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Out of curiosity, am I the only one will never get over Kamala Harris's insane questioning of Brett Kavanaugh, asking him over and over again about whether he has discussed "Bob Mueller or his investigation" with anyone? She may actually be the most unpleasant person to listen to in all of politics.
Wow that's a bad clip. For those without 8:00 to spare, the summary is:
Harris: Have you discussed Bob Mueller and his investigation with anyone?
Kavanaugh: Yes, with fellow judges.
H: Have you discussed Bob Mueller and his investigation with anyone at [this specific law firm]?
K: I don't remember, but if you have something you want...
H: Are you certain you haven't?
K: Is there a person you're talking about?
H: It's a very direct question. [repeats it]
Committee Member(?): Objection, you can't expect him to know everyone who works at a specific law firm.
Harris: Have you ever discussed Bob Mueller or his investigation with anyone?
K: Of course, he was a coworker.
H: Have you discussed Bob Mueller or his investigation with anyone at [this specific law firm]?
K: I need to know who works there.
H: I don't think you do. You can answer it without a roster of the employees.
K: No, I can't, particularly when you switched from "and" to "or" after the objection.
H: Have you discussed Bob Mueller and his investigation with anyone at [this specific law firm]?
K: I don't remember.
H: So you're denying it? I'll move on, clearly you won't answer the question.
If anything, I'm being charitable to Harris. I cut out a bunch of repetitions, insinuations, and opportunities to clarify. (I also cut out some misconduct from the crowd and quibbling by one of her allies(?) because that's not her fault.)
Not everyone wants to follow some random link to watch a video, but it's hard for a transcript to convey her smug, condescending tone as she asked that ridiculous question over and over, acting as if it was Kavanaugh that was making things difficult by being evasive. Making matters worse is the fact that she never offered a post-questioning follow-up to let people know what the hell she was talking about.
I'm not sure what would lead her to do that.
My guess throughout was that she knew Kavanaugh had spoken to a specific person at that law firm, and was looking for either a denial (which she would confront with evidence to the contrary) or else confirmation (which she would use to question its propriety). She even set up her (presumptive, but not actual) followup with "So you're denying it?" at the end.
If she didn't even do a press release detailing what Kavanaugh should have answered and why the facts are damaging to him, then I don't know what her game was. Maybe Kavanaugh was on to something with "Are you thinking of a specific person?": maybe she wasn't.
EDIT: a better theory is that she was fishing for "I don't know who I spoke to about it", but Kavanaugh never gave that answer. He only said that he spoke to fellow judges, and that he didn't know who worked at the law firm. When asked if there was another way to know if he had spoken to someone at that law firm (fishing for "I spoke with some people I don't know well", maybe) he deflected back to the roster of employees.
Maybe she just thought she would show the country her prosecutor skills by making someone squirm on the stand, but forgot that the someone was one of the top judges in the land.
It'd be understandable for even a top judge to squirm on the stand in such a situation, where the "prosecution" is playing Calvinball as Calvin. That makes it all the more impressive Kavanaugh was able to make the "'and' to 'or'" catch, as @sarker pointed out.
Unfortunately, only dorks like us Mottizens are impressed by stuff like this. For most of everyone else it's a "and the crowd goes mild" type of a reaction.
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Pretty impressive to notice something like this in the stress of hostile questioning.
It was more obvious in the real one than my summary, but yes. I was quite impressed with Kavanaugh's responses.
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This is a guy who kept a journal of his daily activities while in high school. And when I say kept, I mean he still had it when appointed to the Supreme Court. "Detail-oriented" doesn't cover the half of it.
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You weren't supposed to notice that. ;-)
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"I'd like to raise an objection here. This town is full of law firms...Law firms are full of people. Law firms have a lot of names, there are a lot of people who work at law firms. [Protestor interrupting]. Law firms abound in this town, and there are a lot of them. They're constantly metastasizing, they break off, they form new firms, they're like rabbits, they spawn new firms [guy behind him loses composure]."
Lmao. I suspect Mr. Lee is hilarious in person. It reminds me of some factoid I read one time, which was that the most reliable way to convince someone to vote for a politician was to have him meet the politician in person.
Politicians are, almost by definition, generally likeable and good at convincing others to support them.
That's why Hilary was such a bad candidate. It's not that she's unlikeable compared to an average person, it's that she's unlikeable compared to an average politician.
Having never campaigned for anything, she was thrust into the highest levels of politics without any skill development. It would be like going right from Little League to the Majors. No matter how much coaching she got, she just didn't have the skills.
Parties should lean into the primary process in order to find the best talent.
