudolph does Kamala Harris well...."

Kamala Harris sounds so weary of all those people in Pennsylvania. Does she even want to be President?

Let me preface this with the assurance that I have never trusted the people who want to be President, and I have despaired over the structural problem that we're always stuck having to vote for somebody who has strongly desired the presidency. But it is possible occasionally — through ascension from the vice presidency — to end up with a President who didn't want the job.

Please watch the TikTok video I've put at the bottom of this post, after the jump, or you can also go here, for YouTube video (begin at 1:06). Alternatively, read the text.

But you won't get the point from the cold text, so I'll have to ask you to imagine a first rate actress reading the lines in the role of a woman who can barely cover up that she's really had it with being carted around to these bullshit nothing places with their tedious needy people:

"I am feeling very good about Pennsylvania, because there are a lot of people in Pennsylvania who deserve to be seen and heard. That's why I'm here in Johnstown, and I will be continuing to travel around the state to make sure that I'm listening as much as we are talking and, ultimately, I feel very strongly that I've got to earn every vote, and that means spending time with folks in the communities where they live, and so that's why I'm here.  We're going to be spending a lot more time in Pennsylvania."

Harris was speaking at a bookstore in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Can you put your usual partisanship to the side and genuinely empathize with her as human being?

"When she starts talking about presence and power—the twin pillars of her political philosophy—she gets steely around the mouth...."

"It’s always been a mistake to think of Harris as a next-gen version of Barack Obama, as commentators who are fixated on color and on vibes sometimes do.... Harris is a person in a role, and sometimes, while speaking, she wears that role the way a groomsman wears a tux he doesn’t like....  During the notoriously dramatic Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, Harris pressed the nominee hard. She set her face neutrally and peered intently at him, asking questions meant less to gather information than to speak directly to the TV-watching audience: 'Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?' Her voice was low and mellifluous and strong: a prosecutor’s sharklike gravitas.... Get in where you fit in, use your power where you can.... These days, by contrast, Harris looks unbounded, emancipated, often genuinely happy. In her speeches, she seems tickled to have another chance at the Presidency, and energized by the prospect of running against Donald Trump and all he stands for. She often looks overcome by joy.... She’s still a prosecutor, poised to use her position for one good reason, the rest be confounded: stop Donald Trump.... It doesn’t matter, by her lights, what the Presidency means, only what she means to do with it...."

Writes Vinson Cunningham, in "The Kamala Show/How Vice-President Harris’s public persona has evolved, from tough prosecutor to frozen interviewee to joyful candidate" (The New Yorker).

A second occasion this morning for my "how does Kamala feel" tag. And how does Kamala feel? Unbounded, emancipated, overcome by joy, mellifluous, strong... and sharklike.

Not a big fan of the unbounded shark as President.

What does "Heavy on Buzz" even mean?

I'm trying to read Reid J. Epstein, in "Harris’s Early Campaign: Heavy on Buzz, Light on Policy/On policy, the vice president is drafting off President Biden, essentially cherry-picking the most popular parts of his agenda and betting that a younger messenger can sell them to Americans" (NYT).

When Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2016, she had more than 200 distinct policy proposals. Four years ago, Joseph R. Biden Jr. had a task force write a 110-page policy document for his White House bid.

Now, Vice President Kamala Harris does not have a policy page on her campaign website.

A last-minute campaign born of Mr. Biden’s depreciated political standing has so far been running mainly on Democratic good feelings and warmth toward Ms. Harris, drafting off legislation and proposed policies from the man she is hoping to succeed....

I made the link a free-access "gift" link so you can help me read this thing. I am irritated by the claims of "buzz" and "good feelings and warmth." We're being instructed on how to feel, but it seems to be about how other people feel, or so we are told. 

