Postmortem Note

Certainly looks like I was completely wrong about the presidential polls, in general, or at least the relation between the polls and what was going to happen. I'm still not convinced the race was ever as close and immobile as they kept portraying it, through all the turmoil from June to now. It's easier to talk about what did happen, which is clear from the NBC exit poll: it was the last-minute undecideds, so beloved of the media, probably the lowest propensity voters of all, who really did decide the election, "breaking" for Trump in the last week, after a period, mainly in September and October, when the main event was Democrats and Democrat leaners allowing themselves to get excited about the freshness and novelty of Harris and Walz, and the departure of Biden made the awfulness of Trump briefly more apparent.

But the majority of the voters decided Trump's awfulness didn't matter, in the finding of the AP VoteCast, a massive survey of 115,000 voters, and there's an element of incipient fascism in that:

Nearly 6 in 10 said Trump lacked the moral character to be president, a reflection of his criminal convictions, his often inflammatory rhetoric, his sexist remarks and actions and his denial of the 2020 presidential election results that fed into the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Slightly fewer than half said Harris did not possess the morality to be president.

This Is Not a Prediction

 

Daniel Drezner suggested there had been a perceptible change in the vibe around the presidential election in the last few days, driven perhaps in part by a change in the Harris campaign's rhetoric: after all these weeks of calling themselves the underdog, they've started allowing themselves to look confident: "We are on track to win this very close race," says campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon. Harris in her new stump speech says, "Make no mistake: we will win." 

That's a strategic decision, no doubt—there comes a moment when being the underdog stops paying off and you want your voters to start feeling they're on a bandwagon of winners, and this was a logical place to make that transition, but there's more to it than that. There's a fire in Harris's and Walz's rally crowds that's like when they were first introduced to the audience in late July and early August, while Trump's malevolent juggalos (as opposed to the musical Juggalos, who don't seem at all malevolent and have given Harris the nod) are plainly dwindling in these final days, as in the scene in Reading shown at top.

I can't at this point imagine Trump winning, and I mean that literally: I should be able to imagine it, I normally have a pretty decent imagination, but my mind just won't go there. 

Maybe it's one of those self-care moves, a sign of mental health even. I can always start imagining it again tomorrow if I have to. We've been preparing for it for two years at least. But for now, imagining Harris winning is so much easier. I'm not saying she will win, I'm just saying she should. If the world makes sense, you know, which is not an easily defended prior assumption and I'm aware of that. I understand she could lose; I'm just not imagining how it happens, or why, for the time being. 

They're running such a technically good campaign, for one thing. "Flawless" is the word that keeps coming up (googling "Harris campaign flawless" returns 850,000 results). They have raised inconceivably huge amounts of money—I'll go back to protesting against that sooner or later (and Obama for breaking the public financing system in 2008)—and they've spent it with discipline, whereas Trump has had difficulty raising money and spent far too much of it on paying his legal bills (that goes back to a while ago, but he's still doing it). 

Netanyahyu's Other War. III

 

Following the Israeli strike in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza, October 28, 2024. Photo by AFP via Times of Israel.

At a certain point Biden reached a conclusion: that the only way to stop the Gaza war and prevent a wider war all around the Middle East was to get rid of Netanyahu. I don't know when that happened, though an incident reported by Franklin Foer looks to me like a likely candidate, in late 2023, when Biden was entreating Netanyahu to turn over to the Palestinian Authority the tax money that Israel collects in the West Bank to finance the PA's work, such as it is (I'm not going to claim it's a very effective government), but Netanyahu doesn't care about the fact that it's the PA's money: on December 23

Biden called Netanyahu with a long list of concerns, urging him to release tax revenue that Israel owed to the Palestinian Authority, the government in the West Bank, which Netanyahu was always trying to undermine in his quest to prevent the establishment of an autonomous, fully functioning state there.

“You can’t let the PA collapse,” Biden told him. “We’re going to have a West Bank catastrophe to go with the Gaza catastrophe.”

As Netanyahu began to push back, Biden couldn’t contain his pique and barked into the phone, We’re done.

They wouldn’t speak again for almost a month.

That rhymes, in a way, with the story of Biden's worst blowup with Netanyahu, back during his vice presidency. That was about the West Bank too, as remembered by Michael Hirsh in Politico Magazine:

The Rectification of Names: Fascism

Scene outside Madison Square Garden, before the big political rally, as reported dramatically by Candace Fleming in Salon:

A couple of Firsters stepped assertively toward a reporter. Would the media cover the rally fairly this time? they wanted to know. Or would the newspapers be biased and inaccurate, as usual? Many rallygoers believed the press couldn't be trusted. Their hero, the face of America First and the man they'd come to hear speak, had told them so. "Contemptible," he'd called the press. "Dishonest parasites." In a recent speech he'd even told supporters that "dangerous elements" controlled the media, men who placed their own interests above America's. That's why he had to keep holding rallies, he'd explained. Someone had to tell it like it was. Someone had to speak the impolite truth about the foreigners who threatened the nation. It was time to build walls — "ramparts," he called them — to hold back the infiltration of "alien blood." It was time for America to close off its borders, isolate itself from the rest of the world, and focus solely on its own interests. It was the only way, he claimed, "to preserve our American way of life."

