Showtime

 

Steve M has a post on two recent profiles of Vice President Kamala Harris, by Elaina Plott Calabro in The Atlantic and Astead Herndon in the New York Times Magazine, that seem to convey a dispiriting message of a kind that's becoming familiar:

Boy, that Kamala Harris seemed so talented, yet she really gives the impression that she's struggling with the job of vice president, and while she's probably ready to be president, you can't blame voters for thinking that she isn't.

The familiar part is the regretful reportorial tone: "I recognize how good this person is, but that's sadly not important; what matters is that ordinary folk don't see it, and I can't imagine what can be done about it." It's something that's being laid on Biden all the time too, particularly over the "age issue", in the Nates' and others' insistence that they're not saying Biden is too old, they're merely saying voters think Biden's too old, and that's what makes it news. Maybe some genius could invent a profession in which reporters could help inform voters about the things the voters are misinformed about. You could call it "journalism".

Steve's point, that this is a problem for Harris, and Biden too—

Harris and Biden both seem to believe that everything they're doing is just fine and the public will come around eventually. They need to acknowledge that that might not happen, even if their opponent is a convicted felon by Election Day. 

—seems pretty much unarguably valid, but one of the things I want to say, as we're maybe sitting around contemplating ways in which they might deal with it, is that it's not exactly their fault. I mean, they have reason to think they're pretty good campaigners, not only because of a long history of winning elections handily in Delaware and California, and Biden's two victories in vice presidential contests in 2008 and 2012, but because of the big national elections they won so convincingly three years ago, against the same presumptive opponent, before he'd even been indicted (not counting the two impeachments, which are indictments in my book, because nobody else seems to take that seriously). 

You want to tell them that style of campaigning won't work any more because why? Because in 2020 they were campaigning against plague, financial breakdown, and the possibility of race war, and now they can't because they already fixed it? Or is it because the bothsiderist media keep telling people they aren't fixed even though they are? The economic problems, as least (on the plague, the media are invested in giving face to the view that it may not be a problem, and the fixes may not work, though they clearly have)? Which they definitely do, in that same regretful tone ("the economy seems to be firing on all cylinders, but there's this perception").

This is a weird conversation in terms of the normal mode of talking about vice presidential nominations. It seems to me they only have a major negative effect on the campaign when they're really disastrous, like Palin. (Quayle in 1992, after the public got to know him, might be another example). Harris's basic function on the ticket is largely the same traditional one as in 2020: to gratify important constituencies the presidential candidate might miss, in her case by being Californian, female, almost-young (she's 58 now), and a member of two key ethnic minorities (three if you count her husband, as I'm happy to do). You'd better not dump her, if you don't want some of those constituencies to feel very betrayed.

Like Pence (evangelical and rural), Biden (very white and union-oriented), Gore (environmentalist), Mondale (northern and liberal). Vice presidential candidates chosen for competence (GHW Bush, Cheney) may have been there to make up for perceived deficits in the top slot, but that was because those perceived deficits (on the part of Reagan and W Bush) were real. And you know how Cheney turned out.

But why does Harris have to go beyond those limitations of the normal to prove that she's some particularly new kind of charismatic figure, the way a presidential candidate does? I think that's the media, doing it for the most shamelessly entertainment-industry reasons. They've been trying for months to work up some primary competition for Biden, that's why they won't stop with the idiotic dementia stories, and now that that's largely failed they're trying to duplicate it at the vice presidential level. (I don't know about Herndon, but Plott made her way to the journalistic top through a National Review Buckley Fellowship, and I've thought she was part of the conspiracy for a while.)

That does't directly help with the question of how Democrats are supposed to cope with this, but maybe in an indirect way: maybe these showbiz aspirations and ratings obsessions were an important part of something we didn't yet understand.

I'll just leave this here

Neville Chamberlain pic.twitter.com/xnYDcXQicB

— CandyflossOfOutrage (@Yastreblyansky) September 2, 2019

Mike Pence pic.twitter.com/OhZDhZdmUU

— CandyflossOfOutrage (@Yastreblyansky) September 2, 2019

Yes They Did

Updated with Bush funeral reference 12:30 PM

"Donald, Donald, I am so disappoint." Photo by Reuters/Marcos Brindicci via MSN.

I told you.

President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin held what the White House described as “informal” conversations at the G20 summit in Argentina. 

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed Saturday that the two spoke at a cultural dinner for leaders and their wives and husbands at the famed Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires Friday night.

Huckabee Sanders did not disclose the content of their conversation, but in a press conference later Saturday Putin revealed that Trump had questioned him about Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian ships in the Black Sea. 

“I answered his questions about the incident in the Black Sea. He has his position. I have my own. We stayed in our own positions,” Putin told reporters, according to the Associated Press. (Newsweek)

Russia's seizure of two Ukrainian naval ships and a tugboat and 24 crew members who are still in dentention a week later was an "outrageous violation of Ukrainian sovereignty," as Ambassador Haley said, on behalf of and with instructions from "the highest level at the American government" (that "at" is pretty weird English). But not so outrageous you can't have a chat with an old friend you have so much in common with, right?

