A long list of people who worked in the campaigns or government offices of George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Mitt Romney and John McCain issued a statement endorsing Kamala Harris yesterday. The full list appeared in USA Today. Many, but not all, of the group opposed Trump’s re-election in 2020. No comparable group of Obama-Biden alumni has endorsed Trump.
Michael Hiltzik is the Pulitzer-Prize winning business columnist for The Los Angeles Times. He explains here that Kamala Harris’s economic plans to help families make sense.
He writes:
Up to now, Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign has been careful about rolling out its policy initiatives, and — at least in political terms — for good reason.
Policy details at this stage of a campaign do little but give opponents and pundits grist for nitpicking. Most voters aren’t very interested in the details of what a given legislative venture will look like once it goes through the Capitol Hill meat grinder. Political journalists, for their part, seem to be chiefly interested in teasing out holes in the proposal.
For Harris’ campaign, this looks like a lose-lose proposition. After grousing incessantly that Harris hadn’t offered policy specifics since becoming the evident Democratic nominee on July 21, the press has moved on to questioning her intentions, sometimes by seizing on misrepresentations of her actual proposals.
That has been happening since Friday, when Harris issued her first policy “agenda.” This was largely devoted to lowering the cost of housing, food, medical services and child-raising for families, and generated a swell of quibbles in the press and the punditocracy. As it happens, however, Harris is right about the burden of those costs, and right about the best ways to address them.
At this point in an election cycle, presidential campaigns are all about themes and impressions. Harris plainly is setting out a theme of help for an American middle class that has rightly felt neglected by government for decades. Donald Trump’s theme is … what, beyond whining about how he’s treated?
Harris’ professed desire to lower food prices led to a spurt of news articles and columns asserting that she was proposing “price controls.”
It’s hard to know where that idea came from; it peaked even before Harris’ policy brief was issued Friday, when the hand-wringers discovered that she was contemplating nothing of the kind.
Some commentators, abetted by the right-wing peanut gallery, may simply have extrapolated from indications that she was targeting price gouging, but that’s on them, not her. (The Murdoch-owned New York Post strained so hard to tag her policies as “Kamunism” that one almost fears that it gave itself a hernia.)
The Harris campaign in its formal statement proposed “the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries.”
Some commentators pointed out that the average net profit margin for supermarkets is about 1%. They argued that this rules out any indication that Americans had been the victim of gouging by retailers.
Is that so?
It’s true that retail grocery profit margins are in the very low single digits. They always have been. But food retailing is a high-volume business, so margins below 2% can translate into annual profits of — to take just two examples — $1.3 billion (at Albertsons) and $2.2 billion (at Kroger).
That doesn’t mean that the grocers can’t gouge shoppers. After all, they did so during the pandemic.
How do we know this? From their own financial disclosures, which show that Albertsons and Kroger jacked up prices well beyond any increases in their costs.
The pretax profit margin at Albertsons rose from 0.96% in 2019 to 1.62% in 2020 and 2.92% in 2021; it fell back to 2.01% in 2023, once the pandemic appeared to move to the rearview mirror. At Kroger, the margin went from 1.62% in 2019 to 2.54% the following year. It dipped to 1.49% in 2021, but rose again to 1.96% in 2022 and 1.89% last year.
Nothing can explain the pandemic-era spike in profits better than these companies raising prices faster than their costs. In other words, gouging.
The Federal Trade Commission said so, without using the term. It found that food and beverage retailer revenues rose to 7% over total costs during the pandemic, well beyond “their recent peak of 5.6 percent in 2015.” That trend, the FTC reported, “casts doubt on assertions that rising prices at the grocery store are simply moving in lockstep with retailers’ own rising costs.”
Even beyond the food sector, as I reported earlier, corporate profiteering was unmistakably a significant contributor to inflation over the last few years. That was the conclusion of a team at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, who reported that markup growth “could account for more than half of 2021 inflation.” The annualized inflation rate reached 5.8% that year.
Notwithstanding the ginned-up controversy over Harris’ anti-gouging initiatives, it’s proper to note that price gouging and its country cousin, price-fixing, have traditionally been a bipartisan concern.
In 2020, Donald Trump issued an executive order to prevent gouging on health and medical resources, which makes his claim that Harris’ initiatives on prices are tantamount to “communism” seem more than a teensy bit hypocritical.
In the food sector, Republicans and Democrats in Congress last year took aim at price-fixing in the meat packing business. In 2022, StarKist pleaded guilty to price-fixing on tuna and paid a $100-million fine; Bumble Bee had also pleaded guilty and its former chief executive was sentenced to a prison term.
One linchpin of Harris’ attack on food prices is closer scrutiny of consolidation in the food industry. “Vice President Harris will … direct her Administration to crack down on unfair mergers and acquisitions that give big food corporations the power to jack up food and grocery prices,” the campaign stated.