ADDED: Is there a shift going on? A week or so ago, it was all about how Kamala Harris feels. I made a tag "how does Kamala feel" because I thought that was the wrong focus. We were told she was "joyous." Obvious bullshit, of course, but that was the nature of the campaign — the purportedly heavy-on-buzz campaign. But now the NYT seems to be nudging us into thinking about how we the people feel, and we're supposed to feel good... good and warm... about Kamala.

AND: "Buzz" is a cool looking word.

"You tell me how and why corporate media constantly speaks from the same exact script this way, verbatim. #KamalaIsJOY"

Not even herd animals are this flagrant about it. You tell me how and why corporate media constantly speaks from the same exact script this way, verbatim. #KamalaIsJOY pic.twitter.com/AHSE9Im1GL

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 9, 2024

ADDED: Byron York has "Joy! Irrational exuberance soars to new levels" (Washington Examiner). Excerpt:

"Adopting joy as a political shield has also allowed Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz to throw some bare-knuckled punches at Mr. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio."

"Ms. Harris, a former prosecutor, has targeted Mr. Trump for his many legal problems — 'I know Donald Trump’s type,' she now likes to say, to uproarious applause and chants of 'Lock him up' that she only recently began to discourage. Mr. Walz has castigated Mr. Trump for 'servicing himself' instead of helping others, and made an off-color reference to a debunked rumor about Mr. Vance and furniture. Both Democrats do it with a smile, and the crowd eats it up.... Of course, Ms. Harris’s joyful-warrior approach has so far not been substantive from a policy perspective...."

Writes Katie Rogers in "Harris Used to Worry About Laughing. Now Joy Is Fueling Her Campaign. Democrats are smiling again, and so is a vice president who once weighed the political risks of cheerfulness. The high spirits are also providing air cover for scathing attacks on Republicans" (NYT).

But maybe get-happy is policy enough: "In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt adopted the song 'Happy Days Are Here Again' to offer a promise of a bright future to Americans stricken by the Great Depression.... In a time of war and economic recession, Barack Obama’s likeness was plastered on a poster [with] the message... 'Hope.'"

"She doesn’t look around for others to join inasmuch as she simply reflects the moment: the thrill, the fun, the catharsis, the you-have-to-laugh-to-keep-from-crying-or-punching-a-wall of it all."

Robin Givhan is writing about Kamala Harris's notable laughing, in "Kamala Harris’s powerful laughter in the face of weirdness/Her guffaws speak to a moment: the thrill, the catharsis, the you-have-to-laugh-to-keep-from-crying-or-punching-a-wall of it all" (WaPo).

There's that word "weird" again, in the headline. I checked to see if maybe Givhan resisted using it herself. Givhan is a wordsmith. You can tell by that one sentence I put in the post title. She went with "inasmuch," and she made one of those long adjectives that hyphens let you construct out of any string of words: "you-have-to-laugh-to-keep-from-crying-or-punching-a-wall." But she's not a got-to-avoid-using-the-word-of-the-day wordsmith. 

I'd hoped "weirdness" was a just-in-the-headline word, inserted by one of those nameless headline writers, but it's in the body of the essay:

How weird is it to deride a person for laughing? Not for laughing inappropriately, in the middle of a funeral, for example...

The link goes to the "Mary Tyler Moore" Chuckles the Clown episode, not — how could it be?! — Bill Clinton laughing at Ron Brown's funeral (laughing, then fake-crying). 

... but simply for enjoying a good chuckle?

But sometimes it is inappropriate — and quite mystifying — as in this widely shared example:

 

Givhan acknowledges the word-of-the-momentness of "weird":

"Looking anew at Harris, I see something different from what I once did: a person who stumbled as a candidate and vice president..."

"... but who kept fighting anyway. I see a woman who struggled to compete for power against her peers, buried under an array of vague and unstated expectations about whether she gave the right answers, had the right ideas, was smart or specific enough. Like any woman of ambition, I deeply relate to these experiences. As strange as it might seem, I have come to think these experiences could make her the ideal candidate in a surreal campaign against a man who is so certain of himself, who admits to no mistakes, who has no humility and who, for many of us, is utterly unrelatable...."

