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October 8, 2024 - 7:00am
Last night, Kamala Harris sat down with the CBS programme 60 Minutes as part of a media reboot. After avoiding the national press throughout the past two months, her campaign has recently announced a series of appearances on podcasts and TV shows. However, this interview suggests that, while the media strategy might have changed, the campaign’s internal logic remains the same.
Harris’s 60 minutes interview has a wall-of-vibes dynamic. Policy details were scorned in favour of vague talking points. When asked about how she would pay for her expansive new spending programmes, she pivoted to claims about how the wealthy needed to pay their fair share. In a telling exchange, Harris refused three times to say whether or not it was a mistake for the Biden administration to loosen border controls as much as it did for the first three-and-a-half years in office. Where exactly Harris stood on many policy questions was no clearer by the end of the interview than at the beginning. Instead, viewers were treated to invocations of “consensus” — and a handy reminder that Liz Cheney is a Kamala Harris fan.
In recent years, the electorate has become increasingly polarised along educational lines, with college-educated voters becoming a pillar of the Democratic Party. Recent polling analysis from CNN gives Harris a historic advantage with college-educated Americans, winning this group by 21 points. By way of comparison, Hillary Clinton won this group by 15 points, and Barack Obama won voters with a college degree by only two points in 2012.
Harris’s vibes-based strategy seems optimised to appeal to this group. Many college-educated suburbanites are repelled by Donald Trump’s pugnacious brand of politics, and are also sceptical of the adversarial tone that often accompanies populism of both the Left and the Right. In appearance, Harris seems distinctly non-threatening.
Perhaps her most spirited moment in the 60 Minutes interview came when she claimed that Vladimir Putin “would be sitting in Kyiv right now” if Trump were president. The domestic challenges that weigh on working families — such as inflation, the border crisis, or economic upward mobility — didn’t seem to generate the same passion.
Early on in the campaign, some observers on the Right worried that Harris could try to take the populist fight to Trump. By leaning into bread-and-butter issues such as healthcare and benefits for families, she could outflank Trump from the populist Left. So far, the Vice President has declined that strategy. Instead, she may be hoping to run up the score among the gentry progressive class.
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SubscribeI wish people would wake up and look around. Painting the populist as a fasc!st threat to democracy isn’t unique to Trump or the U.S. They’re doing the same thing in France, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands. They did it in Italy too, until Meloni was elected and the world didn’t end. These populists are not suddenly appearing at the same time by coincidence.
The world didn’t end in Italy because Meloni adopted sensible policies (much to many people’s surprise).
Thank you for proving the point. Trump adopted very reasonable policies. Democrats decided to mutiny, lie and deceive. And still do.
Injecting bleach and supporting neo-n@zis? Very reasonable!
Except he did not do either of those things did he?
He did both live on camera.
I realize that supporting Trump requires elevated levels of denial of reality but are you really so far detaching from the real world?
Here’s a link to the full transcript, with full context, and everything else you need to disabuse yourself of the mythology around the “inject bleach” comment.
Context is everything (he was spitballing ideas just presented by Bill Bryan, the head of the Science and Technology Directorate at the Department of Homeland Security). Hardly the most articulate of Presidents, granted, but he doesn’t strictly recommend mainlining bleach.
Q The President mentioned the idea of cleaners, like bleach and isopropyl alcohol you mentioned. There’s no scenario that that could be injected into a person, is there? I mean —
ACTING UNDER SECRETARY BRYAN: No, I’m here to talk about the findings that we had in the study. We won’t do that within that lab and our lab. So —
THE PRESIDENT: It wouldn’t be through injection. We’re talking about through almost a cleaning, sterilization of an area. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t work. But it certainly has a big effect if it’s on a stationary object.
div > p:nth-of-type(2) > a”>Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing – The White House (archives.gov)
Grow up. His actual comments are easy to verify. Snopes of all outlets has even fact checked the Charlottesville comments.
He literally said that the neo_n@zis were very fine people.
I know you get upset when its pointed out that your cult leader is a complete and utter moron, Jimmy, but these are the facts and they are not in dispute. Not, at least, by anyone who isn’t a signed up Trump cultist like you.
Didn’t ingest bleach himself you mean?
Shocker! CS has swallowed the regime media lies about Trump and his bleach comments and Charlottesville comments.
Shocker! Jimmy will ignore the evidence in front of his eyes to stick up for his clown king!
Actually, not a shocker at all – our lil’ pal Jimmy does it every day!
The surprise of her opponents, presumably?
