The Case Against Bedwetting
I'm a bit more bullish on Kamala Harris's chances of winning than polls and models suggest I should be. Here's why.
Here’s a different kind of October 7 remembrance.
On October 7, 2016, the Washington Post published a video of Donald Trump, just out of frame on a hot mic, bragging to a stranger about his lack of self-control—about how it makes him act in predatory ways toward women, but that he gets away with it because he’s rich and famous.
“When you're a star, they let you do it,” he said. “You can do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything."
As October surprises go, it turned out to be too good. Trump’s campaign was thrown for such a loop that, within hours, (and through the apparent conniving of Roger Stone), Russian intelligence cutouts published John Podesta’s emails to the internet. Republican elected officials abandoned Trump in droves (before they came crawling back). Millions of Americans became convinced, if they weren’t already, that Trump couldn’t possibly win the November election. Many of them treated his seemingly inevitable defeat as permission to check out of partisan politics. Absent the Access Hollywood tape, some of them would have voted for Hillary Clinton instead of for a third-party candidate, or for nobody. Did this vile revelation perversely help Trump attain the presidency? It’s might have!
Just as plausibly, the Access Hollywood tape may have been the but-for reason Trump’s presidency never found footing. He was unpopular from his first day in office. Tens of millions of people, mostly women, flooded city centers small and large around the world to make an indelible statement about their antipathy to him. The tape arguably both made Trump’s presidency possible and doomed him to be a lame duck.
Liberals interpreted the legacy of the Access Hollywood tape in a number of ways, some mutually incompatible. To many, it was confirmation that, LOL, nothing matters; to me, it was a reminder that, #actually, many things matter. But the most important lesson we all took from the episode pertained to the dangers of complacency.
I devoted a bunch of words this week to logging concerns about Democrats’ preparedness for this October—for whatever ratfucking schemes Donald Trump and his allies have cooked up. Here I want to balance that out by explaining why—nerves aside, and all the wood knocked—I’m bullish on Kamala Harris. Democrats continue to have big blind spots with respect to risk and conflict aversion. They’re highly prone to paralysis and false helplessness. But not to complacency—not anymore. It’s one of several reasons I think Harris may actually be in better shape than most of the data suggests.
THE ODDS, EVER IN YOUR FAVORABLES
I started with Access Hollywood because I remember feeling complacent then myself.