Writes Lydia Polgreen, in "I Was a Kamala Harris Skeptic. Here’s How I Got Coconut-Pilled" (NYT).

I googled "world leaders who laugh" and Google treated it as if I had googled "world leaders who laugh at Trump."

 

Link.

My hypothesis is that Google is actively skewing searches to influence the election. But I get the same effect at DuckDuckGo. And Bing. I also tried Grok, and it foisted Harris and Trump on me repeatedly, even when I demanded that it stop. 

I was googling a propos of the previous post, which is about Kamala Harris's laughing and got me wondering what kind of world leaders are associated with laughing. Are they heroes or villains? I could only think of one, a great American hero:

"Hillary Clinton’s laugh was criticized, and also called weird. There was a suggestion that it made her seem inauthentic..."

"... which was a bizarre point, since genuine laughter is, if not involuntary, then very hard to fake. Lenny Bruce once dared a crowd to try it four times in an hour. Calling women overly emotional or hysterical is a sexist trope, and there’s a long history of positioning laughter in opposition to reason. Plato warned against a love of laughter, suggesting it indicates a loss of control. Ever alert to the theater of power, Trump rarely laughs... ...."

Writes Jason Zinoman, in "Kamala Harris’s Laugh Is a Campaign Issue. Our Comedy Critic Weighs in. The Trump campaign sees Harris’s laugh as a vulnerability to exploit. But far from a liability, it is one of her most effective weapons" (NYT).

"What does a laugh say about a person? That he or she is human. In a divided country, it’s something we all do and enjoy. And as anyone who has hung out with friends late into the night knows, it’s contagious. That’s a powerful political tool. As the poet Ella Wilcox wrote, 'Laugh and the world laughs with you.'"

Ella Wilcox? She started that? Oh!

I am laughing at the surprise encounter with what looks like the childless cat lady J.D. Vance was talking about.

Here's the poem, "Solitude":

"'How would Kamala Harris feel....' I hope that doesn't become the key question at every turn — How would Kamala Harris feel? Ugh."

"I hope this isn't the beginning of a new phase of semi-conscious misogyny: Because the Vice President is a woman, we must think about the Vice President's feelings. Does anyone ever wonder how Mike Pence feels?"

That's something I wrote on November 9, 2020. (The internal quote is from an Axios article.)

I see I made a tag "how does Kamala feel," but then I never used it again. I wanted to keep an eye on an unwholesome phenomenon. Sorry. I forgot. But I want to remember again. The question facing us in this election is what the candidate is offering to do for us and whether she or he will be very good at it. Your support should never be about wanting to boost the spirit and self-esteem of the candidate.

Where will Biden put Buttigieg?

Buttigieg will get some important position, Axios tells us (with no acknowledgement that there's any uncertainty that Biden has indeed been elected President).

Biden officials have made clear to donors and party officials the question surrounding Buttigieg is not if, but where, he lands, Democrats close to Biden tell Axios.

The position Buttigieg wants, we're told, is ambassador to the U.N., and of course it makes sense that his background as mayor of a small city in the midwest sets him up well to deal with international affairs. 

One key question: How would Kamala Harris feel about having a potential 2024 rival lurking the Cabinet and building a donor base from a perch at the United Nations — and around New York City's big donors? 

I hope that doesn't become the key question at every turn — How would Kamala Harris feel? Ugh. I hope this isn't the beginning of a new phase of semi-conscious misogyny: Because the Vice President is a woman, we must think about the Vice President's feelings. Does anyone ever wonder how Mike Pence feels? 

As for the image of "lurking" from a "perch" — don't get me started. It's not possible to lurk on a perch. Lurking involves hiding — lying in wait. It's sneaky. A perch is a high place. It's about being conspicuous — showing off. How do images like this happen? I hope it's not homophobia — 2 stereotypes about gay men popping up in the same sentence.