The Plan

Thank you to Susan Zakin and the ever-excellent Journal of the Plague Years for republishing my essay on anxiety and aging under the title “Uncovering the Mirror.” While we’re talking about the Journal, check out Susan’s remembrance of our mutual friend and journalist Walter Shapiro, who died recently, “The Seer Departs.”

***

When the story is told about how Kamala Harris was able to so quickly and easily secure the Democratic Party’s nomination for President, I suspect it will also answer the question of what she was so quietly up to during in the last three-and-a-half years as Vice-President.

And that story, when it’s told, will be about building a network of relationships with power brokers and organizers around the country who could — when the time was right —help her do exactly what she has done.

Serving under an elderly President who had suggested that he would be satisfied with one term in office and would therefore serve as a bridge to the next generation of leadership, it was obvious that her opportunity would come around sooner or later.

And although she could not be sure about when exactly he would step aside, she had to notice that his health and stamina was declining earlier this year, so her discreet efforts to activate her network no doubt picked up in the weeks prior to his withdrawal from the ticket.

When he finally did withdraw and endorsed her, she sprang into action with amazing efficiency, reportedly making ten straight hours of phone calls. By that evening, she had landed enough major endorsements and triggered actions including the series of zoom calls and fundraisers that effectively wrapped up her ascension to the top of the ticket.

So who exactly were all those phone calls to? Relatively few of the 50* or so names have come to light so far, but their identities are key to this story. I, for one, look forward to reading it.

* I’m guessing the number. Do the math. Five minutes per call. She wasn’t introducing herself. She was implementing a plan.

HEADLINES:

• Harris officially makes history as first Black woman, Asian American presidential nominee (USA Today)

• Harris and Trump are tied in 538's new polling averages (ABC)

• J.D. Vance Is Swallowing Any Pride He Might Have Had (New York)

• Will Trump dump Vance? (The Hill)

• US border migrant crossings fall for fifth month in a row (BBC)

• Tech stocks plunge as Nasdaq enters correction territory (WP)

• Hamas political chief buried in Qatar as Iran vows retaliation (CNN)

• $10M cash withdrawal drove secret probe into whether Trump took money from Egypt (WP)

• US recognizes opposition candidate González as the winner of Venezuela’s presidential election (AP)

• U.S. Sues TikTok Over Child Privacy Violations (NYT)

• New jobs numbers raise alarm bells on recession risk (Axios)

• Wildfires are raging through Colorado’s densely populated Front Range. Four fires have killed one person and prompted hundreds of evacuations. (WP)

• How Simone Biles and Team U.S.A. Gymnastics Came Soaring Back (New Yorker)

• Google pulls Gemini AI ad from Olympics after backlash (Verge)

• The Generative-AI Revolution May Be a Bubble (Atlantic)

• Report: Greatest Factor In Employee Retention Boss Sending Out End-Of-Year Note Titled ‘Thanks Team’ (The Onion)

 

Friday's Links

HEADLINES:

• Russia-U.S. exchange is the largest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War. (WSJ)

• 3 newly freed Americans are back on US soil after a landmark prisoner exchange with Russia (AP)

• Evan Gershkovich lived his journalism dream before his nightmare began (WP)

• Harris campaign says it raised $310 million in July, doubling Trump’s haul (CNN)

• What Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand About Race in America (Politico Mag)

• The 1970s Berkeley Black cultural center that shaped Kamala Harris’ political imagination (Slate/Berkeleyside)

• How will Kamala Harris' presidential bid figure in to legislative and state races? (NPR)

• What polling shows about the top VP contenders for Kamala Harris (AP)

• JD Vance’s policies for parents are even more sinister beneath the surface (MSNBC)

• Why Are So Many Americans Choosing to Not Have Children? (NYT)

• JD Vance Called Democrats a “Childless Cabal,” But We Did the Math (Mother Jones)

• How Trump’s Ideas Could Seriously Mess With Your Financial Life (NYT)

