Harris & Co. sold ‘Hope’…’Joy’ and Noth Going Back’….
Will ALL promised help Democrats Keep 1600 Pennsylvania Ave?
And Abortion Politics IS still around….
Selling ‘Joy’….
Joy cometh in the morning, but so do hangovers. The party in Chicago is done, the confetti has been swept up, the pictures have been posted to social media. But the real question as exuberant Democrats woke up on Friday was whether they could channel the sheer intoxication of the United Center into a sustained, 74-day sprint to Election Day.
Vice President Kamala Harris emerged from her nominating convention with a burst of momentum that Democrats hardly expected barely a month ago, when they thought they would be tethered to a possibly doomed re-election bid by President Biden. She has rejuvenated a once demoralized party and given a jolt of optimism to Democrats who now see victory in reach.
The buzzkill reality, however, is that victory is anything but assured. The thousands of jubilant delegates in the hall this week were not representative of the swing voters that Ms. Harris needs to defeat former President Donald J. Trump. History is littered with presidential candidates who roused their partisans at conventions only to fall short come November. And whatever else he is, Mr. Trump is no pushover. Ms. Harris can expect a bruising battle over the next two and a half months.
She knows that, of course, and veterans of past campaigns, including former President Bill Clinton and the former first lady Michelle Obama, made a point of warning ecstatic Democrats this week to temper their heady expectations. Ms. Harris has had one of the most impressive debuts of any general election candidate in recent times, yet she still faces polls within the margin of error….
The Politics of Abortion as a Issue….
Democrats, coming out of a convention where they highlighted reproductive rights like never before, are counting on the measures across the country to both expand abortion access and help them win in battlegrounds for the presidential race and control of the U.S. House and Senate, with key races in states including Arizona, Nevada and Montana…
Trump scrambling to undo his Abortion moves…..
Donald J. Trump, who recently said he has “no regrets” about appointing the Supreme Court supermajority that overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling on abortion rights, declared on social media on Friday that his administration will be “great” for women’s “reproductive rights.”
Mr. Trump’s use of the specific phrase “reproductive rights” — the language used by abortion-rights advocates — appeared to be an effort by the former president to refashion himself as essentially supportive of abortion rights and as a political moderate on an issue that has the potential to be damaging to him in November.
“My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights,” he wrote on Thursday morning on Truth Social, his social media platform.
At the Democratic National Convention, the end of Roe — and Mr. Trump’s professed pride in appointing the justices who eliminated it — was a central focus. Women told haunting, personal stories about the dangers they faced being denied abortions after the ruling was overturned, with pregnancies that were not viable and that threatened their own health.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who has been at ease discussing reproductive rights on behalf of the Biden-Harris administration, talked at length in her nomination acceptance speech on Thursday night about Mr. Trump’s role in curtailing those rights. She has framed Mr. Trump as a threat to “freedoms” — reproductive freedom and the freedom of economic mobility among them….
Bill Clinton on the move from Biden to Harris….
Bill Clinton offered the audience at the Democratic National Convention a gentle admonition this week: to defeat Donald Trump, focus on his narcissism, not his fabrications.
It sounded like he was talking directly to Joe Biden, who by that time was on vacation in California.
Just two nights before Clinton spoke, during Biden’s farewell convention speech, the current president had cited Trump mistruths on crime and border policy multiple times. “I never thought I’d stand before a crowd of Democrats and refer to a president as a liar so many times,” Biden said as midnight approached.
Clinton’s comment was part of something broader going on this week in Chicago: Even as Democratic leaders praised Biden for his leadership (and for dropping out of the race a month ago), they implicitly and specifically rejected his political strategy toward Trump.
Biden’s portrait of this election as a defensive “battle for the soul of the nation:” Gone and replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris’ more optimistic rhetorical focus on freedom, bolstering middle class families and bridging divides.
“With this election, our nation has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past,” Harris said Thursday night…..
…
Jonathan Chait: “After Donald Trump’s surprising win in 2016, the Democratic Party was panicked into abandoning the Obama model as a failure. Earlier this month, I examined Kamala Harris’s political challenge through the lens of Obamaism. Could Harris rediscover a winning formula her party had discarded? The convention gives us a clear answer: Yes. She. Can.”
“The Obama recipe has several key components, all of which were vividly present in Chicago. The most obvious may be novelty. Obama promised to turn the page, leaving behind frustrating and tiresome debates of the past, rather than overpowering the Democrats’ adversaries.”
“The convention, accordingly, presented Harris to the country as if she was an outsider. Speaker after speaker hammered this theme.”
image….Politicaldog101