The State of the Election

I am very distressed at the present condition of the election. I thought that Kamala would by this time be far ahead, the character of Trump having revealed himself, just the other day by admiring Arnold Palmer's penis. He is a clown but Kamala rightly says that Trump is an unserious person who could bring about very serious consequences. My late wife reminded me that my predictions were largely based on hope rather than data or analysis and so what I say should be discounted. My daughter-in-law says that one party or the other will be very angry at the outcome, but that is not my feeling. If Kamala wins, I will be relieved, I think, rather than elated. If Trump wins, I will despair over whether the constitutional measures are available to control his worst instincts, which is to cede a lot of Ukraine to Putin, put eleven million people in detention camps and then deport them, and get revenge against his enemies, which include Pelosi and Schiff as bad people who are part of the enemy within. Sixty-one percent of veterans will vote for Trump even though Trump admires Hitler. What is going on?

Let’s put aside the issues. Kamala wants capital gains taxes lower than Biden did. She wants substantial tax breaks for home ownership, children and new businesses. Conservatives can support those proposals because they reduce taxes and Liberals can support them as a way to provide more entitlements to people. Yes, Kamala could have campaigned against the “Do Nothing” Republican Congress, as Harry Truman had done in 1948, but never mind. The only point of difference in the election is the character of Trump versus the constitutionalism of Harris and that is by now well established even  though some people think Trump is a flawed vessel who will further their own agenda, much of which seems to me indefensible. These differences are clear. So, less than two weeks before the election, what has to be said has been said. Everyone should go out to vote and let us be done with it. 

My daughter said to me many years ago that politics was character, and that applied to the electorate and not just the candidates. My point was that the qualities of a person’s politics, whether they are mean or niggardly to the poor, or care only for their own financial benefits, or are statesmanlike, was an expression of their innermost natures. But I don’t want to believe that because it would mean half of the  present electorate are tainted in their souls. Better to think they have been caught up in a frenzy induced by culture, which rapidly changes, and so will just pass, as Trump said would happen in the spring of 2020, at Easter time. But it takes work rather than wishes to lift the malaise. 

Ezra Klein in the New York Times says that Trump’s disinhibition makes him attractive. To some extent, people like him mean when some voters are too timid to be so outrageous. But I disagree. Think of what is the content of what he says. Do people disregard that? They just agree with the anger. These people may think you need a mean person during mean times and so a strong man will make the nation free. But crime is down and the economy is up and the nation needs the immigrants to keep the economy going. So anger is an end in itself, not for a purpose. It seems that there has been a sea change in that a lot of people do not want the President to be Henry Fonda or Jed Bartlett: cool under pressure, very well informed, humane. They want the opposite. That may mean Trumpism will outlast Trump, some other potential dictator arising, and that is very disheartening, that meanness, not disinhibition, the real thing. 

What might it be that could control Trump if he were elected? The 25th Amendment or a conviction by the Senate of an impeachment? Congressional Republicans have not been a bulwark of democracy, cowering instead because of their contributors and local party officials and their base, the Cheneys notable exceptions, but note that neither of the two have elective office, nor do some Republican ex-congresspeople and loads of ex Trump officials who have defected from Trump.  And as for the Supreme Court? All the male justices are corrupt. Alito and Thomas get millions of dollars worth of perks from interested donors who have business at the Court and sometimes report these and sometimes don’t and are both into far right points of view and so in Trump’s pocket. Roberts refuses to impose any ethical standards with any bite. Gorsuch and Kavenaugh told Senators during the time of their confirmations that Roe v. Wade was “settled law” and did not add that they would overrule it anyway. That is hardly the honorable behavior expected of a Supreme Court Justice. 

So the anti-democratic forces have been mobilizing for quite some time and can be attributed as far back as Gingrich who tried to make the Republicans something other than the me too party which for many years acquiesced to Democratic initiatives but just slowly. And at this juncture, one might expect there to be rioting of the streets by either side while in the moment of what used to be called a revolutionary moment as preceded the French Revolution or even the easily pacified Vietnam War protests. But people like me are amazed that what we anti insurrectionists do is follow out the formalities of democratic institutionalism for as long as that lasts, hoping that Kamala will win and that Trump would be restrained, nothing premature to be done. This may be the most important election since 1860, but let the other side fire on Fort Sumter.