If you’re an executive of Kroger and Albertsons, you can probably figure out that she’s talking about you. Those grocery giants are trying to push through a gargantuan $24.6-billion merger that, like all such mergers, will almost certainly produce higher prices at the checkout conveyor. The Harris campaign telegraphed that she will give the Federal Trade Commission more authority to chase bad actors in the food sector. The FTC already has sued to block the merger, and it’s a fair supposition that under a President Harris the agency won’t be backing off.
On housing, Harris is proposing $25,000 in down-payment assistance for first-time home buyers, with special attention for first-generation buyers. Her campaign didn’t specify how that assistance would be delivered, but did project that more than 4 million first-time buyers would be eligible over four years.
This proposal generated cavils in the chattering classes that it would drive home prices up to absorb the $25,000 grant, putatively keeping homes out of the reach of the beneficiaries.
A couple of points are germane here. One is that government-sponsored down-payment assistance programs are in place in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The difference in Harris’ proposal is that it would be federalized and somewhat more generous than many state programs.
Pundits who claim that the proposal would drive prices higher must not know much about how the housing market works. First, fewer than one-third of home buyers are first-time buyers.
Sellers who assume that all their bidders are sitting on $25,000 in government cash risk pricing their homes out of a market in which two-thirds are using their own resources.
Budget hawks at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which was founded with money from a hedge fund billionaire, fretted that the down-payment proposal would raise the federal deficit by $100 billion over 10 years, at least.
To put this in perspective, consider the biggest federal giveaway to homeowners, the mortgage interest deduction from federal income tax.
This deduction costs the Treasury about $30 billion a year; if the increase in the standard deduction enacted in the Republicans’ Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 expires as scheduled next year, the cost of the mortgage deduction will soar to $84 billion in 2026, according to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.
Unlike the down-payment assistance contemplated by Harris, the deduction on home mortgage interest and points is heavily skewed toward the wealthy.
More than 63% of its claimants in tax year 2018, the most recent for which the IRS provides statistics, had incomes higher than $100,000; the $123 billion of deductible interest and points they reported to the IRS was 73% of the total.
More to the point, the mortgage interest deduction is a lousy tool for spurring home ownership, which supposedly is the goal of such tax breaks. That’s because it is “targeted at the wealthy, who are almost always homeowners,” as Harvard economists Edward L. Glaeser and Jesse Shapiro observed in 2003.
For middle- and low-income Americans, on the other hand, the No. 1 obstacle to home ownership is the down payment. Helping those households buy a house is tantamount to the government putting its money where its mouth is.
During an impromptu encounter with the pressSunday, Harris rightly described her initiatives as investments, not spending. Consider her remarks about the child tax credit, on which she proposes to restore to the level of up to $3,600 per child enacted in the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan, and to raise to $6,000 for the first year of a child’s life.
“The return on investment in terms of what that will do and what it will pay for will be tremendous,” she said.
She’s right: In 2021, when the higher credit was enacted, the credit reduced the child poverty rate by about 30%, keeping as many as 3.7 million children out of poverty by the end of that year. When the enhancements expired in January 2022 and the credit fell to $2,000, the child poverty rate spiked to 17% from 12.1%, plunging those 3.7 million children back under the poverty line.
This is the program that Sen. JD Vance, the GOP candidate for vice president, claims to love. But when a raise in the program came up for a vote in the Senate earlier this month, Vance didn’t even bother to show up to vote.
Andy Borowitz is a humorist who wrote for The New Yorker for years. He now has his own blog. This is a recent entry:
MINNEAPOLIS (The Borowitz Report)—A study published by the University of Minnesota Medical School on Friday “strongly indicates” that people who are exposed to Sen. JD Vance lose all interest in activity that would lead to reproduction.
According to Dr. Davis Logsdon, who supervised the study, “Research subjects exposed to JD Vance became less likely to reproduce and more inclined to acquire a cat.”
Logsdon said the responses of study participants became “even more pronounced” when they were shown an image of Vance in drag.
In that situation, he said, the participants exhibited a range of behaviors from “recoiling in horror” to “attempting to flee.”
“Taken as a whole, this research suggests that JD Vance might not be the best messenger for his own pro-reproduction stance,” the researcher said. “He could, however, be an effective promoter of abstinence.”
When Project 2025, the definitive guide to Trump’s second term, began to generate negative reactions, Trump claimed he was taken by surprise. All of a sudden, he played dumb about Project 2025: He said he didn’t know who was behind it and had barely heard about it.
As Dan Rather and his team at “Steady” determined, he was lying again. Nothing new there, but he wanted to discourage the public from learning more about Project 2025.
Dan wrote:
Donald Trump and his campaign may have disavowed it, but don’t think for a moment that Project 2025 is going anywhere. A newly released hidden camera interview with one of the project’s authors, who also served in Trump’s Cabinet, reveals that the Republican nominee has “blessed it.”
