Oct
2
2024

I'm Not a Hater, But…

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… it's looking real good that I will (eventually) be vindicated, according to Katherine Mangu-Ward: The Coming Vindication of the Double-Haters.

At the start of the summer, it looked like the 2024 presidential election might come down to the double-haters. Roughly 25 percent of voters told Pew pollsters they had unfavorable views of both Joe Biden and Donald Trump. (And this was before Trump's felony conviction and Biden's disastrous debate performance.)

Some of us are longtime double-haters in good standing. But it's worth putting those numbers in context. In 1988, only 5 percent of voters told pollsters they disapproved of both major party candidates. In 2000, that figure was 6 percent. Even the previous Trump-Biden matchup in 2020 pulled only 13 percent into the double-hater camp. For several months of this election cycle, Americans really were letting the hate flow through them in unprecedented ways.

But after Kamala Harris quickly and dramatically replaced Biden on the Democratic ticket, the double-haters seem to have disappeared into thin air. A bump for the Democrats was perhaps to be expected; Harris showed 48 percent favorability against 48 percent unfavorability in an August New York Times/Siena poll. But Trump also got a bump; his favorability number was the same as Harris', with 51 percent unfavorable.

KMW goes on to note that we've entered "the era of total policy nihilism" where the candidates "will literally say anything to get elected." And her bottom line seems designed to cheer me up:

But policy nihilism is only tenable for as long as the campaign lasts. Someone will win, and that person must govern—at which point the double-haters will almost certainly be proven right.

… except what we'll be "proven right" about is the awfulness of whoever wins.

Also of note:

  • Fortunately, shouting "What an idiot!" at a TV is still protected by the First Amendment. No, I didn't watch the veep debate last night, but if I had… well, let's go to the transcript, and examine Governor Walz's grasp of Constitutional jurisprudence:

    [Walz:] You can't yell fire in a crowded theater. That's the test. That's the Supreme court test.

    Uh, no it's not. Greg Lukianoff and Nadine Strossen wrote an entire article about this particular cliché, but here's the one-sentence summary:

    Anyone who says “you can’t shout fire! in a crowded theatre” is showing that they don’t know much about the principles of free speech, or free speech law — or history.

    In a saner country, Walz would hang his head in shame, resign from the ticket, go back to mismanaging Minnesota. Alas, we don't live in that country.

    And (also alas) we live in a country where a current SCOTUS justice can make the same claim.

  • Doesn't sound like something Calvin Coolidge would have done. Jeff Maurer claims We’re All Too Beat Down to Care That Trump Is Hawking $100,000 Watches and Crypto. And he might be right. He's talking about this:

    K. Trump watches. Roger that — can I go play XBox now? I mean, I know it’s fucked up that a presidential candidate has a merch store in which he sells bibles, sneakers, and other stuff, and I know that an ethical breach like that would sink any other campaign, but I also know that Trump’s fans will hold him to ethical standards the same day that Willie Nelson’s fans demand that he submit to rigorous drug testing. If you’re Jimmy Carter, you have to walk away from your peanut farm, if you’re Richard Nixon, you have to itemize a puppy on your FEC filing, but if you’re Trump, your campaign can be the loss leader for your trashy-rich QVC store, and we’ll all say “whatever” and freak out over a baby hippo.

    Awwww! Baby hippo!

  • It ain't Ms. Pac-Man, baby. The National Review editors weigh in on Kamala Harris’s Video-Game Economy.

    After being ridiculed for not having a policy platform, the Kamala Harris campaign released an 82-page document outlining the vice president’s ideas on the economy. No longer suffering from lack of detail, it still suffers from lack of good sense.

    The Harris view of economics is that the United States is a single-player video game, and the federal government is the player. Creating a thriving economy is simply a matter of pressing the right buttons in the right order.

    Harris has replaced her formerly far-left economic views with minutely technocratic ones. Democrats want to use their freshly expanded IRS to micromanage flows of money in the economy through an even more invasive and convoluted system of tax credits than already exists.

    Further fun fact:

    The platform villainizes “Wall Street investors” while also proudly touting that Goldman Sachs estimates higher economic growth from Harris’s plans than from Trump’s. It attacks “big corporations” while noting that nearly 100 business leaders have endorsed Harris for president.

    I have always been an "America will muddle through somehow" guy, But I am not optimistic that this will end well.