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Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst addresses relevant political and social issues of our times in a straightforward and honest manner. Taking on anti-logic factions that are growing in society. News and opinions that you can rely on for integrity and depth!
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Harris Campaign Post Mortem with Jamie Miller
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A detailed examination of Kamala Harris's campaign reveals the pitfalls of vague messaging and reliance on identity politics. The episode highlights the Democratic Party's need for reform and a coherent, compelling narrative that resonates with voters. They must move on from the disaster-politics they have used.
• Kamala Harris's early campaign excitement faltered into relief and regret
• Failure to define a unique identity led to campaign difficulties
• Economic messaging did not connect with blue-collar voters
• Ties to Biden's administration created perception issues
• Identity politics fell short of resonating with a broader electorate
• The episode stresses the importance of a strong two-party system for political health
https://reasonablearguments.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=substack_profile
Welcome back to Real Clear. I'm your host, lucas Klein. I started Real Clear to help people bring their minds to bear on pressing matters of our times. If you like what I'm doing here, visit the link below in the show notes and subscribe. Through Substack. You can see my writings as well as all full audio episodes. I rely on you for word-of-mouth references. So thanks very much. I hope you enjoy this next episode. So thanks very much. I hope you enjoy this next episode. Welcome back to Real Clear Podcasts with Lucas Klein.
Speaker 1:This week I have the pleasure of being joined again by political consultant Jamie Miller. Jamie is a very keen political mind as well as all-around good guy, in my view. He has been on multiple campaigns for well-known figures, such as Newt Gingrich's presidential campaign, and he continues to consult for Republicans, specifically in the state of Florida, but nationally. Also. He writes Reasonable Arguments blog, which you can find in the link below. This is a great episode that covers a lot of things, including primarily, a post-mortem on the Kamala Harris campaign. The reason I think this is important is because, as I've said before and will say again, we need a strong two-party system and right now the Democrats need a facelift. They need to reform their identity into something more relevant to the American people. If they're able to do that, then the GOP and the Democrats have a useful tension between the two of them, and that tension is important for compromise. And in order to solve problems, you have to see them first, and that's why Jamie and I are discussing this particular issue now.
Speaker 1:I hope you enjoy. Also, please send this podcast to anybody. You know there's no ads, ever. It's entirely membership supported and I don't generally promote the podcast. I rely on you to see value here and to spread the word. Thanks very much. Psychological analysis to maybe buttress your political analysis and what the meaning is of the election result in november, where donald trump was elected again in a non-consecutive term to be president of the united states. That's right. The narrative is, of course, for people who are newly disaffected on the left especially, that the reason that Donald Trump was elected is because mean, bad people voted for him. Is that how you see it, jamie?
Speaker 2:I'm going to boil this down to a couple simple things. Harris had to lose the race and Trump had to win it, and I always say that if Harris had to lose the race and Trump had to win it and I always say that, harris, if Harris hadn't, you can have both people run what I would call winning races and if that had happened, harris would have won, I think Trump. If Trump ran a losing race and Harris ran a losing race, I think the default is also to Harris. So you had to have Trump run a winning race and Harris run a losing race, and that's what happened. If you boil it down to basics Now, I wrote in my Sunstack reasonable arguments in July that this is right at the cusp of Harris becoming the nominee that I predicted there would be three emotions of the Harris campaign excitement, release and regret.
Speaker 2:And I think one failure for the Harris campaign is they squandered the excitement phase From the day she got in until the last day of the convention. There's no question that there was extreme excitement around her candidacy, but very shortly after the Democrat National Convention it almost immediately turned into relief and I think that was the pinnacle of the relief stage happened during the debate and I even used this term in the blog or in the newsletter, whatever you want to call it that she was running a campaign based upon she's not Joe Biden and not Donald Trump was running a campaign based upon she's not Joe Biden and not Donald Trump and just being a student or a PhD and a teacher of these things that the two most scripted moments in a debate are your opening statements and your closing statements. Those are the two statements you can control 100%, and Harris's closing statement of the debate, and I called the debate a draw and everybody said I was wrong, and I still don't think I was wrong, because I felt like Trump won the beginning and the end and Harris won the middle, and so I called the debate a draw. And one of the reasons why I said Harris lost the end of the debate the scripted moment that she controls 100% she ended that with you should vote for me, because I'm not Donald Trump and I'm not Joe Biden, and she never truly made the sale to the American people of who she was, how she was going to be different, what she was going to do and why she was qualified, other than her serving as vice president, and Americans as a general rule, while we've had vice presidents become president, it's more often the case that they lose than win.
Speaker 2:And because Americans don't automatically assume that because you're vice president, because you can become vice president for political reasons, for all these other reasons other than being qualified, political reasons, for all these other reasons other than being qualified, and so Americans don't just assume that because you're vice president, you are an acceptable and qualified president, and I think at the end of the day, you know she squandered that excitement phase.
Speaker 2:She leaned into the relief stage and then you know I don't know most people have forgotten in the exhaust of history, if you will, that you know a lot of us going into the debate and even after the debate, a lot of us, more conservative types, were saying why isn't she sitting down for an interview, why isn't she engaging with the public, why isn't she doing more campaign events? And I think it was that period of time where, if she had listened to conservative and continued that excitement even another 10 days, it may have changed the outcome of the race for her. But she didn't. She squandered that initial excitement phase and I thought that was probably one of the biggest flaws in her campaign. Of course you could go down the list of she never really did say how she would be different from Biden. She never really she's like.
Speaker 1:She knows, jamie. Do you think she knows how she's different from Biden? Do you think she has any awareness of her own positions?
Speaker 2:I think my guess is that she does, but she either didn't trust her positions to be accepted by the American public or she brought in so many Biden people and it was done so fast at the end that I don't know if you know this, but in October of 2023, I also predicted in my blog that Joe Biden would wait until after the Republican National Convention and decide he's not running, and it would be Democrats who forced him out, not Republicans, due to his health. I called all of that in October of 2023.
Speaker 1:I am linking to reasonable arguments below. People should visit it.
