Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has three recent observations worth pondering.
1) Trump and Vance have been completely wrong-footed by having to face Harris instead of Biden.
2) “Weird” is turning out to be surprisingly effective at banjaxxing the MAGA Party.
3) The switch to Harris has compressed campaign time down in a way that’s not been seen recently in America.
I’m going to be quoting extensively from the three pieces Marshall wrote because they collectively cover some pretty important elements of what is really unknown territory. I don’t think the mainstream media has really grasped how different this situation is.
(As a paying subscriber, I’m able to share full access to these commentaries by Marshall — I recommend reading them all in their entirety.)
Regarding the first point, Marshall covers it with Vance: Kamala Sucker Punched Us and It Was So Not Fair. Here’s some key bits:
...JD Vance, at a private fundraiser, referred to the candidate switch as a “sucker punch.”
This was a fascinating and I think unintentionally candid admission. A sucker punch is by definition something you feel is unfair. But more than that, it’s a painful blow that catches you unprepared. Fair isn’t really a meaningful metric in presidential politics. If anything, invoking it signals a kind of weakness. But it’s getting caught unawares and getting hurt that really comes through here. The day before Joe Biden announced his departure from the 2024 race the Times published an article based on interviews with top brass on the Trump campaign which reported that Trump was prepared to destroy any Harris campaign on the launchpad, including an avalanche of banked TV ads, oppo research and more. It would be some mix of Willie Horton and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, just with more velocity and power.
As they usually do with the Trump campaign, the Times reported the campaign’s bluster as simple fact. But at the time I found this threat quite credible. Not that I necessarily thought they would annihilate Harris before she even took flight as a candidate. But were they ready and willing? How could they not be? A Harris candidacy has been a distinct possibility quite literally for years. As we’ve endlessly discussed, Biden, like Trump, is an old man. It would be no actuarial surprise if he’d simply dropped dead during the campaign. It’s the most obvious thing to plan for. But we saw the reality just the next day. The Trump team was caught entirely unprepared and flat footed by the switch. And they still haven’t gained their footing...
...We’re just one week into a 15-week sprint. So they not only may but certainly will regain their footing. But Vance’s candor tells the story. They were unprepared. They got hurt. And for the moment they’re unable to respond. It’s very low energy, as Trump would say. And along with Trump’s continuing refusal to agree to debate Harris, these visible demonstrations of weakness are not only reactions to Harris’s momentum, they are also fueling it.
emphasis added
‘The commentary goes on to relate how the Trump-Vance campaign has been thrown off by having to deal with being called weird. It follows from an earlier piece:
Are You on Team ‘Weird’?
...The power of “weird” is that it clusters together all of the things Democrats care about and want to prevent under the vast degenerate banner of Trumpism in a language that is intuitively understandable. People hear it and without having to recall or analyze the full menagerie of the Trumpian freakshow say, “Yeah … you’re right. Just weird.”
emphasis added
Here’s a key point about weird:
...But isn’t “weird” just making fun of people? Well … yes. And that’s good. It’s good to mock and make fun of people who are bad or want to do bad things. It’s also necessary politically. One of the challenges of the Trump era is that Trumpism is very threatening and dangerous. It aims to upend and destroy the foundations of our civic democracy. But in cataloguing these threats and pumping up outrage over every Trumpian transgression we can also build up the image of their power like inflating a vast flaccid balloon, a sort of collective psyching yourself out. Good thrusting mockery cuts right through that. Yes, they’re dangerous. But they’re also insecure, stunted degenerates. They’re weird. Normal people don’t want to be around them. They think this kind of talk is normal because it’s common parlance in the far-right podcast subculture they live in. That’s really the JD Vance story right there. In his world, raging at miserable cat ladies trying to rule our lives doesn’t seem strange.
An election campaign isn’t a seminar. It’s not an argument or a logical proof. It’s a battle to get the most votes and acquire political power. What pushes those fights forward, far more than many Democrats understand, are image-moments of performative power — acting and making your opponent react, knocking opponents back on their heels with attacks they can’t manage to respond to. Walzian weird has allowed Democrats, at least over the last week, to step right around MAGA’s perpetual spray of deflectionary nonsense, and say who these guys are. The best they’ve been able to manage in response is to go on Twitter posting pictures of Democrats standing next to trans people and say, “NO YOU’RE WEIRD!!!!” in a kind of huffy, vein-popping and desperate way. Performances of dominance are always central to a political campaign, and more so in a presidential campaign than any other. Donald Trump’s understanding of this has always been the root of his electoral power.
emphasis added
Jessica Bennett at The NY Times offers up this: Trump Is ‘Weird,’ Vance Is ‘Creepy.’ Finally, the Democrats Start Name-Calling. (Full access link)
Snowflakes. Groomers. Cucks.
