Bret Stephens: Gail, why isn’t Kamala Harris running away with the election? The race in the battleground states is basically a tie, despite Harris spending three times as much money as Donald Trump and having a much bigger ground game — and despite Trump putting in a terrible debate performance and generally making a spectacle of himself, or worse, every time he opens his mouth.
Gail Collins: Hmm. I guess I should refrain from pointing out that I’m being asked that question by a person who has yet to commit to voting for Harris himself.
Bret: Much as I love to inflate my importance, I think I’m more of a symptom of Harris’s problems than the cause.
Gail: Can we blame the Republican Party? It used to specialize in conservative financial options: lower taxes, fewer government services. But now it’s the voice of the alienated, often rural and less well educated, who are just ticked off at everybody else.
Bret: One of the most interesting recent stories in The Times is an analysis of undecided voters, and their concerns about Trump and Harris. One of the most important findings — one that should really concern the Harris campaign — is that a high proportion of undecided voters are young, low-income and Black or Latino. The concerns about Trump are familiar: “too extreme,” “angered easily” and so on. But some of the concerns about Harris were more surprising. A Black man in North Carolina said she was “overall untrustworthy.” A Black woman in Michigan worried she was “too liberal.” A Hispanic man in Arizona said he was “unsure about how prepared she is to be president.”
Any counsel for the Harris campaign about putting these concerns to rest?
Gail: Even though she’s vice president, Harris is a super-new face on the political scene for lots of people, who only pay attention when it’s presidential voting time, if they pay any attention at all. The two tracks to fixing that are lots of TV ads and lots of outreach — rallies, neighborhood volunteers ringing doorbells and passing out literature on the sidewalks. In other words, the old school.
Bret: That’s a part of it. The other part, I think, is that Harris hasn’t done enough to reassure undecided voters that she’s decisive, knowledgeable and well advised. In 2008, Barack Obama reassured wavering voters by naming Warren Buffett, Paul Volcker and Colin Powell as some of the people from whom he took advice. She ought to do something similar: Name some widely respected policy heavyweights as members of her brain trust — people like Robert Rubin and David Petraeus. And announce that Liz Cheney will be her secretary of state.
Gail: Hey, that would certainly draw some attention. You know I don’t agree with you about announcing half her cabinet before she’s elected, but the Liz Cheney vision is pretty wow.
Bret: And I repeat my suggestion that Harris needs to have more sit-down interviews with nonpartisan journalists — not those who’ve previously announced they’re voting for her — who’ll pitch her some fastballs so she can demonstrate comprehensive command of the issues and an ability to articulate thoughtful answers under pressure. Not sure why she hasn’t done that already.
Gail: Wish there was gonna be another debate but Trump’s not crazy enough to risk that. By the way, what did you think of the battle of the would-be veeps?
Bret: Vance came off depressingly well.
Gail: It’s interesting how rational he can appear when he’s in the mood. But he’s always going to get caught up in that question about whether his boss won the 2020 election. Vance clearly knows Trump didn’t, but can’t be on the team without embracing the theory that Trump was robbed.
Bret: Vance is probably the most convincing reason for me to vote for Harris. He’s Trump with a brain, which is what makes him genuinely scary. And even if Trump doesn’t win next month, Vance’s success in the debate sets him up as the leading G.O.P. contender in 2028.
Gail: Which brings me back to my main worry. Are you afraid that if Harris wins the election, Trump will refuse to accept the results and we’ll wind up with Jan. 6 squared?
Bret: Trump will only accept the results of the election if he wins. That’s what we’ve come to expect of him — and he’s made that perfectly clear himself. But I don’t think that will matter much: Even many Trump supporters know, deep down, that he lost the last one. It’s Vance who has the wit and amorality necessary to do more serious damage to the system.
Gail: OK, I’m now envisioning the rest of my life suffering in a political Vanceworld. Thanks for ruining my week.
Bret: Think of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” with many fewer cats.
