The Musical Innertube - Volume 2, Number 149 - Dick Polman on the new political realities

JOHN

On today's Musical Innertube, we welcome back political commentator Dick Polman. Dick is Maury Povich writer-in-residence and professor of journalism at the University of Pennsylvania, where he's been since 2006. He's also a former national political writer and political columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he and I were both colleagues at one time. Follow his work at dickpolman.net. Welcome back, Richard! Good to see you.

DICK

It's a pleasure to see you guys again! Anything to talk about?

JOHN

That's the question, isn't it?  I was writing a letter to somebody, and in the time where it took me to go from page one to Page three, everything changed, and I had to rip it up and start again. So, we're sitting here, we have a new Democratic nominee for President, maybe? As we sit here, she has not been ratified officially, but does seem as though Kamala Harris has commandeered the following so that the Convention won't be a problem. Where do you see this going? What do you think's interesting right now? There might be a few things you could say.

DICK

Yeah, well, there are. I mean, you know, the speed of events this past week,  it reminds me of, there's an old Bob Dylan lyric, I forget which song it was - oh, yeah, it's a song called Things Have Changed, and he won the Oscar for it for a movie. And there's one line in there where he says, “The next 60 seconds can seem like an eternity.” And that's what it felt like. And just, I'd go on a bike ride, I'd come back, this past week, and the and the world had changed again. So, everybody seems to be madly trying to readjust to it. I think the best readjustment of all has come from Kamala Harris and her people who have just like orchestrated, really, the most amazing, efficient rollout of a new candidate that I've ever seen - and I've been, you know, covering politics on and off, and mostly on, since 1988. The fact that, obviously there was a lot of work going on behind the scenes as Joe was in his, Joe Biden, was in his final throes, where they just wanted to be ready and hit the ground running, in terms of what they wanted to say, and who they were going to contact within the party, and getting social media stuff up and going, and tapping into donors, and so, you know, I mean the, the reports we have - and I think we have yet to see in the press the definitive story on this - is that she's working the phones, she and her colleagues, or allies, I should say, are working the phones really, really hard to gin up support and basically to clear the field. And the fact that nobody else, none of these other potential candidates, who are now actually potential vice-presidential candidates, wanted to prolong the Democrats’ intramural agonies of the last month. There was almost this feeling like, you know, let's just put all this behind us and get to work and not have a new period of chaos. So, I think all of this has really put Trump back on his heels. They weren't expecting this, or, they could have. But I think they had wish casting there and they were all geared up to run against the old guy, and now all of a sudden their candidate is the oldest candidate in American history who can't string sentences together. And so, you know, the script has been completely flipped. I mean, pick your metaphor. The Chess board has been reset. So, I think what we've seen in the last few days, amidst her almost completely erasing Trump's lead in in the various polls, she's already making gains. This was supposed to be the week where he was supposed to get the so-called “bounce” off his convention. He got nothing. She hasn't even had hers yet, it's in a few weeks. She hasn't even picked the vice-presidential candidate yet from a bounty, a basket of riches, really. So, I think the Trump people have really been trying to figure out exactly how they want to go at her. Various Republicans have made misogynistic and racist remarks, as we would expect, and some of the Republican leaders in the House like put out something where they said don't do that! But they can't help themselves. So, I think they're going to try to do something from the Republican playbook that has worked occasionally, didn't work against Obama, but it's worked against others in the past. Basically, to paint her as too far left for the mainstream. You know, she's a California liberal, this kind of stuff. And she can mitigate that a lot, I think, by who she picks as vice-president. But I'm sure you guys have questions about that in particular, so I can pause for breath.

DON

Let me throw something in here. I've seen an ad that the Republicans have put on television so far, which I thought was pretty weak. But it's the first attack ad against Harris. And they say that Kamala was “in on it.” She knew about the president's weaknesses and mental problems and covered it up. And then they go on to make the usual problematic statements about how everything that Biden did was terrible, and he was the worst president ever and all that sort of thing. But I thought that was an interesting tack to take, especially right up front in the ad, to kind of blame her for Biden's mental incompetence.

DICK

Well, I don't know if your, Don, if your question is, do I think that would be effective with voters.

