While the Kamala Harris coronation for Democratic presidential nomination continues in its safely shielded path, her sacred status among party members growing with each day, the decision to select Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota as Vice Presidential running mate had all the hallmarks of unbearable caution. Caution for being secure from any ambition on his part (Presidential contenders tend to pick running mates unlikely to go off the reservation or eclipse them during their time in office.) Caution, as well, from other factions in the party that may make things interesting at the Chicago Democratic Convention slated to start on August 19.
Caution, also, from any disturbance posed by overtly visible talent, which can be something of a handicap for higher office. The Minnesota governor had certainly received attention from Harris for his less than profound suggestion that comments made by Republican contenders Donald Trump and J. D. Vance were “weird”. In an interview with MSNBC, Walz declared that “These are weird people on the other side.” He reiterated the view at a campaign event in which he claimed that the Trump-Vance ticket was a “threat to democracy” that would see rights removed and people placed in danger.
Given that much media coverage involves skipping over garbage cans rather than scouring the garbage, this was a perfect illustration about a figure who should, at best, stick to mediocre party slogans. But no. Harris, the Democratic anointed papier-mâché candidate for the White House, thought differently.
Many Democrats revelled in the fatuity of it all. “Tim’s signature is his ability to talk like a human being and treat everyone with decency and respect,” said former President Barack Obama in a statement. The Los Angeles Times was told by a Democratic source allegedly close to Harris that Walz revealed much “ease in cutting through political jargon to deliver a straight message,” something that appealed to her.
Walz may have an advantage insofar as he is utterly unknown to the voters that will swing the election. Outside his state, he is clean, cold tabula rasa and utterly without distinction. The figure of no record can create something anew. But the person overlooked for his role – Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania – may well cause tongues wagging, not least through his supporters.
Shapiro certainly would have been a far more interesting choice. Hypocritically, he was attacked by members of his own party for adopting an enthusiastically pro-Israeli position in the Israel-Hamas War, one that most Democrats implicitly, or explicitly support through the continued supply of arms sales to the Netanyahu government. But perfumed cant and ham performances are everything in Washington, and Shapiro’s refusal to condemn the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza with appropriate ceremony drew such labels as “Genocide Josh”.
A perplexed Jared Moskowitz, Democratic Representative from Florida, summarised the issue with lean clarity: “Josh’s position on Israel is almost identical to everybody else, but he’s being held to a different standard. So you have to ask yourself why.” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, also from Florida, noted with suspicion that Shapiro, as “the only Jewish candidate is getting excruciating, very specific scrutiny, particularly around his positions on Israel.”
William A. Galston, chair and senior fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, suggests two possible pitfalls to the Walz pick. For one, he opens a flank for Republicans to argue that Harris has yielded to the more progressive side of the political aisle.
While there is much to rebut and rebuke about the Harris-is-Progressive position, her stances on the Green New Deal, supporting Medicare for All, among others, will provide ammunition for the GOP squirrels that will hardly be defused by this choice. Walz is obviously there as stuffing for the moderate, even conservative voters, though this a severe misreading. The days of Walz as a pro-gun rights member of the National Rifle Association are now the stuff of dusty archives and amnesiac diarists.
The notion that he is a siren to working-class voters and those from the rural constituency is also highly questionable. Between 2018 and 2022, the gloss, notably in the rural areas, wore off. In 2022, his re-election was largely attributable to the suburbanites of Minneapolis. The current version of Walz is one endorsed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who has been enthusiastic, along with other progressive voices, for his selection.
In another sense, as Galston goes on to suggest, this Harris pick could well aggravate some Democratic voters and squander the chance of a VP running mate able to draw in voters from a swinging state. The solidly safe Democratic state of Minnesota is hardly likely to make a dent in the campaign funds of the major parties, let alone disrupt the electoral compass.
Shapiro, being the governor of one of the presumptive jewels of the Electoral College, exceeded President Joe Biden’s 2020 share in the state by some margin in a number of salient groups: seven points among rural and provincial voters; seven points among non-college voters; nine among Republicans and voters inclined to the Republicans, and five among Independents.
In the final count, the VP running mates of either are unlikely to redirect navigation in any significant way. Such candidates generally count as embroidery for the campaign, and, when in office, function accordingly. That said, embroidery can still be noticed, and in this regard, Walz is remarkably unnoticeable.