Speaker 2:Yes, thank you, and so that was a prayer to me going to Substack. I think that is in reasonableargumentscom, but so we've. To me it was apparent that he was going not going to be the nominee and when I predicted that he would wait until because it just made sense to wait until Trump doubled down on J you know, like he picked JD Vance I didn't pick that but he picked I predicted at the time that that Democrats would go into the Democrat National Convention and I actually predicted Chuck Schumer would be the nominee, because I thought really, between Schumer and Pelosi in a convention setting, that those two would whip the votes and that that's the scenario where Schumer's going to become the presidential nominee and instead they. To Harris's credit and I always say this is the probably the highlight of her campaign was the 48 hours after Biden said he was getting out. Where she really worked that's as hard as she worked in the entire campaign was that first 48 or 72 hours, in my opinion, to secure the nomination, and then, once she secured the nomination, it was oh, of course, I'm going to beat Donald Trump, I don't have to do anything. And the Biden folks who she brought in, which were numerous in her campaign. There were really no Harris people. They were all Biden people and Obama people, and so you have to realize the Biden people won in 2020 running campaign.
Speaker 2:We like to say from the base.
Speaker 2:Those of us on the right say, oh, he ran the campaign from the basement, but he truly campaigned less than any president successful president in history since James Garfield's 1880 front porch campaign.
Speaker 2:And he would pop out from his basement, he would have six reporters separated by 25 feet and he would call it a grassroots event and I think by the Biden folks who joined the Harris campaign. And I think this was all orchestrated to some level about Biden getting out. We can win a sprint against Donald Trump. We're not sure that we can win a marathon and so if we have somebody out there from January because Americans and the other reason why Harris campaign fail is that she didn't separate herself from Biden and Americans just felt like Democrats went too far left and and they punished them at at the ballot box for that. And whether it was boys and girls bathrooms or boys and girls sports, or men and women's prisons or electric vehicle mandates, we saw all of these things that I think America looked at and said you know what this is? Just going too far left. And so she needed to come out and moderate herself.
Speaker 1:And she didn't come out and define herself at all, which then allowed Trump to do so, and she really was in a tough position there politically, because if she differentiated herself from Joe Biden, she could then not use the past four years as some sort of basis of credibility. So what a position to be in. Although if she was more able politically, it can be done, she strikes me as one of the most least capable politicians that I've ever seen, and let me she probably has a lot of regrets.
Speaker 2:She brought people in who were more loyal to joe biden's legacy than her future. I should probably write that down. That's pretty good, but that's pretty damn good, but it is. But it's true that she brought people in who were more loyal to Joe Biden's legacy than her future and that ended up costing her, because I think there were people in very high positions in her campaign who made decisions that were in Joe Biden's best interest not hers.
Speaker 1:Let me run by by you some of my impressions of Kamala, and this is more on the level of personality and impression than it is on political strategy. Did you happen to catch the Tucker Carlson interview with the Teamsters president, sean O'Brien?
Speaker 1:I caught the headlines but I didn't watch the whole thing. It was remarkable. For everyone who isn't aware, the Teamsters are one of the largest labor organizations. Labor unions in the United States have been for a long time. They have a storied history and they're typically a stronghold of the Democrat Party. The Democrats can typically count on them to vote en masse for their nominee. The interview was quite revealing and at one point Sean O'Brien said to Tucker he described how his vice president, a member of the executive committee of the Teamsters, ran into Kamala on the campaign trail at some sort of gala or something fundraiser and introduced herself as the teamsters part of the teamsters executive committee. Kamala pointed in her face and said y'all better get on board now. Sean o'brien is a hard-nosed blue-collar guy who doesn't take any nonsense and he said to to Tucker in the interview.
Speaker 1:pardon my French, but who does this fucking woman think she is? And I grew up in a blue collar neighborhood part of the country. I know exactly where he's coming from. I know the kind of sentiment that wells up in a man who scrapped his way up from the bottom and organizes people who do things that make the country run, vital, essential labor People to have someone, yeah, and I think another, and I think that's a good example.
Speaker 2:Sorry for interrupting.
Speaker 1:That's all right.
Speaker 2:There's no worries.
Speaker 1:That's a good example of her using authority that she had not earned example of her using authority that she had not earned self and self-anointed is, I think, the impression that comes across to me psychologically, and I think, uh, mr o'brien was reacting to. She seemed to anoint herself within herself as the second coming of obama, but she possessed none of the poise, none of the charm, none of the strategy, and expected that other people, uh, nonetheless, view herself as such. That, um, resembles to me um, a a profound lack of an ability to appraise oneself accurately, and I think that really scared Americans that this is a person who has such hubris and such overestimation of her charm, character and ability that she doesn't actually see the reality of her aptitude. So I wonder what your reactions are to that appraisal.
Speaker 2:I think she also misunderstood the environment and, like I said that I think, people in this election, every election has a dynamic unto itself, every single one, and there are pressures on that election that candidates can barely control, even up, even at president of the United States.
Speaker 2:And so one of those things I think was with DEI and I think most of us agree that we should have fair practices in hiring and housing and all of the things upon DEI, it's done to protect, let's say, 30 or 40 percent of the minority population, whatever you want to categorize that as and yet when you have a huge corporation, dei is% who is not in the protected class, or 51% or whatever number you want to call it. Who is not in the protected class is now not eligible for any promotions because they all go to DEI. And she misunderstood. Go back to VPs being qualified for president, vps being qualified for president. She part of the narrative I hear now is oh, especially on progressive podcasts on which I appear people will say, of course America wasn't ready for a woman, or certainly not an African-American woman, and I said in this environment, americans were not ready to promote a DEI hire which most people saw Kamala Harris as not being qualified to be vice president.
Speaker 1:Didn't Joe Biden say that he was doing a DEI hire when he was going to appoint his vice president? He did.
Speaker 2:He said I'm only going to pick a woman. I'm not sure if he said I'm only going to pick a woman of color, but he did. I believe he said I'm going to pick a woman and so he automatically undermined the vice presidents. He put that DEI label on the vice president and while that wasn't a let's call it a theme of the campaign, I think it was an undercurrent that the electorate felt.