DON

Dick, do you think that will be effective with voters?

DICK

To answer, I'm skeptical. The reason is, well, two things. I mean, first of all, you know, what was the vice-president, any vice-president, supposed to do this situation like that? You know, they're not going to get out ahead of the person that they report to, you know, and say, hey, it's time to get out or, hey, I'm gonna tell the press what's going on here, you know, no vice-president's going to do anything like that. But more importantly, I think it's backward looking. You know the Trump people still want it, they still want to run against Biden. They still want to run against him being old. And you know, that's their safe ground. But it's backward looking to do that. I think most people are just saying, well, you know, the 70% of Americans, or something like that, who thought he was too old and that he shouldn't run - now he's not running. So, they've turned the page, and I don't think they care about trying to relitigate what happened in the last six months. So, what you would say to something like that if it came up, say, in a debate, if Trump does debate her, I don't know what she would say, but probably it would be something like, well, you know, we're here to talk about the future. We're here to talk about, not what happened, but what happens next and then go into her, you know, her agenda.

JOHN

I was very surprised by what you mentioned that, after a burst of, well, you have to say it, sort of misogynist and racist sort of quips, some of which got to be, well, more than on the edge of the scene, they went over the brink. But then a lot of folks in the Republican hierarchy said, nope, reel that sucker back in, you don't get to do that. That was really stunning how quickly that happened and how quickly people pivoted and they're looking for something else - that we've gone from racist to floundering. But the fact that there was a call that went out so quickly to correct or not to do that, aren't you surprised by that? That seems something we hadn't seen before.

DICK

Yeah, yeah, it did, in the sense that those kinds of dog whistles have been very common in the past, but they must have some kind of internal soundings that it's going to turn off people this time around and, you know, Obama went through a lot of the racist stuff. He won big, he won reelection. And you know, I think there's some feeling within the Republican hierarchy there that this stuff isn't going to isn't going to work again. They know they have to pull independent voters, however small, but important that particular cohort is, and I don't think they think it's going to fly with them. You know, when we heard one of the one of the biggest dog whistles, of course it's getting called a dog whistle - it's a shriek that everybody hears - was this whole thing that she was a DEI hire. You know, which basically is kind of like saying, you know, anytime a woman of color rises, it has to be because the fix was in and they're not as qualified as white people. And Lisa Murkowski, the Republican senator from Alaska who votes independent a lot, you know, even said something about that, you know, she questioned that attack. So, it'll be interesting to see whether it does come up again.

DON

One of the attacks that Trump has already pulled on her, I guess he wrote it on his Truth Social thing, was that she's dumb as a rock. And that's kind of like -

DICK

Oh, that’s right. That’s a quote.

DON

And that that's kind of like the calling the kettle black or something. You know what I mean?

DICK

“Windmills cause cancer,” you know. I mean, there's the “how you can rake the forests after a climate change fire.” I mean it's endless, right?  And “dumb as a rock” is another, you know, that's again, you know, they're not as intelligent as white people. Kellyanne Conway tried something on Fox News the other night where she said she's, you know, she's lazy. She doesn't work hard. You know that's another one you can easily connect the dots on. The other one that Trump tried the other day, invoking Obama when he posted something - he's been trying to weasel out of a September debate with Harris, that's kind of where it stands now - and the statement he put out was, well, you know we'll wait. She hasn't been nominated yet, and she hasn't gotten an endorsement from Barack Hussein Obama, quote-unquote, who thinks, he says, who thinks that she's a Marxist fraud. And he just put that out yesterday, hours before Obama has now endorsed Harris. So, you know, so they don't they don't quite know what to do. I think if I was advising them, which of course, I would never be, but if I was, I'd probably say, try to tie her to what your internal polls say are the least popular aspects of the of the Biden program, or the Biden record. Which would, I guess would include, you know, border crossings, and stuff like that, which some of them have. They've been trying that with her. And my guess would be that if he does debate her. That would come for sure.

JOHN

Sure, sure. The “border czar” thing, maybe, deficit spending, these kinds of things, in love with red ink. Yeah. So, as you know, Richard, in 2020, Kamala Harris was not a success as a candidate. She just did not make much of an impression. She didn't rise really high to the top. She didn't connect. She didn't seem all that adroit in, well, political candidate skills. I'm just wondering what happened. She seems a lot better.

