A DISTANT LAND: How in the world could this race be tied?

MONDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2024

Notes from a distant land: Back in the day—back at the start of the current century—these acts of political self-sabotage typically came from Blue America's big Hollywood stars.

In one election, the (politically) clueless act came from Whoopi Goldberg. (She was of course well intentioned.) In another election, the (politically) clueless act came from Larry David.

In each case, a close presidential campaign was sidetracked, for several days, by discussion of the (politically) clueless behavior of a Hollywood star. In one instance, the Gore campaign was negatively affected. In the other case, the political harm was done to Candidate Kerry. 

At that time, this was the way those of us in Blue America would imperil our own nominees. Increasingly, Blue America's political leaders now perform these acts themselves. 

Over the course of the past three or four days, we've been dismayed by what happened when Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer got together with Liz Plank, a Canadian podcaster, to create an ill-advised bit of video about the (little-known) CHIPS Act.

Whitmer is a very successful second-term Michigan governor. Perfectly predictably, the videotape she and Plank created inspired a wildfire across Red America—across a very broad land.

Whitmer has now apologized to Catholic leaders in that (battleground) state for what she and Plank have wrought. If you think that votes don't get affected this way, we'd pose Al Pacino's famous question again:

Who's being naive [now], Kay?

We'll offer links to reporting about this unfortunate matter below. In our view, the bad political judgment here pretty much went off the charts. 

Sadly, this wildfire burned through the countryside at a time of declining poll numbers for Candidate Harris. Such surveys can only be approximations, but this is part of a news report in today's Washington Post:

Trump chips away at Harris’s national advantage, two new polls show

A new ABC News-Ipsos poll, conducted from Oct. 4-8, showed that among likely voters, Harris led Trump 50 percent to 48 percent, within the poll’s margin of error. Last month, the same poll found Harris at 51 percent support among likely voters compared to Trump at 46 percent.

An NBC News poll also conducted from Oct. 4-8 and showed an even split between Trump and Harris, with each garnering 48 percent support among registered voters. In that same poll last month, Harris was up by five points—another result within the poll’s margins.

A CBS News-YouGov poll conducted a few days later, from Oct. 8-11 but released also Sunday, found less of a shift.

And so on from there. Summarizing:

At ABC/Ipsos, Harris had lost three points on her nationwide lead. At NBC News, she had lost five points—and the nationwide race was now tied.

There is no way to be sure, but it's generally agreed that a tie vote in the nationwide popular vote would result in an electoral college win for Candidate Trump. 

Recent history also suggests—though there's no way to be sure—that a similar electoral college outcome would accompany a two-point nationwide win by Candidate Harris.

In the face of this current trend, Whitmer and Plank were putting their cleverness on full display. Red America responded with fury, in a way which could move votes in Michigan and all across the land.

So it goes! So it goes as our own imperfect tribe tries to keep Candidate Trump out of the White House. 

At this site, we'll be voting for Candidate Harris, but a certain question is widespread wherever Blue American discernment is sold. That basic questions goes like this:

How can this race be tied?

This very morning, Jonathan Alter, a good decent person, offered a version of that question when he appeared on Morning Joe. 

Long ago and far away, we lunched with Alter, in bright sunshine and even al fresco, at the 2000 Democratic Convention. Jonathan Alter's a good, decent person—but we were disappointed by what he said today, part of which went like this:

I did have illusions about roughly half the American public.

We can't yet post his fuller statement. Until the Internet Archive returns, it may be that we will never be able to post the full text of what Jonathan said. 

But that was Alter—a good, decent person—giving voice to a certain view about every Trump voter in this wide, highly varied land.  By way of contrast, when Candidate Hillary Clinton made her unhelpful statement about that "basket of deplorables," she said that only half of Candidate Trump's supporters could be judged that way.

We thought Jonathan's statement was very Blue but was also unwise. 

Why might someone vote for Candidate Trump? Attention Kamala Harris voters! There exists a wide array of reasons why someone might vote for Trump!

We're going to vote for Harris ourselves, but we've been dismayed by the performance of her campaign—by the performance of the candidate herself—in the past week or two. 

We don't how who's going to win this election, but we weren't surprised to hear that she seems to have been sliding a bit in the nationwide polls. That brings us back to a certain statement about a distant land. 

Last week, we quoted sacred Thoreau, right there in the second paragraph of Walden. No, this wasn't a political statement—but its imagery has been ringing in our heads:

Walden; or, Life in the Woods

[...]

I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. 

Sacred Thoreau quickly acknowledged "the narrowness of [his] experience." He said he understood his own experiences well, but perhaps not so much when it came to the lives of others.

He said he wanted other writers to give sincere accounts of their own lives. If such people have lived sincerely, the famous writer evocatively said, those people had been living in "a distant land to me."

What did the gentleman mean by that last statement? We assume he was lurking in the region inhabited by Yevtushenko at the start of his poem, People:

People

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.

Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.

"Planet is dissimilar from planet," Yevtushenko said (in translation). Quickly, he moved on to this:

To each his world is private,
and in that world one excellent minute.

And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.

In any man [sic] who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.

There are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.

But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.

Whom we knew as faulty, the earth’s creatures
Of whom, essentially, what did we know?

Our view? In this lament for the millions of people who lost their lives under Stalin, Yevtushenko was saying something like this:

Every other person lives in "a distant land to me." His or her experiences are essentially unknown to me—indeed, to all of us who view that person from the outside. 

Our planet is filled with millions of other people—with many millions of the earth's creatures. Our planet contains the worlds of many millions of such people—"Of whom, essentially, what did we know?"

Plainly, no one else will ever be as smart or as decent as those of u in Blue America are widely known to be. That said, other people are people too—and their experiences, perceptions and understandings may not align with our own.

In Blue America, we often see our tribunes expressing puzzlement about how anyone could be voting for Candidate Trump. Quite often, we proceed to offer our own unflattering explanations of the motives behind such decisions. As the great anthropologist Gene Brabender said:

Where I come from, we only talk so long. After that, we start to hit.

Where did this great anthropologist "come from?" He came from the planet Earth!

Even here in Blue America, it seems that we "only talk so long." Also, we may not be strongly inclined to wonder about the private worlds of others

During the course of this week, we'll be reporting from a region of gloom as Candidate Harris tries to insert a bit more punch into her (recently faltering) campaign.

We'll be voting for Harris ourselves. But why might somebody else be voting for Candidate Trump?

We'll report this week from a distant land—from a distant land inhabited by neighbors and friends who live right down the street!

As for those of us within our own tribe, could we declare a moratorium on our obvious cleverness for maybe the next three weeks?

Could we put a lid on our obvious brilliance? On our stores of tribal snark?

Governor Whitmer apologizes to Michigan's (many) Catholics: In our view, the reaction to the wonderfully clever video would have been easy to predict. 

In our view, the political cluelessness put on display is puzzling but hard to miss. Under our faltering nation's current journalistic arrangements, Red Americans have already heard about this. Blue Americans never will. 

For the initial report in the New York Post, you can just click here. For a subsequent report about the governor's apology, you can just click this.

At Mediaite, readers were given "just the facts." For those barebone facts, click here.