Speaker 1:I think she believed that, something along the lines of what you're saying inside herself. I think she believed that she was entitled to the role of president based on some of the things that you're describing. If I might just continue with the Teamsters example, because it's quite profound, this year is the first year 24 that is, that the Teamsters interviewed each presidential candidate and they had 16 standard questions that they asked each candidate. Trump agreed right away and went in for the interview and answered everything and some of the answers he provided they said were acceptable. Some were not, but he was willing and able and stayed the full course, as with RFK, when he was was running independently. Kamala showed up, answered four questions. One of her aides stopped the interview 20 minutes short. She got up and left, turned around and said to them I'm gonna win with or without you it was.
Speaker 2:That type of hubris was unfounded and it's unfortunate that she felt the need either to say those things. It's certainly unfortunate if she actually believed them, because we don't. She was running against an incumbent president and so in an incumbent president is hard to be. He did not have a primary. It's funny because if you look at Alan Lichtman's 13 indicators for becoming a president, I had Donald Trump winning using Alan Lichtman's 13 things and Lichtman's no. There's not enough and I'm like I just think you're applying bias to your own strategies.
Speaker 2:But because if you look at and I turned it a little bit and said let's call Trump the incumbent party, because there's a good part of America 40-something percent throughout Biden's entire four years who felt like 2020 was, at the very least, not free, fair and transparent elections, if not fraudulent.
Speaker 2:And so of course, we know there's a group who thinks that it's fraudulent and we also saw what happened out in California this time thinks it's fraudulent, and we also saw what happened out in California this time. There's no way you can say people counting for 30 days is a free, fair and transparent election. Now, was there fraud that cost Republicans two or three of those congressional seats out there? I don't know, but it's pretty funny that within 24 hours of the Democrat having more votes than the Republican, all of a sudden no more votes show up. And so there's those of us who aren't ready to go down the conspiracy theory path. But we also sit there and say, hey, if we're going to elect the leader of the free world, we need to take steps to ensure we have free, fair and transparent elections, and I went on a tangent there. Sorry about that.
Speaker 1:And I think in your calculus that must have somehow represented an inclination toward voting for Donald Trump. So, jamie, as I watched Harris then start to interview, right, she had that period of time where she was absent and people like yourself were wondering, wow, is she going to start using any kind of political capital during the time that she has available? Then we saw perhaps the reason why she was not put in front of interviewers. We saw because to hear Kamala Harris is to want her to be quiet. She sat down as a psychologist. I saw a person who was remarkably fragile, in the sense that she is so flustered that she can't actually think. And then I came to realize that part of the reason that she would get flustered is because she would become incensed. And then you wonder how could such a I can't use clinical terms here to describe someone who I have not evaluated but how could someone who is so easily incensed by someone challenging her hope to occupy the Oval Office and this didn't take a psychologist to observe this? Everyone observed this. If interviewers pressed back, she would flare, she would. You could see this in her demeanor. She would become Enraged internally. You could see this on her and I think that accounted for her doing obscene things like standing up and leaving the Teamsters after 20 minutes.
Speaker 1:Typically a Democrat stronghold vote. Stuff like that cost her Wisconsin and Michigan, and it's such a profound thing. I'd like to ask you you are a political insider. You are obviously, obviously very capable consultant in the political world. Do you know people attached to the harris campaign and, and if so, come on? Didn't everyone know?
Speaker 2:so the short answer is I'm probably two or three people removed, like the old three rules of Kevin Bacon. I like to say that rumors I hear might be a little bit more fresh and valid than are heard around in public, but I always like to say rumors are rumors and I've worked for some very strong women in Republican politics and it's a. She reminded me of some of them and part of it is, I think, when you're challenged, women react differently than men. Sometimes some women act react differently than some men and and I think you put the the head of the hammer on the nail a little bit when one of the my biggest criticisms last week of the campaign was just, I just simply would say she's not qualified to be commander in chief.
Speaker 2:Can you imagine her running our military and I think there were people out there who even wanted really to support her who then fell, and then they've come back with leader as Trump. I was like Trump ran our military for four years without problems, like as much as you want to say that he's going to push the button and all these things. He was there for four years, capable, willing and able to push the button and he never did so, versus someone who, I think other people saw this character, whether it is real or imagined, or whether it was an act or the real person, because sometimes I work for one politician in particular. I won't use the name, but she was a completely different person behind the scenes than she was, than her persona was in public, and I always said I can sell your persona, but I'm having trouble with the person.
Speaker 1:You're touching on something there, jamie, that I think was at the heart of the rejection of harris as a candidate. It wasn't clear who is behind there. No one knew who this person is. I suspect she doesn't, to be frank, and that's something that really terrified americans. They know donald trump, known quantity. Love him, hate him or otherwise. He known quantity. Love him, hate him or otherwise. He's known quantity. They can pretend as though he's not, but he is. Trump is. He is who he is in every different setting. He'll wear a blue suit in 110 degree weather, sweating like a hog in Arizona at a rally, because that's just who he is. He's a Queens businessman who isn't going to put on some hokey uniform or overalls and pretend that he's a farmer. He's going to show up in his $10,000 blue suit in the middle of the summer and he's going to hold a three-hour rally. He just is who he is and there's something about that is actually settling, I think, for the voting blocs. Kamala is a rotational series of as if personalities. What do you think?
Speaker 2:couple and his win in 2024 is in uh, he proved through 2020, through his first presidency, that he could lead people through fire. But in 2020, people were not willing to accept the fires he set. And in 2024, people who supported him because he leads us through fires, despite the fires that he sets, they don't think they didn't see Donald Trump as a different person. They just saw him from a different angle and they said you know what? Yeah, he sets fires and we don't like the fires he sets. And you could ask, I think a lot of the supporters maybe not a majority of them, but a big percentage, 20, 30% would say I don't like his tweets, I don't like his demeanor, I don't like the personality traits about him, but I'm going to vote for him anyway because he leads us through and there is no confidence that Harris would ever lead us through fire and there is, without a doubt, the opportunity that she was going to set some of her own.
Speaker 1:And, speaking of setting some of those fires. Sorry to interrupt Jamie. Setting some of those fires. Sorry to interrupt Jamie. I was absolutely terrified of her ideas of taxing unrealized capital gains. Obviously she's never going to be able to pass that, but what kind of rationale is that she'll never be able to pass it? To even entertain that as an idea is about comes up with this year?