My son says that I shouldn't worry because the election won't affect my life. I will have my Social Security and my streaming services and Amazon and my friends and family. But I have followed politics for three quarters of a century and care about it and can't give it up, the way I did with baseball when Derek Jeter retired and management knew that A Rod was on steroids. My daughter tries to just cultivate her garden but has become obsessed as well with the  election. My granddaughter is spoiling for an argument about how disgraceful Trump is. I guess I should be an Olympian and notice how foolish mere mortals might be and so let the election be noted as a possible upheaval that in history can occasionally come to nations, but I cannot disengage because this is in my time and in my place. I cannot just note that I am fortunate to live in interesting times. But my options are few. I vote and exercise my voice by writing and I can allow myself to feel dispirited.

Re-release: Class and Gender in Thirties Movies

Men, like the poor, are stolid and reliable, while women, like the rich, are diverse and uncertain.

In four years we will mark the centenary of “The Jazz Singer”, the first talkie movie. That is as long a time as the century between the time of “Great Expectations” and when I graduated from college. That seems to me to be a very big difference. There should be a major celebration of the invention of the talkies, as important as great battles or other events so dedicated, because so much was ushered into our consciousnesses. Maybe the publication dates of great novels, those who always seemed to have been here once they were created, should also provide a new version of a saints calendar, also now forever once canonized. Oh, and how the talkies talked! The dialogue of Thirties films, often based on plays and novels, were crisp and witty and eloquent, characters saying what they had to say about themselves and other people and their situations, even including “The Grapes of Wrath”, where Henry Fonda makes clear enough what an Okie immigrant family off to California had to say for himself in his understated way. But that decade was so long ago, however vibrant they may still be, that the topics covered in them, across the genres of comedy, tragedy and melodrama, are very different from the ones seen today and so it takes some excavation so as to mine them.

The topics for the decade were the condition of women and the condition of the rich. In both cases, the conditions were problematic in that it wasn’t clear what women or the rich were like or what they should be like. Both of those kinds of people were murky and so difficult to understand. Ernst Lubitch, known for his scintillating touch, starts “Bluebeard’s Ninth Wife” with  whether Claudette Colbert is married or unmarried or a loose woman or not because she is buying the trousers of men’s pajamas. It turns out that she is buying it for her father and so that is respectable and so the romance can begin, Gary Cooper, not known for comedy, the usual and unproblematic man who is daring, decisive and stoic, just what a stereotypical man should be, just as he is in all his stereotypical roles all the way through “High Noon” and beyond, while Grace Kelly is surprising in that she appears ats the decisive decision maker at the end of that movie. Women are amazingly different from one another even if also attractive while male heroes like Fonda and Heston and the aforementioned Cooper are true to form even if also deficient rather than fulfilled, as happens in “The Wizard of Oz”, where the Tin Man is lacking a heart and the Scarecrow lacks a brain, and the cowardly Lion lacks courage. A true man has to gain all three attributes, while Dorothy and the other women and girls all have their own peculiar motives, Dorothy wanting just to go home, and all those witches, some good and some bad.

The same is true of the women in the melodramas of the Thirties that were regarded as “women movies” because they explored the varieties of what were women, ever fascinating and to men alluring even if subject to conversation as “only” about women’s concern. The queen of the sub-genre was Bette Davis who could be everything: an ugly duckling who becomes a therapist and a lover to a limited Paul Henried in “Now, Voyager”, a flibbertigibbet who becomes a heroine as she faces death in “Dark Victory'', men in these movies dutiful, like George Brett, never fully aware of what is going on in women’s secrets, as when he is killed in a duel in “Jezebel” because Bette Davis eggs him on about supposed slights and then she turns into a hero by taking Henry Fonda into a pest house during an epidemic, she more likely to manage through it if anybody could. Women could be anything, but men were the same old.

