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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.
We begin today with Michele L. Norris of The Washington Post and her reminder that President Joe Biden picked Kamala Harris— and only Kamala Harris— to be his successor.
It’s been more than a little clear, during the long weeks of hand-wringing about President Biden’s age and his ability to win, that there was another concern: The ability of Vice President Harris to step into his shoes. […]
This question should have been a (sic) settled years ago, when Biden picked Harris as his running mate — and a majority of Americans voted to elect them as a team. Yes, Harris had a tough first year finding her voice, her footing and a team that best supports her leadership. But it is evident that Harris has found her stride, especially since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022, as she has traversed the country trumpeting the long-term effects of that ruling. She has been steadfast in the weeks since Biden’s troubling debate performance last month. She knows she has been in the spotlight, quietly auditioning for a job that her boss was, until Sunday, determined to hold on to. Let’s just concede that walking that tightrope was not easy. […]
But it is long past time to stop underestimating what Harris can do for a party that is in a ditch, thanks to this overlong Shakespearean drama about Biden’s acuity. She has strong support among Democrats, has muscled up on foreign and domestic issues in a manner few can because of her unique perch, not to mention daily access to classified briefings and her experience serving on key Senate committees.
Oh…why not?
Haili Blassingame/The New Republic
The question immediately turns to who runs alongside her. In a country where finding the right political pairing is as much about balancing out identities as qualifications (unless it’s two white men), people may not immediately warm to the thought of pairing Harris with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, or any other female politician. There’s mixed reporting around whether Whitmer is even interested or up for the task, but inevitable questions like, “Is the country ready for two women to lead it?” reveal how, while our imagination has grown tremendously in some ways (not all of them good), in others it remains incredibly small.
Even before Biden’s announcement on Sunday, the idea of a Harris-Whitmer ticket had made its way into public discourse with surprising velocity, a sign that a political calculus rooted in questions of electability and national readiness may be changing. The biggest question people are asking about Harris and Whitmer, or whoever winds up on the ticket, is whether they can win in November—a reasonable and necessary question. But there is a great swathe of time after November. Elections aren’t endings; they’re beginnings. A two-woman ticket would demonstrate that Democrats believe there is an after-election world that they will be relevant in shaping. The slogan practically writes itself: a historic team in a time when history is being made in all the wrong ways.
Within seconds of the bullet grazing his ear during his campaign rally, Donald Trump pumped his first in the air. An American flag rippled in the breeze behind him, blood streaked across his cheek. This is an indelible image for his supporters to hook their hopes on. Do the Democrats have an equivalent of this? An all-female ticket could be a step toward one. The Dobbs ruling has altered the political landscape, and women are driving this shift. Harris-Whitmer would offer an indisputable counterimage to the one Trump has successfully spun alongside his newly minted running mate, Senator J.D. Vance. That choice sent the message that Trump was doubling down—on macho politics, yes, but more specifically on abortion bans. But backlash doesn’t belong to the right; Democrats have equal access to it should they choose.
Governor Whitmer has said (in so many words) that she is not interested in being Harris’s running mate. Still…it doesn’t hurt to ask.
It’s irresponsible not to speculate.
Prashant Jha of the Hindustan Times looks at the Asian-American and, more specifically, the Indian-American reaction to Vice President Harris’s probable nomination.
Harris’s possible nomination does indeed appear to have galvanised both the incredibly diverse Asian-American community in general and the Indian-American community in particular, which can see in her both a symbol of their success and a potential opportunity to have American politics reflect the diversity of American society. It also comes at a time when these communities are far better organised and therefore in a position to make a difference both financially, and in terms of votes in swing states in close elections. […]
Indian American Impact Fund, a key political outfit that has supported 116 Indian-American candidates and raised $20 million in the last eight years to elevate the community’s political representation, endorsed Harris on Sunday.
Deepak Raj, Impact’s cofounder, said that as one of Harris’s most vociferous supporters “from the very beginning of her political career”, Impact was thrilled to back her candidacy. He added, “We are ready to leverage our extensive network of resources to mobilize South Asian voters, confident that they will be instrumental in delivering the White House to Kamala Harris in November.” Harris had attended the gala dinner of the Impact annual summit earlier this year.
Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic says that now the shoe salesman is the one that appears obviously old and incoherent.
Remember, if you still can: The Republican convention was a carefully curated, meticulously planned presentation. As my colleague Tim Alberta has said, the theme was “strength.” Strength was expressed by exaggerated, absurd, comic-book figures: Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock. The latter chanted “Fight, fight!” and “Trump, Trump!” while pumping his fist. Then he sang “American Bad Ass,” an unlistenable work of profound dissonance. Trump himself walked into the convention hall to the strains of James Brown’s famously misogynistic anthem “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.”
