SUNDAY: Harris takes a hike on Al Smith!

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2024

The humor of Candidate Trump: In Friday afternoon's post, we formally announced the date of this year's Al Smith Dinner.

One day later, the Harris campaign swung into action. CNN offers this news report about that candidate's plans:

Kamala Harris to skip historic Al Smith Dinner in New York before election, campaign official says

Vice President Kamala Harris will not attend next month’s Al Smith charity dinner in New York City, her campaign has told organizers, opting instead to stump in a battleground state on October 17, less than three weeks before the election.

The historic Catholic fundraiser traditionally features light roasts by the two major-party nominees—aimed at one another and others—in presidential election years. This fall’s gathering is already sold out and poised to welcome an estimated 1,500 guests to a gala ballroom in Midtown Manhattan,

Candidate Harris won't attend! As the report continues, it offers this surprising recollection about the wit and wisdom of Candidate Donald J. Trump: 

Donald Trump stunned attendees in 2016 when he abandoned the collegial banter and launched a series of personal attacks on Hillary Clinton, who in her own remarks had offered the expected round of self-deprecating humor. The affair—black-tie for attendees, white-tie for the headliners—is named after the first major-party Catholic presidential nominee, four-term New York Gov. Al Smith, the Democratic standard-bearer in 1928.

Smith lost to Republican Herbert Hoover, and it would be more than three decades before another Catholic candidate, Democrat John F. Kennedy, was nominated by a major party—on his way to the White House in 1960.

Eight years ago, with New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan seated nearby, Trump ambushed Clinton, calling her a liar and mocking her over hacked emails.

When the audience booed, Trump went further, saying, “I don’t know who they’re angry at, Hillary, you or I [sic]. For example, here she is tonight, in public, pretending not to hate Catholics.”

The lesson that year was obvious. Nice guys (or gals) win the popular vote but lose the Electoral College.

Fearlessly, Trump was willing to call attention to Clinton's hatred of Catholics. On Saturday morning, the trio of friends on Fox & Friends were busy describing Harris's father as "a hard-core Marxist." 

Pete Hegseth said he wonders "what she heard at the dinner table" when she was growing up. Such are the wages of "segregation by viewpoint," the pseudo-journalistic practice by which the friends all voice the same points of view as they read from the same corporate scripts.

In 1960, did Candidate Kennedy kick-start the tradition according to which the candidates offer humorous remarks at this charity event? 

You'll have to research that one yourselves. Theodore White seems to give that impression in The Making of the President 1960.

At any rate, one of Kennedy's quips that year involved his wealthy father. As we noted on Friday, the sally went like this:

On this matter of experience, I had announced earlier this year that if successful I would not consider campaign contributions as a substitute for experience in appointing ambassadors. Ever since I made that statement, I have not received one single cent from my father.

That calls to mind an alleged remark from that year's primary season. Allegedly, Candidate Kennedy offered this quip, out on the stump, about his father's participation in the West Virginia campaign:

My father wired me, "Don't buy one more vote than necessary. I'll be damned if I'll pay for a landslide."

So it went in days of yore. At any rate, as the brainwashed daughter of a hard-core Marxist, Harris won't attend.