Conrad Black: The polls have narrowed and are ambiguous about the overall popular vote, but that in itself should not be overly perplexing to the Trump camp.
After many months of high confidence, sustained and confirmed by the polls, there is a ripple of concern in the Trump camp. It is caused by fear that something previously considered to be unthinkable could be occurring: the appearance of a new Kamala Harris, who has only to renounce all her previous insane policy positions to be accepted as a plausible candidate for president.
The twin nightmare is that Ms. Harris will somehow, with the connivance of the overwhelmingly anti-Trump national political press, slip through the ten weeks between the end of the Democratic convention and Election Day without her mental acuity, or the sincerity of the grace of policy conversion she will claim to have had, being significantly tested.
Unlike her chief, she can finish a sentence and read a Teleprompter, although in any unscripted state, she has to exercise extreme caution to stay clear of her chronic case of foot-in-mouth disease. The polls have narrowed and are ambiguous about the overall popular vote, but that in itself should not be overly perplexing to the Trump camp.
Except for Trafalgar and Rasmussen, all the polling agencies are conducted by left-wing universities and press outlets, and normally under-rate President Trump by two to three percentage points. Apart from that the Democratic candidate normally carries California and New York by a total of 4 million more votes than the Republican margin in safely winning Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and South Dakota.
The two groups of states have equal numbers of electoral votes, and if the two candidates are neck and neck in the popular vote across the country, that gives the Republican nominees a margin of four million votes or about five percent of the total in the remaining 44 states.
There is nothing to be particularly concerned about for the Republicans in the results to date, although it must be said that the Democrats have accomplished a slick transfer. It is hard for a person with any sentimentality to fail to congratulate President Biden on frustrating the efforts of those who chiefly overthrew him, in particular, President Obama, who wanted to start from scratch with uncommitted delegates and to have a freely contested convention.
It says something for Mr. Biden’s perseverance that after the terrible problems, strains, and disappointments of his reelection effort, he was able to choose his own successor, and kick those who had betrayed him in their political shins. The Democratic Party and its conspicuous sympathizers in the national political media are so relieved that they will not be facing the impossible mission of trying to reelect Mr. Biden that they are jumping around like a team that has just won the Superbowl with a touch-down on the last second of regular play.
They are emancipated from the impossible mission of trying to reelect Mr. Biden. They all have known for a long time that he was both incapable of governing for four more years and had an indefensible record for the last four. They are momentarily forgetting that the vice president was just as unfeasible as her chief, without the excuse of the octogenarian.
At first, the Democrats celebrated by putting forward absurd arguments, such as that the Republican nominees were “weird.” Their media groupies and cheerleaders followed with pseudo-analysis such as: “The Republicans had a Harris strategy until they didn’t,” even as the most experienced and cynical veterans of Democratic campaigns past, James Carville and David Axelrod, have cautioned that the general Democratic celebration of the surge of their support is premature.
The Republicans can demonstrate from videos the spectacular handspring that Ms. Harris is attempting to stage on practically all of her previous public policy positions. They can establish that she is responsible for the disaster on the southern border, and is complicit in the fact that most Americans have less disposable income than they did four years ago, and they can, as a light entertainment bonus, fill the airwaves with the full range of her misstatements, incomprehensible utterances, and that ever-popular late night comedy favorite, the endless sequence of her simulations of a cackling Norn.
The vice president has already entirely endorsed Mr. Biden’s project for maintaining relevance as the election unfolds: term limits on the Supreme Court and an ethical standard that would be enforced by judges of lower courts, and the end of the Senate filibuster.
It is a vulnerable proposal, and the fact that Ms. Harris is an enthusiastic supporter should be just a harbinger of many destructive campaigns against respected institutions and the extent of the raw meat she would like to feed to the woke and the extreme left, who now make up about 40 percent of Democrats, that she might support.
The presumptive Democratic nominee has never won one delegate vote for president at a convention. Despite being a former prosecutor, she is not fast on her feet even with a slightly probing reporter, let alone an opposing candidate. She absolutely cannot defend the Biden administration, cannot slip out the back door into the tall grass and claim she didn’t approve of the Biden administration’s innumerable fiascos, and would be at risk of political destruction to give spontaneous interviews to serious journalists or to debate with Trump.
She is now at the same point as she was when she began her campaign for the presidency four years ago: an apparently attractive and electable candidate. At that time, she withdrew from the race before there was a single primary and was retrieved from oblivion because Mr. Biden had promised a non-white woman the candidate for vice president.
Here we are again, and Ms. Harris is fresh air compared to the desperate stumble to the political mortuary of the Biden campaign. There is no reason to believe that she has added anything to her stature in the intervening years, and she is instead now encumbered by the disasters on the southern border and intimate association with all the failures of what Trump, without exaggeration for once, refers to as the most incompetent administration in American history.
https://www.nysun.com/article/a-ripple-of-concern-courses-through-the-trump-camp-as-democrats-are-emancipated-from-president-biden