• After Years of Raising Prices, Food Companies Hit Consumers’ Limits (WSJ)

• The Michigan Supreme Court has shot down an effort by Republican lawmakers to weaken minimum wage and paid leave laws that voters were set to pass by ballot initiative six years ago. The “adopt and amend" maneuver used by Republicans thwarted the will of the people, the court found. [HuffPost]

• For Iran and Hezbollah, calibrating response to Israeli strikes leaves no room for error (AP)

• The Tehran assassination has changed the game (ABC)

• Security forces fire tear gas as anti-government protests break out across Nigeria (AP)

• To preserve their work — and drafts of history — journalists take archiving into their own hands (Nieman)

• In world first, EU's sweeping AI law enters into force (AFP)

• AI has a climate problem — but so does all of tech (Verge)

• Mark Zuckerberg has brilliantly cornered us (Business Insider)

  Frightened Olympic Divers Still Unable To Desynchronize Movements Days After Event (The Onion)

• Frightened Olympic Divers Still Unable To Desynchronize Movements Days After Event (The Onion)

'Lock Them Up'

“It was one of the greatest errors in evaluating dictatorship to say that the dictator forces himself on society against its own will. In reality, every dictator in history was nothing but the accentuation of already existing state ideas which he had only to exaggerate in order to gain power.”
― Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

One riveting yet fraught moment in what has become Kamala Harris’s new stump speech comes when she portrays herself as a prosecutor going after her rival, Donald Trump, a felon.

This drives her followers into a virtual frenzy as they begin loudly chanting “Lock him up!” It is, of course, a rejoinder to Trump’s crowds’ chilling chants about his political rivals.

And it would be fair say Trump is finally getting a taste of his own medicine.

Still, there is a darker side to all this. So far, there is a subtle but important difference in how the rival candidates react when their followers start those chants. Trump encourages them, joins in and nods approvingly, clapping in rhythm; whereas Harris looks uncomfortable, smiles awkwardly and seems hesitant to embrace the potentially ugly mass sentiment she has tapped into.

The negative aspects of mass psychology set loose by a populist demagogue are not so easily squeezed back into the bottle once they have been uncorked; we know that from history. And there is more than one scenario for how everything could go terribly wrong here.

Trump’s blunt threat that if elected he intends to be a “dictator on day one” is only the most obvious one currently. 

Bolstered by the Supreme Court’s sweeping decision granting presidential immunity, future Commander-in-Chiefs may feel emboldened and justified to implement anti-democratic measures in a moment of crisis, say, after an assassination attempt or another January 6th-style insurrection. Under extreme circumstances, and freed from the traditional restraints, who knows what actions the occupant of that office might take?

What I am suggesting is that the fate of our democracy going forward may partly hinge on what our next president chooses not to do with all of that new power as opposed to what he or she actually does.

For now, for a harbinger of what may be to come, keep a close watch on how our would-be leaders react to those madly chanting crowds. 

And ask not for whom the mobs chant. They are chanting for you.

HEADLINES:

• Russia agrees to free Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan in multi-country prisoner swap (ABC)

• How two strikes on militant leaders in the Middle East could escalate into a regional war (AP)

• Fed opts to hold interest rates steady — but a cut could be coming in September (CNN)

• About 8 in 10 Democrats are satisfied with Harris in stark shift after Biden drops out: AP-NORC poll (AP)

• Harris wipes out Trump’s lead in polls of US presidential race (Al Jazeera)

• Kamala Harris Carves Open Huge Polling Lead Over Donald Trump (Newsweek)

• School taught JD Vance to see a divided nation — and to use that division (WP)

• Republican senators divided over Trump sticking with Vance (The Hill)

• Trump says Harris ‘became a Black person’ as NABJ event turns hostile, chaotic (WP)

• Trump falsely questions Harris’ race as he appears at gathering of Black journalists (AP)

• Trump’s outreach to Black men hits a stumbling block: Kamala Harris (WP)

• The Haves and Have-Nots at the Center of America’s Inflation Fight (WSJ)