The same division between women as problematic as to what they are while men have problems, whether of enemies or existential issues while remaining true to their identity or just failing to accomplish it by being too soft or insufficiently suspicious or overtaken by lust, as happens in “Double Indemnity”, something Catholics understand as an overabundance of a natural thing, also applies to the rich, who are problematic in that they are opaque, not quite revealing what they are up to.  The young George Cukor’s movie “Holiday” enters a rich home to find out what those people are like. The girl to whom he is engaged but he knew little about her turns out to want him to become a banker, which he, Cary Grant, finds boring, himself a self made man through Harvard and a fancy law firm, and wants to try out new things, which is admirable for men, and so she tires of him, while her sister, Katherine Hepburn, perhaps at her most glamorous rather than overly angular, wants Grant to follow his whims, which is what a respectable and loving girl wants her man to happen, a lapse into conventionality unbecoming of Hepburn as the independent woman, but there being other fish to fry, and so the two at the end come to one another, as would be expected from the first moment the two stars meet with one another because, after all, they are the stars. The financial magnate of the family, on the other hand, is difficult to understand other than that he has connections but does not know why capitalist fetishism is a concept much less a fault, just trying to meet his potential son in law by offering his own connections and wealth, having disregarded his own son who drinks too much because he is so tied to the loathsome bank when he had wanted to be a musician. Woe is me to the children of the rich. They are all psychologically scarred and most of them would be better off without money, which is a fantasy that other than rich people in the audience might find as a compensation for not being rich.

Unlike most Thirties movies, which are long on talk and short on visuals, Cukor is alive with set decoration, leading to his visualization thirty years later of “My Fair Lady”, what with all those flowers. Here, in “Holiday”, Cukor contrasts the mansion with staircases and internal elevators and regal paintings and adornments, with the room Hepburn has set aside for herself as having a fire, comfortable sofas, bookcases and the piano and barbells her brother used before he gave up his childish ways. (Someone else, I suppose, stokes that fire. As Mel Brooks might say, “It's not bad being rich.”) Hepburn is comfortable rather than stuffy, and that seems all to be said of the difference between the rich and those not inclined to be rich, the father saying he does not understand what is happening to the world other than that it makes him uncomfortable. The rich are not greedy, just confused, a set on the way out if they could bother to notice. Maybe the title is called “Holiday” because viewers are on holiday visiting the rich but knowing the rich are dodos, those people making themselves rather than their employees miserable.Feel sorry for them. That is a kind of vacation.

On the other hand, the poor are not problematic, even if they are also tragic or flawed. To use the terms used by Civil Rights activists in the Sixties, when whites asked what Blacks wanted, the answer was that Blacks wanted to have what white people already had. Similarly, the poor in the Thirties, wanted the comforts of the rich, by hook or by crook. Edward G. Robinson in “Little Caesar” wanted to become a powerful boss and his nerve, intelligence and diligence, all male traits, led that to him, even though he is machine gunned in the end, a classic tragedy about the wheel of life, ending with his remark “Is this the end of Rico?”, which sadly it is. The hero of “Scarface” also rises to the top and also is upended, even more unsettled by his unaware lust for his own sister. But that is aside from the rise and fall, all the way through to the Godfather trilogy, where he cannot free himself from crime and become, let us say, a Senator. His greatest betrayal is that of his wife, who aborts his child, because she does not want to live with this gangster family, and that is the only time that Michael Corleone rages rather than calculates, while his older brother Sonny is always raging, and so weaker as a man. The type of men runs through the movie decades.  

One of those so-called “screwball comedies” of the Thirties combines the two binaries of male and female and rich and poor. It is Gregory De Cava’s “My Man Godfrey” starring William Powell and Carol Lombard. The magnate father is annoyed at the  spendthrift ways of his wife, who is a ninny, as well as his two daughters, one mean and vindictive and snooty while the other is ditzy, and supposed to have had a nervous breakdown in the past when in fact she was trying to escape from her madcap lives. The two daughters compete in a scavenger hunt, which means they are so mean spirited and callous and humiliating so as to recruit some poor person as well as a live goat to show himself to a society party to win points for having accumulated worthy objects that are useless. The mother has what is called a “protege”, which is an exiled Russian who amuses the family by walking around the living room like a gorilla to amuse the family, in return for which he gets canapes and the chance to play the piano. The idle rich are women who don’t know what to be or to do with themselves. 

