Candidate Harris, please please please!

MONDAY, AUGUST 19, 2024 

False springs of the 20's: Yesterday, on one occasion, she finally took the bait.

We hope she never does it again. As described in Jeff Mason's report for Reuters, this is what she said:

Harris implies Trump a 'coward' during Pennsylvania campaign appearance

MOON TOWNSHIP, Pennsylvania: U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris indirectly criticized former President Donald Trump on Sunday, suggesting her opponent in the Nov. 5 election was a "coward" whose politics focused on putting down rivals.

The remarks came in a campaign appearance in the critical battleground state of Pennsylvania with running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, before Harris heads to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which kicks off Monday.

"Over the last several years there's been this kind of perversion that has taken place, I think, which is to suggest that the measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you beat down. When what we know is the real and true measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you lift up," Harris told a crowd of supporters. "Anybody who's about beating down other people is a coward."

She did not directly name Trump, who in a campaign appearance Saturday in eastern Pennsylvania referred to Harris as a "radical" and a "lunatic."

She did not directly name Trump? Technically, that's accurate. But everyone knows who she meant—who she was calling a coward.

We don't fault her for taking the bait, but we hope she never does it again. There's nothing Candidate Trump wants more than for Candidate Harris to enter into a name-calling contest. Pitifully, it's a type of fight he's strongly equipped to win.

In fairness, it's extremely easy for to take the bait—and to get taken in the process. It happened to Professor Dyson last Thursday night when he and Keith Boykin took the bait offered by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC).

The first mistake belonged to CNN. Simply put, you can't book a person like Mace on the assumption that she will behave like a regular, good-faith pundit and guest.

Last Thursday, CNN booked her to spend the full hour on "a special edition of NewsNight, State of the Race." She was booked with three other people, including two Harris supporters.

Understandable but sad! In this report, The Hill describes what happened. We would say that two of the other guests got lured into taking the bait. Sadly, the headline on this report says this:

CNN panel gets chaotic after Mace repeatedly mispronounces Harris’s name

It's extremely easy to take the bait. With similar thoughts in mind:

Candidate Harris refused to take the bait when Candidate Trump made his ludicrous claims at the NABJ convention. Cosmetically, she has been a sensational candidate—a candidate equipped to help her nation turn the page on certain "identity" issues.

With that in mind, we've been rereading Hemingway's A Moveable Feast of late—the 1964 edition only, the edition with the stunning story-telling right in the last two pages. 

(Another edition, with revisions by his grandson Seán Hemingway, was published in 2009. That initial, brilliant story-telling was simply washed away.)

A Moveable Feast is Hemingway's memoir of his life in Paris with his first wife and their infant son, from 1921 through 1926, "when we were very poor and very happy." Early on, he describes the phenomenon he will later refer to as a "false spring:"

With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason. 

In those days, though, the spring always came finally; but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.

The next chapter is called "A False Spring." Here's the way it starts: 

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest...

Here comes the sun, George Harrison said, in our view to great effect. Perhaps he had seen the day when Candidate Harris would be equipped to help her struggling nation move on.

Please don't take the bait, we'd say. Don't let this be a false spring.