The weekly export puzzle:
Was Tim Walz the right pick for running mate?
Walz is a broadly agreeable guy - the picture of American normativity. Republicans are trying to swift-boat him, but in a nation not in a big proper war and with issues enough on the plate, and targeted only at a running mate, this should have nothing like the impact it did on the Kerry campaign in 2004. Compare that to Vance, who appears to have been successfully dragged down and is poised to, if he also loses the vice-presidential debate to Walz, be framed as a liability to the ticket. Of course, such a loss is far from given; while Vance doesn’t impress me, young, articulate Ivy League guys seem to set media coverage alight in a way that the slower spoken and more homely Walz might struggle to.
Regardless, all of this is likely playing out on the margins of the election. Margins still matter in an election this important, and not everybody is pleased with how Walz as a pick tweaks them. Democratic critics of the Walz pick typically take a line that can be broken down into the following parts.
Harris is an underdog in this election.
Therefore, she needs to embrace a higher variance strategy. (In plain English, if she was ahead, she’d just have to minimise her risks and wait for Election Day, like Luxon did successfully last year. Because she’s behind, she has to take risks in order to get ahead before Election Day; it’s worth risking losing ground, because she’s already unacceptably far behind.)
Therefore, she should deploy all available tools to shake up the election.
Therefore, she should have picked a higher variance running mate.
I agree that Harris is an underdog. For all the current surge in enthusiasm, these typically dissipate after some time, and she surely can’t sustain this for three months straight. Jacindamania only had to work for seven weeks in a much less intensive media environment, and Labour were already backsliding hard in the polls by the last couple weeks. If Jacinda had come in three months before the election, she would probably have lost to National. Harris is the vice-president in an unpopular administration and I’m not convinced yet that the economic outlook is reaching rosy yet; it’s hard to shrug off the memories of inflation when those goods are now pricier for good every week you go buy them. Question marks remain around how a black and Asian woman will fare when the data we have is almost entirely on white guys.
I also agree that it follows that she needs to take some risks. Biden’s people had bought into a very obviously wrong and yet widespread fallacy: as the election got closer, people would take a look at Trump and remember they don’t like him. America has been looking at Trump for nine years straight, with only a pause around that 2021-2023 period where he mostly slipped under the radar. A fraction of swing voters still haven’t really made up their minds about him, but almost everybody has an opinion about Trump by now. The campaign is just about what percentages of the bases turn out, plus whether the swing voters who were fed up with him in 2020 will let their grievances with him overcome their dissatisfaction with the current government.
Harris can’t sleepwalk to defeat like Biden was. She must get across the messages on substantive issues like the infrastructure and border bills that Biden could not. Along with that, she has got to energetically represent a rejection of the divisions and dangers of Trumpism. After nine years of trying to raise the alarm, it’s been a relief to see the switching of tacks to calling Trump weird - there was no guarantee it would work, but they tried this out and, hey presto, they seem to be striking a nerve and finding a winning message. Between that and the classic American virtue of freedom, they can package up messages around issues like abortion and rainbow rights in relatable terms.
Trump has been helping all of this along. It’s entirely possible that he’s suffering some form of PTSD playing into his recent reluctance to appear publicly - it’s very fortunate for the Democrats how quickly the assassination attempt has been forgotten, but they shouldn’t miss the potential behind-the-scenes impact on his modus operandi. When he has shown up, he has been performing at the lower end of his range. You can’t be doing weird boomer shit where you stubbornly refuse to understand basic concepts like both the black and Indian heritage of Harris being celebrated. Thirty four million Americans identify as biracial, and in an election happening on the margins, reminding them that you’re old and not exactly invested in celebrating their successes is the perfect representation of why Trump is such a clumsy and poor candidate.
To circle back to the Walz argument, where this runs aground for me is the idea that you have to bend every possible tool towards introducing risk. As I've said before, almost nobody votes for the vice-president, because people broadly understand that a vice-president is unlikely to be important, plus most aren’t paying attention in the first place. (What people don’t understand is the unlikely but plausible chance that the vice-president becomes president and is thus very important.) A vice-president is there just to accentuate your appeal, as Walz has by stabilising her “normativity” flank as a glass ceiling shatterer.
However, if a vice-president can do very little to help you, they always have the chance to do a lot to hurt you. Sarah Palin is the gold standard for this: an inexperienced governor of a small state without a good understanding of the world could not be risked a heartbeat away from the presidency when McCain was an old candidate with health issues. Plus, she reminded the country of what they didn’t like about Republicans - folksy dumbasses like Bush sending them up the creek.
Just because you need to take some risks (like, for instance, replacing Biden with Harris!) doesn’t mean you can afford to take every risk, because some will put you so far behind that the other risks that work out for you can’t make up for them. This is why Sarah Palin was a bad pick: she provided an initial boost to McCain, but in a campaign that was already sufficiently high-variance given the unusual natures of Obama and McCain as candidates, her downside was too high. Put another way, you can’t always take low-upside, high-downside risks. Walz is, in many ways, another Tim Kaine, but in that election Hillary may well have been better served by Sherrod Brown as a fellow low-risk guy to mitigate the risks Trump was introducing. Now, all the Democrats need is normalcy on the home front as they take the fight to the Republicans.