Speaker 1:This is no defense of Donald Trump. Believe me. He says some, as Joe Rogan says. Donald Trump says some wild shit and he also puts people in a very difficult position by having to believe that he's not going to do some of the wild stuff that he says he's going to do. That's one of my main criticisms of Trump. Actually, when he says, say in 2023, that he's going to be looking very carefully into media organizations who happen to be critical of him, whoa buddy, that's not good. Don't do that. But, kamala, these are not just kind of social media tweets not saying those are permissible by Trump. They're not. You shouldn't do them. But she actually has stated positions that she's walked back, like she's going to tax unrealized capital gains. I mean, you do that. The economy is over tomorrow.
Speaker 2:It's. There is no basic misunderstanding of the American economy, and I think there were enough things like that. Just put up enough red flags for Americans to say you know what, just can't. We've been down this road four years with Biden, and there's a good group of people who don't think Biden's been in charge for any of those four years, and so then it's like, okay, she brought in the same folks, and so there was also this underlying current of thought that whoever's running the country now is going to run the country with her, and the country hasn't been run very well the last four years. And so I come back to my original statement that she never told the American people who she was, what she was going to do, why she was qualified to do it. Do you think she?
Speaker 1:knew who she was. Jamie, that's really my question.
Speaker 2:I'm like you. I've never spoken to her so I don't know. I see the persona, I see on television. I think that if you and I were to have an honest conversation with her privately and I think my guess is just knowing politicians and lots of women who have won and lost, and some who have been winners and then lost, all this sort of stuff my guess is that she would have regrets that she didn't bring her in her own people and she didn't control more of the narrative of her campaign narrative of her campaign. My guess is there's probably three or four pivotal moments that she wishes she had said X, y or Z and she said ABC, and she did so because that's what her people were telling her, or Biden's people were telling her, and to me that is probably somebody we don't want as commander in chief right, if you're listening to employed staff Now, I've also said that it's great.
Speaker 2:As a leader, you want most of the people around you to be people who listen to what you say and go do them.
Speaker 2:But you also need some people around who share differing opinions from you, from each other, and so a leader then can take those things, and I think Donald Trump one other big difference of Donald Trump and if you're a progressive listening to this, I think this is one of the glimmers of hope you can have for the next four years is that, in his first term, donald Trump practiced what I like to call the politics of subtraction. You are either with him or I'm throwing you by the side of the road. I don't need you, I'm never talking to you again, I'm never going to be involved with you, ever again. And in 2024, we saw a different Donald Trump who practiced the politics of addition Marco Rubio, secretary of State Vivek Ramaswamy, as whatever that is with Doge, you go down the list of people Elon Musk, all the people who were former rivals of President Trump, who he has now brought into the fold at a very high level, and that's something that is different than what we saw in 2016 and 2017.
Speaker 1:You see that as maybe a change in his inclination. Why do you think he had go ahead?
Speaker 2:I think he did. When somebody loses, they reflect on it. You start, regardless of whether you have. I believe that he thinks that the 2020 election was stolen from him. I mean, maybe he's right, but it was still close enough to be stolen. Fraud is finite. Regardless of how much fraud there may or may not exist, it's finite and he ran a good. He ran a good economy until COVID. He did well with getting the shot out to people who wanted it as quickly as possible and it ended up being in December for senior citizens. But still that was a Herculean task done very fast. And it was funny to me how quickly the politics of that changed, because Donald now it's Donald Trump's fall that embodied, like the politics from December completely switched on on the COVID shot, when I think those of us who want to look back and try to remember history correctly would say that we went through some Herculean efforts to get that shot to people within eight months and certainly almost the entire population had the shot available to them within 12.
Speaker 1:Speaking, if I might interject something here, that is, I think you're talking about political reversals and the shifting tides of Arizona, so to speak, regarding political persuasions. How weird was it for lack of a better term that all of a sudden the Democrat nominee for president is campaigning with the Cheneys? This what Dick Cheney has been the Darth Vader to the left since he's been in politics, especially since Iraq and the intelligence problems that sprung after 9-11. This is like the Darth Vader to them, and all of a sudden, the Cheney name is used as an endorsement. We have political whiplash in this country.
Speaker 2:That's a great point. It is the term. Politics makes strange bedfellows. It's no more apparent than right there. Or you can look at Trump and Elon Musk. They're two billionaires who probably always thought of themselves as two sharks in the same pond. And then they joined forces and here they are, I. That particular part is very interesting of how and I think it from a deeper educational level I think people will be studying for some time this period of time as both parties are grappling with their political identity, and there are times where that is seen as more. Now you would say, oh, when you have a president, it's harder to grapple with your political identity, because your political identity is the president. But if you look at 2019, democrats were grappling with their political identity. Today, democrats are grappling with their political identity. The same thing with Republicans 2015 and, let's say, 2022.
Speaker 1:Let's even go back to the 1970s. Prior to Gingrich, the Republicans were a joke. Everyone felt bad for them, they had no identity, and then they sprung anew in the 1980s and became formidable, which is, jamie. One of the reasons I wanted to hold this episode with you is to help people start to think Democrats in particular about how to reorganize the ethos and positions of their own party, because the tension between two strong parties produces the kind of harmonic tunes that the country can hum along with, otherwise known as compromise, and if you have one weak party that's confused on its messages, then we don't have useful tension upon which to compromise. So they are in need of a tremendous rebirth, and I don't think they're going to get there unless they depart from this position that nothing to see here, nothing to learn. The country's a bunch of bigots who voted for Donald Trump. That's why he won. Yeah, you're not going to be doing a whole lot of self-improvement if that's the position, and I really do want the Democrats to be stronger so that we can have an actual two-party negotiation in the country. I think people like John Fetterman are starting to do that, and others.
Speaker 1:There was a very high up member of the DNC. I can't remember who it was. May actually have been the chairman who said in in 2000,. The 28th.
Speaker 1:We're going to need someone who actually speaks normally, and he was.
