Halls of Shrewd'm / US Policy❤
No. of Recommendations: 3
When trump is spewing about what a great business man he is, and how he will make America great again, why doesn't Harris bring up the 3 failed Casinos in Atlantic City. An industry in which the House Always Wins, and trump bankrupted not 1, not 2, but 3 Casinos. What a loser.
When trump talks about what a friend of the working class he is, why isn't Harris ready with names and the stories of tradesmen who got screwed over by him. There are plenty of stories floating around. I've seen utube vid's of people who got hurt bad by trump.
When trump talked about Biden spending his time on the beach, why didn't Harris bring up the huge amount of time trump spent golfing during his Presidency, more wasted time than any other President in history has surely done. And while she's at it, bring up the exorbitant cost foisted up the US taxpayer for Secret Service having to try to jump thru hoops protecting him on the golf course, and the exorbitant cost that trump surely is charging to house the SS while they stay at Mara Largo. Don't worry about being real accurate, just do a trump and throw out any numbers she wants.
Harris missed some wide open chances to go for the jugular. trump sure doesn't "play nice"
so deal him the same hand.
No. of Recommendations: 9
Harris missed some wide open chances to go for the jugular. trump sure doesn't "play nice" so deal him the same hand.
It appears her strategy was to focus her more personal attacks on Trump not for the audience at home, but for Trump's ego.
When attacking for the audience at home, she went after the state of the country at the end of his Presidency - that he left office with the highest unemployment, a public health crisis, and the worst attack on democracy since the civil war (paraphrasing). But when she criticized his personal failings, she went after the stuff that would make him mad - leaders laughing at him, "his generals" thinking he's terrible, his crowds being bored with him. Stuff he couldn't lay off of, so that he would show how easily provoked he was live on national TV - and would get so wound around his own axle that he wouldn't be able to go after her at all.
No. of Recommendations: 9
why didn't Harris bring up the huge amount of time trump spent golfing
Harris did not want to get sucked into Trump's 'what about' quagmire that would distract from her strategy. Had she brought up golf it would have opened up a floodgate of Trump nonsense; his wheelhouse.
No. of Recommendations: 5
...would have opened up a floodgate of Trump nonsense; his wheelhouse.
His "asylum" as it were. 😉
No. of Recommendations: 7
When attacking for the audience at home, she went after the state of the country at the end of his Presidency - that he left office with the highest unemployment...-------------
This was an area where Harris grossly mis-stated facts and Trump failed to handle the point.
She stated that Trump left office with the highest unemployment since the Depression. Actually, no. Trump merely experienced the highest unemployment rate DURING his term but he didn't exit his term with unemployment at its highest level since the Great Depression.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/ci...March 2020 unemployement was 4.4%. It spiked to 14.8% in one month in April 2020, then returned to 6.7% by December 2020 then reached 3.9% by December 2021. 6.7% unemployment in December 2020 was certainly higher than politicians and the public had been used to over the prior decade but 6.7% unemployment is hardly disasterous and it was clear it was continuing to go down to its prior absurdly low norm.
There are two points to learn from that. One is that Trump didn't CAUSE that 14.8% unemployment. The pandemic did. In the absence of a vaccine AND viable treatments for those contracting COVID AND any better knowledge on how to stop a viral infection, the US economy was basically committed to eating that spike in unemployment. But literally NO ECONOMIST ON THE PLANET expected any country's unemployment to return to prior levels within six months. Every economist was predicting the future via outdated economic theories of what was happening and thought that spike in unemployment would trigger a depression.
What all of those economists failed to understand is that an economy with consistent 4% unemployment is reflecting a labor market with a chronic shortage of bodies. The minute physical circumstances allowed, a majority of those not disabled by COVID returned to work and unemployment vanished. Note that because "unemployment" only reflects those who WANT to work full time, it is not safe to assume lower unemployment means more net jobs. Remember, tens of thousands of teachers, nurses and other "front line" workers QUIT their jobs in disgust over poor treatment by the public and their employers while bearing most of the exposure risk prior to vaccine availability. If you are wondering why unemployment can be so low yet it seems like there are fewer workers, it is because those two statistics are not strictly positively correlated. Unemployment can go down without total jobs rising if people are abandoning the workforce.
If Trump had any grasp of actual economics and if he hadn't allowed himself to become totally distracted by working to defend his ego throughout the debate, he could have picked up on this mis-statement from Harris and made her look stupid. But Trump doesn't know the facts and doesn't know the theory to make the point so it sailed over his head.
WTH
No. of Recommendations: 3
But when she criticized his personal failings, she went after the stuff that would make him mad - leaders laughing at him, "his generals" thinking he's terrible, his crowds being bored with him. Stuff he couldn't lay off of, so that he would show how easily provoked he was live on national TV - and would get so wound around his own axle that he wouldn't be able to go after her at all.
That's what litigators do, yes? They try to rattle the witness. That should be right in her wheelhouse. From the sounds of it, that is what she did.
No. of Recommendations: 16
"But when she criticized his personal failings, she went after the stuff that would make him mad - leaders laughing at him, "his generals" thinking he's terrible, his crowds being bored with him. Stuff he couldn't lay off of, so that he would show how easily provoked he was live on national TV - and would get so wound around his own axle that he wouldn't be able to go after her at all."
Yep. By going after him on things that she knew would get him wound up and defensive, she accomplished three things:
1. By making him defensive, she knew he would then talk about those things he was being defensive about rather than the things he wanted to talk about.
2. It showed quite clearly how easy he was to control and manipulate. If he is this easily manipulated in a debate, he is easily manipulated by foreign leaders (or anyone really who actually wants something from him).
3. By manipulating him in into going into his defensive rants, he looked like the crazy old uncle that everyone rolls his eyes at. Not very presidential at all.
This presidential race is going to be decided by the few undecided voters. These undecided voters already know Trump and do not like Trump (heck there are lots and lots of Republicans who don't like Trump but will vote for him anyway), but they might have been willing to hold their nose and vote for him if the alternatives were either an old demented man or an unknown crazy liberal. The main thing Harris had to do during the debate was to appear presidential. She had to show those few undecideds that she wasn't a crazy liberal woman and she could be presidential. I think she was able to do that on her own, but just in case, she made sure that the contrast to Trump was an easy one. After all, it is much easier to look presidential when being compared to a crazy old uncle who spews wild conspiracy stories.
No. of Recommendations: 4
mocking trump for inducing self-destruction turns out to be a strategy long known as effective, and the origins of the Lincoln Projects weekly clips on conservative media for 5+ years.
it's only recently that Dems have incorporated this, since Biden was unlikely to execute well. (speech problems, age, and not really his personality)
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/...of course, to deflect accusations that she lacks substance, Harris is more than capable to voice rational, if not explicit, policy points as the bulk of her approach.