Into their lot comes a bum who, it turns out (spoiler alert!) to be down on his luck because he was a Harvard graduate who had been spurned by a woman and thought of suicide but was impressed by the stoical men who endured their poverty and so he lived in a shanty near a refuse dump and is picked up for the scavenger hunt and then asks to serve as a butler for what shows itself to be a ditzy family. He too is the compassionate, articulate, well mannered and stoical and resourceful person who can lead the labile young girl out of her distress and she falls for him even though he is thought to be a bum, hardly likely given his bearing, while another bum just wants his reward for having been entered into the scavenger hunt. Poor men have dignity while rich girls are mean or atwitter.

I take note, again, of the set decoration and the costumes. The, at the time, well appointed kitchen has a refrigerator with a cylindrical portion on top of it which I take was the refrigeration unit, and is, of course, now antiquated. Technology marches on.. The women wear Thirties gowns that seem to me colorless and dowdy though no doubt glamorous at the time. Fashion also moves on. The dump where Godfrey is found is just off Sutton Place, which means, I infer, before the FDR Drive built in that area and doing away with the dumps and the bums. Infrastructure changes. The value of a movie made in a time will last as physical culture is available to be appreciated from another time for its atmosphere whatever the time’s only much more slowly changing social structure.

How different it is in the movies twenty years later. In the musical remake of “The Philadelphia Story”, with Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby, called “High Society”, only the just teen daughter acts haughty and weird, everyone else normal people. Another movie at the time, “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” has Frederic March as the haggard advertising mogul who blames himself for having neglected his troubled daughter, je in despair about her rather than, in the Thirties, indulging her. Gregory Peck is the up and coming advertising executive, also forthright and stoic, who arranges to provide regular money to the child he had made when in Italy during the war when he finds out about their condition, and the wife supports him in his plan, something regarded as heroic. 

Skip another generation. The rich are like Michael Douglas in  “Wall Street”, from 2010, just greedy rather than people who can justify themselves, as investment bankers do, of making it possible for the economic market to work, and young women are physically exploited by rapacious men, as is clear in “The Handmaid's Saga”. Reese Witherspoon in the recent miniseries “The Morning Show” offers up many victims of rape because of men using their powerful positions, a version of the idea of a previous generation where  Andrea Dworkin saif that all sex is rape, just modified enough to be plausible, when what I think is that Jane Austen got the relation of the sexes and the rich and the poor just about right, however are the changes since then of costume and mores. Mr. Wickham, in “Pride and Prejudice”, is a cad, but he is an exception to the rule, not the rule itself.

A word should be said about the relation of fiction to reality. Should we trust to Thirties movies and those films that follow them about the reality of what is depicted there? After all, fiction, whether a novel or a movie, is made up. Its characters and plots are concocted even if films claim to be “based on a true story” because scriptwriters put in events and characters so as to make the films clearer to follow and so as to fill out a generic type.Its hard to make up settings, it is true, especially in science fiction, where even Kubrick’s “2001” is an extrapolation of how women and men would dress and how no one would smoke. So a reader is unlikely to trust fiction. People are distorted from what people really are and situations are abbreviated or just insufficiently imagined rather than an accurate depiction of reality.

But what is the alternative? Voting behavior measured through polling data may have said somewhat accurately from 1940 to about 1980 or so who would vote for whom, that moment past in that people came to hide their preferences by lying. And even the most innocuous question, such as whether you approve of the President, is ambiguous, in that it doesn’t make clear whether you approve his way as a person or approve of his policies. And much of history is to condense contemporary newspaper reporting with some documents added on. So what else is there to do but find the truth through fiction, especially when it comes to the temper of the times or the fads of the moment, like Hula Hoops and the war between the Communists and the ex-Communists that Whittiker Chambers regarded as the central debate and war of his time? 

