Harris is Gambling on the Basic Decency of Americans

In the classic Democratic tradition of second guessing, doom-saying, handwringing, and general angst, a number of commentators here and in Democratic circles have been expressing concern over MVP Harris’s shift in message from introducing herself and laying out her ideas to attacking Trump for being unstable, unfit, and generally unhuman. Perhaps the most disingenuous such expression is from Frank Luntz, Republican strategist and commentator, whose unsolicited advice to MVP is to cool it on Trump: Kamala Harris Still Not Connecting With Persuadable Voters: GOP Pollster.

According to the Republican pollster, Harris’ best stretch came when she was making the case for herself about why she should be elected. That progress, in his view, has stalled with her increased focus on attacking former President Trump in recent weeks.

I am not a political strategist, and I have said here many times that I am convinced that Harris and her team know what they are doing. And what I think they are doing is this: They are taking a great gamble that the American people still value decency, honor, civility, that they respect the law and believe in fairness and opportunity for all.

Kamala Harris embodies those values. She has laid out  — Luntz and other snipers notwithstanding — her policies and how they will promote and defend those values. Even as she steps up her attacks on Trump, she harks back to her platform and her goals. In pointing out how Trump embodies none of the American virtues, she is highlighting her own.

But it’s more than that. Yes, Trump is a known quantity, and yes, we all know who and what he is. Or do we? For one thing, many of us have short memories and already have blanked out just how bad Trump’s term was (even before covid). The voting public needs to have its memories stirred.

For another, Trump has gotten much much worse and is getting more so every day, as he openly descends into madness (the Ivan the Terrible version, not the King Lear one).

Trump Escalates Threats as Campaign Enters Dark Final Stretch (NYT)

A campaign marked by Donald J. Trump’s apocalyptic extremes has turned even darker in its final days.

With voting already underway in battleground states, the former president on Friday escalated his threats to prosecute and imprison a wide range of people involved in elections and politics. Hours later, on the hugely popular “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, he said that the “enemy within,” a phrase he has used to describe political opponents, poses a bigger threat to the nation than North Korea. . . .

Republicans say such concerns are overblown. . . . [But] Mr. Trump has insisted he means what he says, even when some of his allies try to downplay his remarks.

Which is why

Vice President Kamala Harris has intensified her own alarms about Mr. Trump, switching the joyful tenor of the early days of her campaign to stark warnings that he would govern as an authoritarian and curtail what she casts as core American freedoms — like a woman’s right to terminate a life-threatening pregnancy. There are also hints that Mr. Trump’s dark promises are affecting the political choices of business leaders and media outlets owned by them.

(That last sentence is a non-too-subtle swipe at WaPo and Bezos, whose quashing of the Post’s endorsement of Harris is, shall we say, not going well.)

Trump’s campaign staff are trying to hide this from the public. Republicans are denying his words, downplaying his words, saying he doesn’t mean it, claiming they haven’t heard it, anything to keep from admitting just how devastatingly bad a second Trump term would be for the country. (It’s more likely to be a Vance term, which would be worse, but they can’t say that either.) If Trump’s people are so afraid of letting him be seen for who he really is, it is a smart tactical move on Harris’s part to keep exposing what they are trying to hide. She is forcing the American public to open their eyes and see just exactly what manner of savage beast the Republicans are hoping to foist on the country.

But it’s more than that, and here is where the gamble part comes in. There is a nasty dark strain (and stain) in the American psyche that actually likes what Trump is really saying and really plans to do. From neo-Nazis to White Supremacists to Christian Nationalists to incels and patriarchal types to those who for one reason or another feel left behind and put upon and who turn to Trump because he promises to be their savior and their retribution. Harris is gambling that most of America is not like that. She is risking everything (including our planet) on the belief that most Americans are good people who, when reminded what Trump was and when shown Trump will be, will be so appalled and so disgusted with the very notion of him getting power again that they will crawl over broken glass in a hurricane to vote against him and for her.

Now, Harris is fighting Russian (and Chinese and Iranian) disinformation, she is fighting billionaires with unlimited funds, she is fighting a crooked Supreme Court and a rabid fundamentalist revival that has made a devil’s pact with an extreme Catholic movement, along with media bias, official election deniers, and voter suppression. That’s a lot of enemies, all of them ruthless and many of them desperate, a bad combination. Nonetheless, if Harris does lose, it will be because the American people she believes in no longer exist, not in sufficient numbers to sustain our democracy. But if that is the case, then the battle was lost before she ever came on the scene.

Let us hope she is right, and she wins.

Having read this over a couple of times before publishing, I feel I have to end on a positive note: Based on what we are seeing from mail voting, from early voting, from anecdotal evidence, it appears her gamble is paying off. So mote it be!