More Pronounced With the Brothers

Kamala Harris thinks she’s in trouble with black men and has proceeded to pander accordingly. She called in the heavy reinforcements—former President Barack Obama—to vouch for her in Pittsburgh, where he said that distaste for Kamala Harris “seems to be more pronounced with the brothers,” which he attributed to sexism.

He doubled down later, when giving remarks at her campaign headquarters: “Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that,” said Obama, seemingly unable to imagine other reasons for opposing Harris.

“Recent polling from CBS News and the New York Times/Siena Poll suggests that, though the vice president is winning the majority of Black men, she is so far well behind the kinds of numbers the party drew in 2020 and 2016,” reports Politico. “The latter survey, which included an oversample of Black voters, found the support for Harris drew just 78 percent support—in past elections, Democrats have drawn 90 percent of Black voters.”

Team Harris is freaking out. They released a set of policy planks aimed at this demographic group—called the “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men“—which will “provid[e] 1 million loans that are fully forgivable to Black entrepreneurs and others to start a business.” The others is kind of a hilarious addition, because it’s obviously legally dubious to provide loans only to one demographic group, for being part of that demographic group, so this program will absolutely have to include other people as well, as it should.

Harris also says she’ll take care of black men by…legalizing weed and protecting their crypto assets, though it’s unclear what type of regulatory framework she favors or how the federal government will pull that off. (I did not realize liking weed and crypto was especially characteristic of black dudes.)

Kamala falling in the polls and doubling down on touting the endorsement of Dick Cheney and crypto/weed for black men? It’s like a parody of how a DC Dem sees voters.

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) October 15, 2024

All of it comes together to paint a bit of a dim portrait of black men. The thing that will alleviate crime and poverty in mostly black neighborhoods is…free market capitalism and being treated equally under the law and enforcing laws against violent crime and scaling back the misguided war on drugs. None of this is represented by Harris’ policy approach detailed here, which reads as pointless at best, condescending at worst.

But, again, Harris is pretty clearly in panic mode and trying to shore up support. In Detroit, she went on Charlamagne tha God’s show, ”The Breakfast Club,” co-hosting a town hall with him.

“This is a margin-of-error race,” she said at the beginning of the interview. “It’s tight. I’m gonna win. I’m gonna win, but it’s tight.”

At one point, Charlamagne suggested that Donald Trump’s approach should be called fascism, asking, “Why can’t we just say it?”

“Yeah, we can say that,” replied Harris.

Oh sweet Charlamagne. Where have you been? There are entire media personalities who have not stopped saying that for the last almost decade. There are journalists who mutter that in their sleep. It’s not unsayable; you’re late to the punch.

But the apocalypticism didn’t stop there. “Donald Trump spent four years making Black men’s lives harder,” said Harris in her policy paper. “On his watch, millions of Black men lost their jobs, thousands closed their businesses, and hundreds of thousands lost their health insurance. As thousands of Black men lost their lives to COVID-19, Donald Trump denied the severity of the crisis and made millions more unsafe. Crime in Black neighborhoods soared while Donald Trump tried to cut funding for public safety and made Black communities less secure.”

It’s not clear to me that slamming Trump for his COVID record—when Democrats are broadly seen as those who kept businesses closed, and people shut in their houses—is a winning tack to take, nor will it work to claim he’s soft on crime. It seems like Harris is throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks with this particular group and I’m not sure it’ll be persuasive.

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Scenes from New York: There’s news circulating this week about the Park Slope Food Co-op’s founder retiring. Here’s a Kennedy gem from the archives that deals with the cringe grocery store’s denizens.

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QUICK HITS

• The BBC reports that six people, including the mayor, have been killed by Israeli air strikes in Nabatieh, a city in southern Lebanon.

• “The Harris campaign’s tacit acknowledgment that America is a center-right country is evidence of a conclusion the Left bitterly resents and has argued against for years,” writes National Review‘s Noah Rothman.

• This is hilarious. Donald Trump just straight-up hosted a listening session instead of a town hall, playing, at one point, Sinead O’Connor.

Me after 5 light beers on a warm summer evening pic.twitter.com/15ODRkCieQ

— zerobeta (@zerobeta) October 15, 2024

• “The Chinese warplanes, deployed in record numbers, crossed an informal boundary between China and Taiwan. Chinese Coast Guard boats joined naval ships in encircling Taiwan. Fighter jets took off from an aircraft carrier parked off the island’s east coast. The large-scale military drills China held this week were aimed at demonstrating its potential to choke Taiwan’s access to food and fuel and block the skies and waters from which the United States and its allies would presumably approach in coming to the island’s defense,” reports The New York Times. “The exercises showed how China was improving its coordination of complex operations involving a range of military, coast guard and rocket forces. They also raise the risk of a confrontation or accident that could draw in the United States and its Asian allies.”

• Canings?

I just want what LKY did but for San Francisco

This can be the greatest most prosperous city in the world pic.twitter.com/54MfuJHi51

— Garry Tan (@garrytan) October 16, 2024

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Source: https://reason.com/2024/10/16/more-pronounced-with-the-brothers/