FORWARD

[Art by Shepard Fairey.]

Anyone who reads Orange Crate Art regularly knows what I think about this year’s election. But I don’t want to look like The Washington Post in not endorsing a candidate. So here’s an official endorsement: the Orange Crate Art editorial board — and owner — urge readers to vote for Kamala Harris for president.

We are not going back.

To-do

I like the prospect of a president with, as Kamala Harris says, a to-do list. Not an enemies list. And certainly not a Project 2025.

Related reading
All OCA list posts (Pinboard)

Truncated? No

On NBC Nightly News tonight, Lester Holt spoke of Kamala Harris’s “truncated campaign.” No. Truncated is about the end, not the beginning. If you start late and run the course, your effort has not been truncated.

Merriam-Webster defines truncate: “to shorten by or as if by cutting off.”

The Harris campaign has been a shortened campaign.

Thanks, Elaine, for having your radar on while the news played.

No endorsements

Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, nixed the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris.

And now Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, has nixed that paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris.

Shameful. And shameful.

*

I unsubscribed from the Post after writing this post.

[But the real trick will be trying not to buy from Amazon.]

Extraterrestrial replaces Anderson Cooper?

[Anderson Cooper? As seen on CNN, October 23, 2024. An unaltered photograph, with my phone close to the TV.]

I passed up watching Kamala Harris’s town hall on Wednesday night, but I watched a few clips yesterday, including one in which Anderson Cooper pressed Harris again and again and again about her changed position on fracking. Yes, she changed her position. How remarkable. Get over yourself, Anderson Cooper.

But wait a minute — is that Anderson Cooper? I know it sounds fantastic (as they say in old movies), but I think he’s been replaced by an extraterrestrial of the sort that once haunted the pages of the Weekly World News. Those ETs, or “space aliens,” could not be reached for comment. But consider the fellow who took Bill Clinton on a ride in a UFO, as reported in the WWN in December 1992. The resemblance to Wednesday night’s “Anderson Cooper” is remarkable.

[I couldn’t make this resemblance into a “separated at birth” post, for an obvious reason.]

About last night

In the lastest installment of Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson offers an astute analysis of last night’s debate:

The question for Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris in tonight’s presidential debate was not how to answer policy questions, but how to counter Trump’s dominance displays while also appealing to the American people.

She and her team figured it out, and today they played the former president brilliantly. He took the bait, and tonight he self-destructed. In a live debate, on national television.

Swift FTW

As just reported on MSNBC: Taylor Swift has endorsed Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

Here it is, on Instagram.

Cleanup on aisle 45

Kamala Harris: “What we have done is clean up Donald Trump’s mess.”

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Donald Trump: “They’re eating the pets.”

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Kamala Harris: “World leaders are laughing at Donald Trump.”

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Donald Trump, about offering an alternative to the Affordable Care Act: “I have concepts of a plan.”

NPR, sheesh

From a Consider This story. The subject is Kamala Harris’s effort to align herself with popular Biden administration policies while establishing her own candidacy:

“How is she walking that needle, and how are you going to look for that, particularly in the debate coming up?”

Maybe just listen for the screams?

You can walk a line. You can thread a needle. You can walk the line if you’re Johnny Cash. But you cannot walk a needle. Ouch.

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

[Know your clichés!]

“False balance” in the NYT

Margaret Sullivan, a former public editor of The New York Times, writes about “an ugly case of ‘false balance’” in that newspaper. It’s in a story about Kamala Harris’s and Donald Trump’s plans to increase afforable housing:

The story takes seriously Trump’s plan for the mass deportation of immigrants as part of his supposed “affordable housing” agenda.

Here’s some both-sidesing for you, as the paper of record describes Harris’s tax cuts to spur construction and grants to first-time home buyers, and Trump’s deportation scheme....

Stories like this run rampant in the Times, and far beyond. It matters more in the Times because — even in this supposed “post-media era” — the country’s biggest newspaper still sets the tone and wields tremendous influence. And, of course, the Times has tremendous resources, a huge newsroom and the ability to hire the best in the business. Undeniably, it does a lot of excellent work.

But its politics coverage often seems broken and clueless — or even blatantly pro-Trump.

“I accept”

“On behalf of everyone whose story could only be written in the greatest nation on earth, I accept your nomination for President of the United States”: Kamala Harris, a few minutes ago at the DNC.

And: “The future is always worth fighting for.”

And: “We are not going back.”

And: Harris is the only presidential candidate whose acceptance speech has namechecked John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, and Aretha Franklin.

[The Emhoff children, Cole and Ella, are named for Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald.]

Feeling seen

Jonathan Capehart, as PBS closed its coverage of the Democratic National Convention tonight. For context: he was holding a handkerchief that was a present from PBS NewsHour co-anchor Amna Nawaz:

“Yesterday I said, in politics people want to be seen. They want to be seen in the way their politicans talk to them and talk about them. And when I pulled out my Amna hankie, it was when Michelle Obama said that Kamala Harris — we never have the grace of failing forward; we never have the benefit of generational wealth; if things don’t go our way, we don’t get to complain. That’s how Michelle Obama lived her life — lives her life; that’s how Barack Obama lives [his] life. That’s how I live my life. And to hear that, coming from the former First Lady, is just too — and I’m sorry, but I feel seen. And I think people in this hall feel seen. And I’m certain that millions of Americans feel seen. I’ll leave it there.”

*

Wednesday morning: You can watch and listen here.

Psst, David Brooks

I wasn’t going to make this post. But after reading David Brooks’s baffling appraisal of the speech Joe Biden gave last night, here I am.

David Brooks didn’t like the speech. In The New York Times he writes, “I was hoping for something in the spirit of the Harris campaign — ebullient and joyful.”

