1) As I was watched the Fox News interview of Kamala, the thought that kept running through my head was “why did she agree to do this, especially on Fox?”
From such questions, investigations are born.
She had already done a run of media exposures (I don’t call her time on the “The View” and “Call Her Daddy” interviews) the previous week and they went as well as expected; CBS had to basically take a chainsaw to the video in order to make her “60 Minutes” interview even remotely palatable. For all of the criticism of her for running from the media, she knows the strength of her game and it’s not hanging around people who want serious answers from serious questions.
So given her run-and-hide strategy why do an interview with a hostile network like Fox?
Because her time at Fox was not meant to be “another” interview, but rather it was to provide the hostile environment, the platform, for her to display some spunky behavior and one-liners for campaign ads and the rest of the media to fawn over. She was going to use Brett Baier and Fox as a campaign prop, go into the proverbial lion’s den, hijack and divert the questioning so she can get in some choice quotes for tape, and then get out.
The fact that the interview was going to be less than an hour before airing leaving little time to edit and only supposed to last 20 to 25 minutes (and she was late even for that) lends credence to the strategy that she as going to do a drive-by. A confirmation of that came the next morning when the legacy media decided to use a style guide of calling her performance “feisty.” You go girl.
It was a risky strategy at best because it depends on the interviewer deciding to yield to the tempo and initiative to the interviewee in fear of being called a bully, but Baier didn’t do fall into that trap and instead kept pushing her to answer his questions.
2) Is this is a Kinsley Gaffe, a column-version of a hostage video, or something else?
From a David Brooks’s column the other day:
”On these, as on so many other issues, the position that is held by a vast majority of Americans is unsayable in highly educated progressive circles. The priesthood has established official doctrine, and woe to anyone who contradicts it.”
I cannot think of a better example of a progressive priesthood than the NY Times op-ed page. I wonder what vestments Brooks wears for progressive feast days.
3) Re: Brooks and other columnists, a plea.
The gist of the fore-mentioned Brooks’ column was that the Democrats and Republicans were not acting in ways that Brooks thought were rational, that the world should confirm to his expectations. In other words, unlike Muhammad, Brooks isn’t going to any darn mountain and instead demands it comes to him.
You see it in other columnists, especially Tommy Friedman and his beloved goal of the Two State Solution, a certain arrogance in confusing their clinging to shop-worn cliches as possessing time-worn wisdom. The dirty secret is that much like an athlete that eventually wears down over time and loses their ability to compete, a columnist like any public intellectual exhausts their intellectual capital and becomes irrelevant.
There’s nothing wrong with that, we are not Christ born of the divine and possessed of infinite wisdom to be dispensed, but rather must learn and grow as we interact with a world beyond our understanding. In a better world, columnists would be forced, say every 5 to 7 years, to leave their columns for a few years and go on a sabbatical. Not to go hang out in Davos or Silicon Valley to rub shoulders with the hot new intellectual fad or parachute into some foreign capital for a few days to hob-nob with cab drivers or go to Nepal for a vision quest.
Rather they should do things that would make them uncomfortable on the principle that as with an oyster, the proverbial grain of sand produces a pearl. Send Jen Rubin out to Scranton to sell insurance for a year or Friedman to live in one of those newly-diverse places like Springfield to drive a forklift (I can teach him, I still have my trainer’s certification). Tell them there’s a book deal waiting for them at end.
If they are insistent on wanting a vision quest, I’ve got one for them that is a lot closer than Nepal.
Another risk: It also provided lots of recorded moments that can be used to show the few undecideds that she really is an empty shell of vacuous radical ideas with a bad attitude. So much for “joy”.
death6
Yes there are those clips as well.
Back in the grad school days when I did alot of stuff on rational choice theory, I was attracted to Samuelson’s Revealed Preference Theory as a way of analyzing choice behavior. Basically you gain insights into someone’s goal orientation and status based on current actions.
So applying it to Kamala, there’s been alot of hubub in the infosphere about her collapsing campaign. People have arguments for an against usually based on poll numbers. You can make an argument any way you like given that public poll numbers aren’t worth much… it’s the private tracking polls that campaigns use for their own decision-making that are key but we cannot see those.
However what we can see is how campaigns react and can infer from their actions how they see their environment. The fact that Kamala’s campaign was willing to put her out there in a situation like that must mean that their numbers are showing panic time.
I expect more high risk, scorched earth tactics from her over the next few weeks. There’s been sort of a tradition in American presidential elections of campaigns that are desperate in the last few weeks of just letting all that nervous energy fly, but the way Kamala is going about it is really irresponsible given how they have painted Trump as illegitimate for the past several years.
“If they are insistent on wanting a vision quest”…this isn’t a vision quest, exactly, but for those that are a little bolder and want to Help the Poor and Save the Planet….guy named Juper Machogu, lives in Kenya, big advocate for fossil fuels for Africa, has announced his ‘sustainable internship program’ for those wanting to live in traditional ways, without fossil fuels. Only 2 takers so far:
https://x.com/JusperMachogu/status/1806631452114633179