85 Days: Harris In Hiding
Will the VP speak, a "likeable" JD Vance, and the Walz v. Shapiro question
It’s been three weeks — 21 days — since Vice President Kamala Harris became the defacto presidential nominee for the Democrats.
During those 21 days, Kamala Harris had zero sit-down interviews with the media, and zero press conferences.
Twenty-one days.
If she was a love interest and ignored you for that long, you’d probably figure she just wasn’t that into you.
But according to polls and the left-wing media coverage, Democrat voters could not be more excited!
It feels as if Harris is in hiding. And since the majority of her campaign is being run by President Joe Biden’s previous campaign, you wonder now if their whole strategy for the 2024 election was to hide Biden.
Or, as Donald Trump would say, “Hidin’ Biden.”
It would have been a repeat of his 2020 basement campaign he ran.
With the Sept. 10th debate on ABC less than a month away, my thinking is she wants to give Trump and his campaign as little time as possible to prepare for a debate and where she stands on issues.
She promised to speak to the media by the end of the month, which gives her almost another three weeks to keep her promise.
Hopefully by then she’ll have something definitive to say about her potential administration, domestic and foreign policies, and answers for how she plans to change the state of the economy her and Joe Biden have created over the last three and a half years.
JD Vance
While Harris hides, JD Vance, the Republican vice president nominee, is busy answering a myriad of questions, some fair, and some not.
He’s been maligned by fake internet stories about a love affair with a couch, giving parents extra votes for their children, and well, as newly minted Democratic nominee Tim Walz puts it, being just plain “weird.”
I watched Vance on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopolous (I think George has only hosted a handful of times since I started regularly watching last year), in an interview with Jonathan Karl.
I don’t know how anyone can watch JD Vance speak and not be impressed.
Karl was not throwing softballs. He asked about the extra votes for parents. Vance explained it in context, saying he was discussing it as a “thought experiment,” in response to some Democrats suggesting that children as young as 12 years old be given the right to vote.
I think Vance does better in one-on-one interviews than he does at stump speeches, like that at the Republican national convention last month.
Personally, I would have loved to see him debate Harris. Unfortunately now, we won’t have that opportunity. But we should get at least one chance to see him and Walz, take the stage together.
Walz v. Shapiro
The choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, surprised many who thought Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was the clear choice for the vice presidential pick, especially because it seems like Harris will need to win Pennsylvania to have any chance of winning the election.
As the curtain has drawn back on the selection process, however, it appears Harris and Shapiro were not simpatico, and possibly because Harris felt threatened by Shapiro.
The choice may have been mutual, as from Shapiro’s announcement on X indicated:
“As I’ve said repeatedly over the past several weeks, the running mate decision was a deeply personal decision for the Vice President — and it was also a deeply personal decision for me,” Shapiro wrote.
Makes it sound to me like he had as much a hand in the decision as Harris did, possibly even telling her he wasn’t interested in being part of her ticket and possible administration.
We know they have differences when it comes to Israel and Gaza, and there was a smear attack on Shapiro, that may have come from Trump’s camp, or possibly the far left wing of the Democratic party, or maybe Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman.
But it seems like Shapiro’s somewhat moderate stance would not work for Harris.
Which makes me think of this quote I read in Politico from Representative (NY) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the fading Squad, before Biden packed up and moved to Rehoboth Beach for the rest of the summer.
“You think there is a consensus among the people who want Joe Biden to leave, that they would support Vice President Harris, you would be mistaken,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I’m in these rooms, I see what they say in conversations. A lot of them are not interested in removing the president. They’re interested in removing the whole ticket.”
There may already be some palace intrigue in Harris’ world, and adding a moderate with his own presidential political aspirations was just too much for her.
The election is now less than three months away, and if the remainder of the race is anything like the last two months, we’re in for a very interesting race to the finish line.