Speaker 2:The U? S house will be a good case study for the next two years, because the margin is the majority is so slim three seats or whatever it is and it then allows for a little bit more of regional cohesiveness. My guess is the wildfires in California will bring Republicans and Democrats from California together to help rebuild Southern California, where that devastation is occurring as we speak, and so I think you'll see, my hope is like you, I hope that we'll see more of that. I came along in the mid-90s when Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton balanced the budget, and then I went on to work with Newt Gingrich's presidential campaign in 2012, which was a real proud moment for me. A lot of people don't like Newt and they'd I'd be like, oh, that's a scourge on your resume, but for me it's a pretty proud moment. And then I I think that, to your point of democrats and republicans working together, it is there. There needs to be.
Speaker 2:I think part of what we are seeing here in our current situation is rooted in the Citizens United US Supreme Court case and the Citizens United US Supreme Court case. I'm not a legal scholar, but my political understanding is you basically made corporations people so they could be involved in politics, much like unions are, and so one of the things that came out of that and so most wealthy people are corporations themselves. Their houses are bought by a corporation, their businesses are corporations, and so the actual individual may not be worth that much money. All the money is in these other areas, and so the unintended consequence of that was each rich person in America, whether you're just a developer in Sarasota, florida, or whether you're Elon Musk or Donald Trump, can become their own political party. And so if you're, then your own political party and you gather six or eight members of the House who you've supported and they win party. And you gather six or eight members of the house who you've supported and they win. They now answer and sing out the same hymn book as you, where in the past, prior to Citizens United, that billionaire would normally give money to the political party.
Speaker 2:So you had the extremes on both sides that would get ostracized within their own party. That kept people in the middle, and maybe this is a good thing for us to see what the extremism does for us. So we can say because I think my blog is called Reasonable Arguments I'm not calling it Reasonable Arguments because it's the smartest thing today in politics. But I'm convinced that in the coming years people are going to be like, hey, this guy was forward thinking and now he's this great political mind for speaking from the right, but in a reasonable way versus an extreme way, and so I think that we. So if you have that, you have, so it's all.
Speaker 2:I don't want to say it's all governed by money, but, but you, the money used to come from the party, and then you would have some level of grassroots, some level of a committee, some level of a chairman that there wasn't some bum on the scale, so to speak, but you still had. It wasn't one person who nobody knew, most all of the people like. I just came from the Republican party of Florida meeting everyone in that room who's electing the chairman is elected from their own community, and you have technically elected officials making these political decisions within the party. Where the Citizens United case says oh, you know what? Anybody can set up a political committee, put $100 million in there and influence American elections, and while that may be great, they might be great in the people who are like, oh yeah, free speech, but it's maybe not the greatest thing for a body politic so this is harkening back to the positions that john mccain was uh championing yes, in terms of election reform and so on so I forget exactly what his reforms were.
Speaker 2:His reforms weren't necessarily the Citizens United. I thought that John McCain's my recollection is that he wanted to put caps on the amount people could give, the amount of people an individual could give total to federal campaigns those types of rules. I'm a believer that somebody should be able to give as much money as they want and a candidate should be able to accept as much money as they want, as long as that money is given to and accepted by the campaign. And then make the politician go out and stand before the electorate and say you know what?
Speaker 2:I took $10 million from Amazon from Walmart whatever million from pick, from amazon, from walmart, whatever, and then the people can decide. But what's happening now is ten dollars goes to this third party group, yeah, this pack, a super pack, and no one and the candidates, I didn't know where this negative mail came from, and oftentimes they don't. Oftentimes they don't know where it came, and at the federal level, they're not allowed to know where it comes from, they're not allowed to coordinate with these third-party groups, and so they have certainly at the federal level, they have this firewall that protects the incumbents from these third-party groups and their campaign unifying themes of what you're describing.
Speaker 1:Is that my description of harris as a rotational series of hypothetical positions, in other words, a kind of disparately connected series of personality islands that she hops to and fro from? Maybe in some way connected to your raising the topic of a disconnected, almost federational political system? Now, where messages are subverted, they're channeled in opaque ways, there are faceless and nameless entities that are promoting and pamphleteering all sorts of messages that have various purposes. Maybe Harris, as a candidate, represented something about this zeitgeist, this behind-the-scenes, vague, diffuse zeitgeist that you're describing.
Speaker 2:My guess is that she probably wasn't experienced enough to know how those things even work, and that's one reason why her team was able to guide her. She spent over a billion dollars in a hundred days. Isn't that wild? A billion dollars, a billion and a half, whatever the number ends up being, and so that's an incredible amount of money, and I'm not complaining about the amount of money that's spent. But those donors need to look and say, wow, that's the other thing. When you had money, go to a political party, there was responsibility for the money, and so you had a chairman of that party. If they spent $10 million on Beyonce, it's one thing to spend $10 million, or however many millions it was on, on talent and you win, but it's a whole nother thing. If you spend that, they can lose. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But everybody nobody cares what you do, as long as you win.
Speaker 1:Trump just has Lee Greenwood again and again at all of his ranks and she's got Beyonce in laws.
Speaker 2:I actually got a chance to meet Lee Greenwood at the national convention.
Speaker 1:So that was a cool kind, was a good meandering. He may have gotten better. I think he has gotten better in terms of how he engages in interviews, but I, by contrast, when I watched Kamala Harris, she made Donald Trump look like a policy wonk. Seeing someone engage in dialogue like her sing songy at times, almost like she's trying to create some kind of momentary, instant reverence for her ascendant righteousness by way of vague and almost semi-spiritual answers we're gonna the way we heal the country is we're going to move on from what has been right. And then she'd just pause and look at the interviewer and the interviewer had just asked a question that requires detail and technicalities and she answers almost in a religious fashion with these vague, strange pauses and intonations. I'd never seen anything like it have you.
Speaker 2:I think she misunderstood the moment and being very charitable, jamie, I respect that.
Speaker 1:I'm reasonable, you are reasonable. What does that mean about? What are you saying about me, right?
Speaker 2:now I'm not saying anything about you. I'm not saying anything about you, I think, two things. One thing you touched on was Susie. We've all heard a little bit about Susie Wiles.
Speaker 2:I had the opportunity to work with Susie Wiles with Governor Rick Scott's first campaign, and the one thing I think people say when they say, wait, what you said was Donald Trump's gotten better and, as much as he still lacks some discipline, he was more disciplined in his messaging and I think that was a great deal due to the guidance of Susie Wiles.