I would suggest we follow Georg Simmel who thought that what was embedded inevitably in fiction was not the mores or the fashions or the technologies of a time, however much those artifacts are accurately recorded in film s of the past, but what Simmel regarded as the inevitable consequences of sociation, which means the qualities that emerge from people dealing with one another. Things like cooperation and conflict and hierarchy are everywhere the same down to the higher apes and I would suggest the same for friendship (as old as “Gilgamesh”), and courtship and political negotiation. Simmel modified only to mean that social structures may change, but only very gradually, even as those other things feel quite different from one generation to the next. Men and women haven’t changed since Samson and Delilah, even if Feminists say otherwise. So trust the Thirties movies as telling the truth.

The Presidential Campaign Now

Are voters reliable judges of character?

This is the dirtiest and meanest Presidential campaign in my lifetime. Worse than the Willie Horton ad leveled by George W. H. Bush against Michael Dukakis in 1988 where antiblack feeling was drummed up because Dukakis as governor of Massachusetts had left on parole a convict who reoffended. Just one and tube first Bush must have held his nose about what he was convinced to do. Not Lyndon Johnson unleashing the daisy petals ad and invoking nuclear war if Goldwater was elected in 1964, and a declaration by psychiatrists that Goldwatger was mentally unstable. Just  a few attacks, the petals had withdrawn after it was aired after only one time. Nor even Richard Nixon, who had associated his California campaigns with slanders on opponents being Communist tainted, presenting the checkers speech in 1952 to counter his having a slush fund, by clothing his wife in a Republican cloth coat and a refusal to give back the dog checkers that his daughters loved, himself clothed in Republican conventional respectability. This time is much worse. J. D. Vance says that it is alright to make up and repeat stories about migrants who happen to be legal but black as eating pets so as to show just how awful illegal immigration is. And a trump close supporter saying the white house would smell like curry if Kamala was elected and that Jews would be responsible if Israel was destroyed if Harris was elected, greatly exaggerating the two to three percent of Jewish American voters and American Jews in high places scrupulously and easily holding their allegiance to the United States even if having sentimental associations with Israel. When John McCain jousted with Barack Obama neither suggested the other was a threat to democracy and both current candidates charge that, one of them unfortunately true, the election an existential threat to America for the first time since 1860.

Even less combustible issues are discouraging. The Democratic Primary candidates in 2020, Harris, Sanders and Warren, were to the left of Joe Biden. Now, Harris is to the right of Biden, though not by very much, the best example of that in Harrfis wanting to raise capital income taxes by a little, less than what Biden has proposed. Trump was in favor of reversing Roe v. Wade and said so proudly but is now backpedaling because the issue is inflaming women. Not even the appearance of principle, just as his preferring a border issue rather than a border solution, as he said so overtly to Republican Senators who scuttled a border bill at his behest.This year found, this year as a whole, anti-Israel cohorts tinged with antisemitism has become prevalent and not only on campuses. The White House press corps displays some of that. A correspondent at a meeting asks whether their own beepers (which they probably don’t have as they are antiquated) asks if their cell phones will blow up. Jean Pierre, perhaps because of her discretion as press secretary does not quip as I would, “Not unless you got your instrument from Hezbellah which was a weapon of war sent  to underlings so as to communicate about planned battle action, and therefore liable to enemy intervention so as to disrupt military communications. Why were parents giving weapons of war to their children?

There is an asymmetry between the parties. Democrats don't castigate one another while Republicans say just awful things about one another. The worst Democratic candidates say is minor. Harris criticized Biden on bussing however much she misrepresented his position which was that local districts were free to allow bussing, and that is what happened when Harris was bussed as a child in Berkeley. Obama used his irony and wit to say of Hillary that she was “appealing  enough”. So Biden made up with Harris and made her Vice President and Hillary supported Obama with good conscience. Republican candidates go  for the jugular, as when George H. W. Bush as a candidate called Reagan’s economic policy “voodoo economics” and Vance said Trump was like Hitler. Those shouldn’t be passed off as words that become meaningless when the campaign is over for they lead to a cynical view that nothing politicians say can be taken seriously. Bush just allowed himself to be angry and say his words were only then once he became the Vice Presidential nominee and Vance says he learned to favor trump because of his administration as president though, obviously, being hitler is a  character trait that doesn’t go away even  if good administration follows unless he is a very bad judge of character, which is also a weighty  matter for someone running for very high office.