Strength was implied by the equally choreographed demonstrations of debasement. Nikki Haley, who had repeatedly questioned whether Trump is “mentally fit” to be president—and had declared that “the first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate” will win the election—offered her “strong endorsement.” The vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, who had previously compared Trump to Hitler and described him as “cultural heroin,” performed a kind of kowtow, appearing at the convention in the form of supplicant, acolyte, prodigal son. Like so many other Republicans, he bowed to the power of Trump, to the vulgarity of Hulk Hogan, to a whole host of things he used to say he didn’t like, and maybe still doesn’t like. He even made a peculiar, strained attempt to link his children and his wife, the daughter of South Asian immigrants, to a cemetery in East Kentucky where he said they will be buried, as if none of this will make sense until all of us are dead.
But then Trump himself appeared, and it was as if the emperor with no clothes had taken the stage. There was nothing strong about an overweight, heavily made up yet nevertheless shiny-faced elderly man who rambled and babbled for an hour and a half, completely undermining the slick image created in the previous four days. He began by sticking to his script, solemnly referencing the failed assassination attempt against him days before. But even when telling that story, he could not master the appropriate tone and almost immediately changed the subject. “And there’s an interesting statistic,” he said: “The ears are the bloodiest part. If something happens with the ears, they bleed more than any other part of the body. For whatever reason, the doctors told me that.”
Eventually, instead of sounding like an “American Bad Ass,” he digressed into pure gibberish….
Of course, the shoe salesman looked that way before and during the presidential debate but it’s the perception that matters.
Jon Allsop of the Columbia Journalism Review looks at the media reaction to President Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race.
The coverage, carried along by the steady drip of Democratic votes of no confidence, increasingly read like the prelude to a dam bursting—and yet, when that finally happened yesterday, it still seemed to take the media and political worlds by surprise. Some reporters initially speculated that Biden’s account may have been hacked, or that some other deepfake trickery was afoot; TV news channels took a few minutes to scramble out of their Sunday-afternoon doldrums; Wolf Blitzer, who had seemingly been enjoying a “Wolf Spritzer”(Aperol, Montelobos mezcal, lemon, Cava; fifteen dollars), was soon on duty. (“Joe Biden is so mad at the media that he dropped out on a Sunday afternoon to fuck with their weekend plans,” one writer speculated.) Some journalists noted all the recent blunt denials from Biden’s press aides, and even accused them of a lack of credibility. But it seems that Biden took them by surprise as well. According to the Times, even senior advisers only learned of his decision one minute before he posted it on X. Per Politico, Biden himself seems to have changed his mind over the weekend.
Amid the scrambling came a sudden change of tone toward Biden—at least from the liberal pundit class (which was always a key part of this media story thanks, in no small part, to Biden’s old-school mainstream media diet). As his biographer Evan Osnos wrote in The New Yorker, Biden had seemed to be risking “a grave verdict of history, a creeping reputation for selfish resistance that would forever adorn his life story and overshadow his political career”—a case that various commentators seemed determined to make in the present. Yesterday, however, pundits who had called on him to drop out praised him as an avatar of selflessness; Ezra Klein, who concluded that Biden shouldn’t run again even before the debate, called him “an actual hero.” (On my timeline, the tweet in which Klein said this was immediately followed by another reporter posting a meme of Klein’s face: “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.”) If Biden was a hero, Adam Gopnik, also writing in The New Yorker, concluded that he was a tragic Shakespearean one. “Let us go there,” he wrote. “Of all the Shakespearean figures whom Biden’s fall recalls, it is Lear.”
Lear, of course, did not have to contend with the White House press corps or the Times editorial board—and in the hours following Biden’s exit, at least one prominent journalism professor blamed the Times, in particular, for hounding Biden out of the race with its coverage these past few weeks. This rhymes with a broader theory that elites—both in the Democratic Party and the media, and, sometimes, in both—conspired to bully Biden off the ticket. There was, doubtless, a pressure campaign, one that the world of straight journalism amplified, even if it did not endorse it per se. And yet the reality is much less neat; as Klein and others pointed out yesterday, elites reached the conclusion that Biden was too old to run long after most voters had already done so. In the course of the post-debate reckoning, the elite media (with some exceptions) have been criticized for missing this story or accused of actively covering it up, which sets up an interesting thought experiment: Can the press both have missed the story andforced Biden from the race as a result of it? It’s theoretically possible. (The word “overcorrection” comes to mind.) But if the reality is messier than the idea that the press forced Biden out, the same is true of the idea that it missed the story in the first place, as I wrote recently.
President Biden’s friend, historian Jon Meacham, writes a first draft of history of the current moment for The New York Times.