First, a little background.
Project 2025, the MAGA blueprint to completely overhaul the federal government, is being spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, the daddy of conservative think tanks, with input from more than 100 other right-wing organizations. “The Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise,” the official title, consists of four pillars:
On July 24, Russell Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, Project 2025 author and Republican National Convention policy director, met with two people he thought were potential donors to his conservative group, Center for Renewing America. They were actually working for a British nonprofit trying to expose information about Project 2025. The two secretly recorded the two-hour conversation.
In the video posted on CNN, Vought described the project as the “tip of the America First spear.” He said that after meeting with Trump in recent months, the former president “is very supportive of what we do.” The project would create “shadow agencies” that wouldn’t be subject to the same scrutiny as actual agencies of the federal government. Vought also told members of the British nonprofit that he was in charge of writing the second phase of Project 2025, consisting of the hundreds of executive orders ready to go on day one of a new administration.
When asked how the information would be disseminated, his deputy said it would be distributed old-school, on paper. “You don’t actually, like, send them to their work emails,” he said, to avoid discovery under the Freedom of Information Act.
Last week, ProPublica, an investigative journalism nonprofit, obtained more than 14 hours of training videos, which are part of Project 2025’s effort to recruit and train tens of thousands of right-wing appointees to replace a wide and deep swath of current federal civil servants.
“We need to flood the zone with conservatives,” said Paul Dans, who was in charge of Project 2025 until he was fired because it’s become such a headache for Trump. “This is a clarion call to come to Washington,” Dans said in 2023.
Project 2025 is not a new plan; it has been in the works for decades. The first version was published just after Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. In 2015 the Heritage Foundation gave the incoming Trump administration the seventh iteration. Should you think that Trump and his cronies know nothing about any of this, the Heritage Foundation boasted that Trump instituted 64% of the policy recommendations in that document, including leaving the Paris Climate Accords.
Trump has tried and largely failed to distance himself from Project 2025. Perhaps because two high-ranking members of his administration were directors of the project. On Truth Social, Trump posted, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it….” As for those training videos, most of the speakers in them are former Trump administration officials.
Many of Project 2025’s recommendations are deeply unpopular with Americans. A survey conducted by YouGov found that almost 60% of respondents opposed several big tenets, including: eliminating the Department of Education, giving tax cuts to corporations, ending the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and changing the law to allow the president to fire civil servants.
It is difficult to convince voters that the project’s policy recommendations are real because they are so radical. Anat Shenker-Osorio, a political strategist, spoke about the challenges of discussing Project 2025 with focus groups on the podcast “The Wilderness.”
“When we actually cut and paste verbatim from the Heritage document, people are like, that’s a bunch of bull****. Like, why did you make that up? And what is wrong with you? And why are you lying to us?” she said.
To that end, here are just a few of the most democracy-threatening suggestions, verbatim:
On child labor: “With parental consent and proper training, certain young adults should be allowed to learn and work in more dangerous occupations.”
On education: “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the Federal Department of Education should be eliminated.“
On climate change: “Climate-change research should be disbanded … The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be broken up and downsized.”
On LGBTQ+ rights: “The next secretary should also reverse the Biden Administration’s focus on ‘LGBTQ+ equity,’ subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage, replacing such policies with those encouraging marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families.”
On families: “Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society … The male-female dyad is essential to human nature and … every child has a right to a mother and father.”
Not to mention several highly publicized recommendations on abortion and women’s rights that are an effort to return to America of the 1950s.
The architects of and adherents to Project 2025 want a white, heterosexual Christian nation. The ideals of our 250-year-old form of government, in which majority rules, are anathema to them. They want to inflict their beliefs on everyone, representative democracy be damned.
I cannot state it strongly enough: Project 2025, with Donald Trump at the helm, is the greatest existential threat to American democracy in recent history. And make no mistake, should Trump win in November, he will usher in many if not most of the project’s recommendations.
Perhaps Project 2025 should be referred to as Project 1925. In Trump’s mind, that was the time that America was “great,” and they want to go back to that era of low taxes, no abortions, white Christian male domination, no civil rights laws, low taxes, and a very limited federal government.
No thanks. We are not going back!
Jill Lawrence is a veteran journalist who writes now for The Bulwark, a Never-Trumper site. She writes here about the ridiculous epithets hurled at Kamala Harris’s plan to punish price-gouging. After trying out various insulting names, he has settled on “Communist Kamala.” This is ridiculous, of course, but it stirs fear. Apparently anyone who believes that the federal government has a role to play in supporting the general welfare is a Commie. In Trump’ssworld, the purpose of the Feds is to cut taxes on the rich.
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS wants to punish companies for price gouging—but only food suppliers and grocery stores, and only if federal or state authorities investigate and determine that they have violated what her campaign calls “clear rules of the road.”