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I don’t have much time to respond right now, but would suggest Shapiro would have been a terrible pick and disagree that Walz was the “caution” pick. Suggest you have it completely backwards. Indeed your take on this situation overall doesn’t show much understanding of US political landscape at all.
We haven’t seen or heard much of Mr Walz so far but he strikes me as having a compelling resume – a public school teacher and administrator, football coach ; he enlisted in the Army National Guard at 17 and served in the volunteer force for 24 years ; Minnesota Governor since 2019 AND he recognizes weird when he sees it.
The GI Bill paid for his college education and with teaching degrees, Mr Walz took on a one-year teaching post in China around the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre and has since organised summer educational trips to China for US students.
This man has a lot to recommend him as a US Vice President.
Kamala has shown that she can Walz and chew gum at the same time – Donald does not have that skill !!!
Mainstream Americans, especially the younger ones, have yearned for more progressive leaders for years, which explains, to some extent, Harris’s popularity. Walz’s demonstrated commitment can only reinforce that perception.
He is an attempt to draw the “common folk” dismissed by Hillary Clinton as “disreputables”. The Democrats have plugged in to the want of people to get back to some sort of Normal after the last eight years.
So the Dems have inverted Trump’s
‘common folk” meme with an inversion that has Harris and Walz presenting symbolic identification for “folks like us”. Trump once worked it well. But nice old “bartbecue hat” Harris/Walz is a comforting image after the sort of disruption caused by the gunny, fanatic populist right.
It doesn’t matter that the Dems are no better or less dfsruptive than the Repubs- they just do the Leninist idea that capitalism moves off shore to cool dissent at home by continuing class war in the colonies where the naughty “Darkies” have to be put in their place to keep resource, including labour prices, low as cheap and shore Labour comes on tap.
paul walter
Hillary Clinton in 2016 did not call them ‘disreputables’, she called them ‘deplorables’.
Her comment in full was :
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
As it turned out she was quite prophetic when you consider that five years later, January 6, (2021) when the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. was attacked by a mob of deplorables !
How odd? that as soon as l saw this headline l knew there would be a recommendation for Shapiro.
Behind and beneath all this, is the fact that the constitution, widely worshipped, is an old, cunning, defective, rubberised, holed and fractured document in the hands of those keen to destroy, exploit and revise. Anyone can be a representative, senator, governor or supreme court judge, so encouraging to a common or democratic outlook, but, dangerous in popular self deception. Some stinkers have been vice-presidents and plenty of presidents too in professional and popular assessment. As for judges, FDR fell foul of the court and wanted radical change and restructure. However, in his day, eminent men (yes) were asked, not mediocre crawlers. The USA is a disgrace, with ineffective, doddering, crooked, bent, vain and flawed people being Peter Principled up too high. The Harris and Walz offering seems acceptable, while the excruciating colon reject Trump isn’t.
All the nonMAGAt Seppos I’ve seen commenting agree he’s a great choice. He’s warm, human, humane, intelligent, well-educated, impeccable credentials, good sense of humour, compassionate, mildly activist but not enough so to scare the horses, inclusive, no scandals in the background. I’m not surprised Dr Kampmark is slagging him off.
One guesses that the author would prefer Trump Koch Murdoch GOP to prevail over the Democrats?
Why the antipathy towards anything western, liberal and democratic, surely not repeating Kremlin and the above’s talking points and messaging eg. Tucker Carlson?
Andrew Smith asks “Why the antipathy towards anything western, liberal and democratic?”
How about because Western liberal democrats are would-be-if-they-could-be masters of the universe.
Hypocrites who preach liberty and human rights while running roughshod over the rights of those trapped in IMF-imposed loan conditions that perpetuate the poverty of those unfortunate enough to have to seek help from their former colonial masters who robbed them blind and now wield a whip of a different nature, but a whip nonetheless.
The problem with Western liberal democrats does not end with their brutal exploitation of former colonies.
They derive their power from an economic system based on an ignorance and greed that is driving the world towards an economic cliff.
This was summarised beautifully a few days ago by the economist Prof. Michael Hudson, when asked in an interview for his thoughts on the recession.
MICHAEL HUDSON: “It’s not so much that we’re in a recession; the whole economy has been shrinking really, since 2008. The idea of a recession is a fantasy created by the National Bureau of Economic Research. And the whole principle underlying all of its models is that the economy works in a sine curve; it goes up and down, and there are automatic correction factors.