Hilary is a bad politician, but she's the best the democrats had (have?). No democrat right now is able to convincingly articulate any stance that is amenable to the centre, much less reach across the aisle. Polarization makes the task more difficult but not impossible. I can think of no democrat politician that has any charisma or rally skills. Its all partisan loyalty displays (BLM and Pride support), polemics about how the OTHER GUYS are evil and need to be stopped (everyone anti-maga) or mildly competent bureaucrats in boring constituencies without major insanity. This last category is a GOOD category that the dems have, but theyre not gonna be winners. Perhaps Gretchen Whitmer, Tony Evers or Mark Kelly can impress with quiet competence, but they can't slug it out in an open fight with Jeb Bush, let alone with any Trumper.
Ultimately I blame Obama. He was a charisma supernova that sucked all oxygen for politicking out of the democratic party and wasted an entire generation of politicians who needed to bloody their knuckles in the machines of electioneering.
Are you confident of this? I don't think Biden won in 2020 due to personal magnetism. At least until the boomers die, any politician that goes on the stage and says "I will be boring and keep the status quo, I'm not scary, no sirree" can siphon of votes from otherwise culturally conservative aging population — enough to win elections at least.
Even if boomers don't like guatemalans or transkids, the ones I know all have clay feet and spook at any politician seriously threatening to reshuffle the established order. They're winding out the clock on their comfortable retirements, after all. Consider that the democrats are still 40% likely to win according on betting markets, despite the last four years and their presenting an optically horrible candidate.
I agree that normies love stability. the problem is a bland democrat is the same is a bland republican. And the worry is that the bland bureaucrat is easily bullied by conviction motivated activists. Youngkin defeated McAuliffe because boring McAuliffe flubbed and made him seem vulnerable to the activist wing of trans advocates overriding parental concerns. It is these, among MANY blind spots in the democrat wing, which is why I believe the bland normie is seen as weak: push comes to shove no one has faith Evers or Whitmer will stand up to AOC. (the enemy to me is Jayapal, but no one seems to care about her)
Can the GOP front a bland republican? It seems to me the Democrats are fairly successful at channeling their radical wing's energy into bland-seeming manager politicians. By contrast, the MAGA wing will veto non-MAGA candidates, who in turn spook the normies; this is to my eyes what happened in 2022 with the red wave that never materialized.
The core difference is that, for all of BLM and antifa's blustering about the revolution, the American red tribe is a whole lot angrier about the state of politics. Psmith is only somewhat exaggerating here when he says 100% of the revolutionary energy in our own society is on the right today. Blue tribe meanwhile knows it's playing defense.
Just this week in the UK, the MAGA equivalent in Britain blew up 14 years of Conservative rule to vote for the radical populist Reform, allowing Labour to waltz into power with a laughable third of the vote. This is what I expect in the US if 2028 Republicans try to field a Nikki Haley or Mitt Romney-like.
Counterpoint- Youngkin.
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True, Liz Cheney might as well be under Jorgensen for all the pain she is receiving.
I contend though that the Blue Tribes are playing defense on two fronts: the far right and the far left both, and the public fears the far left more than the far right. The far left is acting as a vanguard element to coopt the machine of the normie like how the far right did it with the centre right normies but this only happened because people prefer the far right to the far left. If the option is the normie right vs the far left, the normie right wins. Issue is whether the far left can wear the skinsuit of the normie left long enough to get into power.
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How would you explain Trump stepping directly into the major leagues and winning in 2016?
I think people, on the left, right, and center vastly underestimate the fact Donald Trump was the most famous person since Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for POTUS.
Which is partly, as a left-wing social democrat, I'm not worried about MAGA, post-Trump. Tucker Carlson or J.D. Vance or whomever is famous to political weirdos, but they're not showing up in guest spots in major motion pictures or being on network TV for a decade or referenced by rappers.
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I should have phrased that differently. Political skills are mostly innate, not learned. To paraphrase Wooden, primaries don't build political ability, they reveal it.
The candidate who emerges from a cutthroat primary will, statistically, be a superior political animal to one who is simply gifted the top spot.
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He’s been people schmoozing for several decades prior.
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Trump did over a decade of reality TV, which is plenty of time to experiment with what people like to see broadcast, anyway.
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Well that and she was full of scandals and made idiotic and preventable decisions like barking on live TV and declaring herself ‘just like your abuela’.
But yeah, a coronated politician who hasn’t been through the selection process for politicians is probably going to be less likable than one who rose through the ranks. And that’s what Hillary was.
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I complained about the same thing just the other day.
Nice to know there are at least two of us for whom the memories of that time are indelible in the hippocampus. What's notable about the clip I linked is that it occurred before the Blasey Ford allegations. I can almost forgive the Democrats for pushing the Blasey Ford story because they really had a chance to take down Kavanaugh, and the Supreme Court is worth a lot of dirty tactics. But Harris's questioning of Kavanaugh about Bob Mueller stood out to me because it was so pointless (and because she was so incredibly annoying).
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