The columnists are all wondering under the guise of what they think the candidates should do is what they think the voters will do. What will motivate Harris or Trump to clinch the deal? What will Harris say to show is her purpose as president rather than just an alternative to Trump? Voters want more than that. But I disagree.The real question I ask is why that choice is not obvious. Whatever Harfris’s shortcomings, whether she flip flops or is not specific on policy, she is not a mean spirited insurrectionist who would sell America to the highest bidder and is afraid to confront any of America’s adversaries, he someone less likely to drop the bomb than to cave in at any treaty.

Consider the current events which make Harris a clear choice. The Biden Administration has been dealing with two major developments in the past few days and has been handling them professionally: they are providing hurricane assistance to the southeast United States and using the American military to assist Iranian missiles against Israel. American leaders are well informed and coordinating with one another and with their allies, saying very little about planks forward, which should be their posture, but as accurate as possible as the facts as they know them. That is  how a responsible government operates and by and large has operated in most Democratic and Republican administrations, sober rather than bellicose, measured rather than precipitous. And what does Trump do? He lied that Biden had not spoken to the Republican Governor of Georgia who himself said that Biden had given Georgia whatever he wanted. Trump lied about covid and recently about pets eaten in Springfield, Ohio, though that a President telling the truth to the American people is a sacred trust even if some information can be withheld. Will you trust Trump should he be elected to tell the people the truth about anything, significant, like a war, or trivial, like his crowd sizes? How can anyone take the position otherwise than that of the NY Times editorial board which is that in this case a patriot can only vote for Harris? And yet the polls remain surprisingly close, as if people disregard Trump as an insurrectionist or all the indictments against him . Why? Do people have no respect for the constitution or simple individual morality whereby we deplore liars and those who disdain the military?

And then, that night, there was the Vice Presidential debate. Vance “won” because he presented himself as more articulate than Walz, who opened with hems and haws rather than getting to the point directly, and also as a reasonable and compassionate person rather than the ogre and extremist preoccupied with punishing cat ladies by reducing the power of their votes. He did so by being mild mannered, family oriented, and engaging in the technicalities of legislation, as if people cared about such things, knowing that arguments could be made on all sides for an audience unfamiliar with the issues. So much for everybody wanting a policy debate when  clearly people prefer the personality debate that was present in the Harris Trump debate where everyone could assess the characters of the people running for President. Also, to achieve his ends, Vance just lied or obscured a number of issues as that was quickly ;pointed out by the commentators on CNN  who clearly prefer Harris. Vance said that he wanted to provide child benefits rather than defend his opposition to abortion. He also said that Trump saved Obamacare when he had in fact tried to overturn it. Vance also said that Trump had turned over power on Jan. 20th neglecting that he tried to overthrow the government on Jan 6th while also himself asking Georgia votes to give him the statue and in  cahoots with those engaged in drafting fake electors to gum  up the electoral process. Some of those actions are under indictment but trials are delayed at the behest of the president who, if he thought himself innocent, would move them quickly to clear his name. But the greatest failure of the debate was that the CBS moderator  put in  the question of Jan. 6th late in the debate rather than making it front and center because that is the central issue about whether Trump is suitable for high office rather than just one of a long set of issues worth debating. Insurrection is not just another item.

And this is happening while the United States is heavily engaged, though without ground troops, in two wars and abortion and the peaceful succession of power are mighty issues for the American people to deal with and debates just skirt around them. In the old days, when people were ideological or interest based, that is what candidates talked about: getting out of Korea or civil rights or welfare for the poor. Sometimes I prefer the old days so the media discussed the issues rather than personalities. But personality is what it is and the media do dig deeply into that rather than just the puff their supporters present. But I am unsure whether the American people are even up to judging character rather than policy. If they were, Harris would win in a landslide.

The Trump-Harris Debate

It is still a horserace.