Once it goes up, there are internal correction factors that move it down, but it’s always rescued, because when an economy moves down, labor becomes cheaper, there’s unemployment, it is hired again, and employers can make more profits, and there’s a recovery.
This is not how economies have worked for the last 5000 years.
What does the National Bureau leave out of account?
That every recovery from a recession has started from a higher and higher debt level.
Now the economy has reached the very peak of its debt-carrying capacity, and there is no way that it can recover. Every recovery has been weaker, and weaker, and weaker, because the debt that it has come has been sort of like driving a car and stepping on the brake.
The debt that has been fueling the financial sector is an overhead. It’s paid by the economy at large, by the 90% of the economy that is indebted. Not only wage earners, but corporations, cities and states, and the federal government.
The recipients of all of this gain are the creditor class, basically the 10%, or even the 1%, and especially the 0.1%.
So the question is not if the economy is in a recession which automatically is going to recover; there is no sign that it’s going to recover at all.
The artificial gain in stock market prices and the financial sector since the 2008 crash has been accrued almost entirely to the top 5% or 1% of the population. The economy at large for the 90% has actually been shrinking.
Much of the so-called growth in national income has been financial returns. Interest payments are counted as part of the GDP. Penalty fees are part of GDP. Rising housing prices are counted as part of the GDP. And yet it’s harder and harder for people to buy housing, and they have to pay more and more mortgage debt in order to buy the higher priced housing.
All of this is called the boom, and it’s not a boom at all. It’s impoverishing the real economy of production and consumption. But it has been making money for the financial economy, which is really extractive.
All of these gains really should be looked at as a subtrahend (a number extracted from another) from GDP, not as part of GDP. It’s not really a product.
The financial sector doesn’t produce a product.
The real estate and rent-extracting sectors, the monopolists, don’t produce a product; they simply charge more. And that’s a transfer payment from the economy to the rent extractors – the recipients of rent, the monopolists, the real estate speculators, but most of all the financial sector.
So if you look at the financial sector as the driving force of the economy, the economy you’re talking about is the economy of the 10% that makes its money by impoverishing the 90%, and therefore impoverishing the economy at large.
So we haven’t been in a recovery since 2008. We’ve been in a steady financial squeeze, a steady decline. That’s called neoliberal growth.”
Yep, we live in an economic fantasyland where the crazies are in control.
That’s “crazies” as in “Western liberal democrats.”
Yes SteveD,
Excellent summary by Prof. Michael Hudson. Ah yes, the olde sine wave, an amplitude of to squeeze or not to squeeze and the band of acceptability – to whom or what? And the frequency of what they think will be the acceptability of return to the drivers to fear or fortune – a confidence trick to be sure.
The keys being keeping up with the Jonses, consumerism, and market power, all driven by debt.
But for the ordinary punter they don’t like to talk about debt, only about interest whether you’re interested or not. And in the big game it’s about (off the gold) fiat money and forex where quantitative easing moves against constipation, and digital currency is said to help work it out, but in reality it’s a way to own you completely. Then there’s the renegade cryptocurrency – invisible and blockchained – whoa! And jurisdiction, and havens and shells and hedges and laundering. All abstractions that capture us, but do not produce anything.
I like the way Yanis Varoufakis calls it technofeudalism.
For Central Banks, there’s much jibber jabber about consumer driven inflation and trimmed means and wage spirals etc. but it’s a facade, the real game is for the big players, forex, profit between banks, liquidity, quantitative easing and govt bonds. Of course, all the commercial banks are now principally owned by the oligarchs of the ever concentrated multinationals – all spinning the yarns of the Big 7 and little Rupert.
Then there’s the absurdity of the govt (and others) raising their prices and excises by the CPI rate come what may, feeding into the whims of international energy price equivalents and the re-insurers and the likes of the City of London, the Military Industrial Complex, and the cost of war.
I think we’re stuck up a wattle now.
Never talk about it, just keep buying debt – even after death, it does not pass.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Senator Katy Galagher and CEO of ACOSS Cassandra Goldie,
I reported to each and all of you 2 illegal debt schemes administered by Services Australia. You are yet to acknowledge the abuse and take action.
Scheme #1. Fake Review scheme. Services Australia provided me with an objection letter instead of a formal review decision required by the law. The initial decision was never legally changed. Services Australia drained thousands of dollars through illegal debt notices and direct deductions from my Centrelink payments. None of you or any government official made a singular comment on this scheme.