DICK

I know watching the first few rallies that she's had, and some of the ways she's handled press questions off the cuff - I think one of the problems in that aborted campaign, where she dropped out even before the Iowa caucus, was that, you know, she couldn't quite figure out what her organizing theme for the for the candidacy should be. She wanted, I think, to lean on being a former prosecutor. But at the time, you know, the atmosphere in and around the Democratic base was, you know, kind of hostile to police. You know, when there were people on the left who were talking about defunding the police, stuff that went nowhere. But, you know, she may have felt like she had the wrong profile for that year. So, she was kind of flailing, and there was a lot of problems with her internal staffing and stuff like that. I think the difference now is, she's got the wind in her back, she has Trump's record, she has his indictments and his conviction in New York and his civil court convictions in New York. And so, there's a playbook that she can already run with. She's got the Biden record, a lot of which Biden tragically was not able to sell for whatever reason, including by all measures, you know, the most robust post-pandemic economy in the Western world, we can start with that. The infrastructure law, that inflation reduction Act, saving union pensions, I mean it goes on, you know, chip manufacturing coming back to the U.S., that's stuff that she can draw on. She's got a record already that she can campaign on. You know, it's like the narrative is already there for her, whereas last time she had to start from scratch. You couldn't quite figure it out in a vacuum. So, and judging from what we've seen, what I was talking about at the top, about getting ready behind the scenes just in case Biden did step down, you know, she's she has put it together. She has marketed it, and the kinds of the lines that she has, trying out call response with the crowd. You know, a lot of times, you know, politics for people who don't pay attention every day, the way we do, most people don't. And if you have this, “we're not going back” mantra, and it sticks, and that she's good and charismatic on the stump because politics is highly visual, and if she could just do that every day between now and November, you know, she's got a darn good chance. And I would never have thought that there was any chance to keep Trump out of the White House a week and a half ago. So, I'm just adjusting, just like everybody else.

DON

I would suppose that with the enthusiasm that's behind her now, she has gathered in Democrats who were worried about voting for Biden, mostly because of his age. But I'm now wondering if she will appeal to those fence voters, the undecideds, who kind of, like, were starting to look at the election and the lesser of two evils. You know, which old guy am I going to vote for? And they weren't really sure that either one was better than the other. But now, with all that's in there, that changes the canvas a little bit. Do you think it changes it enough for undecided voters to maybe think about coming on board?

DICK

Well, yeah. I mean, I think this is her opportunity, her golden opportunity right now. And it's crucial. I wrote something about this the other day. It's crucial. The next month is crucial because she's going to be basically, hopefully, defining herself on her own terms for the next few weeks because, you know, for a lot of people, you know, anybody who's vice-president, they don't pay a lot of attention to that person. They don't really know what that person's doing. You know, it's obviously a much more, you know, active, robust job than it was the back 100 years ago when. John Nance Gardner said - and I'll clean this up for consumption here - where he said that the job was wasn't worth a bucket of warm spit. You know, it matters now, but most people don't really know what the vice-president's doing, or who or what the person's like or anything. So, you know, she is like, for a lot of these swing voters or those independents, it's kind of like introductory mode. And there's a new ad, there's a new Harris ad that I just saw went up online last night, where it's basically like a biography ad. The first half of it, it's a biography ad. She's talking about being a prosecutor, the kind of people, you know, she did some stuff against the banks, you know, there's a whole list of it, fairly kind of like little guy versus the big guy stuff, And then being a senator, and you know, questioning a lot of the Trump administration officials like Bill Barr, and then she segues into her, the second half of the ad segues into what the aspirational program would be for the next four years, defending various freedoms that are under attack. Which is smart, having Democrats trying to recapture the word freedom from conservatives and say there is, you know, freedom for reproductive freedom, you know, freedom to vote.  So, she recognizes that that is the biggest challenge, and she wants to do that. She's really, it's pedal to the metal right now, smartly, because she doesn't want to give the Trump forces any openings to define her negatively. Now they're gonna, they'll try. They'll work with some people, there's still three months to go. You know, in French election, or British election terms, that's forever. But for us it's not. So, you know,there's going to be periods where I'm sure people in the Democratic coalition are going to be biting their nails. But you know, I'm more than cautiously optimistic, and I'm actually watching, as I'm sure you guys are, just what she decides to do with the vice-presidential nomination.