The bottom line on the debate is that it is contentless even if consequential. Famously, in the first televised presidential debate, radio listeners thought Nixon “won”, whatever that means other than making some memorable pointed remarks lacking in  the opponent, while Kennedy was thought by the public to win maybe because of his teeth and smile while Nixon had five o'clock shadow. The debates contest appearances and so people decide they disdain Kamala’s laugh because that has become a Republican talking point. Moreover, we know alot about the candidates. Trump is mean and gruff and garbled and accept or like that for him, a strong man who voters may not have the gumption to express themselves while Kamala is a centrist left Democrat who moved more centrist this time than she was four years ago when the general rhetoric was more leftist even though Biden’s definitely New Deal leanings, pure FDR, was successful economically and overcame Covid. Saying the economy is the real issue is just a way of offering a respectable reason  for liking the Trump style. So why bother having the debate at all?

Well, the debate could provide dramatic surprises and that is what it delivered. And so the debate should satisfy as the real deal the broadcast and cablecast news organizations were hawking for a week now.Trump had to meet a low bar. All he had to do was sound coherent and a bit less mean while Harris, the old prosecutor, had to nail him on the wall to seem victorious. When I saw the debate, I decided that Harris began nervous but settled down and was fine at delivering her impassioned speech on abortion, but she failed to deny Trump’s charge that immigrants were being loosed from prisons and insane asylums, perhaps because so she would not seem to be protecting or defending undocumented aliens. In my view, the debate came down to being parallel stump speeches, each one offering their own slogans and myself amazed that Trump just goes on lying, like immigrants eating house pets. It was a largely useless exercise, I thought, that wouldn’t switch voters. People like the patter of the one they support.

But CNN  commentators thought differently, that Harris clobbered Trump, baiting him into saying stupid and racist remarks or having no answer to why he hasn’t offered a plan to replace Obamacare for the many years since Obama proposed it. The Times thought Trump was made small while Kamala went high. But if you discount his lies, Kamala doesn’t win by exposing them and, following J. D. Vance, it doesn’t matter if Haitians are eating cats, only that immigrants are disrupting American life. What still matters is comparing cheerfulness to meanness, and that is up to the voters. PBS,  the NY Times and the New Yorker mostly said the same thing. 

My take was different. Trying to expand the MAGAS would probably lose but  in a close thing. Trump was baited into saying what Harris wanted him to say, but Trump said what he wanted to say anyway: to be mean and vague and full of lies. His supporters want him to say these things even if MAGA commentators want him to dwell on issues. Why should he? He wins for his followers even if it loses the undecided, that very small figure who actually have not made up their minds about the differences. Trump has to gain more MAGAS to show up to vote, not win the undecided. In that case, he would probably lose but in a close vote. For Harris to really have a resounding victory, to win substantial numbers of MAGAS to her side, she would have required shaming him or getting him to stumble, which he did not do. He told his lies and exaggerations and did not linger on his self praise and grievances and so did not hurt himself unless people were ready to give up on him. The article yesterday in the NY Times by Peters, Healy and Robertson got it right, I think,  were close to the mark by pointing out that undecideds remained undecided which meant, to me, that uninformed people, and especially MAGAS, would vote for Trump whatever the debate results.

A debate is like a stage play and not just because it has revealing dialogue that is constrained in time and space, and in this case, as I claim, where the two sides were talking past one another. It is also dramatic because the audience makes sense of the drama, what is to be taken from the dialogue or excuse for one, out of the content and the exchanges. Playwrights improve a project by trying out audiences as to what makes an impact and will change a play so that it will resonate with real playgoers so that what happens on the strange is not elusive or obscure. They have to get it. Voters are even  less discerning playgoers. They are not schooled in political science or even standard historical references or particularly verbally astute. They just dip in late in the election year into politics and are expected to make a judgment on the candidates even though focus group members just after the debate the other night had difficulty articulating why they liked or didn‘t like one or the other candidate. The voters are amateurs with only passing interest in the subject matter and their specialized languages but they are supposed to be the wisdom of the Republic. Well, not really. People get to vote not because of their education or investment in the nation or even just because voting is an alternative to civil unrest. It is a procedure for transferring power and the Founding Fathers thought that a republic required only that a populace was virtuous, which meant that it could make obvious distinctions between right and wrong. The present election is obvious and we hope the Founding Fathers were right and the American people remain virtuous.