• US-Mexico border arrests are expected to drop 30% in July to a new low for Biden’s presidency (AP)

• Protesters took to the streets across Venezuela, demanding that President Nicolas Maduro acknowledge he lost Sunday's election to the opposition, as a major international observer concluded the vote was undemocratic. (Reuters)

• Wildfire smoke is probably harming your brain (NBC)

• After Furious Battles, Ukraine Loses a Pair of Hard-Won Villages (NYT)

• Cars Are Rolling Computers Now. So What Happens When They Stop Getting Updates? (Wired)

• 3,500-year-old tablet in Turkey turns out to be a shopping list (LiveScience)

• Senators Introduce Long-Awaited Bill to Protect Artists From AI Deepfakes (Rolling Stone)

• Terrified Conservative Planning To Move To 1930s Austria If Trump Loses (The Onion)

 

Anxiety and Age

Overlooked during the non-stop coverage of the Harris-Trump race, Joe Biden gave an impressive speech the other day at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas. His delivery was flawless, without any embarrassing slips or gaffes.

When he was nearing the end of his prepared remarks, he paused the teleprompter and went off-script for an extended remembrance of his early political career, clearly in a nostalgic mood. Although he was improvising, he didn’t lose his train of thought or become confused.

Watching this, I was struck by the sharp contrast between this speech and his disastrous debate performance six weeks earlier. What might account for the difference?

***

Five years ago, I was diagnosed with “Parkinsonism.” A number of medical experts explained to me that it was not Parkinson’s Disease, but a diagnosis based on the shaking in my left arm.

The treatment for this tremor, a medication with the pleasingly poetic name of Carbidopa Levodopa, usually seems to keep the shaking to a minimum.

But recently I’ve been paying much closer attention to when the tremor appears and when it seems to be at its worst, and by doing so I’ve noticed another pattern. Whether or not I’ve taken my pills recently, if I am feeling at all anxious, the tremor gets worse.

During my first 75 years I never thought much about anxiety and certainly didn’t think it was one of the issues that might be affecting my health. Other people, perhaps, but not me. I’d held numerous high-stress jobs and given speeches all over the world, including before Congress and the UN, and I prided myself for staying calm in those moments.

But earlier this spring, my healthcare providers suggested that anxiety might be a contributing factor to my current health problems including an increase in the shaking. They added that anxiety’s effects often worsen with age. 

***

Based on my experience, I’ve come up with my own theory to explain the disparity between Biden’s awful debate performance and his relaxed performance at the LBJ Library, and that is the differing amounts of anxiety he was under on the two occasions.

If my understanding from my caregivers is correct that the effects of anxiety grow worse as part of the aging process, something that used to be routine for Biden, like a debate, could suddenly become extremely daunting.

It’s just a theory, but maybe in the extreme anxiety of the moment of the debate, Biden’s 81-year-old body did him in. We will never know, I suppose, but such are the musings of one older man watching another struggle on what was obviously a very bad night.

HEADLINES:

• Hamas’s political chief Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran (Al Jazeera)

• Israel says its Beirut strike killed Hezbollah’s top military commander, who it blames for Golan Heights attack (CNN)

• Britain urges its citizens to leave Lebanon, warning of rapid deterioration risk (Reuters)

• At boisterous Georgia rally, Harris dares Trump to ‘say it to my face’ and show up for their debate (AP)

• What’s happening in Venezuela? Election turmoil, protests and fraud claims (Al Jazeera)

• US calls on Venezuelan government to release specific data on election (CNN)

• Trump vs. Harris is dividing Silicon Valley into feuding political camps (WP)

• GOPers Finally Admit It: J.D. Vance’s Weirdness Is a Fiasco for Trump (TNR)

• The White Dudes for Harris initiative raised more than $4 million for Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential run with a livestream on Monday night. Prominent Democrats, activists, union leaders and Hollywood stars, including Mark Ruffalo and Jeff Bridges, turned out. [HuffPost]

