Who should be the nominee for vice president?

Democrats are giddy and hopeful. 

Kamala Harris isn't just new. She is catching on.

Democrats now dare to look ahead. They are asking each other, "Who should be the choice for vice president?"

Democrats passed the torch. They aren't clear what Harris stands for yet because she hasn't defined herself within the Democratic spectrum that reaches from Bernie Sanders and AOC to Joe Manchin. No matter. It is enough that she appears electable and might save the country from a man who plotted to overthrow an election to stay in office, nearly succeeded, said he would do it again, and chose a vice president who said he would help him do it.

Meanwhile, Republicans are stuck with a candidate that 55% of Americans loathe. 

Since there was no primary, Democrats did not divide into irreconcilable camps fighting about climate, Israel-Palestine, peace, health care, immigration, and taxes. Those issues rumble under the surface. Potential vice presidents are more than Hollywood central casting criteria. They will have baggage based on who they excite and disappoint. 

Josh Shapiro

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro looks perfect from a central casting point of view. He's a straight White male governor of a blue-wall state. He might calm the nerves of people uncomfortable with a dark-skinned biracial female president. He might not be sufficiently anti-fossil fuel to please climate progressives; there is fracking in Pennsylvania. He is Jewish. That will reassure some Democrats but will worry others. Will he be too uncritical of Israel's handling of the Palestinian population? Progressives, led by teachers' unions, made organized protests opposing Shapiro. Shapiro has supported school vouchers. He is 51.

 Mark Kelly

Mark Kelly is a former astronaut and is married to assassination-attempt victim Gabby Giffords. He is a popular Arizona U.S. senator. He would bring some border-state credibility to the promise that a Harris administration would deal with immigration. Arizona is a battleground state, which is good. Less good is that Kelly made organized labor unhappy because he opposed rules that would have declared some "independent contractors" to be "employees." His manner has been mild and moderate, and he would be a reluctant "attack dog." He is 60. 

Tim Walz

I had never heard of Tim Walz until this week. He is the governor of Minnesota and a former six-term U.S representative from a red district. He won anyway. He had an NRA endorsement. He shifted left when he became governor. His presence would signal Harris wants to include rural, traditional, Midwest-nice values and style in her presidency. Politico headlined that he had "Midwest grit, the Midwest sensibility." The Wall Street Journal says:

Known for his folksy dress and manner, Walz likely would help Harris the most in battleground Wisconsin because he is already well-known in western portions of that state that share media markets with Minnesota. He might also play well in battleground Michigan—one-third of the “blue wall,” along with Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, seen as crucial to Harris’s hopes in November.

Progressives who oppose Shapiro are urging her to choose Walz. He is 60.

Pete Buttigieg

Donald Trump has shown Americans the appeal of a courageous defy-conventional-wisdom approach to politics. A VP choice that would create the most astonishment, the most electrifying buzz, is Pete Buttigieg. He has been nationally vetted from his campaign four years ago. Trump's sexual history probably inoculates Buttigieg from sexual scolds on the Christian right; homophobes weren't going to vote Democratic anyway. Buttigieg brings to the table something that has been missing since Obama left office, an articulate centrist Democratic spokesperson who can take the argument to Fox. Biden couldn't. Harris may well be able to. Buttigieg already is and looks great doing so. He is young enough that he may not frighten Harris into thinking she has to muzzle him. He will get his turn to be president, and in the meantime he can take the message to middle America.

There is a school of thought that American elections have become a contest of TV excitement. Of buzz, not policy. Trump's power comes because he dominates public attention. He is a shock-jock, a provocateur. Trump is getting old and erratic and so is the Trump schtick. 

I think the matchup Trump fears the most is a Harris-Buttigieg ticket. They would upstage Trump. We've seen the Trump show. 

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your emai go to: https://petersage.substack.com. Subscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.]

Trump crashes and burns at Black journalists' convention

Trump wanted to crash and burn.

How dare those uppity and ungrateful Black nobodies disrespect him? 

Trump was on message. Trump is sticking with his team

Robert Reich called the interview "a meltdown" and "calamitous." Aaron Rupar said Trump "self-immolates." 

Here are highlights of the confrontation between Trump and Black journalists. ABC-TV correspondent, Rachel Scott began:

A lot of people did not think it was appropriate for you to be here today. You have pushed false claims about some of your rivals, from Nikki Haley to former President Barack Obama, saying that they were not born in the United States. That’s not true.

You have told four congresswomen of color who are American citizens to go back to where they came from.

You have used words like “animal” and “rabid” to describe Black district attorneys.