No, not last night. The Salon article was posted March 9 2020, and the occasion they were reporting was a lot earlier than that. Almost 80 years earlier, in fact, and it wasn't the open Nazis of the German-American Bund in February 1939 at the "Pro-America" rally that we've been hearing so much about in the last week or so; it was the American First Committee led by heroic pilot Charles A. Lindbergh, perhaps on October 31 1941, barely two months before Pearl Harbor; or, perhaps more likely, the Garden rally of May 23 that year (Fleming doesn't give us enough clues to say, unfortunately), where a nonpartisan group joined him on the dais—Senator Burton K. Wheeler (D-MT) and the popular novelist Kathleen Norris, as well as the Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas (a genuine pacifist, not a mere anti-anti-fascist like the others). Either way, Lindbergh in New York was not using the "racially charged" language that got him into trouble in Des Moines in September:

Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not.

Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.

I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people. Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.

We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we also must look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.

But at the May rally, he and Wheeler and Norris (I hope that's not Thomas's arm behind Norris's head) had allowed themselves to be photographed in a half-assed emulation of the Sieg Heil salute:

Literary Corner: The Weave

 

Socially distanced Biden campaign rally at UAW Region 1 headquarters, Warren, Michigan, September 9 2020. Photo by Patrick Semansky, AP, via USA Today.

Eight Circles and He Couldn't Fill Tbem Up

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

I mean you can do whatever you want. I said
I don't like that. Lo and behold I see
they went and then built a plant and now
they do their business with India. They probably
do it outside India, too. They built
a very big plant. Many countries do that.
All of a sudden you hear they're leaving Milwaukee
or leaving wherever they may be located.
It's very sad to see. And it's so simple,
This isn’t like Elon with his rocket ships
that land within 12 inches on the moon
where they want it to land or he gets the engines back.
That was the first I really saw. I said, ‘Who the hell did that?’
I saw engines about three or four years ago.
These things were coming. Cylinders, no wings,
no nothing, and they’re coming down very slowly,
landing on a raft in the middle of the ocean,
someplace with a circle. Boom. Reminded me
of the Biden circles that he used to have, right?
He’d have eight circles and he couldn’t fill them up.
But then I heard he beat us with the popular vote.
I don’t know, I don’t know, couldn’t fill up the circles.
I always loved those circles. They were so beautiful.
That was so beautiful to look at. In fact, the person
that did them, that was the best thing about his —
the level of that circle was great. But they couldn’t
get people, so they used to have the press
stand in those circles because they couldn’t get
the people. Then I heard we lost. ‘Oh, we lost.’
No, we’re never going to let that happen again.
But we’ve been abused by other countries. We’ve been
abused by our own politicians, really, more than
other countries. I can’t blame them. We’ve been
abused by people that represent us in this country,
some of them stupid, some of them naive,
and some of them crooked, frankly.

From Trump's remarks at the Detroit Economic Club, October 10 2024. The opening bit is from a story Trump has been telling for years, about the injustice of India having a 100% tariff on motorcycles, which was meant, I think he believed, to harm the US motorcycle industry, as Washington Post's Annie Gowen wrote in 2018:

Fascism and Other Matters

It's amazing how much Republicans (I don't mean people who "identify" as Republicans, I mean party cadres, the activists who do the work and enjoy the rewards, ideological and material, because that's the kind of party the GOP is now) despise their voters.

While both sides have been criticized for misleading fundraising tactics, “[t]he Republican fundraising machine has been subject to more than 800 complaints to the Federal Trade Commission since 2022 — nearly seven times more than the number of complaints lodged against the other side,” they report.

One sad example: “One 82-year-old woman, who wore pajamas with holes in them because she didn’t want to spend money on new ones, didn’t realize she had given Republicans more than $350,000 while living in a 1,000 square-foot Baltimore condo since 2020.”

"I love the poorly educated," said Trump, but I think his understanding of "love" is a relationship where he gets a lot more out of it than he puts in, if you know what I mean.

***

This is so embarrassing on CNN's part:

Bot Not For Me

I'm still doing the daily Wordle, partly animated by my hatred of The Times's Wordle Bot and its critique of my performance, even when it praises me:

Who is it talking to? I didn't have this kind of strategic vision at this point. I was just looking to see if the answer contains any more of the commoner letters, and hit two of the letters. That was a good Turn 2 result!

I had no idea at this point that there were only two remaining words, of course, let alone what words they were. The Bot knows, because it only takes seconds to run through all the mathematical possibilities. (If I thought of "beaut" I wouldn't like it, I don't think Wordle's list is the same as the bot's, and that's the kind of word it would recognize but not deploy; on the other hand I have this feeling they've already used it, just a few weeks ago—if I'd thought of "gamut", on the other hand, I certainly would have tried it.) 

My own puzzle going into turn 3 is where do the A and U go? How many English words end in "-UT"? I don't have a list in my head, I have to game it out.