Harris is Beating Trump by Transcending Him

Outside of MAGA cultists I suspect many Americans - likely the majority - are exhausted with Donald Trump's never ending narcissism, fear mongering (usually based on racism) and efforts to divide the nation along racial and religious lines. This in turn has seemingly created a longing for something different and an escape from Trump and everything he is peddling.  It's a longing that the Harris/Walz ticket appears to be connecting with and are riding with a forward looking message instead of Trump/MAGA's effort to take the nation backward in time at the expense of millions of Americans' civil rights and freedoms. Time will tell if this momentum can be maintained, but so far Trump/Vance campaign has been unable to find an effective strategy to counter the Democrat surge.  Moreover, Trump can never stop talking about himself rather than addressing the wants and needs of citizens outside the Christofascist and white supremacist base of the modern Republican Party.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the changed trajectory of the 2024 campaign and the GOP's inability to successfully negatively define the Democrat ticket.  Here are column highlights: 

The sudden and radical shift in the trajectory of the 2024 campaign owes to more than the replacement of President Joe Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate. To a degree that’s still not fully appreciated, Harris has embraced an entirely new strategy: She’s not just pushing back against Donald Trump’s politics of cultural division. She’s bidding to transcend it.

Choosing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate reinforces the move away from clichés about “coastal politics” and “cultural elites.” Instead, she wants to fight on specific, practical measures government can take to improve lives, from family leave to expansions of health coverage. Both Harris and Walz are speaking a soothing and — to pick up on Democrats’ favorite virtue these days — joyful language of patriotism and national unity.

You could tell the Trump campaign was thrown off by the Walz pick when the GOP’s vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, attacked the camo-wearing, gun-owning, small-town Midwestern schoolteacher as a “San Francisco-style liberal.” . . . . The tired misfire speaks to how dependent the GOP is on stereotypes about who “liberals” are and what “liberalism” means.

Trump and Vance want liberals to be Ivy League-educated people (which describes both members of the Republican ticket but neither of the two Democrats) who look down their noses at “flyover country” and disrespect the values of small towns and the countryside. They absolutely do not want to deal with a liberalism that extols “community” and “freedom” (two of Harris’s favorite words) and favors a government active in areas where most voters favor more public action to ease their circumstances.

The contrast Harris is trying to bring home was underscored last Thursday in dueling appearances by the two nominees. Standing amid the faux-gilt of his Mar-a-Lago hotel, Trump, who has largely been homebound at a crucial point in the campaign, talked a lot about himself.

Meanwhile, Harris was in Michigan at a United Auto Workers local flanked by Walz and Shawn Fain, the union’s visionary president, to extol “the dignity of work” and the value of collective action.

While Mar-a-Lago Trump called the United States as a “very, very sick country right now,” Harris spoke an actual populist language with a strong emphasis on patriotism.

“Our campaign is about saying, ‘We trust the people, we see the people, we know the people.’ You know one of the things I love about our country? We are a nation of people who believe in those ideals that were foundational to what made us so special as a nation. … We love our country.”

The (perhaps unfair) irony is that such sentiments seemed old-fashioned from Biden but sound fresh when put forward by a younger woman — from California, for goodness’ sake! — whom no one can think of as a fogey. . . . . and harness the nation’s exhaustion with Trump’s gloomy acrimony.

When a literally straight-shooting football coach like Walz becomes the adviser to his high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance because he doesn’t like seeing LGBTQ kids bullied, he moves discussions of sexual identity from academic gender theory to simple, small-town decency. When Harris says, “We love our country,” pay attention to those words “we” and “our.” Harris and Walz are waging war on “inflammatory symbolic politics.” And, yes, it’s a joy to watch.