You’ve attacked Black journalists, calling them a loser, saying the questions that they ask are stupid and racist.

You’ve had dinner with a white supremacist at your Mar-a-Lago resort. So my question, sir, now that you are asking Black supporters to vote for you: Why should Black voters trust you after you have used language like that?”

Trump responded by saying:

First of all, I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner. The first question. You don’t even say hello, "Hello, how are you?" Are you with ABC? Because I think they’re a fake news network, a terrible network.

Trump's supporters see him as a man with a grievance. Everybody picks on him, like right here, where he sits getting criticized by a Black woman. His base agrees with Trump that he has been treated unfairly by the news media. By Democrats. By prosecutors. By the Justice Department. By his own disloyal cabinet members and White House staff, who wouldn't back his plan to stay in office. By ungrateful Republicans who became RINOs. By ungrateful Jews, who ignore how much he did for Israel. By ungrateful Christians, some of whom fail to vote. By ungrateful Blacks, whom he helped as much as did any former president, including Lincoln. 

Trump's multiple grievances and complaints give his supporters permission to minimize to minimize or endorse Trump's past and present behavior. He was provoked. He was picked on. What about Hunter Biden's laptop? He is just lashing back, defending himself.

And now, here at the convention, there was a technical problem and he was kept waiting for 35 minutes. Trump complained that it was disrespectful of them. How dare they?

This image of Trump in the chair, defiant, while being picked on, is exactly what Trump wants. Trump is a salesman. Even the most clueless of salesmen know that insulting Black journalists is not the way to win votes with a Black constituency. Instead, you find common ground. Trump is doing the opposite. This wasn't an accident. Trump didn't crash and burn. He was making a statement.

This was a highly racialized encounter. Trump kept race front and center in his comments. It wasn't "presidential candidate" and "journalist." It was "White presidential candidate" versus "Black female journalist." How dare they disrespect him? 

In the days after the assassination attempt, Americans wondered if Trump would push "reset." He could be a unifier. It might improve his popularity. No.  

Donald Trump isn't a unifier, and it wouldn't improve his popularity. There are more Whites than Blacks in America. There are a great many people who feel aggrieved by Blacks pushing into formerly all-White, all-male spaces of votes, jobs, and elected offices. These are his base voters: White males. A great many of them don't vote, but might, if they felt motivated. They don't want Trump to make nice with Black journalists, with their set of demands to crowd into new spaces. It is a zero-sum world. If a Black man or woman gets the job or promotion or public office then a White guy didn't get it. 

Democrats put a stake in the ground with their policies. They are the diversity-is-OK party. They are the party of professional women. They confirmed their policy preference with a Black female presidential candidate.

Trump isn't about getting along. Trump's America recognizes competition. If somebody wins, then somebody loses. Immigrants don't make new jobs, they take jobs; your jobs, Trump said. The culture is talking about diversity and sharing power. Many White Americans feel nobody is sticking up for the interests of White people amid all that sharing. Trump is, and he isn't being friendly about it. He understands who his friends are, and he is demonstrating that he will take on their racial rivals. There are sides in this competition and he is fighting for his team.

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your emai go to: https://petersage.substack.com. Subscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.] 

The knockout punch ad

 Ka-Pow!

Sometimes a single event changes a political campaign.

Reagan quipped in a debate that he wouldn't hold Walter Mondale's youth and inexperience against him. Somehow, it made the Reagan age-issue disappear.

Lloyd Bentsen dripped condescension in a vice presidential debate when he told Dan Quayle, who was comparing himself to JFK, that "you're no Jack Kennedy." Quayle deflated.

"Daisy," the 1964 nuclear countdown ad

Sometimes an ad does it. The nuclear countdown ad by LBJ's campaign encapsulated the Cold War fear that Goldwater was reckless and extreme enough to blow up the planet. The swarm of "swift boat" ads turned John Kerry from a hero into a fraud. 

Some of my readers have imagined a knockout punch meme or ad. A knockout punch either establishes a strong brand quality for the favored candidate or undermines the brand of the disfavored candidate by turning the candidate's strength into a negative. Kamala Harris is presenting herself as a strong crime-fighting San Francisco district attorney, then California AG, then tough-questioning U.S. senator. She is showing that she wasn't just plucked out of obscurity to decorate Joe Biden's campaign. 

