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It's Thursday, October 24.
As some of you might have noticed, I was not here the last few days, but I am appreciative of Michael Tracey, the intrepid independent journalist, who sat in for me one night and of our excellent team who put together two great shows in my absence so that we weren't off the air even one night. But I'm very happy to be back.
Tonight: From the moment Democratic Party elites imposed Kamala Harris on their party and then on the country, the most glaring weakness of her candidacy was manifest from the very beginning: she has no actual views or policy she's willing or able to express – to the point that they actually kept her away from any unscripted interviews, and her campaign site had no issue positions of any kind for weeks, not even vague banalities. The campaign strategy could not have been any clearer: to replicate Hillary Clinton's 2016 tactic of featuring as the overarching message that you should vote for her because she's not Donald Trump.
As we said at the time, from the very start, it was obvious this strategy was destined to fail. After the sugar high of having someone younger and different emerge on the scene, of course, Americans would eventually want to know who this person is, what she believes and what she intended to do, before electing her president. Yet her persistent refusal or inability to just answer the most direct and basic questions about her belief system – a failure made far worse by her lack of any political skills that would have enabled her evasiveness to be less obvious – predictably started eroding her polling lead and the favorable perceptions that Americans had of her at the start.
Within the last few weeks, even Kamala's campaign has realized that she needs to explain to voters who she is and more importantly, what she believes. That's why they began putting her on multiple shows where she was forced to be interviewed without a script. Yet, somehow, each appearance was worse than the next and she even managed to be extra bad when they put her in the friendliest possible venue, such as “The View” or Stephen Colbert's program, because the questions were so delicate and gentle at leaving her inability to answer all the more obvious.
Somehow, with each passing week, she is getting worse, all culminating in last night's extreme debacle on CNN's Town Hall” hosted by Anderson Cooper. In response to very direct questions from audience members and a reasonably persistent Cooper, her inability to respond directly to a single question, or at least pretend she was responding was so embarrassing that even Democrats on the CNN panel were admittedly uncomfortable or even horrified. However, Harris' entire campaign has been a vapid exercise in serving the interests of those who fund her. That's been what her whole career has been. In fact, she has no fixed or genuine belief system and that is why she remains petrified of trying to stake out a view of any kind. There's nothing she actually believes, so, she's constantly calculating what view might be politically harmful and what view might be politically helpful and she's just paralyzed. She can't answer questions because she has no views on anything. She may win the race. I have no idea what the outcome will be. If she does win, it'll be despite all of that but if she loses, there's no question that this bizarre and increasingly visible internal emptiness will be a major reason explaining her defeat.
Then: ever since Donald Trump emerged as a viable contender in 2016, Democrats and their liberal media allies have openly called him a fascist and equated him with Adolf Hitler, very similar to how they spoke about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney before converting them into noble Patriots. I know no history before 2016 matters or exists, but it actually is true that they speak about Trump now how they spoke about Bush and Cheney back in 2004.
Either because it was part of their grand 2024 plan all along or because they are panicking and getting increasingly desperate, Democrats have decided not only to rejuvenate this tired tactic but to make it a centerpiece – possibly the centerpiece of their closing messaging of the 2024 election. They have worked themselves into such a frenzy over this that it is now commonplace to hear liberal pundits earnestly worrying or predicting that they will be shipped off to concentration camps if Trump wins, as though he would consider Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid such grave threats to his power that he would demand their immediate banishment into some dungeon somewhere.
One of the primary problems with this tactic, aside from the Democrats' continuous reliance on it since 2015, is that Americans know Donald Trump very well, not just since 2016 when he decided to run for president, but for many decades prior to that when he was a major celebrity, a friend of rappers, billionaires and the Clinton family. He was the star of a major primetime NBC hit show and all that went along with it. And then, kind of importantly, Trump was already the president of the States for four full years – not decades ago, but quite recently. So, is it really possible to convince Americans other than MSNBC viewers and subscribers to The Atlantic that this “Trump is Hitler” narrative has any remote basis in reality? I suppose we'll find out soon enough but it seems far more likely for the reasons we'll go into, that this reeks of desperation rather than is the byproduct of any sort of well-thought-through or reliable or effective strategy.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