Reaction across the spectrum has run a mild to overheated gamut of negativity, with the proposal being called everything from counterproductive and “not sensible” to “Venezuelan-style” Nixonomics and “a heavy-handed socialist policy” that will fuel former President Donald Trump’s attacks on her as “Comrade Kamala” going “full Communist” by imposing “socialist price controls” that would cause rationing and hunger.
Give me a break, man, as President Joe Biden might say. Communist? Socialist? Nixonesque? Not even close.
“In our country both wholesale and retail prices are established by the government,” Soviet Finance Minister Vasily Garbuzov said in 1960. All of them. By fiat. And quite similar to what President Richard Nixon did eleven years later. “I am today ordering a freeze on all prices and wages throughout the United States,” he said on August 15, 1971.
None of this is remotely akin to the modest scope and due process of what Harris has in mind, per her campaign: writing national rules “to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive profits on food and groceries,” and authorizing the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general to investigate and penalize companies that break those rules.
Many states—those vaunted laboratories of democracy—already have laws that ban price-gouging. At its core, it’s simply consumer protection. And while we don’t yet know the details of the Harris plan, let alone how it would evolve when enacted or what impact it would have, as a political calculation it’s never a mistake to empathize with consumers during inflationary times.
Nixon lifted his price and wage controls right after he was re-elected in 1972. Harris announced her plan last week—less than a month after her sudden rise to the top spot on the Democratic ticket in a contest against Trump, who is manifestly unfit to serve and a proven danger to democracy.
Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi helped engineer that candidate switchout, Harris slotted in for a flagging 81-year-old Biden, and it’s the Pelosi campaign mantra that comes to mind these days: Just win, baby. Plus, what’s wrong with politicians signaling in a visceral way that they feel people’s pain at the grocery store? Nothing.
Bill Clinton, the epitome of a feel-your-pain president, signaled both political moderation and emotional connection in two State of the Union speeches—1996 when he was running for re-election and 1997 after he had won a second term—by backing uniform requirements in public schools that wanted them. He argued they could help “break the hold of gangs and violence” and promote “discipline and order and learning” in classrooms.
By scale and historic import, Clinton’s school uniforms push didn’t rank among his administration’s most noteworthy achievements, yet it allowed him to relate to people on a personal, daily-life level, and that’s what Harris needs…
Joe Biden has not gotten the credit he deserves for his economic record. The U.S. economy on his watch has made a stellar recovery from the pandemic. Wages are up, unemployment is way down, the stock market is up, retail sales are up, inflation is down, and as of last week, small business applications were at a record high of 19 million since Biden and Harris took office.Join
Maybe the public hasn’t given Biden credit for all this because inflation has only just shown signs of subsiding. Or maybe it’s because of his age and general unhappiness about a Biden–Trump rematch. But part of it may be, as I have written, that Biden has been playing the long game—setting us up to fight climate change, compete with China, and bring manufacturing home to protect America against future global supply-chain disruptions.
And the investments have been targeted well: renewable energy, high-speed broadband, electric-vehicle battery plants and charging networks, a wave of future-forward manufacturing that studies show has gone largely to red and purple states and congressional districts. Biden will leave the whole country, not just the parts he likes or wins, more self-sufficient and better equipped to take care of the planet.
The concrete results in some cases won’t be apparent for years after Biden leaves office, but progress is happening now—high-speed internet proposals submitted and approved, new jobscoming online, semiconductor manufacturing projects advancing with federal and private-sector financing, and America on its way to producing 30 percent of the world’s semiconductor chips by 2032—up from zero.
Key parts of Biden’s Build Back Better plan largely fell by the wayside in 2022—most notably a care component that included free preschool, paid family and medical leave, child care subsidies, higher pay for home health care workers, an expanded child tax credit, and remedies for what even then was a crisis-level housing shortage. But Biden has not lost sight of any of this, and in fact he revived the family-relief provisions this past spring before exiting the 2024 race.
Harris, whose interest in such policies is longstanding, is now adapting and expanding on the care agenda in ways that mesh with today’s populist economics. She’s doing the same on housing and inflation, informed by her background as a prosecutor and attorney general who protected consumers and their interests, from privacy to home foreclosures.
This is the moment we’re in and Harris is seizing it. That’s the right thing to do in 2024, just as the right thing to do in 2020 was to defend democracy and fight for the soul of the nation. That’s how Biden defeated Trump four years ago and he’s been clear about his objective this year… “Win.”
Peter Greene wades into the debate about what teachers should call students who ask to be addressed by a different name.
He writes:
Names have power, so it makes sense that young humans, who are generally in search of both identity and some amount of power over their own lives, will often try to exert some control over their own names.
As a teacher, it’s not a fight worth picking. I taught so many students–soooooo many– who wanted to be called by another name. Sometimes it was perfectly understandable– a common nickname for their full name, or going by a middle name. Sometimes it was a leap– “Albert” would prefer to go by “Butch.” I had some unusual cases, like the girl who had the same name as three other students in class, so told me she’d rather go by Andrea (pronounced Ahn-dray-uh). And a few times, I had a trans student who wanted to use a different name.