Speaker 2:She did a tremendous job managing this campaign, managing a lot of egos who were on her same level and, like you, don't you go a couple layers down in a presidential campaign and everybody is a personality hard charging, want to win at all costs egos and so she did a great job of balancing all of that, managing up and down, and that's why she was chosen as the first female chief of staff.
Speaker 2:But then to your point about Harris. I think she truly felt that if she could either not speak to the public, like Biden did in 2020, or speak as little as possible, or just that Trump, I think she gambled that Trump would stumble and he did not, and so she never. I don't think she ran a campaign to win, I think she ran a campaign to draw and then she felt like I felt she probably wins the draw but she was seen as a failed candidate and he was seen as a good candidate and in that scenario that was an unwinnable situation for her. And I think your description of her answering a reporter with these platitudes and bumper strip mentality or bumper strip type or meme type, strict mentality or bumper strip type or meme type, I guess now we wouldn't just say bumper strip, we would say oh, she answered so that people could create a meme and so that was like her campaign strategy and it was.
Speaker 1:I didn't strike home you call this a strategy and I'm not. Again, you're being very charitable. I am not sure whether it was a strategy versus a manifest limitation of her as a person. I really wonder whether, by way of a convergence of various factors, she was catapulted into the nomination and, we could say, coronated into the nomination, and no one, including her, knew what to do with her right I, I think you.
Speaker 1:I don't know if they knew how to sell her right she didn't go on joe rogan for three hours like donald trump, because if she did, it would have been the end of her campaign. They knew she had to have known and, by way of defensiveness and her consultants must have known, by way of insight about her, observed that she could not sit down for a free-flowing interview and have a conversation with anybody and I think that those were limitations that the public ended up not being able to, not being willing to live with, and I agree, and so the public.
Speaker 2:I think, like I said, donald troop had to win and she had to lose, but and I think we've described some of what made Donald Trump win and some of what made her lose but she will not be a case study in running a winning campaign and just falling short. Is she coming back? I can't imagine she won't be coronated again. She'll have to come back and earn it and, like you, I don't know that she knows herself well. She has to reintroduce herself to the American people and she did not realize that. She assumed that, because she was vice president, that people knew who she was, knew what she stood for and why she was qualified and she needed to tell Americans all of those things. And in the absence of her telling Americans those things, donald Trump was able to go to a McDonald's window and pass things out of the drive-thru and control the media cycle for 72 hours. And then when Joe Biden, after she has this glorious moment on the looks in Washington DC with the white house, this was her historic photo, right?
Speaker 2:It's on every news to front of every newspaper, every blog, every everything. This was the picture she wanted. And while she's doing that, Joe Biden's calling Trump supporters garbage. And then Trump shows up in a garbage truck.
Speaker 1:See this is. This is such a fascinating behind the scenes picture. Biden's been in politics since 1970s and she goes out in front of the White House and doesn't invite him down. And I think he probably said you want to know what that costs you. Let me show you what that costs you.
Speaker 2:And I wonder the news cycle when there were 144 left. Yeah, that's not. That's not a winning combination.
Speaker 1:I wonder about that garbage comment whether that was him saying, oh yeah, not going to invite me out in front of my own house. Let me show you the political toll that costs you. He's declined, but he's been in politics since the 70s and he's a vicious politician.
Speaker 2:I think the higher echelon of the Democratic Party assumed she would not be able to coalesce the nomination before the convention and she, to her credit, like I said, this was the highlight of her campaign was the first 72 hours where she was able to coalesce and get, and I don't think Joe Biden wanted to endorse her, but then he ended up doing so, I think, within the first 72 hours and she was, and that that was the peak of her campaign. It was I won't say the convention probably was another, but I think it was a peak kind of a slow draw and then the convention brought her back up to that peak and then it was just the air coming out of the balloon all the way to election the way to election and on election day, jamie jill biden, first lady, dr jill biden, wore a full red outfit to go vote, but incredible optics and I can't imagine they were accidental I cannot myself.
Speaker 1:I cannot myself take stock of myself. Take stock of this, listeners, take stock of this. The president of her own party probably voted for Donald Trump If for no other reason than spite and bitterness, and his wife obviously signaled that she's voting or wants people to vote for Donald Trump. This is just profound, is it not? Jamie?
Speaker 2:If it was nothing else, it was a red flag, right?
Speaker 1:I see what you did there. I even thought about that one.
Speaker 2:Sometimes they just rolled off the tongue, I don't even know I did it. But that one it was just sitting there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, good Boy, that blew my mind.
Speaker 2:When I saw Jill Walker, I went and sat up full red outfit and it had to be incredibly confusing to voters, right, not just oh, here at the end, the garbage comment, the timing of it. Joe Biden also stepped on her major national live press conference when she was trying to take credit for ending the dock worker strike and or or prolonging the dock worker strike. I forget exactly what he came out and said then, but he, he had a live press conference or some crazy interview that he did, and when she was walking like almost walking up to the podium for this live thing, it's oh, we're going to cut off to the president of the United States. I'll tell you this little story in 2000. I have one story about James Baker I always love to tell, and it's like that the night they certified the election Now, back then you only had the three TV stations, but you had all these microphones and they had one feed on the podium and so it wasn't. So you had to schedule the podium and the Democrats scheduled the podium from 11 to 1130. And they were trying to figure it out the election was certified at 1058 or whatever for the 11 o'clock news cycle and James Baker is standing there and I had the honor of driving James Baker that night to this event and I'm not sure why I got the honor, but somebody picked me for that.
Speaker 2:So I drive him to this and I like to go look at the YouTube every now and again because as he's walking up, baker, who does not have the podium from until 1130, and he was in his early 70s at the time and I think he just wanted to go to bed I'm like I'm not going to sit from until 1130. And he was in his early 70s at the time and I think he just wanted to go to bed. I'm like I'm not going to sit around for this. So he walks up to the podium and there's some Democrat staffer just saying no, the podium's not yours.
