Rally for Vice-President Harris with Governors Shapiro and Whitmer

29Jul2024

arriving
Arriving at the rally for Vice-President Kamala Harris, featuring Governors Shapiro (PA) and Whitmer  (MI).

As of July 1st, the decision of President Joe Biden to step aside and to be replaced as the 2024 Democratic presidential candidate by someone or another was pretty much a done deal. By July 23rd, Vice-President Kamala Harris had enough support to declare that she was now the nominee. On the 24th, Biden bowed out of the presidential race.

crowds
I was in the ADA section on the very far left (looking from the stage). Pretty much everyone else stood. When the place got really crowded, spectators occupied bleachers up on the second level.

I of course, having been a history major back in college, had recalled Lincoln's 1864 campaign slogan "Don't change horses mid-stram." But the Democratic Party decided to go all-in on Harris and it turns out to have been a good decision. As of August 2nd, her overall unpopularity is 6.6%, but that's an improvement over July 8th, when she was 17.4%. A Morning Consult poll found that on July 28th that the public's assessment was 50% favorable and 46% unfavorable.
The Cook Political Report: "Presidential Campaign Reset: Arizona, Georgia and Nevada Move From Lean Republican to Toss Up" 8Aug2024.

Representative Dean
Representative Dean (black shirt) poses with constituents. I used to be in her district until they re-drew the distrcts.

Harris is making progress in the polls, but the real reason for optimism is that she's young and vital and full of energy and Trump is looking old and grumpy by comparison. Like "racist grandpa is up way past his bedtime."

A big problem of course, is that the Swift Boat Veterans threw a monkey wrench into the campaign of Senator John Kerry 20 years ago. His advantage among veterans was cut down by several percentage points. Were any of the accusations truthful? Did ANY of them stand up to scrutiny? Not a one! Has the press learned a damned thing? $%#@ No!

Heh! Brianna Keilar (The only member of CNN I have any use for) really got under Senator Vance's skin, to the point where his "rebuttal" doesn't make any sense at all!

warm-up speaker
One of the warm-up speakers.

Very interesting. The Biden Administration has crossed many of Putin's "red lines," fearing each and every time that they might set off a nuclear war. But for Ukraine to directly invade Russian territory, while that should have been a red line that should have sparked World War III, Putin's response has been quite restrained. More on the invasion of the Kursk area.

Several days after the Ukrainian invasion of Russia, Russia is still struggling to assemble and move an adequate force to the Kursk region to effectivey push back against Ukraine's invasion.

the two governors
The two governors, Whitmer from Michigan and Shapiro from Pennsylvania.

If the upcoming election were to be fought on the straightforward grounds of popularity, Harris is making extremely good progress towards evening the score. Problem is, the challenge may be to defeat the election deniers who refuse to certify vote totals. Fortunately states have refused to humor the deniers and have insisted that votes be certified anyway, but each challenge feeds cynicism and disrespect for the certification process.

Shapiro
Video

A few weeks ago, I saw a piece summarizing where candidates stood on various issues.  They had Trump's latest positions on abortion. I felt that the only item that should have been posted was that he appointed three anti-choice Supreme Court Justices, who all voted to overturn Roe v Wade even though they all denied having pre-judged the question. We've seen that Trump's position is hardly set in stone. He has now said that he's perfectly willing to ban mifepristone, a commonly-used abortion drug. His position on abortion is evolving over time as it depends on the wishes of his supporters as much as on his own convictions. What are his convictions? No one really knows.

filing out .

And of course Elon Musk, the fellow who runs Xitter and naturally, the alleged "Free Speech Absolutist," is now "demanding the government infringe on free speech rights. Again." Musk's legal threats caused GARM, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, to simply close down as they weren't prepared to pay the multiple millions in legal fees that it would have cost them to have fought his lawsuit. Musk's real problem, of course, is that Xitter is overrun with Nazis and white supremacists and other terrible people. Many companies, quite understandably, don't wish to have any association with it.
Is Musk a good citizen, as far as reliabl information goes? Hardly. He's simply a font of election misinformation, none of which is corrected by the "Community Notes" that debunk other claims on the Xitter platform.

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