Gail Collins: Bret, I can’t wait to hear your impression of Kamala Harris’s big Chicago speech. Tell, tell.
Bret Stephens: As rhetoric? I thought it was strong. She told Americans who she was, where she came from, what her values and dreams are made of, why she loves America, who and what she’ll fight for. There was hardly a wasted sentence. It was fairly light on policy, but she came across as a plausible commander in chief. The contrast with Donald Trump’s Fidel Castro-like performance at the Republican National Convention last month was stark.
Do you think she’ll win?
Gail: One more question first. Listening to the speech, I imagined she’d written it specifically for you, with tons about American values and the evils of Trump but nothing about her specific plans for the economy. Would she have lost you if she’d moved on to raising taxes on the rich, price gouging …
Bret: Yup. The problem with Harris is that she’s a political chameleon — a tough-on-crime prosecutor in one phase of her career, a self-described “radical” in another. Voters will want to figure out whether she’s a pragmatist (good), an opportunist (not good) or a phony (doubleplusungood). One way to find out is to insist that she sit down for some serious journalistic interviews and answer a few difficult questions. I can think of some.
Gail: Can’t argue with you about the interviews. Harris isn’t even doing press conferences and that’s just wrong. Hope she’ll make a turn now that she’s the official nominee.
Bret: She won’t be able to avoid sit-down interviews the way Joe Biden did for too much of his presidency. Otherwise, it will fuel the perception that she’s no better than whoever is feeding words into her teleprompter. Especially since she didn’t go through the process of winning actual primaries.
Gail: If you were her questioner, what would you ask?
Bret: In no particular order: If grocery stores, whose profit margins hover between one and three percent, are price gouging, what do you say about Apple, whose margins are above 25 percent? Do you believe, as you signaled in 2019, that illegal immigrants should be entitled to free health care? Is the phrase “from the river to the sea” antisemitic? Will you use military force to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon? If the record of the Biden-Harris administration is so strong, why do a plurality of Americans describe the current state of the economy as bad or very bad?
Gail: The economy is not bad! But go on …
Bret: What causes inflation? Have you witnessed any instances when President Biden’s mental faculties appeared diminished and were you worried about his ability to serve out a second term? Would you send American military forces to fight for Taiwan if it were attacked by China? Name one liberal position with which you disagree and why? How will a Harris-Walz administration differ in policies from a Biden-Harris one?
And I’m just warming up.
Gail: That’s quite a collection, many things I know she’ll address and none of them things I’d imagine her wanting to dip into during her nomination speech.
Bret: Fair.
Gail: And Bret, I should mention that I thought her speech was just terrific. Can she win? Sure, but it’s hardly inevitable. Kinda worried the Democrats are so thrilled with the sudden transformation from Biden to Harris they won’t be as obsessed as they ought to be.
Bret: Tim Walz’s football analogy about Democrats having the ball and driving down the field while they’re down by a field goal was a good metaphor.
Gail: Has to be an important issue to lure you into making a sports reference …
Bret: Hehe. The problem is that wavering voters haven’t liked the last four years. And many of them, I suspect, are worried that Harris is a Bay Area leftist masquerading as an establishment centrist. This is why the polls are still so tight, even as Trump seems to have been dozing the last few weeks. They will remain tight, with Trump expected to gain slightly, now that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has finally dropped out of the race.
Gail: You know, if there’s suspicion Kennedy got the promise of a big job in the next administration for endorsing Trump, I’d expect the Democrats to mention it frequently. He once said, “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” Can you imagine R.F.K. Jr. as secretary of Health and Human Services?
Bret: Or secretary of the Interior? Seems to know all about bears.
Gail: Hehehe.
By the way, we haven’t really talked about the Democratic National Convention itself. As usual with conventions, there were a lot more speakers than anyone would want to listen to. But besides Harris, I did enjoy hearing Tim Walz, the Obamas, Oprah, Elizabeth Warren and members of the Central Park Five.