JOHN

We'll return to our podcast in just a moment, but first, here's a soothing musical interlude.

(MUSICAL BACKGROUND)

DON

Dick Polman is Maury Povich writer-in-residence and professor of journalism at the University of Pennsylvania, where he's been since 2006.

JOHN

From 1992 to 2006, he was national political writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, covering presidential elections from 1992 to 2008.

DON

He was also a political columnist at the Inquirer. And from 2012 to 2019, he was a columnist on WHYY-FM.

JOHN

Follow his work at Dick Polman | National Interest, and check out his University of Pennsylvania, webpage, Department of English (upenn.edu).

DON

And now we return you to the Musical Innertube, already in progress.

Speaker 1

Speaking of vice presidents, another figure on the national stage, who wasn't there a couple of weeks ago to the same degree is JD Vance. Known mostly in these parts as an author, but also as a Senator, and a very strange choice in some ways. I'm just wondering what your analysis of JD Vance's performance so far has been. I might add that for many vice-presidential candidates, the vice-president's role has been as an attack dog, which is sort of hard to be more of an attack dog than the main candidate for the Republicans, Donald Trump. I mean, you can't. That guy's already attacking, but JD Vance has done a lot of attacking. Not to the best results, I don't think, but I'm wondering what you think.

DICK

Yeah, well, you know I there's reports out now that Trump's sons were arguing vociferously for Vance when Trump was actually leaning in other directions, that's just been in the last few hours. And I think they felt confident to over-confident that this thing was basically in the bag, that Joe was going to be stay in the race and be easy to beat. And so, you know, events kind of sort of like, you know, he's kind of like Trump's “mini-me,” you know, he kind of like doubles, triples down on all the stuff that Trump is already able to do with the base. And he's got a string of misogynistic comments, one of which I'm going to get into here, that don't exactly advertise him as someone who can broaden the potential electoral possibilities for Trump. You know, in terms of attracting new voters. And he doesn't have much charisma from what I can tell in terms of politics being visual. But the biggest problem I have, and if I may, I want to quote if I may, from the piece I wrote earlier this morning, the column that that I posted earlier this morning, and this was my opening paragraph because it segues perfectly:

Serious questions: Did anyone in Trump’s inner circle bother to vet J.D. Vance in advance? Did anyone perform even minimal due diligence, looking for old bombshells that might explode in Trump’s face? Or did everyone at MAGA HQ actually believe it’d be a great idea to hire a guy who’s a veritable parody of a misogynistic meathead?

And so, I go on to try to - of course, you know, as I tell my students, if you want to use a phrase like that, you gotta back it up. OK. So, what's happened in the in the last few days is that - and it wasn't so hard to unearth, somebody pushed a few buttons on the Internet and found them, these comments he made where he's basically assailing people who don't have children. And he had these comments from 2021 about, you know, we have too many quote-unquote childless cat ladies, and it's not a good idea, I don't think, to malign - and I  went through the census on this the U.S. census - it's not good to malign 21.6% of the adult population. I don't know if, I don't think that's anything Trump has necessarily bargained for. So, he made these comments, it wasn't just about childless cat ladies, he said -this is in 2021, I'm quoting here - “When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power. You should have more of an ability to speak your voice than people who don't have kids. Let's face the reality. If you don't have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn't get nearly the same voice.” And there's another: somebody at ABC News this morning has unearthed something he said in 2021 where he said that people without kids should be taxed higher than people with kids. So, you know, it's kind of like none of his business whether, if somebody chooses not to have children in their lives, that's their business. Or there's also, of course, millions of people who want to have kids who can't, you know, and they're trying to lean on IVF, In Vitro Fertilization, which by the way he voted against in a Senate vote earlier this year, in terms of protecting it. This has gone on for five days. He's he went on a - Megyn Kelly has some kind of a, I don't know if it's a podcast or whatever, she had it filled this morning - he went on the hill to defend himself and he said, oh, it was just a sarcastic remark, which is, of course, you know, sort of a distant cousin of Trump's “I was only kidding. Nobody has a sense of humor,” when he gets caught out. So, this is what he says, it's a sarcastic comment. But he had said it like, at three or four different conservative forums.