For years the MAGA movement has approached politics the way a bully would approach a schoolyard, sparring with labels so nasty, they seemed expressly chosen to appeal to the kind of people who stuffed nerds in lockers in sixth grade. And for years Democrats, abiding by the mantra to go high, not low, have responded by trying to be the adults in the room: defending themselves with facts, with context, with earnest explanations that nobody remembers (if they defend themselves at all).
The problem is that taking the high road only works if politics is a sport played mainly by people who act like grown-ups, which it is not. And also: Facts and context don’t make for particularly sticky messaging.
Enter: Weird.
emphasis added
The last point Marshall discusses is something that really needs to be recognized. The switch from Biden to Harris has taken the presidential campaign into territory we haven’t seen before. Marshall discusses it in Blitz:
...But in one of these conversations over the last few days I got to talking about the particular dynamics of a three-month campaign, something totally unheard of and unprecedented in modern American political history. American presidential campaigns last at least 18 months. In some ways they’re perpetual. But there’s nothing in recent American history to compare to what Kamala Harris is doing right now.
emphasis added
….But the key part that stands out to me is this: a huge amount of modern Republican campaigns are based on wearing down a Democratic politician over months and years in the right-wing echo chamber. We saw it with Clinton, Obama, Clinton, Biden, Kerry. It’s a well, well worn thing. But it takes time. There are seldom knock-out punches. It’s a slow osmotic process. And the critical part of it takes place at the nexus where what’s happening in the right wing echo chamber bleeds into and begins to shape mainstream media reporting.
Obviously we don’t know how this campaign is going to play out. Looks pretty good ten days in, but there’s ten times more days coming. But regardless of how it plays out, this blitz factor — something totally new and unexpected right as the true campaign starts — is clearly wreaking havoc not only with the Trump campaign but with the whole far-flung Republican political and media apparatus.
emphasis added
For once Democrats are acting and the MAGAs are reacting.
It’s putting the Harris campaign in the position of driving the narrative, and Trump is flailing in spectacularly nasty fashion to try to regain control of it. Headlines at The NY Times: “Trump Questions Harris’s Racial Identity, Saying She Only ‘Became a Black Person’ Recently”; and “Trump Remarks on Harris Evoke a Haunting and Unsettling History”. (See the video in this other diary I just posted to see where he’s coming from.)
A guest essay by Christopher Whipple warns Kamala Harris Has a Brief Window Before the Attacks Really Begin. (Full access link.)
Mr. Bond, the G.O.P. veteran, sums up the Trump playbook: “They have a two-part list. One is take Harris down.” The second is don’t let Mr. Trump be a jerk. “That’s the entire list,” he said — “and the second part may be impossible.”
Digby wonders how long it will take before the press starts turning on Harris: When Will They Put Kamala In The Barrel? She quotes from Brian Beutler, writing at Off Message. Some snippets:
...Reporters swooned over pictures of Trump bleeding from the ear. For the umpteenth time, they fell like a ward of amnesiacs for his team’s deceptive insistence that Trump would “set a new tone” with his convention speech. Large newspapers went to press celebrating the supposedly chastened Trump before he’d finished delivering his angry, meandering remarks.
Media figures more recently raced to offer a generous interpretation of his pledge to Christian conservatives that they will no longer have to vote after this election. And through it all, they’ve shrugged at the games Trump has played with his campaign promises: selling policy to billionaires, even if it entails reversing his own positions, and lying about the Republican agenda.
Now they tell us, in so many words, that they’re sick and tired of the good Kamala Harris vibes, announcing implicitly that they intend to cover her more adversarially in the near future…
...But experience should prepare us for the opposite. If campaign journalists have taught us anything it’s they’re perfectly capable of turning reality on its head and making Trump’s opponents suffer for his sins. They can make Hillary Clinton an avatar of corruption in a race against a court-sanctioned fraudster; they can make Harris an avatar of inconsistency against a guy who trades policy for cash.
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Tom the Dancing Bug nails how the press reflexively normalizes Trump and the MAGA Party.
To go back to Josh Marshall one more time,
We’ve spoken about OODA loops before, the military theory concept of getting inside and disrupting an adversary’s decision-making process, primarily by situating and acting quickly enough that you’re changing realities before an opponent can react to them. Harris got inside the Trump campaign’s OODA loops starting on the 21st and she’s stayed there ever since.
emphasis added (more on the OODA loop here)
Weird is proving an effective tool in putting the MAGAs off balance. We’ll have to find ways to keep putting the pressure on — and dealing with the media. The remaining months of the campaign are going to be like nothing we’ve seen, but if the Harris campaign can keep running the OODA loop faster than the MAGAs, fingers crossed.
BONUS: Digby has found an incredible video; When Memes Collide.
Don’t vote weird.
