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Tomorrow night might be the last big television event of the 2024 presidential race. JD Vance and Tim Walz will debate each other, and since Donald Trump is so far resisting the idea of having a third presidential debate, this may be it for face-to-face encounters between the two campaigns. So I found myself wondering what I would ask the two candidates, if I had the chance.
Donald Trump got his start in politics by infamously pushing the "birtherism" lie about Barack Obama. Now he's pushing what might be called a "burgerism" lie about Kamala Harris -- that she somehow just made up the fact that she worked at McDonald's back when she was a student. It's all a measure of the desperation Trump finds himself now wallowing in, since to date none of his attacks against Harris have even come close to landing.
Republicans have a problem with women. Their problem is basically that more and more women don't want to vote for them. By increasingly-wide margins, in fact. Some Republicans have now begun to realize this, and they are desperately trying to woo these women back to their side of the aisle. This is not going well, to put it mildly.
Thanks to the decision of one man, Nebraska will not be making an eleventh-hour change to the way they apportion their Electoral College votes. This is a very obscure sort of thing, but in one particular scenario it could be key to the entire presidential election. This makes the news that one Republican in Nebraska's state government has decided not to go along with the last-minute change rather important.
Donald Trump (rather infamously) never admits he's wrong. Even on things that are easy to disprove with incontrovertible evidence, Trump will still insist he is right. He will construct an alternate reality inside his own head where he is proven to be right and all those who disagree are proven to be in some giant conspiracy against him, and he will go right on insisting that up is down, or that night is actually day. He never backs down and certainly never apologizes -- no matter how much harm his lies may cause.
Congress is back in town, after their obscenely-long summer break, and (as usual) they are facing a big deadline. This is exacerbated by the fact that it is an election year, so all the congresscritters really want to be back in their home states and districts campaigning full-time. So they really want to just pass something and get out of town (again).
However, to achieve this goal would mean reasonable politicians on both sides of the aisle sitting down and hammering out a bill, and then both houses passing it with little or no drama. Since the House of Representatives is run by Republicans, this is currently impossible. It may yet happen, but only after the House GOP puts on yet another Kabuki production of: "Here Is Precisely How Incapable We Are Of Governing." And as we've already seen, this sort of thing can end the political careers of anyone currently in the speaker's chair.
This week, the mainstream media proved yet again how good they are at missing the forest for the trees, at least in the political world. The entire week, the chattering classes pushed their new Donald Trump scandal for all it was worth. Now look, we're no fans of Trump (far from it!), but it all just seemed like the attention and outrage were a wee bit misplaced.
CNN has begun to release "teaser" quotes from tonight's big interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, in an effort to build interest (and ratings). Among other tidbits, it was announced that Harris committed to appointing at least one Republican to her cabinet. This actually isn't all that unusual; the practice of bringing in a few members of the opposing party so a president can brag about having a "team of rivals" (the phrase originally referred to Abraham Lincoln's cabinet). But it did start me wondering about which department(s) she might be thinking about.
It has now been announced that CNN's Dana Bash has won the journalistic sweepstakes and will be conducting a joint interview with Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz on Thursday. This will fulfill a promise Harris made to sit down for an unscripted interview with the media before the end of the month.
Which directly leads to the question of what Harris and Walz should be asked about on Tuesday. So putting on our late-summer "If It Was Me" thinking cap, here are the questions I would ask Harris and Walz, if they were sitting down with me for an interview.
Over its first three days, the Democratic National Convention kept building on one overriding theme: joy. Or, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explained to Stephen Colbert last night, for Democrats it was "the rebirth of hope." I almost expected Beethoven's Ode To Joy to be played at some point, but I guess the various DJs didn't have a copy. A far different Alex -- the main character in A Clockwork Orange -- would have been seriously disappointed by this omission, since (as he put it) it would have added: "all the banging and creeching about Joy Joy Joy Joy." The lack of "Ludwig Van" aside, though, it certainly was a joyful event for the first three nights.