The five, you’ll remember, were young Black and Latino men arrested and charged with sexual assaulting and badly injuring a young white female jogger in 1989. Some of them had terrible legal representation, and they wound up spending years and years in jail for a crime that evidence shows they totally, absolutely did not commit. One of them is now a member of the City Council. People here in New York remember how in response to their arrest, Trump spent a huge amount of money on newspaper ads, including one in The Times, calling for the return of the death penalty — something for which he still refuses to apologize.
Any speakers that really struck you?
Bret: Well, let me just say for the record that the ad was despicable — and maybe it isn’t too late to return the money?
Gail: Feel free to ask, but giving money to Donald Trump would not be on my priority list.
Bret: As for the speakers, I thought Biden’s delivery was a pretty good reminder of why he isn’t the nominee.
Gail: Gotta admit you’re right on that one.
Bret: But the speech that struck me as the most worth listening to was Bill Clinton’s. In his genial and conversational way, he gave Democrats their best line of attack against Trump — “Don’t count the lies; count the ‘I’s’ ” — to emphasize the 45th president’s bottomless narcissism. But he also warned Democrats about coming across as the party of cultural condescension. It was a quiet but unmistakable dig at his wife’s infamous “basket of deplorables” comment, which made it that much more … interesting.
Gail: Hmm. Wonder if Hillary had that interpretation.
Bret: Gail, one larger point about the convention is that it was supposed to convey “joy.” But as our colleague Patrick Healy pointed out in an astute essay, “Joy is not a strategy.” Actually, it’s more like a helium balloon that rises and rises — until it deflates and crumples. So where do Democrats go from here?
Gail: Not much more than a couple of months until the election, and you’re gonna have to get your people organized to go out, ring bells, help folks register for the deeply popular mail ballots, and otherwise make sure every possible supporter is going to actually vote. Getting the troops enthusiastic is important.
Bret: In this respect, having Harris at the top of the ticket is a blessing for Democrats, particularly among minority voters who weren’t exactly thrilled about Biden.
Gail: But Patrick is absolutely right that joy is not going to persuade a majority of voters to vote for you. The Harris campaign has to come up with an agenda she can sell to the country — probably won’t be all that joyful, but it will, I hope, be full of good plans to improve the economy while taking some of the profits from rich people and corporations and moving the money over to help the poor, the schools, the environment.
Bret: Her challenge is going to be to persuade voters that her agenda is something new and has nothing to do with the last three-and-a-half years of governance.
Gail: Just wondering, since her agenda will obviously include tax hikes, and other items you aren’t crazy about, what’s the chance she’ll be able to finally get your vote?
Bret: My taxes going up would be a small price to pay for keeping Trump out of the White House. But I’m going to need a lot more convincing than a single speech light on policy details, especially since I’m hard-pressed to think of anything in her past record that recommends her to me as a credible future president. I’ll keep an open mind, since my current plan is to cast a write-in ballot for Mr. Magoo.
Gail: Ah, we are gonna have a lot more arguing to do. I said I wasn’t going to ask you this every week, but with only 10 weeks left until Election Day, maybe I just will. That’s not much time, and control of the House and Senate are also up for grabs. Any predictions there?
Bret: I can easily imagine the House flipping back to the Democrats, but Senate math seems to favor Republicans: nearly twice as many Democrats are up for re-election this year. But candidate quality still counts, which is why a talented Democrat like Ohio’s Sherrod Brown looks like a winner against his Trumpy opponent, Bernie Moreno. So … we’ll see.
Last thing: No reader should miss Tina Brown’s gorgeous and meaningful guest essay in The Times on Gus Walz, Tim Walz’s 17-year-old son, who jumped up teary-eyed during his dad’s convention speech to say, “That’s my Dad!” Like Gus, Tina’s adult son Georgie is neurodiverse, and what makes them both unusual is also what makes them spectacular. “One of the joys of my life in the social churn of New York is living with a son whose inability to read the room makes him incapable of telling anything but the truth,” she wrote. If only all of our politicians were as honest as Gus and Georgie.
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