JOHN

Yes.

DICK

And it’s gone on for a week. And what I'm struck by is that Trump hasn't said a single word publicly in Vance’s defense on this. Because I did the math, 21.6% of the adult population doesn't have kids, that's 50 million Americans. And so, this is not what you want from a -you don't want a vice-president who's going to undercut and make worse the problems you've already have, which is that MAGA world feels like it's an exclusive club just for, you know, a certain type of, you know, white male and white female and hardly anybody else. Oh, and of course the biggest thing of all! Who's the number one childless cat lady in America? Taylor Swift. Who at some point is going to endorse Harris. So all these people are putting out, you know, videos - or not videos, they're putting out memes of Taylor Swift, who's on the cover of Time magazine, with a cat wrapped around her neck. So, you know, you know, it's not a good idea to tick off Taylor Swift, who has more Instagram followers worldwide than there are Americans. Yeah, so that's my take on JD Vance.

DON

I remember seeing that a couple of days ago, I guess it was, the cat lady remark was on Tucker Carlson was still on the air, because it was on his show, probably on Fox. But anyway, it was when JD Vance was running for the Senate in Ohio. And an explainer line that he put out there was that people who run for office and don't have kids, don't have a stake in the future. So, they're not thinking about what they're going to leave kids, what sort of world they're going to leave the kids later, because they don't have kids to worry about, which I thought was a little empty headed. The second thing that occurs to me is that. Donald Trump didn't give two whits about Mike Pence either. He seems to run independent of his vice-presidential candidate.

DICK

Of all good points I. Mean people who don’t have kids, millions and millions of them have nephews and nieces and stepchildren, like Kamala Harris. So you know, they support candidates who want to increase the childcare, which is part of the Democratic platform, and they support candidates who want to, you know, broaden the eligibility for Obamacare, which, you know, helps people, you know, through the Medicaid program who are in poverty with kids. And so, that whole line of argument of his is, you know, it's - I don't know whether to call it just weird or reactionary, but I can call it something else. And this is something that's very interesting I didn't know about until yesterday, was that he got this idea, or he's sharing an idea, from Victor Orban, the Hungarian autocratic dictator.  Orban's party tried to enact - as it was a few years ago and hasn't gone anywhere yet - but they tried to enact something where they were going to tax people without children at a higher rate. So, you know, and, of course, Tucker Carlson loves Orban. Orban was just at Mara Lago. It's not hard to connect the dots here, And so going back to the question about, you know, Kamala being more effective as a communicator, she has so much to work with here, and even some of the terminology she's using, and some of her people are using, saying not just making the case against Trump, prosecuting the case against Trump, which has a great double meaning given you know, his legal woes and the fact that he's still facing a sentencing, a potential sentencing for his criminal guilty verdict during September.

JOHN

September the 18th. I just heard, and that that's if they get there. We'll see.

DICK

Correct. Yeah.

JOHN

Richard, I've asked you this question before. It's sort of a philosophical question, but it comes up even more sharply now. The rate of change on the political scene. Things we've never seen before coming up an incredible succession very quickly. Is this going to be one of the things that that people have to worry about? The voters are not famous in the United States of America for having long memories, they're not famous for being deep analysts, and they're not required to be any of those things. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying, as a large number of people, they look around and say, “Well, who's president today?” It's a day after Labor Day, you know, still most of us don't start paying attention until later, but it's going to be a very different race, especially after the DNC. I'm wondering how people stay abreast of this. What do you think?

