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The longer Kamala speaks uninterrupted, the more incoherent she appears. Thus, her teams wants the debate to be a continuous conversation: She interrupts Trump, he interrupts her, and she doesn't get bound up in 2 minute rambling answers. This is the opposite of Joe, who can no longer adapt quickly to a live conversation, so they wanted closed mics so he could recite rehearsed answers.
The twitter PR spin (that comes from Kamala's handlers, almost certainly not Kamala herself) is just spin. I think you have to be very credulous to believe that Trump is scared of debating Kamala Harris. Likewise, I don't imagine that Kamala's brain trust is a brilliant team of superplanners. They probably just figured this was an attack line that sounded good. I don't think it is.
There's an interesting point in there.
Most politicians are quite good at establishing a rapport with their constituents during in-person interaction. I won't link them here for the sake of brevity, but "I met ${congressman} and he wasn't the scum-sucking pile of human shit that I expected him to be" stories are incredibly common. This rapport building usually translates to public speaking as well. It's almost a universal trait in politicians.
Off the top of my head, I can only think of four cases where that's not true, and where direct person to person communication seems to result in lower favorability for the politician in question. They are in no particular order:
Looking at that list, I can't really see any obvious commonality. We have two and a half Democrats and one and a half Republicans (I'm splitting Bloomberg). We have prosecutors and businessmen. We have men and women. We have representatives from the North, South, East, and West.
Are there other politicians like this, where their mere presence seems to be anathema to their political goals? What's behind it?
Hillary is the GOAT of "How in the hell is she worse in person?!" stories around the beltway.
The further we get from 2016, the more it looks like a Trump victory was inevitable.
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None of them had really faced a truly competitive election before, except for Santorum (who racked up some genuinely impressive wins). Usually politicians have to have some baseline likeability to get to the national election stage.
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Are we sure about that? The public seemed to like him less as they got to know him, but he was supposedly genuine, friendly, and caring-seeming in person, just way outside the overton window on the public stage.
Santorum's political career is an interesting case study. Everyone forgets this, but when he was in the House he represented a district that was heavily Democratic and waged his first Senate campaign as the prototypical "compassionate conservative" who would look critically at the budget but still try to accommodate social services spending. At the very least, he always shied away from the "up by your bootstraps" mentality that characterized a lot of the Reagan right in those days. As such, he was a rising young star who had bipartisan support. His first term was relatively uneventful, and he cruised to victory in a totally unmemorable campaign that was nonetheless closer than it probably should have been. He was popular enough in PA but had no national profile. He decided to rectify this during the Bush administration by going hard in the direction of the religious right. This decision absolutely boggles the mind. Maybe things looked different in 2001 or 2002, but those guys generally don't win presidential primaries, let alone general elections. He couldn't even keep his Senate seat, losing to Bob Casey, who even back then always looked like he was about to fall asleep.
As far as him being unlikable in person is concerned — I'm from the same neck of the woods as him and I never heard that. That being said, most of his interactions around here are from the '90s, when he was "your local elected official" as opposed to after 2000, when he was "national political celebrity". Part of the reason people may view him as unlikable may be that he turned into a caricature of himself at some point and couldn't turn it off. Maybe the lone attendee of his 2016 rally during the Iowa Caucuses can shed some light on this.
It's entirely possible that this is 100% driven by genuine religious convictions.
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All the reports I have are from PSU and CMU faculty and staff. That probably has enough impact that, in hindsight, maybe I shouldn't have included him in the list.
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I can't say for sure. The people I know who have met him first-hand are all of a specific (upper middle class blue tribe) type, so there may be some cognitive bias in play.
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I'm always surprised that they're surprised. Con artists don't scam people by being so off-putting that no one would ever want to speak with them. People can know going into an interaction that they're being targeted for a confidence trick and then still get tricked by it.
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It would be interesting if Trump chose not to speak at all and gave Kamala a chance to hold a two hour uninterrupted unprepared speech.
The impartial, unbiased moderator would immediately declare the debate over. The network would then proceed to the post-debate discussion in which a panel of impartial, unbiased journalists would discuss how Kamala's stunning and brave girlbossity dazzled the Bad Orange Man into a catatonic state.
This is pretty low effort. At least make doomposting interesting and have something to say.
meanwhile... https://www.themotte.org/post/1140/transnational-thursday-for-august-29-2024/245145?context=8#context
The job of the mods is hard enough and they’re doing a great job. Let’s cut them some slack.
Campy is at least trying to be humorous which I appreciate. The mods post was just sneering. They literally can't think of a single reason beyond contrarianism that people aren't supportive of Ukraine?
You don't have to call me a "they," I'm not non-binary.
The question wasn't "Why aren't you supportive of Ukraine?" It's "Why are you pro-Russia?" Those aren't the same thing.
Well, you've narrowed it down to a 50/50 choice, but IMO "they" is the appropriate pronoun to use when facing that unknown.
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Unmodded post, he can say whatever as a citizen.
And in every discussion you will see the same comments about how they're against Ukraine because globalism or trans people or something. It just feels wildly incongruous every time, like trolling.
I was comparing it to campys post, campys post has no mod flair and is just a standard citizen so... try again?
I generally see the explanations about globalism go into the history of nato expansion and western expansion, aggression and regime change in pretty depth. I see the other sides explanations seem to have no knowledge of history that predates the Russian invasion and they are full of incongruity, Russia being both a paper tiger that can be stopped with surplus western military gear while also being a threat that will soon be sailing across the Atlantic with western Europe in ashes behind it. Or the nonsense about wanting Ukraine in NATO, even though we are not willing to send western people to go die for them now, apparently their strategic importance will change somehow if the war ends.
It's nonsense which is why people tend to resort to reddit post level dismissiveness. If I were to speculate about their motives as they do about mine I'd say they are either brainwashed leftwing people that got caught up in the bad orangeman loves Russia propaganda that the MIC pushed to keep their wars going, or maybe some kind of boomercon with early stage dementia that can't see the difference between today and 1980 and somehow thinks this is a western chauvinism thing when the people pushing for this war would like nothing more than to toss western values into the trash bin.
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That post would be modded if anyone else said it.
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