STILL TOO CLOSE TO CALL

 It has only been a little more than two months since President Joe Biden decided not to run for reelection and Vice President Kamala Harris stepped in as the Democratic candidate for the presidency, but the whirlwind of activity that has occurred since then has come fast and furious.  The Democratic convention was a joyful affair, with Barack and Michelle Obama delivering great speeches and Harris herself emerging energized.  The Presidential debate with Donald Trump was even better for her, with most viewers overwhelmingly thinking that she clearly bested him.  Really, it seems that the Harris campaign has been perfect so far, with no major gaffes or missteps.  Sure, she has some residual baggage from the Biden administration, but her handling of it has been effective as she's laid out her new economic plans while trying to counter Trump on immigration  and hammering him on her strongest issue, abortion.  Along the way she's picked up endorsements from Republicans like Dick and Lynn Cheney, and over 700 former secretaries of state and defense who all signed a letter stating that Trump posed both a threat to democracy and our nation's defense.

You would think that a campaign with all that going for it would be riding high, but while she did get a slight bounce from both the campaign and the debate, current polls show her only slightly ahead nationally and essentially tied in many battleground states.  The poll analysis website 538.com has them running even.  And with Trump refusing to debate Harris again, there's probably no breaking story or "October surprise" awaiting that could radically change things.  It really looks like the vote on November 5th may be one of the closest ever.  What really scares me is that Trump's polls numbers were lower than his actual percentage of the vote  in 2016 and 2020, so he could have the advantage here. 

Why is this happening?  Is America really about to elect a twice impeached convicted felon?  Sadly, the answer could be yes.  And really, a lot of this comes down to American men. One thing the polling clearly shows is that this will be the most gender divided election ever, with some polls showing Harris leading Trump among female voters by a whopping 20 points.  That's no surprise, given that this is the first presidential election since Roe Vs Wade was overturned.  But this goes beyond the issue of abortion, with Trump's swaggering, absurdly boastful nature appealing to men who somehow see his string of marriages to younger and younger women as something to aspire to, and who cheer when he goes to Ultimate Fighting matches.  And who shrug off his infamous Access Hollywood tape comments as "locker room talk" and buy into his argument that the criminal charges against him are just being political witch hunts.

As an American male myself, I find it soul crushing that such a despicable man could be a role model to anybody, and I know I'm not alone in this.   But most male are going for Trump, raising the depressing possibility that a misogynistic man who's been accused of sexual assault or rape by 26 different women could defeat not one, but two different female candidates.  Again I have to ask, why is this happening?

COMPARE AND CONTRAST

 

Another assassination attempt was made against presidential candidate Donald Trump last Sunday when an armed, mentally unstable person camped out at his golf resort, waiting for him.  Thankfully the man was stopped with him ever firing a shot.  This is, of course, the second such attempt made against Trump during this campaign, and an investigation into just how two such dangerous people could have gotten so close to him is understandably, underway.

Trump has, not surprisingly,  blamed what he called the "inflammatory rhetoric"  from Democrats, as has his running mate, JD Vance.  In a classic burst of Trump hypocrisy, Trump used the exact kind of language that he was condemning to describe his political opponents, calling them the “enemy from within” and “the real threat.”  But what do you expect from a man who says that if he loses we "won't have a country anymore", calls his opponents "vermin" and says that immigrants are "poisoning the blood of America." 

Sadly, I could go on much further when listing the violence tinged, hateful words that Trump and his supporters regularly use on the campaign trail or in social media.  But what I want to do instead is to compare and contrast the reaction to this attack, and another violent. politically based one.

In October of 2022, just before the midterm elections, a mentally disturbed man, armed with a hammer, broke into the home of Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and brutally attacked her husband.  While he eventually recovered,  he had to spend days in the hospital with a cracked skull. The attacker was obsessed with online rightwing conspiracy theories.

