Too Left or Not Too Left

Photo by Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters, via.

One thing on the selection of Minnesota governor Tim Walz as the Democrats' vice presidential candidate that I think it's up to me to say, because it's about one of my hobbyhorses, in the face of the fatwah issued by ayatollah Jonathan Chait:

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz Need to Pivot to the Center Right Now

Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. (I guess Chait means "the center right! now!" rather than "the center! right now!", but both are problematic.) 

He doesn't bother to specify what exactly they need to do in terms of policy, other than suggesting that Walz needs to back off of "providing free health care to unauthorized immigrants"—because Chait thinks it's politically more advantageous to punish the undocumented than it is to protect the broader public against the spread of a deadly pandemic ("Healthcare exclusions contribute to extreme inequities...Latinx Minnesotans have died of COVID-19 at twice the age-adjusted rate of white Minnesotans and their age-adjusted ICU-admittance rate for COVID-19 is nearly four times higher"). It's "moderate", for Chait, to force a susceptible subgroup of the population to seek care in the emergency room or just die untreated, and what you need right now is that kind of "moderation":

So, clearly, Harris does not need to run a perfect campaign to beat Trump. But at the moment, she is in a toss-up environment, and every inch counts. Does Walz help her gain those inches? I don’t believe he does. Rather than being one of the most moderate governors in America, he is one of the most liberal, and possibly the most liberal, which is why he became a hero to the far left in recent days. Walz is not a leftist, but he has adopted some unpopular positions...

So I've spent a lot of time on the stupidity of politicians clustering like moths around the flame in the Overton window, or trying to achieve popularity by discovering the precise G-spot, inch by inch, among everybody in the world in a single file from left to right. I'm sorry, folks, politics has more than one dimension!

Politics is about the multidimensional formation of coalitions, you've got your issues and I've got mine, and we can or can't join forces, but the aim is to form the coalition that will win. And there is, on the whole, no such thing as a "center":  The "center", for most issues, is composed of people who just can't make up their minds, or refuse to do so, like Chait, as if having a policy opinion were somehow undignified.

The big thing the Walz nomination is making me think about is the vastness of the difference between "centrism" in the punditry and "moderation" in the general population. Where the anti-partisan pundits are literally afraid of taking a position the way a person might be afraid of spilling red wine on a carpet, the nonpartisan voters just don't generally feel the need, if it isn't something that has a direct impact on their lives, and are happy to take a position if it does (don't cut Social Security!). When they're complaining about politicians being too political, and why can't they just compromise, they don't mean what the pundits mean, that they should scrap their convictions and write a bill that leaves everybody dissatisfied; rather, they're just dismissing the issues that they don't feel like thinking about.

And really, why should they have to? We partisans don't think about every issue either, but if we want to address one, we don't have to think as hard, with a sense of principles we can appeal to, more or less, or a politician or platform we can trust. Principles like "government can be used to make people's lives better", and politicians like Tim Walz who plainly believe in that.

Centrist pundits look at Walz's record as governor of Minnesota, especially the second term, when he's had Democratic majorities in the legislature, and they're appalled by the absence of bows to Republican demands: it's so one-sided! Moderate voters, the same rural white guys who came out in unexpected force to vote for Joe Biden in 2020, listen to Walz talking, and see somebody they can trust. They've been doing that in rural southern Minnesota for 17 years.

Walz says to the pundits,

"What a monster! Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn, and women are making their own health care decisions. And we're a top-five business state and we also rank in the top three of happiness."

Walz is proof that the pundits who demand that Dems “appeal to rural voters” don’t mean “explain progressive policy in a way that connects with rural voters” they mean “be conservative in a way that I, the pundit, personally agree with” fuck ‘em

— Micah (@rincewind.run) Aug 7, 2024 at 12:52 AM

***

A story at Axios confirmed what I suggested earlier, that Trump's team delayed his appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists convention for 70 minutes with their demand that the planned live fact checking not proceed:

• At the time, President Trump blamed the delay on audio problems.
• [NABJ president Ken] Lemon told Axios, "There were audio problems, but they were resolved very quickly."
• "The bigger problem was his threat not to take the stage when he had agreed to go on. He did not want to be fact-checked, but we could not let him on the stage without fact-checking," Lemon said....
• "I was prepared to go on stage to craft a statement, saying he decided not to go on stage because of fact-checking... we couldn't compromise on that.
• As Lemon was preparing that statement, Trump walked onto the stage.

What the Axios story is missing is that the live fact checking did not in fact happen (Politifact ran a kind of fact check on Trump's performance, I now find, but it wasn't live, as you can see by checking it out; it started at least a little over an hour after the performance ended, and I'm pretty sure over 25 hours after. 

Maybe that was something the Trump team directly negotiated with Politifact and NABJ had nothing to do with it, and Lemon is telling the truth as far as he knows it. But it's really weird that none of the journalists who bothered to write about it, and nobody on the NABJ board, seems to have looked at the #nabjfactcheck to find out. If it's so vital that it should take place, as Lemon said, how did they not find out? 

Let's just add, because I'm feeling nobody's saying this either, that Trump and his campaign just acknowledged that it is a necessary element of his rhetorical technique that he should be permitted to tell all the lies he can fit without challenge. He didn't intend to say it in public, but it's what he told the NABJ. He couldn't go on otherwise. And he got his way.