Scheme #2 . Family Assistance Office used the objection letter to force me into further significant debts. They issued 2 separate debt notices over $4000 in total for my whole Rent Assistance payments. On both of the occasions, the debts we waived. Their computer-generated debt letters automatically include whole Rent Assistance (100%) if a parent was ineligible for its FTB dependent part (15%).
I was paying off the illegal debts for 3 consecutive years (2022, 2023, 2024). Services Australia were trying very hard to push me into homelessness and continued abuse even after I raised the issue with each and all of you,
Anthony Albanese, Katy Galagher and Cassandra Goldie, are you going to stop all this?
For anyone doubting why we should hold Western liberal democrats in contempt, this from Pearls and Irritations today.
“In an astonishing “Eff you” to the survivors of the 1945 US nuclear bombing of Nagasaki, several Western countries including the US, Australia, Canada, France, Italy and the UK have just dropped a bombshell: reportedly announcing their ambassadors are shunning this week’s commemorations in solidarity with Israel. Last week the mayor of Nagasaki, Shiro Suzuki, rescinded Israel’s invitation to the annual peace ceremony. It was a gentle but pointed diplomatic message: Lest we forget what it was – and still is – all about.”
You could not make this stuff up.
Starting to get sidetracked. Walz is a breath of fresh air. Ths team can only steer the ship towards safer waters. Trump is a captan of the titanic wannabe.
Not giving any carrots for good behaviour is only going to encourage bad shit. Think strategic, not just today and tomorrow
Ps, i see russia has won the war………they just got rammed from behind.
Looking forward to collecting a few coffees
I saw a clip where the RBA’s chief analyst was asked a question as to the causes of the current inflation cycle and part of the answer was, that a large part of Australia’s population has savings! I almost broke my jaw. That must really p… off the rich people.
Yes Fred,
In a whirling dance of the mad money wielders, the capitalists, the banks, the multinationals and the govts, hypnotize themselves, and call up press-ganged economists and central bankers in an arcane bid to ward off fiduciary suicide.
So enmeshed are they in their market meddling abstractions and bean counting, they neglect the primacy of living, imagining and mastery through supply and demand via the local environment and ordinary folk. Preferring instead to extract from the ordinary folk, as if they are inconsequential outsiders, in return for ever decreasing services, all to prop up their demonstrably failing confidence trick system, and its wielders.
By an ever-increasing extraction, in a mindless pursuit of balance of profit and growth at any cost, through a sophisticated circular guilt-trip of blame and temptation, they punch down on what they call ‘inflation’, ‘stagflation’ or ‘deflation’ (a name-game invented by the wielders). It should be more correctly be called a ‘gouge’ for managing the ‘bloat’ of the wielders. The ‘bloat’ from their over-indulgence, or the ‘bloat’ of their inevitable decomposition.
They even try to stop ordinary folk dancing or resting by imposing 24/7 their designer clay feet.
the sad thing is, real-estate is the biggest bringer of economic disasters. Not having its own department looking at how to drive prices down fools everyone into thinking the RBA has everything under control. AND THEY CLEARLY DONT.
I can’t imagine any party saying “Vote for us and we’ll drive down the price of your house”.
The Donald at his Montana rally: “Trump: Kamala Harris, you know, it’s interesting. Nobody really knows her last name. If you ask people, do you know what her last name is? Nobody has any idea what it is. Harris. It’s like Harris.”
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1822115282980339869
Perry, thats exactly the attitude that got us in this friggin mess. You think that more of the same is going to fix the problem?
Prices need to come down. radical thinking is required. It cannot be avoided for ever.
The vicious, spiteful and petty childishness of the repugs never ceases to amaze me.
https://thehill.com/homenews/4822265-gop-scrutiny-intensifies-over-walzs-military-record/
They’ve gone from frightened by the Harris/Walz ticket to completely terror-stricken. The Washington tailors must be raking in a fortune from making brown trousers.
Andyfiftysix, that was merely an observation.
Not content with almost crawling on hands and knees to the orange lunatic and wheedling for a job if he loses Really Effing Krackers, it appears, has been trying the same thing with Kamala Harris.
https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/robert-f-kennedy-jr-tried-to-meet-with-kamala-harris-to-discuss-job-in-her-cabinet-20240815-p5k2rm.html
I give The Donald, no matter how much he “prepares” in advance of the debate, no more than 7 minutes before it all falls apart when he’s in front of the cameras.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/17/tulsi-gabbard-trump-kamala-harris-debate