Vice President Kamala Harris continues her momentum
toward the 2024 presidential election since President Joe Biden’s surprise
announcement on Sunday that
he would not accept the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination.
Yesterday, more
than 350 national security leaders endorsed Harris for president, noting that
if elected president, “she would enter that office with more significant
national security experience than the four Presidents prior to President
Biden.” As vice president, she “has met with more than 150 world leaders and
traveled to 21 countries,” the authors wrote, and they called out her work
across the globe from her work strengthening partnerships in the Indo-Pacific
region to her historic trip to Africa and her efforts to expand U.S.
relationships with nations in the Caribbean and North Central America. In
contrast to Harris, the letter said, “Trump is a threat to America’s national
security.”
Those signing the letter included former Central
Intelligence Agency director Michael Hayden, former director of national
intelligence James Clapper, national security advisors Susan Rice and Thomas
Donilon, former secretaries of defense Chuck Hagel and Leon Panetta, and former
secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.
In a New York Times op-ed yesterday, former secretary of state
Clinton praised Biden for his “decision to end his campaign,” which she called
“as pure an act of patriotism as I have seen in my lifetime.” She went on to
say that Vice President Harris “represents a fresh start for American politics,”
offering a vision of an America with its best days ahead of it and, rather than
“old grievances,” “new solutions.”
Clinton noted that her own political campaigns had
seen her burned in effigy, but said, “It is a trap to believe that progress is
impossible” and that Americans cannot overcome sexism and racism. After all,
she pointed out, voters elected Black American Barack Obama in 2008, and she
herself won the popular vote in 2016. “[A]bortion bans and attacks on democracy
are galvanizing women voters like never before,” Clinton wrote, and “[w]ith Ms.
Harris at the top of the ticket leading the way, this movement may become an
unstoppable wave.”
Yesterday,
Harris held her first campaign rally, speaking to supporters in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, where the Republicans held their national convention just last week.
The energy from the 3000 people packed into the gym where she walked out to
Beyoncé’s song “Freedom” was palpable.
She began by thanking Biden and touting his record,
then turned to noting that in her past as a prosecutor, California attorney
general, U.S. senator from California, and vice president, she “took on
perpetrators of all kinds—predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off
consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So,” she said,
“hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.” She went on to remind the
audience that Trump ran a for-profit college that scammed students, was found
liable for committing sexual abuse, and “was just found guilty of fraud on 34
counts.”
While Trump is relying on “billionaires and big
corporations,” she said, “we are running a people-powered campaign” and “will
be a people-first presidency.” The Democrats, she said, “believe in a future
where every person has the opportunity not just to get by but to get ahead; a
future where no child has to grow up in poverty; where every worker has the
freedom to join a union; where every person has affordable health care,
affordable childcare, and paid family leave. We believe in a future where every
senior can retire with dignity.”
“[A]ll of this is to say,” she continued, “Building up
the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency. Because…when our
middle class is strong, America is strong.”
In contrast, she said, Trump wants to take the country
backward. She warned that he and his Project 2025 will “weaken the middle
class,” cutting Social Security and Medicare and giving “tax breaks to
billionaires and big corporations,” while “working families foot the bill.”
“They intend to end the Affordable Care Act,” she said, “and take us back…to a
time when insurance companies had the power to deny people with preexisting
conditions…. Remember what that was like? Children with asthma, women who survived
breast cancer, grandparents with diabetes. America has tried these failed
economic policies before, but we are not going back. We’re not going
back.”
“[O]urs is a fight for the future,” she said “And it
is a fight for freedom…. Generations of Americans before us led the fight for
freedom. And now…the baton is in our hands.”
Meanwhile, MAGA Republicans are still scrambling for a
plan of attack against Harris. One of their first angles has been the sexism
and racism Clinton predicted, calling her “a DEI hire.” House Republican
leaders have told fellow lawmakers to dial back the sexist and racist
attacks.