A Trump-supporting reader of this blog, a retired Grants Pass attorney Lynn Myrick, posted a comment with a premise I expect to see again. Medford provocateur Curt Ankerberg made similar comments. Myrick alluded to Kamala Harris having dated a powerful California political leader, Willy Brown. He helped her win the San Francisco county D.A. position. Myrick posted a comment for publication that posits Harris sleeping her way into power as a young female attorney in sexual congress with her patron. After all, she worked "under Willy Brown." Snide. Some will chuckle; some will think it is disgusting misogyny.

This fits the "swift boat" approach. Reverse her brand. Don't think of Harris as a high-achieving crime-fighter. Think of her as a slut. 

College classmate Steven Law sent me an imagined 60-second ad. It repositions Harris from the second-banana position of a vice president. Law said, "The image I want to create is Harris as a fighter, but without mentioning her opponent." He writes that attacks on Trump no longer influence voters. Trump "loves being attacked. He gets his power from it."

Steven Law

Steve Law is a retired financial analyst and counselor for domestic abuse survivors, who gave up a career as a search engine marketing analyst to serve on nonprofit boards and to rehab housing units. He lives with his Peruvian wife Nancy in Windsor, CT and Lima, Peru. His proposed ad:

Face shot of Harris: "When I’m president, it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy."

Voice-over (Harris): "When I see a prisoner dying in police detention, I’ll summon the police chief to my office."
Visual: Animation of a uniformed police chief, hanging head, entering the Oval Office.

Voice-over (Harris): "When a Supreme Court justice violates ethical norms, I’ll call them to my office and give them a piece of my mind."
Visual: Animation of a police chief crawling out of the Oval Office as a judge in robes enters.

Voice-over (Harris): "When I see a hospital CEO close the only hospital within fifty miles, I’ll call them to my office."
Visual: Animation of the judge sneaking out of the Oval Office as an executive in a dark suit enters.

Voice-over (Harris): "All those representatives who voted against immigration control? I’ll call them to my office."
Visual: Animation of the executive, suit rumpled, staggering out of the Oval Office as a gaggle of Congress members enter.

Voice-over (Harris): "When I see oil company CEOs who don’t plow their profits into renewables and manufacturers who profit from the epidemic of gun suicides, I’ll call them all into my office."
Visual: Animation of the gaggle, hair mussed up, creeping out of the Oval Office as a crowd of CEOs enter.

Ending face shot of Harris, with crowd in background: "We’re mad as hell, and we won’t take it any more."

I realize that this ad is not going to be produced and run by the Harris campaign. But in this period of political trench warfare I consider it "comic relief" to sit back and imagine the kind of message that might really make your point and change the campaign.

I welcome readers to send me their own suggested ads. If they are interesting or funny or might in fact be a knockout punch, I may publish them here.

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your emai go to: https://petersage.substack.com. Subscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.]

Electric vehicle road trip

Can you get there in an electric vehicle?

Yes. 

Even on a road trip in the lightly-populated eastern two-thirds of Oregon.

Tam Moore tells the story of a road trip in "Oregon Trail" country. Settlers in the 1850s traveled across the high desert Mountain West, including land in what became the state of Oregon, and kept moving. They wanted to get through that land all the way to the fertile and well-watered valleys west of the Cascades. That population distribution hasn't changed. There is about one congressional district's amount of people in the eastern two-thirds of Oregon, but only if the district boundary reaches west at the southern boundary to grab the population spikes in Western Oregon's Rogue Valley, my home. Eastern Oregon has agriculture and conifer forests and lots of sagebrush, but not a lot of people. 

It doesn't have a lot of charging stations, either, but it has enough.

Population density map of Oregon. 

Tam Moore made the road trip in an electric vehicle. He never ran out of charge. It helps to do a little planning. Moore has been a journalist for seven decades, starting with the campus newspaper at Oregon State University, then as a journalist for KOBI television, and then as a print journalist at the Capital Press.

Moore

Guest Post by Tam Moore

You can teach an old dog new tricks.

The mantra of our times includes “electrify” again and again. A transition to electricity, thought to have less impact on Earth’s atmosphere than that caused by burning fossil fuels, is a good thing of course. It’s also a political mantra you see occasionally in this blog. Peter wrote that the 2024 election would be decided on wedge issues, and among them he listed the transition to electric vehicles. Not everyone is on board with EVs. Trump encourages rally crowds to jeer at the mention of electric-powered cars and boats. 

I got my first hybrid car, a Prius, in 2005. I figured to depreciate it as a work car over two years, then make it the family’s retirement vehicle. My wife, Barbara, got a little all-electric Chevy Spark in 2014. It had a range of about 80 miles before needing a recharge. The Prius, with its combination of gasoline and battery energy, was good for over 400 miles, sometimes up to 550 miles, before it needed a drink or a charge.