Populism is merely the promotion of popular policies that broadly appeal, and as long as these have a chance of succeeding they are a threat to the sort of “democracy” that incumbent politicians promote which is equally “populist” in its own way involving the deployment of a vast army of regime supporting bureaucrats of various stripes. What is ironic is that the current incumbent political regimes tend to be more fascistic in political form than the insurgent populists. The “fascist threat” is merely a bogeyman to a population that actually doesn’t know what economic policies Mussolini, the creator of fascism, actually promoted, which was a form of state socialistic managed capitalism. Mussolini would have been delighted to have the sort of military industrial complex that would enable him to intervene abroad and try to impose his form of fascism on less developed nations just as the US currently does.
No, but on the flip side, many of the changes their (working class) voters were hoping for are rarely realized either. There may be several reasons for this. Perhaps some ‘populists’ are simply opportunists and and not actually motivated to change anything. But even if they are, a lot of power in the West simply resides outside of the voter’s influence. Supra-national institutions and agreements, PR and big financial interests all hold a lot of power. The status quo isn’t easily and quickly changed and, of course, this is by design. The problem is that many populists movements have no clear plan on how to deal with these power structures. For example, their economic plans are often vague, shallow or actually conformist to the neoliberal status quo.
But when all is said and done we either vote for Trump or Harris or no one. That’s it, folks.
We focus on Kamala vs Trump as the deciding battle but it really doesn’t matter. The enlightenment is over. Rational, empirical-based policy delivering meaningful, measurable progress is gone.
Managerial and leadership positions in the state are reserved for college educated people. And college educated people are swung by “vibes”. An infantile, empty-headed framework for decision-making that can justify anything but conclude nothing.
So, whoever wins the captaincy in November, the ship of state will still be sailed by a crew using “vibes”. And that is why across the West everything is very obviously falling apart.
This is so true. Policy and outcomes no longer matter in the suburbs – only the status game. It was the same with Brexit: nobody knows anything but everyone has an opinion.
Many college-educated suburbanites are repelled by Donald Trump’s pugnacious brand of politics, and are also sceptical of the adversarial tone that often accompanies populism of both the Left and the Right. In appearance, Harris seems distinctly non-threatening.
They are all about style and virtue-signalling, as opposed to results and real virtue – the virtuous don’t need to put their virtue on display.
This article says more about today’s college educated person more than anything else.
That they are smarter and more successful than you?
Most of them, around 58% will end up with a job that does not require a college degree.
They are very, very smart.
Let’s take your statistic seriously, which is being very generous to you as Trump cultists are rarely acquainted with the facts.
You do know that getting a job is not the only reason to enter advanced education, right? I suppose you probably don’t, do you?
In my experience a heck of a lot of our ever-expanding professional class are engaged in adding complication and expense to everything, the core of some jobs is pontification and prevarication. Along with massive risk aversion, it’s why we can’t do anything any more – from stopping boats breaking across our borders to getting infrastructure projects done or cleaning water. I do some work for a utility company on the physical (construction) side, a job I’m doing now would have cost a private client about 500 pounds, direct cost to the utility company about 10, 000.
Employment is not the main point of schooling. Education – insight – is. Why is it common, indeed typical, for those with lots of schooling to attain so very little insight? For doesn’t that seem the case?
The educated used to be the adults in the room. How is it that we now take for granted that the educated will be “swung by vibes”? This calls for an explanation, does it not?
I was wonder did anyone else get the irony of that statement in the article. But it wouldn’t be the first time education universally has been questioned.
You can make an argument that American Vice Presidents are selected for not being a challenge to the authority of the President – so Kamala Harris already comes pre-diminished. It might also explain the selection of Tim Walz as her VP running mate. The puppet’s puppet’s puppet as it were.
J D Vance may be an exception to this observation.
Obama>Biden
Biden>Harris
Harris>Walz
Trump-Pence?
“J D Vance may be an exception to this observation.”
LOL! Vance is one of most obsequious ass kissers in history! He will say literally anything to secure the chance to be humiliated by Trump. And so it goes for most of the Republican party – it will take a generation for them to get over the destruction Trump has wrought.
Imagine having to admit to your kids and grandkids that you gave up every principle you ever had to support a moronic sex offending criminal because you were a woman hating racist.
The sane, grown-up citizens have at long last come to understand that the Wokeness goblins that drive them mad were hatched in universities – those finishing schools for the ‘opinion forming classes’. The tragedy of it is that it has taken 30 years for that penny to drop. Our great folly was failing to foresee the long-term consequences of allowing our universities to become colonised by an intelligentsia intent on cleverly unpicking the threads that held Western civilisation together. The irony of it is that the Democratic Party still trades as the voice of the underprivileged whereas the reality is that it has become the voice of a lefty college-sheep-dipped, overprivileged metropolitan middle class. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/take-me-to-your-experts
This phenomenon isn’t new. The Fabians pioneered the strategy 100 years ago and Blair and Clinton perfected it. You hijack the party of the left, ditch the levelling-up and replace it with eugenics, identity politics and globalist economics. You and your voters get richer; the poor get poorer and, best of all, you get to feel good about yourself in the process.
