Chuck Darwin on Nostr: In her most recent work on the stump, Kamala Harris has gone to great lengths to ...
In her most recent work on the stump, Kamala Harris has gone to great lengths to raise the salience of the danger that Trump poses.
What’s more, she’s making her case in a way that gets media attention and appeals to wide swaths of the electorate
—and she’s making her democracy case at a moment when the public seems ready to hear it.
The approach she’s taking is some of her best strategic output since her debate.
Trump’s been giving her a lot of material to work with lately.
His most recent stump speeches have been nearly undiluted herrenvolk pornography, flamboyant arias against migrants and other “enemies within,”
coupled with some of the most despotic ideas he’s ever mused about,
including invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to dispose of his political enemies.
(His former secretary of defense has urged people to take Trump seriously in this regard.)
These recent appearances have been so disturbing that his Monday rally in which he slipped into a fugue and swayed to music for a half an hour seemed to be a nice break from relentless invocations to political violence and oblique threats to political rivals.
Far from letting Trump slide, Harris has been making Trump’s recent rants the centerpiece of her campaign appearances.
On Wednesday, Harris appeared at a rally in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with former GOP Representatives Adam Kinzinger and Barbara Comstock and a slew of other Never Trump Republicans,
and made a speech about protecting our constitutional values.
She wove in recent news
—Trump’s aforementioned plans to punish his political enemies;
General Mark Milley’s warning that the former president was “fascist to the core”
—in an effort to make these stakes clear:
“He considers any American who doesn’t support him or bend to his will to be an enemy to our country.… He says that as commander in chief he would use our military to go after them.
Honestly, let that sink in: Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged.”
As NPR noted, this turn from Harris is part of a larger effort to “appeal to moderate Republicans and independent voters,”
which may cause some consternation to those who’d prefer she center her rhetorical efforts toward left-liberal audiences.
But Harris’s overtures to center-right fence-sitters aren’t the bipartisan triangulations of yesteryear.
Harris isn’t Biden, making impossible promises to lead GOP electeds back off the QAnon cliff, and she’s certainly not following Barack Obama into the Grand Bargain weeds.
Harris needs moderate suburbanites to climb on board with her.
The Democrats have a rough Senate map, so Harris has to run in a way that might help save Montana Senator Jon Tester’s job.
But this outreach is all about democracy as well:
Some of the Republicans Harris might reach are conservative election officials who haven’t drunk the Trump Kool-Aid,
for whom a little bit of assurance might help them steel themselves against the pressure to commit ballot jankery.
At any rate, if the terms of our détente with moderate Republicans is that we all agree a dangerous caudillo shouldn’t be president,
these are perhaps the most favorable-to-the-left negotiations in recent memory.
At any rate, I’d rather spend the next four years having policy arguments with a too-centrist Kamala Harris than being rooted out as an “enemy of the people.”
Harris doesn’t just save this rhetoric for the Never Trump set, however.
This is but a part of a recent push to make these arguments in front of rallygoers of all stripes,
often by doing little more than standing out of the way and letting Trump speak for himself.
As NPR reported on a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Harris showed attendees a 30-second mastercut of Trump’s recent public derangements
—a montage that “showed Trump repeatedly complaining about ‘the enemy from within’ suggesting they should be jailed
—or dealt with violently.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/187278/harris-trump-defense-democracy-2024
What’s more, she’s making her case in a way that gets media attention and appeals to wide swaths of the electorate
—and she’s making her democracy case at a moment when the public seems ready to hear it.
The approach she’s taking is some of her best strategic output since her debate.
Trump’s been giving her a lot of material to work with lately.
His most recent stump speeches have been nearly undiluted herrenvolk pornography, flamboyant arias against migrants and other “enemies within,”
coupled with some of the most despotic ideas he’s ever mused about,
including invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to dispose of his political enemies.
(His former secretary of defense has urged people to take Trump seriously in this regard.)
These recent appearances have been so disturbing that his Monday rally in which he slipped into a fugue and swayed to music for a half an hour seemed to be a nice break from relentless invocations to political violence and oblique threats to political rivals.
Far from letting Trump slide, Harris has been making Trump’s recent rants the centerpiece of her campaign appearances.
On Wednesday, Harris appeared at a rally in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with former GOP Representatives Adam Kinzinger and Barbara Comstock and a slew of other Never Trump Republicans,
and made a speech about protecting our constitutional values.
She wove in recent news
—Trump’s aforementioned plans to punish his political enemies;
General Mark Milley’s warning that the former president was “fascist to the core”
—in an effort to make these stakes clear:
“He considers any American who doesn’t support him or bend to his will to be an enemy to our country.… He says that as commander in chief he would use our military to go after them.
Honestly, let that sink in: Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged.”
As NPR noted, this turn from Harris is part of a larger effort to “appeal to moderate Republicans and independent voters,”
which may cause some consternation to those who’d prefer she center her rhetorical efforts toward left-liberal audiences.
But Harris’s overtures to center-right fence-sitters aren’t the bipartisan triangulations of yesteryear.
Harris isn’t Biden, making impossible promises to lead GOP electeds back off the QAnon cliff, and she’s certainly not following Barack Obama into the Grand Bargain weeds.
Harris needs moderate suburbanites to climb on board with her.
The Democrats have a rough Senate map, so Harris has to run in a way that might help save Montana Senator Jon Tester’s job.
But this outreach is all about democracy as well:
Some of the Republicans Harris might reach are conservative election officials who haven’t drunk the Trump Kool-Aid,
for whom a little bit of assurance might help them steel themselves against the pressure to commit ballot jankery.
At any rate, if the terms of our détente with moderate Republicans is that we all agree a dangerous caudillo shouldn’t be president,
these are perhaps the most favorable-to-the-left negotiations in recent memory.
At any rate, I’d rather spend the next four years having policy arguments with a too-centrist Kamala Harris than being rooted out as an “enemy of the people.”
Harris doesn’t just save this rhetoric for the Never Trump set, however.
This is but a part of a recent push to make these arguments in front of rallygoers of all stripes,
often by doing little more than standing out of the way and letting Trump speak for himself.
As NPR reported on a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Harris showed attendees a 30-second mastercut of Trump’s recent public derangements
—a montage that “showed Trump repeatedly complaining about ‘the enemy from within’ suggesting they should be jailed
—or dealt with violently.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/187278/harris-trump-defense-democracy-2024