By: Robert Showah – wsj.com – August 28, 2024

Trump is trying to be the hard surface that prevents her from floating into office.

I don’t so much have in mind the popularity of political conspiracy theories such as QAnon or that “Trump would be a dictator on day one.” Conspiracy theories are the permanent background noise of politics.

Modern credulousness arrived with Facebook, Google and their offshoots. The success of the online platforms has less to do with their content than its appearing on an illuminated screen. Since the invention of movies, then television and now cellphones, humans have happily surrendered themselves to a screen.

The compulsion to check cellphone screens has reset the way people want to experience their daily lives. With each glance, they are looking for something “new.” Not something extraordinary or remarkable. Just “new.” Posting and scrolling pedestrian photos on Instagram and constantly checking social-media feeds have proved that the bar for the quality of a new experience has become very low, but irresistible. How else to explain the phenomenon of online influencers? It has become possible to sell anything—for a while.

The Democrats, long astute in the manipulation of narratives, recognized the utility of this obsession with the new and created “Kamala.” And did it with admirable speed. The new Kamala is a centrist. She is about joy, freedom and the middle class. She will “cut red tape.” The convention Democrats were wearing hunter’s camouflage, waving American flags and, hilariously, chanting “USA!” California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a consummate pro, called the new Harris “directional.”

Ms. Harris in her acceptance speech described “a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness.” She made it sound as if we are actually emerging from Donald Trump’s presidency, not the fourth unpopular year of Joe Biden’s.

The TV Nielsen ratings for Ms. Harris’s acceptance speech were slightly betterthan for Mr. Trump’s—28.9 million for hers compared with 26.3 million for his. She bumped ahead of Mr. Trump in some opinion polls.

Republicans are upset that the media isn’t more aggressively pointing out that Ms. Harris was joined at the hip with Mr. Biden for three years, or that the current Kamala and the former version are rife with contradictions. Republicans are asking water to run uphill. The media’s existence today is tied to announcing the “new” every 15 minutes, and she’s it. Mr. Trump mostly spent the first week yelling at the Kamala bubble, which simply floated forward.

The website 270 to Win has a mesmerizing countdown clock to the election. Wednesday just past noon it read: 68 days, 12 hours, 59 minutes. If you’re on Ms. Harris’s campaign team, you’re checking that clock every day because her fall to earth could happen anytime.

The culture of easy, often mindless, adoption I’ve described here comes with a harsh downside, as any marketer will admit. Look at what has happened to the movement known as diversity, equity and inclusion. Or the ESG investing model. Both have fallen out of public favor and are attempting a more modest rebranding. Growth is slowing for online dating apps. The unstoppable crush for electric vehicles? Gone. Don’t expect Elon Musk’s Trump infatuation to last.

The difference, of course, is that a presidential election isn’t like an impulse buy on Amazon Prime. If voters wake up halfway through the first year of the Harris presidency and say, “OMG, what did I do?” they won’t be able to drop her off in a mailer with a return label.

By then, Democrats—especially if they win control of Congress—won’t much care what undecided voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada thought they were getting. What voters will get is a build-out from Mr. Biden’s fiscal 2025 budget proposal, which would spend nearly 25% of the total U.S. economic output.

To “pay for” all the tax credits, subsidies and new entitlements listed in the Harris party platform (described on these pages as “The Democratic Party’s Project 2025”), there will be higher taxes on productive capital. Senate Democrats will kill the filibuster, enabling whatever legislation they want, such as expanding the Supreme Court.

But to get there, the Democrats have the hard job of keeping the Harris bubble out of contact with hard surfaces. The first will be CNN’s Dana Bash, who Thursday evening gets to ask about what Ms. Harris believed during her lifetime before Mr. Biden withdrew. Or about the destructive anti-Israel protests this week at Cornell University.

Theoretically, the hardest surface of all is Mr. Trump. The at-risk Sept. 10 debate on ABC, with or without an open mic, could significantly deflate Ms. Harris if her opponent somehow counters her intention to prod him into self-destruction.

None of that has happened. She’s still floating. The path to the Oval Office should not be this easy. So far, it is.

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Source: If You Like Your Town, Can You Keep It? – WSJ