This spring Barbara switched to a low-mileage Chevy Bolt EV, an all-electric vehicle, which, at full charge, boasts a 300-mile range. We are mid-way through Bolt-testing the discipline of long-distance electric vehicle travel in Eastern Oregon — where charging stations are fewer and far from standardized. It is certainly a different mind-set from planning a trip with the plug-in hybrid Prius. And there’s even more thought needed Eastside. It is a more challenging place for EV-tripping than is the I-5 Interstate, where charging stations have proliferated in the past decade.

Before setting out, I consulted my longtime friend Courtland Smith, who has EV-traveled from his home in Corvallis, Oregon to New Mexico and back.

Then we did our own EV round trip of nearly 500 miles on I-5, with charges at a Walmart 180 miles from home and at a Dairy Queen one-third of the way into the return trip. The DQ charge was a hint that extra time needs to be part of trip planning. The Bolt did just fine taking on juice while we ate our dinner. But the guys who pulled in next to us at the charging station with a brand-new Nissan EV had nothing but trouble. As we ate, I kept seeing their car moving around to different chargers. “It kept cutting out,” explained the Nissan guy, as we unplugged and headed home with a battery 85%-charged.

Photo of the charger and accidental photo of the author

Learning new tricks for distance-EV travel includes savvy use of a smart phone along with learning the correct charging station configurations. Chevrolet gives us a smartphone app that designs a route, locating compatible charging stations within range. It even computes in the background the terrain elevations — a factor in the energy needed to get from point A to point B — before suggesting where to recharge and how long you need to stop at the charging stations.

Also added to the phone are a half-dozen apps for electric charging station networks you might come across en-route. At one stop, an Electrify America station at the Bend, Oregon,Walmart, I started and stopped the charging process with taps on the app. At another, in Burns, with ChargePoint, I learned to use my phone itself to tap the charging station.

Without that phone, I’d be out of juice when the battery fully discharged.

The Chevy app also takes the finalized route and, through a cable, transfers it to the car navigation system. By the time we get home, we’ll have a whole bunch of new tricks. And I might be able to tell you how paying for electricity at public stations compares with buying gasoline for the Prius. My guess is it’s going to be close because we ran up a $27 charging bill in Burns, to say nothing of the misery of hanging around in 97-degree heat while our Bolt took on that expensive juice.

Learning new tricks is fascinating, but you can bet a lot of drivers in this auto-centric country aren’t going to tackle EVs if they can’t figure out the technology.

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your emai go to: https://petersage.substack.com. Subscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.] 

If you can believe your eyes and ears

     "Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport. Yet the frogs do not die in sport but in earnest."
          Bion of Borysthenes 325-250 BCE

Elon Musk tweeted, "This is amazing."

The X algorithm made it pop up on 150 million accounts, including mine. I was curious. I clicked.

I saw Kamala Harris' face. I heard her voice. There was her campaign logo. It was a two-minute video ad. It was fake.

Click here to see the video on YouTube.

It is easy now to make realistic misrepresentations of others. Google "voice clone apps" and see for yourself how easy it is to clone your own voice or someone else's. You can read a minute of text into your phone, or paste in a minute of someone else's recorded voice, and the program can duplicate that voice saying, with perfectly natural-sounding intonation, whatever text you insert for it to say.

I tried it. It is uncanny how realistic it is.

The video starts with "I, Kamala Harris, your Democrat candidate for president, because Joe Biden finally exposed his senility for president at the debate. Thanks, Joe. I was selected because I am the ultimate diversity hire. . . ."

Its production values are excellent. Its artificiality is revealed by content. The fourth word, "Democrat," is the word Republicans use instead of the correct "Democratic." 

The original creator of the video labeled it parody. Elon Musk did not. The 150 million people who saw the video saw Musk's version. Musk has begun playing the role of political provocateur and troll. He throws chaos into the mix for sport, like boys throwing stones. The ability of candidates to control their own faces and voices dies in earnest. Viewers will have heard both Kamala Harris' voice "for real" praising Biden, but also her manufactured voice criticizing him. This puts counterfeit and real side-by-side. She is no longer the sole and authentic "first person" spokesperson for herself. 

We are entering the final months of a campaign. We have dangerous tools of self-destruction available, and we have people with enormous power willing to handle these tools carelessly. The frogs die in earnest. That last bastion of "reality" has been removed. We cannot believe our own eyes and ears.

Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your emai go to: https://petersage.substack.com. Subscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.]