Speaker 2:And if you ever look at that, he does one of these and winks and he starts talking into the microphone and it's like I'm the former secretary of education and so I'm the former secretary of education. I'm not. I don't know who you are, but you're not keeping me from walking to this podium and it's very similar to Joe Biden. Of course, the press is going to say three weeks of confusing messages, and Harris didn't help herself by having a cohesive message or telling people what she was going to do, or who she was, when she says you're different than Biden.
Speaker 2:We know you're different than Biden. You're going to do something different. You had to disagree with him at some point.
Speaker 1:We know you're different than Biden. You're going to do something different. You had to disagree with him at some point. She can't claim that the past four years have you're better off for them and simultaneously differentiate herself. We haven't even gotten into Tim Walz. Maybe we can dedicate a few minutes to him, we'll see. But there was a social media ball or fundraiser for Kamala Harris in Chicago probably a month before the campaign, and I missed my invite. Yeah, you need to get on that next time. The most they could come up with in order to reflect who she was a cascading series of images of Doritos because she likes Doritos.
Speaker 1:That's it, yeah that's it was the Dorito eater campaign. She likes Doritos and not much else. To be frank, it was just techno music and a bunch of people who for some reason were excited about the campaign, and then an acknowledgement that she likes Doritos.
Speaker 2:And then she adds Go ahead of saying I'm a minority, I'm a woman, I'm not Trump, and she coalesced almost a majority of Americans to vote for her for those three reasons. But if you want to be intellectually honest with people, nobody else voted for her for any other reason. I take that back. Educated white women college educated white women may have voted for her on the abortion issue.
Speaker 1:But not in numbers that she needed. If you look at those block numbers, they did not turn out for her and you were close to what pre-polling data showed they would. Post-polling data showed that they were not even in the neighborhood of where they said they were going to be.
Speaker 2:And Donald Trump expanded the electorate for himself in every other demographic. Now, he didn't win every other demographic, but he won white women overall. You have to slice out the college educated white women to say, oh, kamala Harris, she grew that percentage by 2% over Joe Biden In Georgia. It is the number I like to use. With African-American men, trump grew his percentage from 10 to 23%. Hispanics he grew whether you want to bring that into Hispanics or South Americans, central Americans, cubans, mexicans, puerto Ricans. He grew his percentage in every single category of those demographics. And so there was a major flaw within the Harris campaign of not recognizing that she had to be different than Joe Biden. She had to say something like hey, I was behind the scenes saying X about energy policy was going to be inflationary and I was right about it.
Speaker 1:But she was so glad. Yeah, I'm so glad she didn't have the guts to do that. She didn't have the guts. You say guts, I say self. I don't. I'm so glad you went. She didn't have the guts to do it. She didn't have the guts. You say guts, I say self.
Speaker 1:I don't think there was any material there. I'm not surprised that people showed up in numbers like they did for Trump, especially amongst the voting blocks that you just described. They did two homes on my own and when I wired up my first house in Oregon, electrical wire cost $45 for about a 50-foot spool, 14-gauge Romex wire. It's $130 now for the same spool of wire. And you can't tell an electrician, a plumber, other types of journeymen who have to load up their truck with, they have to capitalize their truck basically every time they head out for a job. You can't tell them that your plan for improving their economic outlook is to create an opportunity culture, an opportunity economy. That's what she said. And then, when asked what that means, there was no description. It was just another series of vague, platitudinal answers, like it's going to be. I can't even repeat it. It was just vague farts in the wind.
Speaker 1:And at least with Donald Trump, there is some reasonable reliability and some sort of basis as to what he's going to do. He could answer I'm going to bring down the cost of fossil fuels. That's going to reduce the price of almost everything, because everything has to go from one place to another. That at least is a cohesive answer. Whether you like that answer or not remains to be seen for some people. But people could hear that and say oh yes, knee bone connects to the hip bone and through the femur. Nothing she said on economic grounds made any sense and I think people were looking going lady Romex wire costs me three times what it once did. My margins on an electrical job aren't adding up. I don't care if you have some sort of vague, cloudy answer about a utopian future. Nothing you're saying makes any sense and those blocks yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 2:The mistakes she made during the excitement period, the optics of them changing Joe Biden's policies and just putting Harris's logo on them, for instance, not changing a word and just saying, oh, here's her website, here's her platform, here's what she's going to do and not change anything. That's to me and, I'll be honest, that's not what I've encountered in any with any Republican woman I've ever worked with ever. They almost get in too much detail. I had to pull back. Hey, listen, let's tell us the high points, let us take it from there.
Speaker 2:And oftentimes I always have one in particular. I would say, oh, she got really thick into thin things, but but she, she got really thick into thin things, but she would micromanage those things, and it seemed like Karis was that kind of person, but that for some reason, like you said, the self, like her self-awareness she did not feel confident running for this office enough to take charge of her own campaign, and I don't think she ever did take charge of her own campaign and I don't think she ever did take charge of her own campaign, and so I don't think she has a defining ethos.
Speaker 1:There's no ethos because there's no serious, secure sense of self. I think she's a diffuse entity and I just want to follow up a bit on the blue collar strain there. The the one general position that Harris and most modern Democrats take obviously is I'm going to improve the economy and your quality of life by taking money from others who we deem as bad and rich and all the rest, and then giving you that money in these ways that I think would help you. That's not going to work amongst the blue collar demographics that you just described, especially the Hispanic voting blocs, because they're excessively not excessively. They're very entrepreneurial. They don't want you giving them entitlements, they want to make money themselves. So the message just was completely deadened for people, especially at a time where we're in a recession and people, especially entrepreneurial, hardworking people, are saying I don't want you to give me money or things, I want to make it myself.
Speaker 2:One of the things that Democrats, I think don't, I think that they're just a little tone deaf on, is when they start talking about things like inheritance. We're about to have the largest transfer you hear it all the time Largest transfer of wealth in the history of the world from baby boomers to the next generation when they pass. And so now Democrats are like oh, we need inheritance tax because there's too many rich people. My parents aren't rich. My dad was a minister, my mom was a social worker, but yet they would fall under inheritance tax because they saved all their life and invested well, and that's post-tax money.