Did I agree with all of them? No more than I agreed with some of my students’ questionable fashion choices. But it cost me nothing to honor these preferences, to give students that small measure of control over their own identities. It was a small thing for me, but a thing that helped make my classroom a safe, welcoming space where we could get on with the work of learning to be better at reading, writing, speaking and listening.
So I don’t get teachers like Vivian Geraghty, the middle school language arts teacher who found herself with two transgender students and a) refused to call them by their chosen names and b) asked to have them removed from their classrooms.
Geraghty is going to matter because she was told to resign, maybe, and then sued the district. Based on a U.S. District judge decision, this matter is going to trial (at least partly because there seems to be dispute about what actually happened). According to court documents, the students made their request on Day One and Geraghty knew these requests were “part of the student’s social transition” but disagreed because of her religious beliefs and “wanted those students out of her classroom.”
Geraghty cites her religious convictions as the reason she would not honor the student request, and though this is a fashionable hill for christianists to die on these days, I don’t really get it. Why is transgenderism such a heinous crime against religion and conscience that they cannot even acknowledge such people exist is beyond me.
Part of the dispute is over whether Geraghty jumped or was pushed. Her defense is from theAlliance Defending Freedom, the conservative culture panic law group that has made several trips before SCOTUS, including Dobbs. They say Geraghty could not put aside her beliefs to “affirm untruths that harm children.”
And yet she was okay with treating two actual children like this.
I do not and probably never will grasp the current argument that one cannot practice one’s faith unless one is fully free to discriminate against people of whom you disapprove, and yet that argument surfaces again and again.
But I do believe this– it is not a teacher’s job (nor, really, that of any adult) to tell a student who he or she is. We can nudge, offer encouragement and support, and create a safe place for them to try to figure it out. But the most basic part of treating a human being like a human being is to call them by the name they have for themselves. If you can’t do that and if you insist that you must have the God-given right to make your disapproval of their identities clear to them in every interaction, then you do not belong in front of a classroom.
John Thompson, historian and teacher, writes about the controversies swirling in Oklahoma, mostly around the MAGA State Superintendent of Schools Ryan Walters, who has mandated Bible lessons in every grade, among other things.
Thompson writes:
The Oklahoma press has been reporting on a seemingly endless number of battles between traditional Republican, conservative legislators, and rightwing extremists exemplified by State Superintendent Ryan Walters and Gov. Kevin Stitt. But this week this political civil war exploded. It culminated in Walters demanding that the Republican Speaker of the House, who almost certainly plans to run for governor against Walters, start impeachment hearings against him!
As KFOR News noted, that raises the question as to why Walters would call for an impeachment hearing against himself. It then quoted the former Attorney General Mike Turpen, who has a half-century of political experience, “Ryan Walters appears to be embracing what I call victim-hood,” Turpen said. “Ryan, what you’re doing right now, saying ‘come get me,’ is political suicide.” Turpen then concluded, “I have no idea who’s advising him, but it breaks my heart for his family,” he said. “This is a Republican Party like a firing squad of circle, and they’re all aimed at one person, Ryan Walters.”
As Nondoc explains, this came at:
The end of a long week for Walters, which has included news about a legislative investigation into how his agency has and has not allocated appropriated funds, questions about his compliance with state transparency laws, and a new defamation lawsuit filed against him by Bixby’s superintendent (Rob Miller.)
This also was pivotal because Miller was the first superintendent to publicly call out Walters on his mismanagement of funds, even though the World spoke to “at least a dozen other superintendents [who] confirmed that Miller was accurate.” Walters then responded to Miller, a highly respected Gulf War veteran, by calling him a “clown” and a “liar,” and claiming that ‘the Department of Education was ‘dealing with all kinds of financial problems’ at Bixby schools.”
And Walters repeatedly continued to use his aggressive language, “I will not continue to stand here and listen to Speaker McCall and (Republican) Mark McBride lie about my office and lie about the work we are doing.”
As the Oklahoman reported:
On Monday, state Rep. Mark McBride sent a letter to McCall requesting a special investigation of Walters and the state Education Department. Initially, McCall told McBride “no” and said there would be no investigation until 51 Republican members of the House signed the letter.
By Thursday, however, “McBride had the support of 24 other Republican House members and the 20-member Democratic Caucus.” And as the Tulsa World reported, “McBride said he’s heard from other representatives who want to sign on or say they want Walters and the OSDE investigated but are afraid to go public.”
And, as the Oklahoman further explained, its stories this week looked “at Walters’ agency’s failure to turn over funds for life-saving asthma inhalers and why it took more than a year for “off the formula” school districts to be reimbursed for a state-mandated teacher pay raises.”