Cheap shots

pic.twitter.com/zfocHrdlRH

— Ｃｒｕｓ (@Kreuzader) December 1, 2018

Trump shakes hands in photo op with Argentine President Macri, forgets why he's there, and wanders away. The second one with appropriate soundtrack.

Whoever wrote his eulogy tweet for Old Bush was singularly inventive: "Whenever I was with him," as if there was some historical moment when they used to hang together all the time:

Scavino? When was Donald ever "with" GHWB, actually? Did they meet face to face? https://t.co/keEgzuEw4d

— Yasterisk (@Yastreblyansky) December 1, 2018

"I don't know much about him," Bush said, among other things. pic.twitter.com/zeAai7ikW2

— Yasterisk (@Yastreblyansky) December 1, 2018

RIP GHWB

Also, as he receded in very old age into inoffensiveness, whether jumping out of airplanes in his 80s or wearing Bill Clinton socks in his 90s, he became truly cute in spite of everything. Photo via Associated Press.

I don't usually stop to commemorate the deaths of old people about whom I don't have a lot of positive things to say, but the contemplation of George H.W. Bush could lead somewhere interesting:

Anyway, he was conservative in the real sense, which is something I think people are just now realizing they miss. He fought bravely and knew a great deal about baseball. Played it well too, they say.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) December 1, 2018

Dick's getting his Hemingway on here, isn't he? It's that, though, the "real sense" of being a conservative, which I think for the real Nixon might be what this anonymous Redditor suggested a couple of years ago:

I've always thought of Nixon as a Gaullist or Disraeli type of conservative with a small-town American strain in him rather than a Reaganite conservative or a "closet liberal". He was conservative in the real sense of the word--his major domestic and foreign goals revolved around order and structure, not ideals or justice--but a different kind of conservative. Makes a lot more sense, and that's what Nixon himself thought.

I don't know if he thought it or not, but I think he might have been pleased by having the description applied to him alongside the patrician George Herbert Walker Bush, emphasizing the calm "realism" of his views once he achieved the presidency, and papering over the noise and squalor of the dirty fighting and deceit that got him there up from early poverty and rage.

Would you like spies with that?

Kilauea eruption, 1983, via Hawaii Volcano Expeditions (When I write about Greenwald, as I haven't done in a while. I like to illustrate it with volcano pix in tribute to the special qualities of his prose).

An odd thing in relation to the scandal du jour over the weekend, and the revelation that the FBI had asked an academic in England to try to worm some information out of both George Papadopoulos and Carter Pageon their knowledge of the conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian state (and, as it later turned out, Michael Flynn as well, though that was possibly just in 2014, and Papadopoulos's and Page's boss in the campaign, Sam Clovis, who talked to him about relations with China), or as Donald Trump put it, sounding more and more hysterical every day, put it,

Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president. It took place very early on, and long before the phony Russia Hoax became a “hot” Fake News story. If true - all time biggest political scandal!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 18, 2018

Yipes! Though I didn't see any reason why they shouldn't have had an embedded informant in the heart of this criminal conspiracy, as they might inside a mafia family, there was no reason to supposed that they did in fact have one. As we soon learned (apparently The Daily Caller was the first to report it), what they had was Stefan Halper, a veteran of Republican administrations who has been for some time a Fellow of Magdalen College and was director of Cambridge's American Studies program, who enticed Papadopoulos to talk by commissioning a bona fide research paper from him and engaged him over dinner and drinks and apparently failed to get him to talk about the tens of thousands of incriminating Hillary emails; and had what Page described as "benign interactions" with that person.

Republicans, of course, decided to go with the Deep State Infiltrates Spy Into Trump Campaign line, where they were joined by our old friend Glenn Greenwald, as I learned from LGM, has been at work reinforcing that in The Intercept, demonstrating how especially sinister Stefan Halper is, with the allegation that he

Russia's Munich moment

Balaclavas in Balaklava, at least the guy on the right: Ukrainian border guards at the Crimean town. Photo by Sergey Ponomarev for the New York Times.

Unexpectedly, the first hack to come out crying "Munich" over Russia's ongoing adventure in Crimea seemed not to be one of the usual wingnuts (except clearly fascist commenters at The American Interest) but Dr. Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzeziński (McGill, Harvard) on CNN.

But here's Forbes [jump]

Triumph of the Won't

From my RWNJ pal Doug Brink, who sees a Leni Riefenstahl at work in the photos of the president with the troops:

This image still bothers me...

The White House poster recently noting Veterans Day weekend... It bugs me...

From the White House Facebook page

Maybe what disturbs me is how it compares with other historical images. [jump]

Is there intelligent life in Langley?

Like many others, I was startled to learn about the Government Accountability Institute (toujours GAI, toujours GOP!) and its discovery that our president appears to have missed quite a lot of his daily intelligence meetings. Indeed, I had no clear idea that the meetings even existed—though who could ever forget George W. Bush and "All right, you've covered your ass now"? (Happy September 11, by the way!)