And what was the response of Donald Trump to such a vicious attack?  He made jokes.  He repeatedly made sick jokes during speeches about the attack that had left an innocent man hospitalized.  And he didn't stop, he still joked about it this very month while giving a speech in front of fraternal police officers, saying, "Nancy Pelosi has a big wall wrapped around her house. Of course, it didn't help too much with the problems she had, did it?" (Thankfully, witnesses described the joke as only getting a few awkward laughs).  And it wasn't just Trump, ridicule of the attack and conspiracy theories about Pelosi and his attacker being lovers, spread throughout  right wing media.  While this attack was obviously different than an assassination attempt made against a presidential candidate, they are both politically based, potentially deadly attacks made by mentally unstable men.

Compare that cruel response by Trump to President Joe Biden's about the recent  attempt on Trump himself:  Neither he nor anyone connected to the Kamala Harris campaign have in any way downplayed the seriousness of what happened, and Biden strongly condemned political violence and called for more government aid for the Secret Service.  And while some radical people on the left have made sick jokes about the assassination attempt on social media, no mainstream political figure on the left has embraced any anti Trump conspiracies or said anything to condone what happened.  The notion that it is people on the left that are using violent language, or even that both sides do it, is just a false equivalency.  

I myself often use strong language when describing my deep loathing of Donald Trump and the political cult movement that he represents, but naturally I draw the line at condoning violence.  My hope is that Trump will lose the election in November and then go to jail for the multiple crimes I think he has committed.  In fact, I think Trump has been engaging in lawless behavior for years and should have gone to jail for it long before he got into politics.  (I especially believe those 26 women that have accused him of sexual assault or rape, and those accusations stretch back decades.)  I can think all of these things and still be repulsed by the assassination attempts made against him.

WILL THE DEBATE CHANGE THE RACE?

 

I tend to not be good at gauging who won a presidential debate after I've seen it.  Being an unswayable progressive, I allow my own bias to think that my side has always won.  I even thought that Barack Obama did alright in his first debate with Mitt Romney back in 2012, a debate that even Obama himself later admitted that he lost.

Given that, I watched the first (and probably only) presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris with anxiety.  I knew that the bump in the polls that Harris received after President Joe Biden agreed to step down and she took over as the nominee had seemed to fade, with the race now being a tossup.  

Even right after the debate, I wanted to say that Harris won, but I wasn't sure.  My biggest fear was that the lies that Trump spoke, most of which he had repeated many times at his rallies, just might work on the American public at large the same way that they do for his rally crowds.  (And, for the record, a CNN fact checker says that he lied 33 times, and Harris only did once, and some of his more absurd lies were corrected live by the moderators).

I was relieved to hear that nearly all of the pundits have said that Harris won; she looked calm, collected and often even amused while Trump got angrier and angrier.  Plus she introduced some economic ideas that could be popular and firmly stated her position on abortion well.

Plus she really did seem to get under Trump's skin better than Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden did in their debates with him.  Perhaps the most interesting exchange came when Harris said “I’m going to actually do something really unusual. I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies. Because it’s a really interesting thing to watch.” She then mentioned his usual rally speech subjects like windmills causing cancer and the fictional character Hannibal Lecter.  Then she concluded by saying, "And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”  

Not surprisingly, to a man obsessed with his rallies and their size, Trump looked flustered and threw out an absurd childish insult when it was his turn to speak, “People don’t go to her rallies, there’s no reason to go, and the people that do go, she’s busing them in and paying them to be there.”  Hopefully, most of the American public will see just what happened there, a bitter old man lashed out over an insult to the thing that he was most obsessed with; his own popularity.  For the rest of the debate he seemed flustered, ranting laughably about immigrants eating people's dogs while Harris just rolled her eyes at his ridiculous claims.  

One clear indication that Trump lost is that shares of Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, fell more than 12 percent the next day.  He also looked like a loser when he started bleating that the debate was "rigged" against him; as usual, he thinks that everything he ever does is perfect and the only way he can ever lose is if the other side cheats.

But even if Harris did as good as possibly could be expected last night, I still fear it may not be enough to get her over the finish line. Don't forget that Obama in 2012 and George W Bush in 2004 both lost their first debates and then won reelection.  Debates tend to only have a slight effect on the polls, and with two months to go, this is still a very close election.  Still, it was great to see that at least once, Trump was called on his terrible lies and humiliated in front of millions.