Politicians' Authenticity Is More Important To Most Voters Than The Fine Points Of Policy

Trump told cheering MAGAts he's "hot as a pistol." Did he mean an arquebus?

Yesterday Jamie Raskin had some fun at JD Vance’s expense again. After the convention, he returned to Maryland “ready,” he wrote, “to work for a clean-sweep across America in less than 75 days… On Monday night I had the honor of welcoming America to the ‘Democracy Convention’ and the ‘Freedom Convention’ I reminded everyone that Donald Trump had turned Lincoln’s party of freedom and Union into a dangerous authoritarian cult of personality. I asked J.D. Vance a question. Was he aware the only reason there was a ‘sudden job opening’ for Trump’s running mate on the GOP ticket was that Trump’s MAGA mob, chanting ‘Hang Mike Pence,’ had tried to kill Vice President Pence after he refused to follow Trump’s orders to illegally nullify the votes of millions of Americans and steal the election? Pence said that he would not be supporting Trump in this election and declared him unfit for office because he placed his political ambitions above the Constitution.”

Predictably, Vance then began attacking Raskin, “asserting (bizarrely) that I was making the January 6 insurrection all about me and then (weirdly) holding me responsible for higher grocery prices.” I’d like to see Raskin debate Vance after Walz is through with him! The Democrats have learned a lot since 2016. Few people have articulated it better than Jamie Raskin… and historian Rick Perlstein. Did you miss his column in the American Prospect, Say It To My Face? He could just as well have been talking about Raskin when he wrote “A quiet revolution has been unfolding in how Democrats campaign, and it helps explain why being a Democrat has suddenly felt so joyous these past five weeks— and maybe why the Harris-Walz ticket is pulling ahead of the opposition. Democrats are suddenly allowed to say what they mean. No trimming. No ‘triangulation.’ No rhetorical bank shots, no apologies. Really, we haven’t seen anything quite like it since the surprise landslide of Ronald Reagan in 1980 shocked the party of  ‘Give ’em hell’ Harry Truman into its modern-day defensive crouch.” I’ve known Raskin for a long time— back when he was in the Maryland legislature. He’s always been one of the most authentic people in politics. Perlstein’s column is about what happened when the Democrats decided to eschew their post-Truman inauthenticity and get real again.

You probably know the story of how Truman got the nickname. His political calling card was a Tim Walz–like, down-home Midwestern plainspokenness. He was tearing into the opposition with a fierceness when a delighted audience member cried lustily, "Give ’em hell, Harry!" He shot back, devil-may-care: "I don’t have to give ’em hell. I just tell the truth and they call it hell."

And that’s what Democratic presidential candidates never seemed to do again after that Reagan trauma: simply tell their truth.

It wasn’t that they lied, precisely; outright untruth remained the province of the party of Nixon, Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump. But they were never quite truth-tellers, either. Campaigning as a Democrat, at the highest level of the game— especially at the presidential-nominee level of the game— has come to mean never directly and precisely saying what you believed.

If, that is, you even remembered what you believed, after the consultants got through with you.

You saw it in Michael Dukakis’s appeal to the electorate in 1988. As a point of pride, he adamantly refused to name what Democrats were fighting against. Conservatism’s crass worship of money and explicit contempt for the notion of disinterested public service made Reagan’s administration the most corrupt in U.S. history. Figures like Attorney General Ed Meese, HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce, and EPA Administrator Anne Burford were either guilty of or stood credibly accused of outright looting of the public purse. The scar of inequality grew deeper and deeper each year of his presidency, and creepy theocrats increasingly called the tune at the base of the party.

But "this election," Dukakis simpered in his DNC acceptance speech, "is not about ideology. It’s about competence." In a fleeting reference to the Iran-Contra scandal, which proved that Republicans were ready, willing, and able to leapfrog the Constitution whenever it fit their ideological needs, Dukakis said, "It’s not about overthrowing governments in Central America— it’s about creating jobs in Middle America."

Rhetoric like that only served to confirm what Republicans often said: Democrats’ existing system of beliefs— the definition of "ideology"— must be pretty damned weird, if they’re running away from it so hard.

In 1992, Bill Clinton made his own unique contribution to his party’s newfound tradition of not giving the opposition hell. It was called "triangulation." What that meant— explicitly— was that the party’s nominee found the rest of his party distasteful. He surely wasn’t like those callous Republicans, but he also wasn’t like all those other icky Democrats in Congress either. That was the reason you should vote for him. Any wonder that, two years later, voters turned so many of those icky congressional Democrats out of office in favor of Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolutionaries? At least, after all, those guys seemed proud of what they were selling.

Then there was Al Gore. If there’s one thing any random person on the street can tell you about Clinton’s vice president, it’s that his greatest passion, the truest thing he knows, is that human-caused climate change is the worst problem the world has ever faced. Indeed, he believed that in 2000, when he ran for president. He just never talked about it on the campaign trail. The reason, probably, was that the wizards running party strategy crunched the numbers, ran the focus groups, and decided that was not what the public wanted to hear. Useful enough to know, as far as that goes. But what did that mean for how the candidate appeared to the electorate?

Well, it’s hard work saying something other than what you believe in your heart. It makes a speaker sweat. You see the gears turning— and maybe grinding— inside their head. And it’s unpleasant to avoid talking about what you really want to talk about. It makes a person look and sound squirrelly. It conveys an inherent untrustworthiness.

Which, no wonder, has been the dominant image of Democratic presidential candidates for most of our lifetimes.

…But now: farewell to all that. Now, we can tell them the truth, and let them call it hell.

You saw that all last week in Chicago, from likely and unlikely sources. Oprah Winfrey: "Let us choose common sense over nonsense." Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, on enlisting in the Army at 17: "I had to ask my mom to sign the paperwork for me, because I don’t have bone spurs." Rep. Jamie Raskin, also of Maryland: Trump is a "career criminal … and his pet chameleon J.D. Vance." Coach Walz: "Health care and housing are human rights." Because, simply this: "Freedom!"

…Which brings us to Kamala Harris’s speech. No need to rehearse the best lines; history will do that for us. That’s largely because the soul of the thing was not its specific sentences. It was in her affect. That sense you had that there were no gears grinding away inside her head, nor negotiations with herself. That feeling that she was telling the truth as she saw it, devil take the hindmost. That it seemed to emerge not from her teleprompter, but from her being, singing a song in the key of her life.

Maybe because the consultants didn’t have time to assemble their focus groups, she was left alone to tell her truth.

But look at what happened next: They’re calling it hell. Keep that up, Kamala Harris. Keep it up.

It just keeps getting worse and worse for Trump every week. Kamala is going to crush him... and he knows it. And he's scared shitless.