• Trump rally gunman stopped firing after local officer shot at him (WP)

• In many ways, a world built for cars has made life so much harder for grown-ups. (Atlantic)

• Massive California Wildfire Signals Grim Outlook for 2024 (Bloomberg)

• Heat Waves And Wildfires Give Urgency To The Fight To Cut Methane (Forbes)

• The Taliban say they no longer recognize Afghan diplomatic missions set up by the former government (AP)

• Why Global Investors Are Watching What Japan Does Next (NYT)

• OpenAI starts rolling out its Her-like voice mode for ChatGPT (Verge)

• Artificial Intelligence Gives Weather Forecasters a New Edge (NYT)

• Federal investigator Terrance Jepson noted that gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks also appeared to have bookmarked WikiHow pages like “10 Steps To Transform Yourself Into An Inscrutable Paradox.” (The Onion)

Math's Moment

Imagine that it was your job to advise a candidate for president on the following matters:

• Which potential running mate would help their ticket in battleground states?

• What issues and lines of attack should the ticket emphasize?

• In which media markets and on which platforms should they run campaign ads?

Knowing there will be a constant flow of questions like these in the weeks ahead, you have a team of data scientists at your side to help determine the best answers to give your candidate.

The data team runs multi-variable analyses factoring in the demographic trends, party registration, poll data, focus group results, media coverage, local endorsements, recent news events, and various other elements in order to come up with recommendations.

Meanwhile, the election news cycle changes on a daily, even an hourly basis. Something that seemed to be a given yesterday may be irrelevant by tomorrow.

No, it would not be an easy job. But the future of the country may depend partially on how well you do it. And to think that you wondered as a kid, “How will math matter when I’m a grownup?”

HEADLINES:

• Both Venezuela strongman Nicolas Maduro and opposition claim election win, as US voices ‘serious concerns’ (CNN)

• Biden proposed term limits for the Supreme Court. How that might work (AP)

• Harris has super-charged Democratic hopes of taking the House (WP)

• Trump marginally ahead of Harris in US national polls, but Harris improves from Biden’s polls (The Conversation)

• Trump Loses It Over Devastating Fox News Poll on Kamala Harris (TNR)

• How a Trump victory would change the world economy (Financial Times)

• How Kamala Harris took control of the Democratic Party (WP)

• The $600 Billion Digital Ad Business Is Hanging on a Few Words From Google (WSJ)

• Gunman at Trump Rally Was Often a Step Ahead of the Secret Service (NYT)

• Trump assassination attempt: Texts reveal officers were aware of Thomas Crooks 90 minutes before shooting (Fox)

• Chimpanzees have similar conversational habits to humans. But the way they take turns with gestures may help strengthen their social bonds — much like we do. (WP)

• US solar production soars by 25 percent in just one year (Ars Technica)

• Simone Biles made a stunning return to the Olympics — The gymnast advanced to the all-around final in Paris (WP)

• OpenAI Fires Shot at Google With AI-Powered ‘SearchGPT’ (PYMNTS)

• A.I. is getting good at math — and might soon make a worthy collaborator for humans. (NYT)

• Team USA’s Arrival In France Leaves American Basketball Rims Largely Unguarded (The Onion)

 

Supreme Reforms

 What could a lame duck President do that would be a gift to all Americans? Lead the effort to reform the Supreme Court. Biden has come up with three recommendations for reforms:

• No Immunity for Crimes a Former President Committed in Office

• Term Limits for Supreme Court Justices

• Binding Code of Conduct for the Supreme Court

In its statement, the White House noted that “President Biden believes that no one—neither the President nor the Supreme Court—is above the law.”

Congress would have to agree for these changes to be enacted but this is a first step. If we had leaders truly committed to bipartisanship, this would be passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law.

