An Early Morning Piece

John Heilmann’s Impolitic newsletter over at Puck News is always worth a read, even when it’s not. Which is like never. Here’s a gem from this weeks lead-up:

“The question is how long Vance’s turn in the barrel will last, and whether Trump — who you just know privately agrees that Vance is weird as hell — will eventually drop him like a hot, hairy rock. In a normal election, the answer would be: like it or not, Trump will stick with Vance; dumping a running mate not long after choosing him would be sheer madness. But this is 2024, when the only rule of thumb is that any eventuality that appears implausible, inconceivable, or downright impossible is a lead-pipe certainty to occur. And if that logic holds, we may soon be hearing Trump spouting his most famous catchphrase — “J.D., you’re fired” — followed by a P.A. system somewhere ringing out, “Governor Burgum, white courtesy phone!””

John, ever hear the name Thomas Eagleton? Or Sargent Shriver?

The Harris Honeymoon & Team K’s Quest to Make It Last

The first week of Kamala Harris’s wholly unexpected, wildly unlikely stint as the de facto Democratic nominee was more smashingly successful than she or her team could have dared to hope or the political class expected. Now comes the hard part.

The first week of Kamala Harris’s campaign for the presidency is difficult to describe in a way that does it justice, but also doesn’t appear to be an exercise in partisan hyperbole, gratuitous puffery, or hallucinogenic experimentation gone haywire. The if-you-put-them-in-a-screenplay-you’d-be-laughed-out-of-Hollywood circumstances that conspired to make Harris the de facto Democratic nominee this late in the game are one source of this difficulty. (Duh.) But even more bedeviling is the reality that in the seven days since her wholly unanticipated, entirely unplanned-for, wildly unlikely ascension to the top of the ticket, the V.P.’s nascent campaign hasn’t seen a single meaningful thing go wrong: not one tiny hiccup, modest slip-up, or mid-sized screw-up, let alone some major fuckup. Indeed, on almost every dimension, Harris’s first week went better — and in certain critically important areas, way better — than she or her team could have dared to hope or anyone else in professional politics had reason to envision.

Among the Harris skeptics or critics who abound in Washington, the low expectations that greeted her fledgling candidacy were rooted in their dim assessments of her stint as V.P…