Moreover, “other lawmakers criticized Walters for his recent online name-calling about Bixby Public Schools Superintendent Rob Miller.” Vocal critics included “House Speaker Pro Tempore Kyle Hilbert (R-Bristow) [who] did not sign McBride’s letter, but on Tuesday he did call for an end to Walters’ “rhetoric toward educators.”
Hilbert also said, “The same is to be said about allowing legislators access to meetings in which they are clearly authorized by statute to observe.” (He thus came out in support of Attorney General Gentner Drummond’s legal challenge to Walters’ refusal to obey that law. By the way, Drummond will likely be another opponent to Walters in the governor’s race.)
Even Gov. Stitt backed off from Walters’ “name-calling,” saying that, “‘hey, let’s focus on the policies.’ It’s a hateful game sometimes in politics, as people are taking shots at you.” For what It’s worth, Stitt is now calling for “discussions across party lines.”
Then, Rep. Kevin Wallace (R-Wellston), the chair of “the House Appropriations and Budget Committee became the “spearhead” of the call for the investigation of Walters and the Education Department by the Legislative Office of Fiscal Transparency (LOFT). And then, McCall “softened his stance and approved an investigation by LOFT.” It “will focus on issues raised by both legislators and private citizens regarding alleged state Education Department funding disbursement issues.”
And by Friday, Senate Pro Tem Greg Treat said, “Numerous Senators and I have been raising questions about spending and money not being allocated to specific programs the legislature has authorized at the Department of Education.” The Senate’s leader further explained that he originally said, “investigations like the state Education Department/Walters investigation weren’t part of LOFT’s original mission or purpose, but he supported the review because the concerns were serious.” He now says, “the Senate will stand ready to respond to any of the (LOFT) findings.”
And that brings us back to the second series of internal conflicts between MAGA’s and “adult Republicans.” As the Oklahoma Voice had reported, months ago, Senator Treat had “warned Gov. Kevin Stitt against targeting Republican senators who are up for reelection.” Treat cited “strong rumors” that Stitt “is seeking to take out good members of the Republican caucus.” He said that Republicans had supported Stitt on school choice and outlawing abortion, but “some Republican senators have been at odds over tax cuts, gaming compacts and other issues.” Treat tactfully said, “I know he (Stitt) is fairly new to it, but all of us talk and so it is even a smaller group of people who fund these ventures.” And, “senators have heard from people who have been “hit up” by Stitt’s operation to go after some Republican senators.”
Who knows if the pushback against Walters and Stitt is a prelude to the inner conflict that the Washington Post reports is growing in the Trump campaign? It reports:
Some of the internet’s most influential far-right figures are turning against former president Donald Trump’s campaign, threatening a digital “war” against the Republican candidate’s aides and allies that could complicate the party’s calls for unity in the final weeks of the presidential race.
For instance, the rightwing extremist Nick Fuentes “said on X that Trump’s campaign was ‘blowing it’ by not positioning itself more to the right and was ‘headed for a catastrophic loss,’ in a post that by Wednesday had been viewed 2.6 million times.” And, “Candace Owens, a far-right influencer … described the conservative infighting in a podcast Tuesday as a ‘MAGA Civil War.’”
Whether we’re talking about Oklahoma’s or national MAGA-ism, they have grown, in large part, because it is easier to tear down a barn, than build one. Now, that truth may be wrecking Trumpism.
Heather Cox Richardson describes the Democratic National Convention and Kamala Harris offering a vision of community, of neighbors helping neighbors, of government removing barriers to opportunity and lifting up those who need help.. She notes that the party has gone beyond identity politics: Harris did not mention her race or gender even as her nomination was history-making because of her race and gender. Instead of the tired tropes of the past, she appealed to traditional American values.
The raucous roll call of states at the 2024 Democratic National Convention on Tuesday, as everybody danced to DJ Cassidy’s state-themed music, Lil Jon strode down the aisle to cheers for Georgia, and different delegations boasted about their states and good-naturedly teased other delegations, brought home the real-life meaning of E Pluribus Unum, “out of many, one.” From then until Thursday, as a sea of American flags waved and attendees joyfully chanted “USA, USA, USA,” the convention welcomed a new vision for the Democratic Party, deeply rooted in the best of traditional America.
Under the direction of President Joe Biden, over the past three and a half years the Democrats have returned to the economic ideology of the New Deal coalition of the 1930s. This week’s convention showed that it has now gone further, recentering the vision of government that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, called upon to make it serve the interests of communities.
When the Biden-Harris administration took office in 2021, the United States was facing a deadly pandemic and the economic crash it had caused. The country also had to deal with the aftermath of the attempt of former president Donald Trump to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and seize the presidency. It appeared that many people in the United States, as in many other countries around the world, had given up on democracy.