DICK

First of all, something you just said a few minutes ago about people having short memories - I think it was Gore Vidal who said, “USA stands for the United States of Amnesia.” And I really believe that. I mean sometimes the conversations I have with intelligent friends about things that just happened a few years ago, you know, and they forgot it or they didn't, you know, or they have a mis-memory of it. But anyway so, that aside, I think Harris has to basically campaign as if she is telling people things for the very first time, like they're hearing it for the very first time. Because for some reason they weren't crediting Biden for the economy at all, they weren't crediting him for rebuilding the roads and bridges which they're driving on every single day. And so, you know, she has to sort of, with a full court press, in every aspect of media, she has to drive that home. And one of the things I think that's different - you were talking about maybe the velocity of change -

JOHN

Sure, that's the whole thing I am saying.

DICK

One of the things that I've really been struck by in the last week, and I just foresee this continuing for the next few months, is just the flood of what's called user generated content, which is all these young people under the age of 30 putting up stuff on TikTok, about Harris, you know, putting the other videos and music and other things beyond my particular expertise. And you know, that's how a lot of people, particularly young people who are, you know, couldn't have cared less about Joe - and I saw it in my students in Penn - they're tuning in, you know, because Harris kind of speaks to them. It's her vibe, it’s her profile, it's all that kind of stuff. You know, they're teed up for her now, and they get a lot of their information, as such, from social media and TikTok in particular. And then, you know, we can say, oh God, that's really superficial. But if it turns out their votes, we'll take it. You know the first week of her candidacy reminds me little bit of when Obama ran in 2008, and he became, for whatever the social media cutting edge was at that time, 15-16 years ago, he was he was all over it. And I see a lot of that same kind of energy happening now. So, I think it's a combination, you know, of all these different factors. One of the good things is that, yeah, people were exhausted, they were exhausted by the status quo. Nothing seemed to be moving. Nothing seemed to be changing when it was Biden/ Trump. And now the dynamic has been completely upended, and there's an end date only three months away. So, I think with all that going on, I think that's enough to make people - I don't want to say everybody - to make an enormous percentage of the electorate actually focus in.

DON

And as we all know, Kamala is brat.

DICK

Yeah, I knew what that meant last night. I have since forgotten it, that was 12 hours ago. But again, that's another, that comes from a very popular black performing artist who put it out there and all the people, all the zillions of people who follow her, saw that. And you know, if it tees them up to listen to Harris's message, that’s all to the good. Having said all that, I think the other thing about the vice-presidential pick is, and not everybody may necessarily agree with me on this, including you guys, but I said before that that the that the Republicans are going to try to paint her as you know, too liberal, San Francisco Liberal, California liberal, that old stereotype. And I think she needs a very - and there are a number of them - a very capable white guy who can go into the Rust Belt states, and, you know, and just really talk turkey with white working-class voters, with which Biden really made some headway out in 2020, vis-a-vis Hillary in 2016. And we don't necessarily lose that. So I think a lot of these guys names who’re in contention right now, I think they're very, very capable of doing that. Personally, and this could be completely off base when the announcement gets made before August 7th, first, I think Mark Kelly, the senator in Arizona, who was, you know, Navy Combat Vet, astronaut, former astronaut, elected as a Democrat twice in a border state where he's had to deal with the immigration issue. And there was one other aspect of him that I that I like. And now I'm like.. oh yes, he's married to Gabby Giffords, who survived that horrific shooting. And you know, it personifies the gun reform issue, which Harris is really vocal about, and she can speak to it personally, along with Mark Kelly, out on the stump and traveling around. So, I mean, if it's not him, if it's one of the others they're talking about, including our very own Josh Shapiro, you know, fine. But I think for some, I think Kelly maybe adds the most to the ticket. That's just me.

JOHN

Well, Richard, we always learn so much from you when you come on, and I think we're going to be talking to you again in a couple of weeks, maybe in a month and a half, to see where we are because who knows, after the DNC, might be a different world yet again, who knows? Who knows? Thanks for being our guest again.

DICK

Let's stay in touch. September, if there's a debate in particular, that would be a good time, but, you know, who the heck knows? You know, events are in the saddle, and “Ride Mankinds,” Emerson reputedly said.

DON

So there we go. And I would only add, Dick, that I think you're probably brat.

DICK

I'll check it with my kids - I'll check it with my grandkids - and see if they agree.

JOHN

dickpullman.net, ladies and gentlemen. He understands the assignment. We'll talk to you soon, Richard.

DICK

Alright, thank you guys.