The Face of the Harris-Walz Blue Dog Strategy: Tim Ryan
Hacked JD Vance Dossier Published
New York City mayor Eric Adams will be arraigned today on federal bribery charges.
He is serious about a border wall. He’s tough on China. He won’t let the extreme MAGA Republicans take away your freedoms.
Sound familiar? It’s been the tenor of the Kamala Harris - Tim Walz campaign this side of Brat Summer. But in 2022 it was the campaign trail tune of Rep. Tim Ryan as he ran for Senate in Ohio against JD Vance.
On today’s episode of Politics Politics Politics I did debate prep episode for the upcoming Vance debate against Tim Walz. In preparation I watched Walz’ debate with Scott Jensen for Minnesota Governor and Ryan’s clash with Vance.
It surprised me that Ryan, a throwback to the old days of the Blue Dog Democrats, sounded more like the current ticket than Walz during his run for gubernatorial re-election.
If Harris loses this race, this is going to be a massive line of second guessing.
With Biden jettisoned, why did the fresh new Democratic standard bearer want to sound more centrist than the centrist candidate that beat her in 2019? Why not take this moment to break with her boss on solutions she would take into her own term?
Sure, some of the positions from the 2020 Democratic primary needed to go (Pennsylvania loves fracking? So do I!) but why not draw a harder line on guns? Or single payer health care?
This could make her position changes into more of an evolution as opposed to a hard reset where her firmware was flashed from Progressive Game Changer to Pleasant Consensus Builder.
Of course, if Kamala wins then this will be a stroke of brilliance. A nose-diving campaigns solved by a firm yank on the sticks to right the trajectory. Flush out the progressive overreaction of the Trump era with a return to common sense Democratic solutions.
There’s just one problem, it didn’t work for Ryan. He lost to Vance by 7 points.
He became another example, oft ridiculed by the online progressive left, of a Democrat who thinks he can win by running as a Republican.
But maybe Ohio wasn’t the place for this strategy, maybe 2022 was too early.
Maybe Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in 2024 is the exact moment. Maybe Tim Walz and Kamala Harris are the perfect messengers.
Every Blue Dog has his day, after all.
JD Vance Dossier, Allegedly Hacked By Iran, Published
published the dossier allegedly compiled by the Trump campaign for vetting of the freshman senator this summer. I’ve only skimmed it (it’s long) but no one is disputing that it’s legit. The information was allegedly hacked by an Iranian agent who has been peddling the document to various news outlets.
I am glad it’s out. I was glad Buzzfeed published the Steele Dossier. I was mad the Hunter Biden laptop story was suppressed. It’s the journalists job to run down if the information is real not decide if the public has a right to read it.
Also, it’s the internet in 2024… do we feel better if we see the info on a seedy message board like Kiwifarms or some GitHub repository and not on Substack? This was going to get out there and now it did. Big whoop.
The effect on the Trump campaign will likely be nonexistent. After all, if there were something really news worthy in it we’d be talking about that and the fact that it is published.
We’ve already memory holed two assassination attempts and a candidate switch… JD Vance’s Never Trump era is small potatoes.
Tim K
Hey there, so something that has been coming up a lot across the pods, both PX3 and We're Not Wrong, is that at the level of what policies the Presidential campaigns are running on, if you take their word for it, they are actually quite similar.
As was noted, on immigration and abortion Trump and Harris are offering almost identical platforms but nobody on the other side believes them. Trump is obviously well established as running on a mix of vibes and whatever is personally of benefit to him, and many accuse Harris of doing the same thing, noting how she adopted all manner of popular on Twitter policy stances in 2019, only to "evolve" on them in 2024.
So what gives? Its affective polarization. We hate each other. In part because we are ignorant of each other, as has also been noted, but also because its been my observation that nobody, nobody at all actually puts in any faith in "adults in the room."
For all that Trump disassociates himself with Project 2025, no one on the left really believes that he's actually going to personally be a major obstacle to a plan that annihilates most of the checks and balances that kept him from deleting the administrative state when it wouldn't do what he wanted due to a pesky melange of legal interpretations from court cases and congressional rule making.
Most of the right wingers I have observed and interacted with do not have faith that Harris would be a real obstacle to "gender anarchy" "child grooming" or "open borders" or whatever other things that escape Tumblr and the academy that keep cultural conservatives awake at night.
Is this lack of faith in "adults in the room" or moderating forces unfair? As a lefty, I have thrown salt over my shoulder at the mention of Kristen Sinema and Joe Manchin, as I suspect Jen has although I'm a relatively new listener to Cong. Dish and We're Not Wrong. I'm sure right wingers see them as the guardians of the gate, the last Blue Dogs holding the line against a riotous left whose "low T" makes them simultaneously too feeble to die on the sands of Taiwan yet paradoxically all too capable of brutalizing cops and burning cities to the ground.
As a pragmatic leftist, I understand all too well that I'd miss Manchin when and if he lost his seat to a maniac who wants to burn books, inspect everyone's genitals before they can enter a restroom, and drill baby drill. Or at least someone who would be willing to pretend to be that person for cable TV.
Which is just a long way to go to say that the universe has a dark sense of humor in that the fringe left and fringe right are perpetually disappointed and frustrated yet utterly convinced their opposite number is on the verge of seizing unchecked power, despite the best efforts of brutally cynical establishment types who don't want "the loons" to blow up the financial portfolios of the normies.
First, Manchin is already gone. Behold the form of The Destructor, future West Virginia Senator Jim Justice and his DUMP TRUCK of a pooch Babydog:
I agree that we tend to hate each other because we don’t care to learn about each other. We also tend to elevate the worst representatives of our causes and then find ourselves doubling down on defending them because it appears as if our way of life is under attack when in reality it was probably just four dickheads on Twitter.
Thanks for the email!
Thanks for defending Ken! #true&newsworthy