Easy Sunday: Trump said WHAT??

Trump told Christians to vote in 2024, but there won't be any need to vote after that.

This is not a joke. 

     "Christians, get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what? Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. I love you, Christians. I’m a Christian. I love you, you got to get out and vote.

     In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote."

Donald Trump at Turning Point USA Believers' Summit, July 26, 2024

.

I watched the video of this. 

I was looking for a smirk or a wink or some clear sign that Trump was just being outrageous for the sake of being funny. Or to get the media worked up. Or to make liberals react. Or maybe he was saying that he was only going to run this one time, in 2024, because whatever happened in 2028 was some other Republican's problem, not his, and Trump looks out for number one, not others, and we all know that. 

This is classic Trump, doing "strategic ambiguity." He is putting an idea on the table to consider so that it becomes acceptable, maybe. Maybe not. It is sort of a flirtation. What is clear is what his campaign did not do. They did not hasten to dismiss it with something like, "Oh, President Trump is just horsing around to make liberals get their shorts in a wad. What's wrong with you liberals?" His campaign ignored it. 

So, too, did the conservative media. A diligent search of Fox News and Newsmax websites show nothing whatever on this. It is like it never happened. They don't want to defend it; they don't want to oppose it. But now it is out there.

Trump is normalizing authoritarian delegitimization of elections. He is putting dangerous anti-democratic ideas into the political waters, daring Americans to say "no" to him. If he is elected, Americans will have tacitly said "yes." He will have told us his intentions and we voted for him anyway.

Trump isn't hiding who he is. Maybe he is dangerous. Maybe he is just a showman, being interesting. He is doing so by saying outrageous things.

That is a good foil for Kamala Harris, assuming that she says things that come across as reasonable. Reasonable versus crazy is a good matchup.

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your emai go to: https://petersage.substack.com. Subscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.]

Switcheroo. Now it is Don-OLD Trump

Trump is the cranky old man. 

Kamala Harris is the new, fresh face.

I am seeing a lot of videos of Kamala Harris smiling and laughing and enjoying this moment.

I had worried that she didn't seem serious enough. Commentators were making fun of her laugh. I have changed my mind. Stay happy and optimistic. Let Trump keep talking about carnage. Let Trump keep talking about the last election. Let Trump keep looking back to a former America. Let old men criticize her laugh.

Until Biden dropped out, I didn't fully comprehend that Trump is old, too. Trump is crazy old. There is a mental template that Trump fits into neatly -- the belligerent and vile old man. Trump is the old man shaking his fist at monsters. 

Kamala Harris seems younger than her age, 59.

Apparently Kamala Harris is "brat." Being brat, I have learned, is a good thing. A British pop singer named Charli XCX-- yes, that is her name -- tweeted that "kamala is brat." Young people have picked that up. Brat apparently means self-actualizing and willful, a little bit sassy. "Sassy," too, is a good thing. Charlie XCX said brat is “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter, a strappy white top with no bra." In the context of Kamala Harris, it means Kamala Harris has broken out from under the thumb of old men and is now free to be herself. 

Charlie XCX has a new album. This is its cover:

Apparently the album is a big hit, and lime green has become a popular new color among the young. The Harris campaign is incorporating lime green into its branding.

Harris used an expression -- falling from a coconut tree -- to make a point about humans not living in isolation. We are born into families and communities. We didn't just fall out of a coconut tree. Coconut tree emojis have gone viral. 

This is all new to me. It seems sort of trivial and un-relatable. Youth are a foreign country. But they are a big cohort of voters, if they feel they have someone to vote for. Maybe they do now.

I was not seeing either Biden or Trump with the eyes of younger adults. Events that happened 40 years ago are part of my life. They seem "normal" somehow. But events 40 years prior to my college years were the late 1920s, and that era seemed impossibly old-fashioned to me. Talking movies were just starting. Calvin Coolidge was president. Young people see Ronald Reagan the way I saw Calvin Coolidge.

Will this matter in the 2024 election? Biden was a turn-off for young voters. The Biden team thought student loan forgiveness would excite young people. No. Policy does not motivate and excite constituencies as much as being relatable does.

Harris has a sassy vibe. It projects feminine power and attitude. Harris is brat. 

Brat is good? I still don't get it. I am not supposed to get it. It is their language and by intention it is different from mine. Age matters in this election. The generations matter. It always has mattered. Democrats can finally see that clearly. That was the problem for Biden. Now it's Trump's problem.

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your emai go to: https://petersage.substack.com. Subscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.]