Shapiro was the other finalist with Walz and, if Harris loses, is probably going to be most cited as the best alternative. All Shapiro really promised was a bit of a boost in one swing state, plus some of the same advantages that Walz does around Midwestern moderation. I’m inclined to think the electoral impact of nominating a Jewish supporter of Israel with past charged statements against Palestinians who has made more peacenik statements recently is marginal either way: picking him doesn’t signal a decisive turn on Gaza.
For all the heated rhetoric from both left and centre-left around the impact of the ongoing genocide of Palestinians by Israel, I suspect most critical leftists who were going to vote for somebody in a vacuum will probably show up and vote for Harris regardless. This is a topic all of its own that I’ll see if I wind up getting into, because I continue to maintain that as critical as the issue is and as decisively as one can feel about it, my convoluted rants are an extraordinarily poor fit for a breakdown on the complexities of Israel-Palestine that you could just find elsewhere.
The long and short of it is I think people are very given to saying that, because the stakes in Gaza are so high, so too is the impact of every decision Western voters make in relation to it, whereas there probably isn’t a silver bullet to change either way just because expectations are high. In a sense, the war is almost just being used as a cypher by many centre-leftists and leftists for electoral arguments that would play out over different issues regardless.
However, a growing number of stories around mishandled cases were popping up that could very easily have become the negative media headlines of this week, instead of weak swift-boating. Pair that with a narrative that Shapiro is ambitious and doesn’t get along with Harris on a personal level, and Shapiro could quickly have become a drag on the ticket, wasting valuable time on defending him instead of accentuating the ticket’s best qualities. And, critically, he’s just not experienced enough to, by being contrasted with Vance, hammer home the Palinesque qualities of that liability. I don’t see the benefits in a swing state outweighing that. (In fairness, Walz came up as a dark horse, and there's a risk that if he was better-known and tested that some skeletons would have come dancing out the closet that remain lurking.)
Therefore, I think Walz was a perfectly acceptable pick and certainly a better one than Shapiro, never mind Vance. I still would’ve preferred Kelly, mainly on the off chance that he has a viral moment defending Harris on immigration - one of the Democrats’ biggest liabilities, which could turn around if swing voters come to learn and accept that Republicans killed a Biden border bill for political purposes. The two in many ways overlap on “all-Americanness”, but, critically, the Midwestern route is indeed the right place to focus more for Democrats, with Southern states more nice-to-haves.
Yet I still think, in the rush to focus on this election, we have all forgotten something very important. In 2008, Obama picked Biden, already a pensioner, on the expectation that he would be too old and minor-league to be set up for a presidential run of his own by this. That left the unpopular and flawed Hillary Clinton to take up the banner in 2016, and then Biden defied expectations to win the nomination in 2020, with damaging results.
Now, Walz is being picked as an allegedly deferential 60 year old. He seems like just a good old bloke, but he’s also a politician. What’s to say he won’t run in 2028 or 2032? What if, by fixating on Harris 2024, the Democrats have set up another geriatric presidency? Yes, 68 is hardly 81, but it’s not ideal either - particularly if Republicans finally figure out what young people are. J. D. Vance, after all, is just 40.
The last time a Democratic vice-president was elected who didn’t receive a presidential nomination later in life was in 1948. Democrats need to take a long, hard look at the age range they consider acceptable for presidential, vice-presidential, and Supreme Court nominees. There is nothing to say that lightning won’t strike twice if you’re stupid enough to let it.
[This paragraph has no spoilers. The rest do, but only for the basic premise and direction of the show.]
For the week’s media watch, I’m recommending Carol and the End of the World. I watch television very slowly, often taking several days off at a time, so it took me an embarrassingly long time that I won’t disclose to finish the show’s total runtime of ten episodes. That suited Carol well. The show's pacing is languid despite the urgent subject matter; I’ve described this as “Waiting for Godot if it was good”. That definitely won’t be everybody’s cup of tea, so stay away unless you’re interested in slow, vague meditations on mortality and existentialism.
However, if you are, the show is an inspired take on how we choose to use our days. Though the concept of an impending apocalypse known to all is not original, the show holds itself back from succumbing to the temptation of quick endorphin hits. There isn’t some deeper mystery, conspiracy or lie at play; the collapse of traditional civilization is portrayed not as a Purgesque bloodbath but a largely civil coexistence of everybody searching for satisfaction; and our main characters are not mysteriously hypercapable survivors who know exactly what their goals are.
Instead, the apocalyptic framing device is used for a laser-targeted purpose: if you kick everybody out of their traditional roles - nobody’s working or studying, and a lot of people are shirking responsibilities to family - how do they choose to give the remaining days of their life meaning? It’s an answer which our protagonists thoroughly struggle to answer, and most of all Carol, the definition of wishy-washy, dull indecisiveness. She’s such a sympathetic avatar for the human experience, and watching her grow and what her stubborn determination ends up meaning to the people around her is a satisfying ride.
I love those supporting characters too, but that’d be getting too far into just laying out all the details of the show, so I’ll leave that for you to see. Instead, I’d highlight how willing the show is to go down different avenues in each of its episodes, without feeling it has to tie them all together at the end. Episode 4 was a particular highlight for me in that regard, and only Episode 9 really felt like it let down the show’s otherwise consistent standards. No, Carol and the End of the World doesn’t look phenomenal, have incredible acting, or boast a starring script. But it’s nice. It’s simple. In the end, for all the supposed nihilism of its world, it feels like it goes somewhere, and it takes you there with it. For a ten episode run on a pretty gutsily minimalist premise, I’m pleased with that.
The answer to the weekly export puzzle was Denmark!
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