Biden set out to prove that democracy could work for ordinary people by ditching the neoliberalism that had been in place for forty years. That system, begun in the 1980s, called for the government to allow unfettered markets to organize the economy. Neoliberalism’s proponents promised it would create widespread prosperity, but instead, it transferred more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. As the middle class hollowed out, those slipping behind lined up behind an authoritarian figure who promised to restore their former centrality by attacking those he told them were their enemies.
When he took office, Biden vowed to prove that democracy worked. With laws like the American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, the Democrats directed investment toward ordinary Americans. The dramatic success of their economic program proved that it worked. On Wednesday, former president Bill Clinton noted that since 1989, the U.S. has created 51 million new jobs. Fifty million of those jobs were created under Democratic presidents, while only 1 million were added under Republicans—a striking statistic that perhaps will put neoliberalism, or at least the tired trope that Democrats are worse for the economy than Republicans, to bed.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s nomination convention suggested a more thorough reworking of the federal government, one that also recalls the 1930s but suggests a transformation that goes beyond markets and jobs.
Before Labor Secretary Perkins’s 1935 Social Security Act, the government served largely to manage the economic relationships between labor, capital, and resources. But Perkins recognized that the purpose of government was not to protect property; it was to protect the community. She recognized that children, women, and elderly and disabled Americans were as valuable to the community as young male workers and the wealthy men who employed them.
With a law that established a federal system of old-age benefits; unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services, Perkins began the process of molding the government to reflect that truth.
Perkins’s understanding of the United States as a community reflected both her time in a small town in Maine and in her experience as a social worker in inner-city Philadelphia and Chicago before the law provided any protections for the workers, including children, who made the new factories profitable. She understood that while lawmakers focused on male workers, the American economy was, and always has been, utterly dependent on the unrecognized contributions of women and marginalized people in the form of childcare, sharing food and housing, and the many forms of unpaid work that keep communities functioning.
This reworking of the American government to reflect community rather than economic
relationships changed the entire fabric of the country, and opponents have worked to destroy it ever since FDR began to put it in place.
Now, in their quest to win the 2024 election, Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota governor Tim Walz—the Democratic nominees for president and vice president—have reclaimed the idea of community, with its understanding that everyone matters and the government must serve everyone, as the center of American life.
Their vision rejects the division of the country into “us” and “them” that has been a staple of Republican politics since President Richard M. Nixon. It also rejects the politics of identity that has become identified with the argument that the United States has been irredeemably warped by racism and sexism. Instead, at the DNC, Democrats acknowledged the many ways in which the country has come up short of its principles in the past, and demanded that Americans do something to put in place a government that will address those inequities and make the American dream accessible to all.
Walz personifies this community vision. On Wednesday he laid it out from the very beginning of his acceptance speech, noting that he grew up in Butte, Nebraska, a town of 400 people, with 24 kids in his high school class. “[G]rowing up in a small town like that,” he said, “you’ll learn how to take care of each other that that family down the road, they may not think like you do, they may not pray like you do, they may not love like you do, but they’re your neighbors and you look out for them and they look out for you. Everybody belongs and everybody has a responsibility to contribute.” The football players Walz coached to a state championship joined him on stage.
Harris also called out this idea of community when she declined to mention that, if elected, she will be the first female president, and instead remembered growing up in “a beautiful working-class neighborhood of firefighters, nurses, and construction workers, all who tended their lawns with pride.” Her mother, Harris said, “leaned on a trusted circle to help raise us. Mrs. Shelton, who ran the daycare below us and became a second mother. Uncle Sherman. Aunt Mary. Uncle Freddy. And Auntie Chris. None of them, family by blood. And all of them, Family. By love…. Family who…instilled in us the values they personified. Community. Faith. And the importance of treating others as you would want to be treated. With kindness. Respect. And compassion.”
The speakers at the DNC called out the women who make communities function. Speaker after speaker at the DNC thanked their mother. Former first lady Michelle Obama explicitly described her mother, Marian Robinson, as someone who lived out the idea of hope for a better future, working for children and the community. Mrs. Obama described her mother as “glad to do the thankless, unglamorous work that for generations has strengthened the fabric of this nation.”
Mrs. Obama, Harris, and Walz have emphasized that while they come from different backgrounds, they come from what Mrs. Obama called “the same foundational values”: “the promise of this country,” “the obligation to lift others up,” a “responsibility to give more than we take.” Harris agreed, saying her mother “taught us to never complain about injustice. But…do something about it. She also taught us—Never do anything half-assed. That’s a direct quote.”
The Democrats worked to make it clear that their vision is not just the Democratic Party’s vision but an American one. They welcomed the union workers and veterans who have in the past gravitated toward Republicans, showing a powerful video contrasting Trump’s photo-ops, in which actors play union workers, with the actual plants being built thanks to money from the Biden-Harris administration. The many Democratic lawmakers who have served in the military stood on stage to back Arizona representative Ruben Gallego, a former Marine, who told the crowd that the veteran unemployment rate under Biden and Harris is the lowest in history.