Gail: Now you’ve ruined my week twice, if that’s possible, so let’s change the subject. Melania Trump just published an excerpt from her autobiography in which she proclaims her support for abortion rights. Do you think her husband’s campaign set that up to dilute the anti-abortion tone of the presidential campaign?
Bret: I put the Trump marriage in the same category as Snake Island and the basement of the Lubyanka prison: places best not to visit. But it’s true that political advisers often don’t mind when a spouse softens a candidate’s image, like Barbara Bush cradling an infant with AIDS. Unfortunately for Harris, second gentleman Doug Emhoff hasn’t exactly been fulfilling that role lately, what with the tabloid fodder of his past relationships.
By the way, I meant to ask you about Tim Walz. Does it bother you that he appears to be a habitual liar?
Gail: Well, in a perfect world I would prefer to have a vice-presidential candidate who hadn’t tried to make himself look like a guy who served in combat when in fact his unit didn’t get him farther than Italy. But I deeply resist the “habitual liar” tag.
Bret: And claimed to be in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre when he was not, and that he and his wife used I.V.F. to conceive when they did not, and lied, via one of his past campaigns, about a past D.U.I. arrest when he was driving drunk at 96 m.p.h. I know the response is that these lies are Poconos compared to Trump’s Himalayas, but if you’re going to ask questions about your opponent’s honesty, you’d better tell no lies.
A more consequential story is the devastation from Hurricane Helene, one of the deadliest storms to hit the United States in the last 50 years. It’s a tragedy, but inevitably it’s also a political story, especially in North Carolina. Does this help Harris?
Gail: When a terrible weather disaster strikes and commentators are noting that two of the worst-hit places were swing states, you certainly know it’s election time. There are tons of federal workers in North Carolina and Georgia now, helping people who are injured, homeless, detached from their jobs. And naturally Trump has declared the Biden administration response “rotten.”
Bret: Did you expect something else from him?
Gail: Par for the course, yes, but it’s always helpful to remind people who hate big government that in times of crisis, a strong federal response can look pretty darn good.
Your thoughts?
Bret: As a policy matter? That we need to do a lot more to improve infrastructure to cope with extreme weather events, particularly in vulnerable communities like Appalachia. Politically? That FEMA and other federal and state agencies need to do a much better job now than they did in the fall of 2005 after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. If that hurricane had hit a year earlier, with similar outcomes, George W. Bush would have lost his re-election bid.
Totally different subject, Gail: Any thoughts about the University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax and the sanctions applied to her?
Gail: Wax has been suspended from her job for a year for a raft of statements denigrating Black law students, Asians and women, and — well, you get the drift.
Not the first time universities have run into these controversies — back when I was in school professors were still being fired for being too critical of the nation’s political power structure.
Bret: I think we both agree that Wax has made a raft of really ugly remarks. But the question is about institutional sanctions.
Gail: We don’t want a system of higher education that keeps students from being exposed to the whole range of thinking on important issues. But the trick is to make sure the professors are showing them how to make smart, objective analyses of what they’re hearing.
It’s not clear to me that Wax met that mark — but maybe you know more about the story?
Bret: The principle of academic freedom is vital, and that includes the freedom to make comments that are obnoxious, offensive or simply dumb. The alternative is that university administrators use subjective criteria to decide what’s permissible speech: Why, for instance, should Penn penalize Wax while honoring a professor who says things that are deeply offensive to many Jewish students?
Before we go, Gail, I just want to share a musical discovery with our readers. I’ve always loved covers that are better than the original: Jimi Hendrix’s version of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” for instance, or the Cowboy Junkies’ version of the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane.” Lately, I’ve been amazed by the voice of an artist named Sierra Eagleson, whose interpretations of Led Zeppelin’s “Going to California” or Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man” or the Arctic Monkeys’ “Do I Wanna Know?,” among other songs, are some of the best and most original I’ve heard in ages.
Give a listen — and see you soon.
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