From NSPT4Kids.

I did know that Obama gets his President's Daily Brief (PDB) by iPad, and that that is supposed to be the finest product our intelligence services put out, and having to have a meeting about it every day seemed like a little bit of overkill, when you could always just read it and make a quick phone call if you had a question; and I wondered, idly, if the meetings had been instituted for a reading-challenged President Bush ("What do you mean you told me Osama was determined to attack?" "It was in the PDB! It was in the headline!").

This is not the case, but the facts are available, and almost as entertaining. The daily meetings were cooked up after the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. Richard J. Kerr and Peter Dixon Davis, director and deputy director of the Office of Current Intelligence at the CIA, came up with the idea as they faced

another new administration, another foreign policy team, another group to which we had to prove ourselves all over again....

We knew that in the confusion of changing administrations, establishing daily intelligence support at top levels of a wary new leadership might just as likely be resisted as welcomed. At the same time, this new group valued intelligence; the question was whether they thought CIA was up to the task. How would we be received by a palace guard that at times had appeared downright hostile?

President Carter immediately put the president-elect on the receiving list for the PDB, and Richard Allen, the designated national security advisor for the incoming administration, established contact with Kerr and Davis, insisting that they work with him directly and not through the DCI. They had a number of meetings with Reagan when Reagan spent a week in Washington in mid-November, and more importantly perhaps meetings with the new vice president, George H.W. Bush, who naturally, as an ex-DCI himself, had a soft spot for the Agency.

Bush had ruminated on several occasions about the need to bring Reagan into the current analytic stream as quickly as possible. He felt it was imperative that the newly elected president receive daily briefings based on the PDB, and--even more important--that a professional intelligence officer be present to answer any questions, provide background information, and follow up on whatever intelligence needs Reagan might have. Bush knew from firsthand experience that filtering went on as an intelligence product moved through the White House staff and on to the President. He also knew that to make intelligence relevant the Agency needed regular feedback from its key customers.

It seemed a good opportunity, given Bush's candor and friendly disposition toward the Agency, to make a bold recommendation: because he was scheduled in a few hours to ride along with Reagan to Andrews Air Force Base, perhaps he might want to urge his new boss to request that such daily briefings be provided him personally during the period he remained in California pending the inauguration. Bush told Davis he would give it a try.

I really like the between-paragraphs sleight of hand where they're making a "bold recommendation" to Bush to arrange for what Bush has just said was "imperative" (how bold can it have been? Waiter says to customer, "May I make a bold suggestion? I'd like to bring you the item you ordered"). Kerr and Davis are likely hiding from themselves, as much as from us,  how much this story is about greed, for turf and for access.

From FamilyEducation.

Be that as it may, the proposal worked out, and Davis was summoned right away to Pacific Palisades to start the briefings, spending a week in California while Kerr did the editorial work in DC, and then switching. Now they don't even try to hide their glee:

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the briefing process was the relationship that developed between both of us, on the one hand, and those we briefed. Often during briefings, or while we waited during telephone calls or other visitations, we overheard conversations between Reagan or Bush and potential cabinet members or advisers. We listened to discussions of their strengths and weaknesses, complaints and personal exchanges that clearly were not meant for outsiders' ears....

Equally striking was the degree to which we were given a free hand during this two-month period of direct contact with a top leadership that would eventually include Secretary of Defense-designate Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State-designate Alexander Haig as well as Reagan, Bush, and Allen. We had little supervision from officials within the CIA or the Carter administration.

Another interesting feature of this period was that, to our knowledge, Reagan, Bush, and Allen did not receive formal, regular briefings from any other part of the government. There were contacts with State and Defense, but nothing like the type of regular contact we had established. The lack of contact between us and William Casey, who was to become DCI, was also noteworthy. At most, Kerr would exchange "good morning" greetings with Bill Casey, to whom he had been introduced by Reagan.

Interesting indeed! And then after the inauguration, it just carried on:

By Inauguration Day, the daily briefing system was so well established that it seemed natural to all involved that it would simply continue. The question hardly arose; it seemed a fait accompli. At President Reagan's direction, the service was to be provided also to Secretary of State Haig and Secretary of Defense Weinberger. (George Shultz and William Clark became recipients when they replaced Haig and Allen, respectively.) The Agency had finally obtained the continuing, high-level access it had been seeking since 1961.

And on, and on, until evidently Barack Obama decided he was big enough to read the Brief sometimes without assistance.

What the intrepid briefers told President Reagan about Ayatollah Khomeini's key-shaped cake,  or Colonel North's adventurous method of funding Nicaragua's anti-democratic insurgency are not disclosed: this is an account only of the important matters, of who sat next to whom on the bus to Six Flags, and did she really give him his ring back?

“If President Obama were participating in his intelligence briefings on a regular basis then perhaps he would understand why people are so offended at his efforts to take sole credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden,” Cheney told The Daily Caller in an email through a spokeswoman.

No, if that's what they talk about—Cheney's feelings—then he's already going too often.

Eugene de Blaas, The Friendly Gossips, 1901. WikiPaintings.