Speaker 2:That's post-tax money and so they're not. You know, and you look at blue collar folks. You know, I don't know if you know this about my background, but the first 12 years of my adult life I worked for an electric utility with my name settled on my shirt and work my way back through college that way and then, and so we had. So I think they totally misunderstand that. No, people don't want someone else's money if I don't want my money taken from me. We all realize that, hey, my tax dollars should go help victims of the wildfire, just like your tax dollars should have gone to help victims in Asheville, north Carolina, or Cherry Chimney Rock, north Carolina, where they were impacted by floods through no fault of their own right, through no fault of their own. We as Americans collectively decide we're going to help our fellow Americans when they of their own and we as Americans collectively decide we're going to help our fellow Americans when they're in need and we're willing to be taxed for that. But are we willing to be taxed so that federal government can say that I can only have an electric vehicle?
Speaker 2:When in Florida you look at if you have to evacuate Miami-Dade, broward and Palm Beach counties, fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach. You have to evacuate a state the size of Maryland, which is the 10th largest state in the union, and if you had a hundred percent electric vehicles, they'd get all the way to Disney World. They get to Disney World before you have to charge in central Florida, before you have to charge millions and millions of cars, and then you can get them almost to Savannah, probably still in the wake of the in the cone of the storm, before they have to get charged again. And so you have to have two or three of these charging stations and there's just no there's no disaster plan for that.
Speaker 2:They have. The disaster plan is not for them.
Speaker 1:We don't have these big army trucks full of batteries to you are talking about a utopian, fantasy position, which I think the Democrats have been taking over the last two decades, versus a pragmatism standpoint trump certainly embodies. The republican party has not always embodied that, I think it's fair to say, especially over the last two decades, but trump has, I think, embodied a pragmatism ethos. So there was fantasy world uh, move on from what has been, um, green everything, even though we don't have the ability to power that by far. We're also anti-nuclear, which is insane. The world is driving around pretending that we're virtuous by driving electric vehicles, meanwhile saying we're going to burn coal to do it. No to nuclear, the only safe option. And people like Gavin Newsom remember this. In 2000, signed into law that we're going to have all electric EVs and new production in california by 2030. He then marched it back to 2035 and then two weeks later said don't plug your cars into the grid because it's not equipped to handle it and you know.
Speaker 2:So two things. One is we we have to create 30% more electricity in about five years, for AI alone, for artificial intelligence alone 30% more electricity is going to be consumed.
Speaker 2:I think it's within five years. So our grid's not even prepared for AI. And then, simultaneously, we're going to move from 10% or 15% electric vehicles probably in five years if the mandate was still in place to 60 percent, like a grit, without going to nuclear. It's just not possible. And then, secondly, I read this on twitter, so take it for what it's worth, that california was testing the emissions of fire vehicles coming to help from oregon.
Speaker 1:No way before they would allow them to come into the state, we gotta look into that one If that needs to go on Libs of TikTok or something like that.
Speaker 2:That's true, I did see, I did. It was a person who's my brother's a firefighter and he got his fire truck got turned around because the emissions were too high.
Speaker 1:That sounds crazy, even for California. But if it's, true.
Speaker 2:And I'm not saying it is true, I'm just saying that I read it on Twitter. But if something like that is true and I read it this morning on Twitter, so I haven't had a chance to verify If something like that is true, that is bizarre.
Speaker 1:Welcome to California, our D.
Speaker 2:Are they going to say you have to meet the standards next, or oh, there's too many white firefighters or too many male firefighters. We can't, we can't.
Speaker 1:Jamie, Jamie, this is perfect. I released an episode yesterday on this very topic. The assistant director of LAFD actually said yes, it's important that when firefighters show up to your house, that they look like you. Yes, she said that I don't listen.
Speaker 2:I'm not somebody who wants to. I believe that to stop racism in our country, our government must stop asking us to define our risks and as long as our government defines us by race and makes financial decisions based, or college admissions or grants or anything else based upon race, that we're going to have racism. Because our government demands racism right, our government is racist. And as long as our government is asking our race, there's going to be racism. The only way to solve it is for our government to stop asking and stop categorizing. Oh, we're giving away this with. 51% of small business administration loans go to women or African-Americans or whatever. We need to stop collecting and reporting that data if you're qualified.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You're talking about that evil word called meritocracy and the old way of doing things, this ancient individual called MLK Jr, who apparently had a few things of value to say.
Speaker 2:MLK Jr, who apparently had a few things of value to say. In Florida we solved this, especially the college admissions issue, by saying the top 10 percent I don't know if that's exaggerated the top 10 percent of every high school gets accepted to a college in Florida and we know that. Just that, while our schools are segregated, some have a higher percentage of African-Americans or Hispanics or whatever than whites. And you solve that problem by not saying, oh, we're doing this, no, we're going to solve it by hey, even if you are stuck in an F school and we grade our schools here if you're stuck in an F school, still 10%. If you've reached the highest 10% of that school, you have the opportunity to go to college in Florida. And it's not based on race, it's based upon hey, if you're in the top 10%, you're in the top 10%. It now becomes a math Period.
Speaker 1:As we draw to a close here, it's possible that you are saying and I agree with you that America has woke for want of a better term and DEI fatigue, that we've just really we've had it. We're exhausted with it. Everybody is, and especially at a time where we have crested into a recession. It is not important.
Speaker 2:It's a hindrance and to the extent that the Harris campaign tried to fuel itself with these very embers, they found that they had already been extinguished. Is that fair to say that we've entered a recession? Probably at the end of July, about the same time Harris not because Harris was announced as the nominee, but about the same time she was announced as the nominee. And I'm trying to remember the economic method I think it's the RUM method that the RUMs and it's also the inverted yield curve which is, I think, even more predictive.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's. I use the. It's funny because I brought up Lichtman and he his bias said that Harris was going to win. Rahm said that, oh, his method no longer works to predict a recession, when it obviously predicted a recession started in July. And so it's. Those folks are, who are alive and have come up with these brilliant ideas, turned against their own ideas because of politics, which really seems sad to me from an academic standpoint.
Speaker 1:Completely agreed. Jamie Miller, the author of Reasonable Arguments linked below and political consultant, extraordinary and just all around good guy, thanks for coming on.
Speaker 2:I appreciate it. Hey, it was my pleasure. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate the call back. To be asked back is really special. Thank you, let's do it again. I'd love to.