The many Republicans who spoke at the convention reinforced that the Democratic vision speaks for the whole country. Former representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) identified this vision as “conservative.” “As a conservative and a veteran,” he said “I believe true strength lies in defending the vulnerable. It’s in protecting your family. It’s in standing up for our Constitution and our democracy. That…is the soul of being a conservative. It used to be the soul of being a Republican,” Kinzinger said. “But Donald Trump has suffocated the soul of the Republican Party.”
“[A] harm against any one of us is a harm against all of us,” Harris said. And she reminded people of her career as a prosecutor, in which “[e]very day in the courtroom, I stood proudly before a judge and said five words: ‘Kamala Harris, for the People.’ My entire career, I have only had one client. The People.”
“And so, on behalf of The People. On behalf of every American. Regardless of party. Race. Gender. Or the language your grandmother speaks. On behalf of my mother and everyone who has ever set out on their own unlikely journey. On behalf of Americans like the people I grew up with. People who work hard. Chase their dreams. And look out for one another. On behalf of everyone whose story could only be written in the greatest nation on Earth. I accept your nomination for President of the United States of America.”
The 100,000 biodegradable balloons that fell from the rafters when Vice President Harris accepted the Democratic nomination for president were blown up and tied by a team of 55 balloon artists from 18 states and Canada who volunteered to prepare the drop in honor of their colleague, Tommy DeLorenzo, who, along with his husband Scott, runs a balloon business. DeLorenzo is battling cancer. “We’re more colleagues than competitors,” Patty Sorell told Sydney Page of the Washington Post. “We all wanted to do something to help Tommy, to show him how much we love him.”
“Words cannot express the gratitude I feel for this community,” DeLorenzo said.
To anyone who wonders if there is a difference between the two parties, here’s a big one: gun control. A Trump-appointed federal judge in Kansas struck down a ban on machine guns. He was following the advice of Justice Thomas, who made the wacky argument that if something was okay when the Constitution was written, then it’s okay now. The Founding Fathers did not ban machine guns: why should we?
Up next in the arms of school shooters: fully automatic machine guns. Trump appointee U.S. District Judge John Broomes (Kansas) ruled that the ban on owning fully-automatic machine guns that’s been part of American law since the 1930s is unconstitutional. Citing Clarence Thomas’ argument that if something wasn’t illegal at the time the Constitution was written it shouldn’t be illegal now, Broomes has set up a new case that’ll almost certainly end up before the six rightwing cranks on the US Supreme Court.
During its exhilarating convention, the Democratic Party rebranded itself. It was impossible to miss the sea of American flags, which everyone periodically waved in unison, or the loud chants of “USA! USA!”
It was impossible to miss the frequent paeans to FREEDOM and the signs in the audience emblazoned with the word FREEDOM.
As the brilliant writer Anand Girihadaras wrote on his blog “The Ink,” Democrats reclaimed five words that had been captured by the Republicans:
Freedom. Patriotism. Family. Masculinity. Normalcy.
Governor Tim Walz was a key figure in exemplifying these words. A guy animated by love of family. A coach. A hunter (who favors common-sense gun control). A member of the National Guard for 24 years. A guy.
Kamala Harris, Walz, and others focused on Freedom: the freedom to make your own healthcare decisions, the freedom that comes from knowing that your child will not be shot dead in school, the freedom to afford a home, the freedom to vote. Walz said, on more than one occasion, that the government should not insert itself into your doctors’ office or your bedroom. He repeatedly invoked what he described as a small-town virtue: “Mind Your Own Damn Business.”
Harris and Walz deliberately snatched those words away from the Republicans and claimed them as their own.
At the same time, they doubled down on criticizing Trump for his affinity for tyrants, like Putin. In their display of dignity and patriotism, they contrasted their party with Trump’s unhinged rants and childish personal insults. They emphasized the importance of telling the truth, as Trump tweeted that the next round of a Trump administration”would be great for women and reproductive rights.”
And they showcased JOY, as they laughed and danced in the aisles. The contrast was especially sharp during the states’ roll call vote: Republicans announced their votes to polite applause; Democrats announced their votes to music and dancing and flashing lights. Harris radiated joy, with her vivacious smile and her celebrated laugh. Trump evoked fear, frightening images of a nation in decline, divisesiveness. Which America do you want to live in?
The Republicans spoke wistfully about turning back the clock to a mythical time when America was “great.” An era of white male supremacy? An era of Christian dominance? The Democrats spoke hopefully about a better future, where everyone has the opportunity to live a decent life. The past or the future. Your choice.
The biggest contrast was the difference in the delegates themselves. The Republicans were, with minor variations, the party of white people. The Democrats overflowed with ethic and racial diversity.
Which party is the past? Which is the future?
Diane Ravitch's blog 