Hold on, Dems, it could get bumpy
The Democrats’ convention and their crowning of Kamala Harris as their nominee for president was nearly blemish-free. The ticket of Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz head into the fall with a strong wind at their backs.
But wait a minute, the process of electing a president and vice president is, in a sense, just getting started. And before the first votes are cast, it would be wise for Democrats to heed the words of Bill Clinton.
Speaking Wednesday evening to the convention, the former president warned, “We’ve got the energy, we are happy, we feel like a load’s off our shoulders. [But] we’ve seen more than one election slip away from us when we thought it couldn’t happen, when people got distracted by phony issues or overconfidence.”
The “War Room” warrior and veteran of more rope lines than just about anyone alive spoke truth to the potential for brashness when he told the Chicago convention delegates, “This [politicking] is a brutal, tough business.”
(Clinton knows better than most just how brutal and disheartening politics can be. Putting aside the campaign of destruction directed his way by the late Tribune-Review publisher and Mellon heir Dick Scaife, and his eventual impeachment by Newt Gingrich’s House Republicans in 1998, consider this scenario:
The 1992 Clinton presidential campaign began with a rally in McKeesport. (Yes, Virginia, Pennsylvania was one of the keys to that election as well.) The early evening rally featured Bill and Hillary Clinton and second couple hopefuls Al and Tipper Gore.
Three of these four – both Clintons and Al Gore – would each run for president; and though each would win the most votes in their respective races, only one would ever serve as president. Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 were both denied the keys to the White House by finishing second in the Electoral College.)
But I digress. Here is what former president Barack Obama told the delegates and a national TV (and social media) audience of the campaign’s final two-plus months and the pitfalls ahead, “Make no mistake, it will be a fight…. This will still be a tight race in a closely divided country.”
The ticket itself seems to understand the perilous nature of the weeks leading up to the election. Walz, a former high school football coach and a genial “everyman,” told his fellow-Democrats at the convention and others listening in, “We’re down a field goal.”
According to the latest poll analysis by Professor Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia this is not exactly the case. Harris and Walz are up, but ever so slightly. So meager is their advantage that Alan I. Abramowitz of Emory University, who authored the Crystal Ball polling breakdown, wrote, “It certainly wouldn’t be shocking if Donald Trump were to win either the popular vote or the electoral vote.”
Abramowitz, a political scientist whose 2018 book “The Great Realignment,” traces the rise of Trump, noted that “the safest prediction we can make is that it’s going to be very close…. These results [giving the Democrats a small lead] are based on the assumption that Kamala Harris will enjoy the normal advantage that goes to the candidate seeking … a second-straight party term in the White House.”
Abramowitz said that the election “model” he’s working from and subscribes to historically gives a boost to an incumbent president seeking a second consecutive term. The chief differences in this case, as we all know, are that Harris is not the sitting chief executive and that incumbent Joe Biden, whose bowing out of the race at virtually the last minute led to the Harris nomination, has some of the most dismal poll numbers imaginable.
Has Harris a needle to thread? Yes. Is she up to it? If her acceptance speech Thursday night is any indication, she’s more than up to it. Thursday night she looked and sounded like a president, a wholly improbable development as recently as last month. Disparaged as a political lightweight until recently, she did some heavy lifting with her address, a concise, 35-minute master class of rhetoric, reason, empathy and toughness.
She not only took down Donald Trump, she introduced herself, weaving the story of her childhood as the daughter of immigrant parents into her career as a district attorney, state attorney general, senator, vice president, and now the nominee of her party for president.
Along the way she vividly introduced us to her Indian mother and her Jamaican father plus her goals and intentions as president, including her intention to be a muscular commander-in-chief and a tribune for middle-class American values, patriotic and forward looking. By my count, she used the phrase or its variant “a new way forward” three times during the speech.
Kamala Harris wants America to move, finally and with finality, beyond Trump. In no time soon, we’ll know if she succeeds.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.