Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I have to make a confession: Kamala Harris had a much stronger start than I expected. She appears competent, in command and she is connecting to voters — everything she wasn’t when she ran for president five years ago. I gather you’re not surprised ….
Gail Collins: Bret! Does that mean you’re going to vote for her? I was planning on torturing you until you joined the team.
Bret: I’m not there yet, though the rumored choice of Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor, as her running mate would go far to reassure me about a Harris administration. What do you think?
Gail: Certainly seems to make sense politically — guy from a very important state, with a moderate image that might reassure Democrats who are worried that Harris is too far to the left.
But Bret, can I take one minute to register a big howl about the fact that in a presidential election one vote in Pennsylvania is worth a trillion times more than one vote in, um, New York?
Nobody’s arguing that Shapiro is the best conceivable candidate in the country; he’s just maybe the best conceivable candidate from a critical swing state.
Bret: What else is new? In this case, there would be the happy blending of a terrific candidate who happens to govern a must-win state. I also think Harris recognizes that she needs to temper the perception of her being a Bay Area progressive politician by choosing a governor with a reputation for centrism. It makes for a good contrast to Trump-Vance, where old-and-crazy chose to pair up with young-and-reckless.
Gail: Well, governmentally speaking, I’d be happiest with a vice-presidential candidate who was of the same progressive bent as Harris. But I’ve got to admit that the smartest strategy is to pick somebody who makes the ticket look balanced between the left and the center.
Bret: You just put my finger on why I’m still not sold on a Harris ticket, even if so far she has done everything right, politically, while Trump and Vance have done almost everything wrong. If those two keep it up, they’re gonna lose, even if the so-called fundamentals of the race probably favor the Republicans.
Gail: It’s so interesting — the day Trump was shot, when Biden was still hanging on in the race, I felt sure the Republicans were going to win the presidency, no matter how much voters would have dismissed their plans for restricting support for health care and further limiting abortion access.
Bret: The shooting was three weeks ago. Feels like a year.
Gail: Now, everything is totally switched. Harris is a star and Trump is a crazy person who claims he didn’t know Harris was Black.
That was a super strange performance on Trump’s part, didn’t you think?
Bret: There’s a part of me that feels Trump deserves at least some credit for going before an audience of Black journalists whom he knew would be unsympathetic at best. There’s also a part of me that wonders whether he wasn’t practicing some kind of dark political magic by claiming that Harris isn’t really Black. Conventional wisdom has often been wrong when it comes to judging the political efficacy of some of Trump’s brash and ugly rhetoric.
But my bottom line was: OMG. Plus an additional letter thrown in there somewhere. How do you think Harris should respond?
Gail: Well, she could go for an impassioned speech at the Democratic convention — but I’m thinking her best immediate response would be to stick to snickering — and maybe going with the new all-purpose “weird.”
Bret: I’m with our colleague Tom Friedman on this: Democrats need to stay away from epithets like “weird.” It risks being this election’s version of “deplorables.” Also, it gives Republicans the opening for a killer comeback. As in: “The left calls us ‘weird’ but they want biological males to participate in women’s sports. They call us ‘weird’ but want us to forget their calls to defund the police. They call us ‘weird’ but would rather import oil from Venezuela than get it from Alaska.” And so on. You see my point: Two can play the weird game.
Gail: Not gonna fight with Tom. Or you, at least on that point. So jumping to an entirely different topic — Joe Biden made a big policy speech about the Supreme Court last week, calling for an enforceable ethics code and term limits. What did you think?
Bret: As a political matter, it may help rally the base. As a policy matter, it’s a dumb idea that isn’t going anywhere. Term-limiting the justices, as Biden has proposed, would almost certainly require a Constitutional amendment. Not gonna happen. And who would enforce the ethical code? Having lower-court judges review complaints against their judicial superiors would open the door to perverse incentives and spurious complaints. The best solution is for the justices to adhere to the new code of conduct they recently adopted and for Congress to exercise its Constitutional right of impeachment in the case of serious misconduct — though that hasn’t happened since, oh, 1804.
Guessing you don’t agree?
Gail: Back in the day, when I was first writing about politics, picking Supreme Court justices was a solemn duty, and you did get the impression that most decent lawmakers were trying to show their constituents they were going to be fair and balanced.
That’s all fallen apart, and the Republicans are responsible. Thinking of Mitch McConnell sitting on a vacancy so Barack Obama wouldn’t be able to fill it. And of course Trump’s appalling triple play that’s given us a court nobody can regard as evenhanded.
So I appreciate Biden’s stance, but I admit you’re right in that it’s not gonna go anywhere.
Sigh.
Bret: I would quarrel with you about who’s responsible — my mind goes back to the borking of Robert Bork and then to Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, who got rid of the filibuster for lower-court judgeships. And I think Trump’s Supreme Court picks, particularly Neil Gorsuch, have been thoughtful, serious and interesting jurists. But let’s table this argument and get to the business of “childless cat ladies.” An awful, insulting turn of phrase, but is the falling birthrate a legitimate policy issue?
Gail: Sure, particularly if you’re going to try to come up with an economically sane policy on immigration. Bigger question is whether the decline in births reflects a real cultural change, when it comes to attitudes about parenthood, or is mainly a function of the high cost of child rearing. That’s a point JD Vance is trying to make, but it’s hard for me to imagine him having a sensible analysis about anything.
What do you think?
Bret: Before he was elected to the Senate, Vance gave a speech arguing that children should be able to vote — but that their parents should control those votes. Like term limits for justices, it’s another brainstorm that isn’t going anywhere politically, and it offends the principle of one-person-one-vote that is the basis of every democracy. But I think our country’s falling birthrate is a serious social and economic problem — dynamic economies benefit from young and energetic workforces — and Vance’s argument should be taken as an invitation to thoughtful policy discussions, not hysteria about a Handmaid’s Tale future.
Gail: Agreed, and some of those discussions need to be about student-loan forgiveness and government support for child care programs for low and middle-income families.
Bret: Also, the rising cost of living, especially when it comes to buying or even renting a home large enough for a family. Plus there’s a cultural or ideological factor — people who have become convinced that it is best to live chiefly for themselves, whether because it’s easier or because they think it’s better for the planet or because they fear they’ll make a mess of their kids’ lives. I’m afraid the only effective remedy for that kind of thinking is religion: a conviction that we are commanded to be fruitful and multiply.
Gail: But you’re kind of in the same camp as me when it comes to balancing the declining birthrate with expanded immigration, right?
Bret: One hundred prozent, as my Israeli friends say. America would have long ago gone into demographic, economic, social and intellectual decline if it weren’t for all of the talented and ambitious people who came to our shores. The key is to open the doors to legal immigration so that it can be easier to close the doors to illegal immigration, and do it in a way that can sustain a political consensus.
Gail: Amen.
Bret: Gail, I can’t let this conversation go without expressing my profound admiration for my former colleagues at The Wall Street Journal, and everything they did to free their reporter Evan Gershkovich and the others barbarically held hostage by Vladimir Putin. A team of Journal reporters wrote an extraordinary account of how it all went down, and it’s one of those moments when we can see — for all our problems — that America is filled with good and talented people: in government, in the news media and in other institutions who will fight for justice, freedom and human decency.
When President Biden said, a week earlier, “We are the United States of America, and there is simply nothing — nothing beyond our capacity when we do it together,” I gave our commander in chief a quiet salute of gratitude.
The post Kamala Harris Makes Quite an Entrance appeared first on New York Times.