Mr. Biden has spent a lifetime trying to do right by the nation, and he did so in the most epic of ways when he chose to end his campaign for re-election. His decision is one of the most remarkable acts of leadership in our history, an act of self-sacrifice that places him in the company of George Washington, who also stepped away from the presidency. To put something ahead of one’s immediate desires — to give, rather than to try to take — is perhaps the most difficult thing for any human being to do. And Mr. Biden has done just that.
To be clear: Mr. Biden is my friend, and it has been a privilege to help him when I can. Not because I am a Democrat — I belong to neither party and have voted for both Democrats and Republicans — but because I believe him to be a defender of the Constitution and a public servant of honor and of grace at a time when extreme forces threaten the nation. I do not agree with everything he has done or wanted to do in terms of policy. But I know him to be a good man, a patriot and a president who has met challenges all too similar to those Abraham Lincoln faced.
Here is the story I believe history will tell of Joe Biden. With American democracy in an hour of maximum danger in Donald Trump’s presidency, Mr. Biden stepped in the breach. He staved off an authoritarian threat at home, rallied the world against autocrats abroad, laid the foundations for decades of prosperity, managed the end of a once-in-a-century pandemic, successfully legislated on vital issues of climate and infrastructure and has conducted a presidency worthy of the greatest of his predecessors. History and fate brought him to the pinnacle in a late season in his life, and in the end, he respected fate — and he respected the American people.
Eric Bazail-Emil, Joe Gould, Miles J. Herszenhorn, and Phelim Kine of POLITICO speculates that, by and large, Harris would continue much of President Biden’s foreign policy if elected President.
In most areas, Harris would likely continue many of President Joe Biden’s foreign policy objectives. A Harris administration would probably offer strong support for Ukraine’s war effort, and continue initiatives to deepen alliances in Asia and the Pacific in the face of China’s geopolitical ascendance. And she would likely still see the U.S. provide robust support to Israel and other allies in the Middle East.
But regarding Israel’s war on Hamas, Harris has sounded more sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians, a stance that could mollify Arab-American voters and others who are troubled by Biden’s support for Israel’s war effort in Gaza. […]
Harris has stepped in as a surrogate for the president at world gatherings. She attended the 2023 ASEAN summit in Biden’s place. Importantly for European allies, Harris stood in for Biden at the annual Munich Security Conference in 2022, when she voiced support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyyas Russia prepared to invade — and again in 2023 as they fought on the battlefield.
Paul Krugman of The New York Times states that the data shows that immigrants are not taking away “Black jobs.”
If immigrants are taking away all the “Black jobs,” you can’t see it in the data, which shows Black unemployment at historic lows. If Black wages have, as Trump claims, gone way down, someone should tell the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which says that median Black earnings, adjusted for inflation, are significantly higher than they were toward the end of Trump’s term. (You should ignore the spurious bump during the pandemic, which reflected composition effects rather than genuine wage gains.)
You might ask why, given we have indeed seen a surge in immigration, that we aren’t seeing signs of an adverse, let alone cataclysmic, impact on Black wages or employment. After all, many recent immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, lack college degrees and maybe even high school education. So aren’t they competing with native-born Americans who also lack college or high school degrees?
The answer, which we’ve known since the 1990s, is that immigrant workers bring a different set of skills to the table than native-born workers, even when those workers have similar levels of formal education. And yes, I mean skills: If you think of workers without a college degree as “unskilled,” try fixing your own plumbing or doing your own carpentry. It shouldn’t need to be said, but a lot of blue-collar work is highly skilled and highly specialized. As a result, immigrants tend to take a very different mix of jobs than native-born workers do — which means that there’s much less head-to-head competition between immigrant and native-born workers than you might think, or what Trump and Vance want you to think.
Finally today, Rachel Fink of Haaretz tells the story of Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid’s first meeting with Vice President Harris.
Speaking to Channel 13’s Raviv Drucker, Lapid recalled meeting the potential presidential hopeful back when she was a senator from California during her visit to Israel in 2017. After a busy day of visiting sites and attending official meetings, Harris and Lapid were slated for a brief conversation jammed in at the end of her packed schedule.
“What were we going to do? Solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 12 minutes,” Lapid recalled. “So I told her, ‘I am familiar with days like this. Where the jetlag starts to hit you, the shoes start to ache, and all you want to do is go back to sleep. You have no idea who I am or what’s written about me in the briefing dossier. Let’s just sit here quietly, take a rest, and drink a cup of coffee in silence for the entire 12 minutes.'”
Lapid then described how at some point, Harris actually made a dutiful attempt to engage in polite conversation, asking about his kids, but he refused to budge. “I told her, ‘Relax, let it go, enjoy the quiet,'” he said.
“When our time was over, she got up, gave me a hug and told me, ‘That was the best meeting I’ve had all day,’ and went on her way.”
Have the best possible day everyone!
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