Harris closes strong as Trump gets darker

The end is in sight, and we might get a new beginning, too.

Treasure Island, Fla., (Oct. 7, 2024) - Clean-up is underway after Hurricane Helene. (FEMA Photo by Liz Roll/Released)

Not to put an overly optimistic spin on anything, because we’ve been here before with mixed results, but I’m feeling upbeat.

One of the most gratifying moments of the season has to do with the man who stepped aside. In his new book, War, Bob Woodward writes an epilogue that reminds me of the funeral for yourself that you wish you could attend, to hear all the nice things people say about you. The Woodward epilogue is a preview of Joe Biden’s place in history that he can read right now, while he’s still president.

Woodward zooms in on Biden’s national security team and policies for this book, but as I have written many a time, the same is true of Biden’s domestic record. I understand why pundits and strategists often say it’s essential for Harris to definitively break from Biden. My view is a wishy-washy yes and no.

Biden’s bipartisanship, manufacturing initiatives, economic policies and future focus all have been good for the country, and his 2017 theme of saving America’s soul and democracy after Donald Trump’s corrupt and lawless first term is still, sadly, all too relevant. Harris does not need to distance herself from any of that, or the national security leadership praised by Woodward.

On housing, health care, reproductive rights, and many other topics, of course, Harris has her own ideas. But the larger point is that simply because of who she is — her background, her personality, and her age (she turns 60 on Sunday) — Harris embodies a new demographic era and a turn-the-page moment. And she is running a kick-ass campaign, worthy of a prosecutor confident she’s got a winning argument.

So on that note, what you may have missed from me in the last few weeks, starting with my most recent piece (and thanks as always for reading):

Oct. 14: What Kamala Harris Leaves Out of Her Case Against Donald Trump

Here I decided to think positively, in the vein of what is job one if Harris wins? The obvious answer to me and I suspect millions in both parties is, fix the Supreme Court. Fix its ethics. Fix its extremism. Fix its life tenure. And that led me to an argument that Harris is not making: that she needs a Democratic Senate to do anything at all about the court. Because only the Senate can confirm or block justices and all other federal judges, and only a Democratic majority has a prayer of heading off GOP obstruction, even on issues that draw bipartisan support.

KAMALA HARRIS IS MAKING MANY WORTHY ARGUMENTS against Donald Trump, including emphasizing his lies, hate, and lawlessness. But there is a crucial piece missing in the Democratic case against Trump: the need to elect not just Harris but also a Democratic-led Senate.

The thing is, you can’t take it for granted that most voters remember their high school civics classes and pay attention to the daily workings of government… It’s up to Harris to connect the dots—to be explicit about why she needs to win, and why she needs a Democratic Senate to help her confirm judges and justices who do not have ideological or religious agendas…

Oct. 8: What the Right Gets Wrong About Kamala Harris

I admit this was triggered by what I considered unfair and sometimes condescending stereotyping of Harris based on very limited knowledge of her legal career, Senate work and vice presidential experience.

No one can predict exactly what kind of president Harris would be, but she has shown many signs that it would be nothing like what these prematurely disappointed conservatives anticipate. Their judgments about her seem based largely on geography (she’s from San Francisco) and on her first run for the presidency five years ago—a ten-month presidential primary campaign in a field of nearly thirty major candidates.

Oct. 1: Say Goodbye to Truth as We Know It If Trump and Vance Win

Don’t devalue or ever take for granted government information and data. It is the backbone of journalism, science, economics, agriculture, business development, public health, life and death and truth itself. I was inspired to write this from my experience during the first Trump administration, his plans to dismantle agencies and fire tens of thousands of experts if he wins again, and happening upon this editorial as Hurricane Helene was about to hit.

AS HURRICANE HELENE RACED TOWARD FLORIDA last week, the Miami Herald seized a dramatic opportunity to remind readers that “we live and die—sometimes literally” by information from the National Hurricane Center and National Weather Service. And when you’re trying to figure out whether to leave or stay, whether schools are open or closed, “how much food and gas to buy to survive,” the editorial board wrote, you obviously need “the best, most trustworthy information” possible.

The federal government—in this case, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees those two agencies—has long been that best, most reliable source of information on countless subjects, including weather. “And yet, according to Project 2025—a document hundreds of pages long that lays out a policy agenda and 180-day playbook if the GOP wins the White House—NOAA needs to go,” the editorial said.

It was a striking way to lay out the stakes of a second Trump administration, this time on steroids with JD Vance on board to hasten the end of truth as we know it. And it came the same day Kamala Harris made clear that she is rooted in reality.

Sept. 26: Everyone Who Grasps the Risk of Nuclear War Says Trump Shouldn’t Be Trusted

I was haunted by a column I edited in 2021, written by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Defense Secretary William Perry after the Trump mob attacked the Capitol, pleading for an end to the unilateral nuclear launch capacity presidents have had since the late 1940s. So far it still exists.

It was a mistake to visit Los Alamos in the middle of a presidential campaign that Donald Trump might win. I get that now, after wandering around the New Mexico town that is synonymous with clichés like “cautionary tale” and “Pandora’s box” and “be careful what you wish for.”

…

Trump is now trying for a second term in a race most analysts consider too close to call — a prospect so disturbing that this week more than 700 current and former national security officials signed a bipartisan letter endorsing his opponent, asking Americans to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris because Trump is “impulsive and ill-informed.” Just days earlier, more than 100 former Republican national security officials warned in a similar Harris endorsement that Trump’s erratic nature “threatens reckless and dangerous global consequences.”

A volatile temperament is one of the many reasons Trump is a national security menace. As Hillary Clinton memorably noted in her 2016 convention speech accepting the Democratic nomination: “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”

Sept. 24: Donald Trump, Mark Robinson, and the Nightmare That Won’t Go Away

The past is never dead. It's not even past, as William Faulkner said. I couldn’t shake that feeling watching a documentary about the first organized interracial protest of the civil rights movement, at Glen Echo Amusement Park just outside Washington, D.C. It has a beautiful carousel that my own children rode many times when they were young. The 1960 protestors included Howard University students and white suburbanites, many of them Jewish and at least two of them concentration camp survivors. The counter-protesters included the American Nazi Party. Within two days, the documentary seemed more like a tragic preview of today’s political realities.

YOU EVER HAVE THAT FEELING where you’re watching a movie set in the past, and then something happens in real life to drive home that it’s not even history, and might never be?

Talk about reality biting. Last week I saw Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round, Ilana Trachtman’s documentary about “the first organized interracial civil rights protest in U.S. history”—a picket line to integrate the whites-only Glen Echo Amusement Park just outside Washington, D.C. Black Howard University students and white residents of the nearby, largely Jewish Bannockburn community protested together all through the summer of 1960.

That was Tuesday night.

By Thursday night, Donald Trump had turned two Washington events intended to fight antisemitism into a demonstration of his own uniquely divisive antisemitism, and CNN had reported that Republican Mark Robinson—the black, Trump-endorsed candidate for North Carolina governor—had in the past fifteen years declared himself “a black NAZI” and a slavery supporter; referred to Martin Luther King Jr. as “Martin Lucifer Koon”; and said he preferred Adolf Hitler “over any of the shit that’s in Washington right now!” The “shit” at the time of his writing being Barack Obama, the first black president, and his administration.