David M. Shribman
The still-life watercolor of a now-late political season suddenly has changed.
You don’t have to recall the lyrics of the 1966 Simon and Garfunkel song about the dangling conversation — from which the introductory line to this column is adapted — to know that, in a mere week’s time, the American conversation has changed.
The national dinnertime conversation has moved from whether Joe Biden will stick in the 2024 presidential race to how Kamala Harris will perform in that contest. Biden is the curdled cream in our coffee shop chatter. Harris is the fresh brew.
Now the campaign is taking on an entirely new shape, taking its form in a quote from a 2020 Pixar film named, poignantly, “Onward”: “You need to start thinking less about the past and more about the future.” Here are some of the new topics of conversation that would have been inconceivable when I wrote last week’s column:
— Can a vice president make the leap to the White House?
Harris is trying to be more like George H.W. Bush (who did just that in the 1988 election) and less like Richard Nixon (1960), Hubert Humphrey (1968), and Al Gore (2000), who weren’t able to make the direct jump. The key from the Bush example is to be identified with the strong points of the sitting president. The key from the Humphrey example is to be free of the weak points of the sitting chief executive.
— Who is old?
Last week it was Biden, at 81. Now it’s Donald Trump, at 78. The Democrats have a presumptive nominee who is 59, soon to be 60. The Republicans have a nominee who suddenly looks like the title of a book that was published when Trump was 10 years old: “Old Yeller.” Maybe at age 11 he saw Dorothy McGuire and Fess Parker in the movie version. Harris wasn’t born until seven years later. One of the top movies when she was 11 was “The Other Side of the Mountain,” an apt metaphor of where the Democrats believe they are now.
— What are the issues?
Trump will beat the same drum, perhaps even with less restraint: the 2020 election fraud that he seems to have convinced an entire party was at work four years ago; the notion that the Democrats are Bolsheviks in waiting; the legal crimes of his opponents and the moral crimes of the administration; and — a prediction! — a suggestion that Harris, who will emphasize that she was a prosecutor in California, employed those skills to nudge the Justice Department to persecute him. One more prediction: Trump will resuscitate one of the most effective phrases from modern politics — Jeane Kirkpatrick’s taunt about wacky, out-of-touch “San Francisco Democrats” — and aim it at Harris.
For her part, Harris will talk about abortion, and then she will talk about abortion some more. She will try to persuade the unpersuadables that the economy is better than they believe it is.
Lately, she has been talking about child care; perhaps she anticipated the emergence of a 2021 J.D. Vance riff in which he pointed out that the vice president didn’t have children and thus wasn’t well-suited for national leadership. The GOP vice-presidential nominee — citing Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — said the country was being led by Democrats who were “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
— How does Harris campaign without being Biden in a pantsuit?
First of all, her identity differentiates her. That’s a positive in many of the swing states, and to the extent that it is a negative, it’s mostly confined to places where the Democrats have no more hope of winning than the Chicago White Sox, who have lost about three-quarters of their games this year.
— What about debates?
Trump showed his ease and mastery in the June 27 debate, when he offered a helping hand to Biden’s route to the exit ramp. He was planning on another one for September, with the fondest hope that he might yet again triumph over Biden. That’s obviously not going to happen. Delivering a knock-out punch to Harris isn’t going to be as easy. She nearly delivered one to Biden in a 2019 debate over busing to achieve school desegregation.
But a presidential debate isn’t the only item on the 2024 fight card. Vance was primed to tangle with Harris. Now he’ll have a different opponent. Another sure thing thrown out the window in a week’s time.
— Who will capture the Black vote?
For months, Trump and some pollsters have suggested that Black voters, since 1932 an important part of the Democratic coalition, were primed to look at the Republicans with an open mind. Indeed, Trump has opened a mini offensive in the Black community, and the GOP convention shone a spotlight on many Black faces.
That’s over. The presence of a Black woman at the head of the Democratic ticket all but assures that African Americans — who by some estimates provided the margin of victory for John F. Kennedy in 1960 in an astonishing 11 states — will return to the friendly confines of the Democratic Party. And before you ask whether Harris will have a similar effect on female voters, the other reliable brick in the Democratic foundation, the answer is yes, she will.
— Who’s the bigger threat to democratic values?
Biden spent a good deal of his presidency arguing that Trump — who tried to overturn the 2020 election, has vowed to be a dictator “for one day,” and likely will contest any election returns that don’t place him as the winner — is the ultimate threat.
Trump now has turned the question around. Coming to the defense of Biden — here is proof that anything can happen in this campaign — the former president argued that election fraud was so deep that, as he put it on his Truth Social media site, “They stole the race from Biden after he won it in the primaries — A First!,” adding, “These people are the real THREAT TO DEMOCRACY!”
Now you can say that you’ve seen everything.
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