MAGA Republican representative Andy Ogles (R-TN) has
taken a different angle: he introduced an impeachment resolution against
Harris, while others are demanding that the House should investigate Harris and
demand the Cabinet remove President Biden under the 25th Amendment. The
Republican National Committee has decided to make fun of Harris’s laugh.
But concern in the Trump camp showed today when
Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio shared with reporters a “confidential memorandum”
trying to get ahead of polls he says will show Harris leading Trump. He said he
expects to see a “Harris Honeymoon” that will end quickly.
Trump has continued to post angrily on his social
media feed but is otherwise sticking close to home. His lack of visibility
highlights that the Republicans are now on the receiving end of the same age
and coherence concerns they had used against Biden, and there might be more
attention paid to Trump’s lapses now that Biden has stepped aside. CNN’s Kate
Sullivan noted today,
for example, that “Trump said he’d consider Jamie Dimon for Treasury secretary,
but now says he doesn’t know who said that.”
As Tim Alberta noted Sunday in The Atlantic,
the Trump campaign tapped J.D. Vance in an attempt to harden the Republican
base, only to find now that he cannot bring to the ticket any of the new
supporters they suddenly need.
According to Harry Enten of CNN, Vance is the first
vice presidential pick since 1980 who has entered the race with a negative
favorability rating: in his case, –6 points. Since 2000, the usual average is
+19 points. Vance won his Senate seat in 2022 by +6 points in an election
Republican governor Mike DeWine won by +25 points. Vance “was the worst
performing Republican candidate in 2022 up and down the ballot in the state of
Ohio,” Enten said. “The J.D. Vance pick makes no sense from a statistical polling
perspective.”
Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark, who
specializes in focus groups, noted that swing voters groups “simply do not
like” Vance. “Both his flip flopping on Trump and his extreme abortion position
are what breaks through,” she wrote.
The 2024 election is not consuming all of the
political oxygen, even in this astonishing week. Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission
(FTC) announced that eight large companies must turn over information about the
data they collect about consumers, product sales, and how the surveillance the
companies used affected consumer prices.
“Firms that harvest Americans’ personal data can put
people’s privacy at risk. Now firms could be exploiting this vast trove of
personal information to charge people higher prices,” FTC chair Lina M. Khan
said. “Americans deserve to know whether businesses are using detailed consumer
data to deploy surveillance pricing, and the FTC’s inquiry will shed light on
this shadowy ecosystem of pricing middlemen.”
The eight companies are: Mastercard, Revionics,
Bloomreach, JPMorgan Chase, Task Software, PROS, Accenture, and McKinsey &
Co.
In the House, Republicans have been unable to pass the
appropriations bills necessary to fund the 2025 U.S. budget, laced as they are
with culture-wars poison pills the extremists demand. Today House
members debated the appropriations bill for the Interior Department and the
Environment which, among other things, bans the use of funds “to promote or
advance critical race theory” or to require Covid-19 masks or vaccine
mandates.
According to the European climate service Copernicus, last Sunday was
the hottest day in recorded history. The MAGA Republicans’ appropriations bill
for Interior and the Environment calls for more oil drilling, fewer regulations
on pollutants, no new regulations on vehicles, rejecting Biden’s climate change
executive orders, and reducing the funding for the Environmental Protection
Agency by 20%.
-Heather Cox Richardson
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/23/politics/video/jd-vance-data-ebof-digvid-enten
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/23/gop-race-comments-harris-00170735
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4788663-andy-ogles-impeachment-articles-kamala-harris/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/23/opinion/kamala-harris-donald-trump.html
https://cdn.nucleusfiles.com/9f/9f5bada8-1641-4603-83ad-2e5ef9c481fb/7-23-24-harris-honeymoon.pdf
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4788574-trump-polls-harris-honeymoon-biden-2024/
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/23/ftc-launches-probe-into-surveillance-pricing.html
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/kamala-harris-biden-trump-election-07-23-24
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/07/trump-campaign-biden-dropping-out/679183/
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