I noticed ebullient twice in Brooks’s comments during PBS’s coverage of the DNC last night, each time pronounced /EB-yə-lənt/. As Garner’s Modern English Usage notes, that’s a common mispronunciation.

Has David Brooks latched onto this word for use in talking and writing about Kamala Harris? If so, I hope he gets it right. (Perhaps Jonathan Capehart can clue him in.) I will be listening and watching.

[I left a comment about ebullient on the Times piece. Maybe Brooks will see it.]

Trump, breaking?

From Forbes :

Former President Donald Trump falsely claimed a crowd that gathered to see Vice President Kamala Harris arrive at a Michigan airport for a campaign rally was “fake,” insisting her campaign used artificial intelligence to mask the fact that “there was nobody there” — a claim refuted by images, videos and accounts of the event.

“There was nobody there”? It sounds to me as if someone might be having a psychotic break.

Charles Crumb (Robert’s brother, in the documentary Crumb ):

“When narcissism is wounded, it wants to strike back at the person who wounded it.”

If you measure out your life in crowds, someone else’s bigger crowds might be intolerable.

See also George Conway’s 2019 Atlantic article “Unfit for Office” and his Anti-Psychopath PAC.

Responses and non-answers

Lawrence O’Donnell’s commentary on yesterday’s Trump “General News Conference” is worth watching in full. O’Donnell points out that most of the questions — mostly inaudible, as there was no microphone for the press — were wasted questions, silly, pointless, and that Trump’s responses (most glaringly, to a question about mifepristone) did not constitute answers. And that Kamala Harris’s speech yesterday received little or no airtime from news networks.

Here is a Trump non-answer of my choosing, his response to a reporter who asked for his “constitutional analysis” of Kamala Harris’s replacing Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket. The full question is impossible to hear, but I did make out the words “constitutional analysis.” I have made slight corrections to C-SPAN’s transcription (which — guess what? — doesn’t include reporters’ questions):

We have a constitution. It’s a very important document and we live by it. She has no votes and I’m very happy to run against her. I’m not complaining from that standpoint. And I hate to be defending him, but he did not want to leave. He wanted to see if he could win. They said you’re not going to win after the debate. They said you’re not going to win. You can’t win. You’re out. And at first they said it nicely and he wasn’t leaving and then you, you know it, you know it better than anybody. Wait a minute. So, uh, when you think about it, they said at first they were going to go out to another vote, they were going to go through a primary system, a quick primary system, which it would have to be, and then it all disappeared and they just picked a person that was the first out. She was the first loser. Okay. So we call her the first loser. She was the first loser. When, uh, during the primary system, during the Democrat primary system, she was the first one to quit and she quit. She had no votes, no support and she was a bad debater, by the way, very bad debater. And that’s not the thing I’m looking forward to, but she was a bad debater. She did it — obviously a bad job. She never made it to lowa then for some reason. And I know he regrets it. You do too. He picked her and she turned on him too. She was working with the people that wanted him out. But the fact that you can be, get no votes, lose in the primary system, in other words, you had fourteen or fifteen people. She was the first one out. And that you can then be picked to run for president. It seems, seems to me actually unconstitutional. Perhaps it’s not.

How’s that for constitutional analysis?

Uh-oh

Donald Trump is having what he calls “a General News Conference” at 2:00 p.m. (EDT). I cannot imagine that his advisers have advised that. But the mess his campaign is in? He alone can fix it!

*

1:10 p.m.: He cannot bring himself to say “Kamala Harris.” It’s just “someone else,” “Kamala,” or “she.” Tim Walz is just “a man,” who is “heavy into the transgender world, heavy into lots of different worlds.”

1:17 p.m.: “I think she’s crashing.” (Projection.)

1:26 p.m.: Captain Queeg is at the microphone.

1:34 p.m.: With noticeable sniffs.

1:42 p.m.: “The Minnesota gentleman.” He cannot say the name.

1:45 p.m: In other countries, the government has encouraged people to buy guns, and crime has dropped 29%.

1:46 p.m.: Walz is now “her new friend.”

1:50 p.m.: That’s all, folks. I’m done.

[Fifty splatterings from the Trump Truth Social account as of 10:28 (CDT) this morning. It’s meltdown time.]

It’s Tim Walz

From The Guardian: “Kamala Harris names Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, as running mate.”

An excellent choice, making a ticket very much like Obama–Biden in affect.

Our household has been having fun reading the BigDadEnergy stuff at Threads.

What did I think about Kamala Harris?

I searched these pages to see what they (I) have said about Kamala Harris. Her name appears in thirteen — and now fourteen — posts. From a January 2, 2019 post:

The last thing Democrats need to do is to turn the 2020 presidential election into a battle between oldsters. Such a battle will do little to spark voter interest and much to spark parody. Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren: no. What the Democratic Party needs is a candidate who offers a sharp contrast to Donald Trump not only in policy but in affect. Sherrod Brown, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke: yes.

On January 27, 2019, I was happy to see that Harris was running. And on August 12, 2020, one day after Joe Biden named Harris as his running mate, I wrote, “she will (almost certainly) make a great nominee for president in 2024.”

[And, yes, there was a “How to improve writing” post about campaign e-mails, which were certainly not written by Harris.]

One original thought

One thought, not derived from commentary elsewhere: this clip makes me think that Andy Beshear would be an excellent vice presidential choice for Kamala Harris. He’d be the anti-Vance.

Kamala Harris’s vinyl

From May 2023, Kamala Harris leaves a D.C. record store. With Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald’s Porgy and Bess, Roy Ayers’s Everybody Loves the Sunshine, and Charles Mingus’s Let My Children Hear Music.

[Billboard identifies the Mingus LP only as “a record.”]