HEADLINES:

• President Biden Announces Bold Plan to Reform the Supreme Court and Ensure No President Is Above the Law (White House)

• U.S. in "continuous discussions" with Israel, Lebanon after rocket attack (CBS)

• US blames Hezbollah for Golan Heights attack, says it doesn't want escalation (Reuters)

• Harris and Trump grapple with a transformed race for the White House (WP)

• Harris raised $200M in first week of White House campaign and signed up 170,000 volunteers (AP)

• What Kamala Harris Needs to Win the Presidency (New Yorker)

• ‘Just Plain Weird’: Harris Embraces a New Label for Trump (Time)

• Who’s Afraid of Project 2025? (WSJ)

• Vance continues to feel the scratch of "childless cat ladies" (Axios)

• Inside the powerful Peter Thiel network that anointed JD Vance (WP)

• New Poll Shows Kamala Harris’ Growing Appeal Among Voters (Forbes)

• Wind, Temperatures Pick Up As Fire Scorches Northern California (Barron’s)

• US Farmers Want to Adapt to Climate Change, But Crop Insurance Won’t Let Them (Bloomberg)

• A rock in a hard place (Economist)

• Alzheimer’s blood test catches 90% of early dementia cases, study finds (CNN)

• Generative AI requires massive amounts of power and water, and the aging U.S. grid can’t handle the load (CNBC)

• What could kill the $1trn artificial-intelligence boom? (Economist)

• AI could force 12 million workers to switch jobs in coming years, causing unprecedented competition (Business Insider)

• Dairy Queen Fires Employee Who Discovered Blizzard Machine Gained Sentience (The Onion)

Electoral Math

It’s been quite a week for Kamala Harris. Polls indicate that she has already pulled even with Donald Trump nationally with about 100 days to go until the election.

Of course, winning the popular vote doesn’t determine who becomes president — that is a matter of which candidate wins the most electoral votes. And when it comes to the Electoral College, the legacy system we’ve inherited currently favors Republicans. 

But the national polls matter. Based on past elections, in order to prevail in the electoral vote count, the Democratic candidate needs to win the popular vote by a healthy margin. In 2020, for example, Joe Biden had 7 million more popular votes thanTrump nationally — a margin of 4.5 percent. 

Even if Harris can do that, she likely won’t be elected president unless she wins most of the six key battleground states. 

The state polls to keep a close eye on in the coming weeks and months are in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. You can maybe add North Carolina to that list. Everything else seems pretty much a wash.

The good news for Democrats is the latest polls already show Harris in a dead heat with Trump in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

HEADLINES:

• Harris Erases Trump’s Lead, WSJ Poll Finds (WSJ)

• Trump Tells Christians ‘You Won’t Have to Vote Anymore’ If He’s Elected (NYT)

• Kamala Harris Isn’t Going Back (New Yorker)

• The polls send a clear message about Kamala Harris. But that’s not the full story. (MSNBC)

• Harris campaign reports record-breaking volunteer surge in key swing states (Axios)

• Could Kamala Harris Be a Trump-Level Cultural Phenomenon (New Yorker)

• Usha Vance told friends Trump appalled her. Now she’s working to elect him. (WP)

• Some House Republicans slam Vance as Trump’s VP pick: ‘The worst choice’ (The Hill)

• Firefighters get some help from cooler temperatures after California’s largest wildfire explodes (AP)

• Oregon wildfire explodes to half the size of Rhode Island (Reuters)

• Olympic Ceremonies on the Seine were a daring feat. Paris stuck the landing. (WP)

• Olympics begin with rain, Seine and train pain (Reuters)

• How the U.S. Captured One of Mexico’s Biggest Drug Lords (NYT)

• At least 30 dead in Gaza school airstrike, Israel says targeted militants (Reuters)

• A rocket hit Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, after Israel struck a Gaza school (NPR)

• Putin's Spiraling War Spending Hammers Economy (Newsweek)

• Netanyahu meets the presidential candidates (Reuters)

• AI-Powered Delivery Robots Aim to Slash Costs (PYMNTS)

• Delight At Receiving Breakfast In Bed Mitigated By Difficulty Of Eating While Horizontal (The Onion)