The Fabian angle is very insightful.
People are connecting the dots.
Two things:
First, the liberal political and media elements in the US have succeeded in turning politics into a referendum on personalities rather than policies. So while commentaries spend a lot of time analyzing policy statements (or lack thereof) actual voters are more motivated by the perceived personalities of the candidates.
Second, since the original Clinton v. Trump election cycle, one of the most significant blocks of votes have been the “not/never the other guy” vote. Trump won largely on the “not Hillary” vote. Biden won on the “not Trump” vote. And in the current cycle it may be that in their haste to replace Biden as a candidate, the Democrats may have nominated a candidate that is more unpopular than Trump.
My non-scientific, personal opinion is that Trump will win in a squeaker because slightly more people don’t want Kamala than don’t want Trump.
God forbid.
The fair share lie. Again. And people still believe it.
Yes, and if that’s all she has it’s over. And they know it.
College educated used to mean learned in a STEM or Arts curriculum, well read, and capable of reason.
Those places no longer exist; they were slowly purged beginning in the 50s/60s. Ms Raygun of Olympic fame is college educated.
Go check out the degree.
And on populism – I was taught (and read) that the Democratic Party is the child of the Populist Party , circa 1800s (WJB?).
I don’t think any of the candidates messaging is working. The techniques they’re using seam both tired, vapid, and banal, when listening to modern political messaging it sounds like the kind of stuff you would see in early 2000s if not the 1990s. Maybe that’s because that’s the mental place they want to be, back when they could dominate the political conversation easily and didn’t have to deal with the discontent the public feels towards politics these days and they could rely on gatekeepers to smooth things out for them. I think the intent of both candidates in the election is to make the other one less likable than they are, In other words it’s an unpopularity contest, they’re trying to make the other guy look worse than they. It has nothing to do with policy or vision, of which both candidates are completely lacking in, let alone interested in. When it comes to the messaging style of both candidates, Trump is pretty incompetent when it comes to the social technology end of things, and only manage just to succeed by being provocative and sucking up all the attention, but never succeeding on substance. Harris on the other hand has some substance, but it’s completely devoid of charisma or creativity and imagination, and her people skills are just awful.
The polling is notoriously inaccurate at this stage of an election. Beyond that, the polls routinely underestimate the conservative vote by as much as 10%. I’m a good example. I did not answer eight calls over a two day period from a polling service. There are millions like me. The only poll that counts is on election day. This is why the Democrats are so busy in the early morning hours when the votes are tabulated. If they can’t win fairly, they will find a way to win otherwise. Here’s hoping the Stupid Party has learned this by now.
True of all opinion research. As in….here’s a survey question: Are you the kind of person who would respond to a survey?
No comment.
Chuckle!
Of course educated people despise Trump. He’s an illiterate boorish moron with a following of rubes who are even stupider than him.
He was handed a booming economy by Obama and he drove it into the ground. His open racism is disgusting to any normal person. His evisceration of women’s rights is a terrifying start to where he and his controllers on the extreme right want to take America. Finally, his ass kissing of dictators and bullies around the world is a humiliation for America.
Harris in a landslide.
You need to do a bit of fact checking.
All those awful, flyover deplorables must appall you
All Obama did was to stack future generations with gargantuan debt. As has the puppet who followed Trump.
No candidate in the last 30 years or so has been fiscally responsible. So nothing new there.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, as of 2021, 23.5% of people 25 or older have a bachelor’s degree or higher. There are around 231,510,000 people in the U.S. 25 and older. There are around 259 million people in the U.S. who are voting age (18 and older). This means there are around 27.5 million 18-25.
This makes the college educated demographic about 54.4 million people. If I had to guess, coastal states with large populations and that tend to overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, probably have a higher percentage of college graduates than do majority Republican states. Therefore, any strategy that seeks to run up the margin for this demographic would be a losing one, especially given the Electoral College.
I think this is just the point: the Harris/Walz campaign is utterly failing to convince anyone who would not already to be likely to support them. Virulent anti-Trump rhetoric also probably only works on the demographic identified above. Their failure to clearly address issues of concern to voters (the top 2 of which are the economy and immigration) will likely be their downfall.
As with Two Tier in the UK, Harris gets no difficult questions, is fawned upon by most of the media and when someone does actually pin her on something, she gets away with laughing in an almost manic way.
But, also as here, the entire establishment is behind her. She only has to stand up to win.
How is it that the likes of Trump and Harris aspire to the office once held by FDR?
It seems Kamala’s friendly media tour interviews are not going well. She has an incredibly tough time handling the easiest of questions. If she does not pick up her game I think there is a real risk she loses this election.
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