I meant that he is literally not capable, not that he couldn’t find someone.
Moderating:
Let’s stop speculating about Trump’s sex life and capabilities. It has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
I think your suggestion that the debate might not have been the right forum is correct. The debate was more about Appearing Presidential than it was about presenting policy. Harris rightly referred viewers to her website for more details about policy.
The viewpoint that Trump inherited and benefited from the good decisions Obama made, and then squandered all that by making poor decisions that worsened the effects of the pandemic, is well-supported by facts. Whether it’s an argument that would convince undecided voters is another topic. They might hear it as ‘failing to take responsibility’ (due to the focus on how badly Trump hurt the economy in his term) or such.
Harris clearly intended to leave debate viewers with the idea that she is focused on the future. Arguably, that was indeed the right forum for that message.
Re the economy, thanks everyone for the good posts. Yeah, I think it is more a case of prepandemic nostalgia than any kind of rational analysis of economic changes. Inflation is no doubt the biggest thing. We went a very long time without any kind of extreme inflation–decades, really. So it’s understandable that that would trouble people, though it’s unfortunate that people do their usual reactive blame game instead of looking at the facts.
Nor are people, in general across human history, going to look outside their locale (i.e., outside the US in our case) and discern what’s global in nature from what’s local. The US is doing very well relative to other countries, but Biden and Harris are not going to get credit for that from a large swathe of the American public.
Harris did dodge one question in the debate, however, for which I’d really like to hear the answer: Biden has retained, to my knowledge, all of Trump’s tariffs, and I would like to know why. Has Biden just not thought about it all? Has he found the tariffs to be beneficial? And so on. The tariffs on steel basically killed a Japanese company that I helped set up through my interpreting and negotiating skills, so it wasn’t exactly a victimless bit of policy.
On the whole, though, I think Harris has threaded the needle of owning Biden’s record while not being Biden about as well as anyone could. People who are imagining that there is some sort of Trump circa 2019 zone we could go back to now are, as usual when it comes to Trump, being stupid.
Indeed. Up until the past few years, the U.S. hasn’t had an annual inflation rate of 5+% since 1990 (+6.1%), and it hasn’t been since the late 1970s/early 1980s where inflation was seriously bad (+13% in '79 and '80, and five straight years of 6+% inflation) – no one under the age of 50 has any real memory of what the economy was like in those days.
The Loomer thing hasn’t gone away from the news cycle, but I think I should make another thing clear: she is a racist, anti-Semitic, conspiracy-flogging toxic loon that should not be within 1,000 m of a presidential candidate whether they have a romantic connection or not. She’s so bad that she is in a big beef with another toxic loon, MTG, about her statements, etc. (though there seems to be some jealousy over who gets to be close to the Ocher Deity).
Re a potential relationship with Loomer, at the very least Donald has failed to avoid the scent of impropriety: he’s got his arm around her at events, she’s traveling on his plane, etc. And one reason for this is that Trump is deregulating, likely because of dementia, and just doing whatever. I mean, this morning he tweeted out, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,” in all caps. Great idea! I’m sure he focus-grouped that before proceeding…
Bill Mahr was speculating on the Loomer-Trump connection in the past few days, saying (close paraphrase), “Who’s Trump fuckin’? Cuz it’s not nobody. He’s been a dog for far too long.” Pace a poster above, I don’t agree that Trump having relations within someone not named Melania could not be covered up. I think he could get the sex partner(s) to be discreet. The problem is that he himself has lost the ability to be discreet.
LOL, I do. And both oil crises as well. 53 and counting…
Which just kind of proves my point. 
It’s been a century since the last big pandemic. You’d think that would trouble people even more.
To use your example, my impression is that the U.S. can unilaterally impose tariffs on steel from Japan, and then Japan would typically impose tariffs on goods they import from the U.S. as a form of retaliation. Biden could have dropped the steel tariff in the hope that Japan would drop theirs, but there’s no guarantee that Japan would do so. It would be smarter to negotiate a trade agreement between the two countries that eliminate both tariffs.
So Trump could institute tariffs on his own, but Biden eliminating the tariffs wouldn’t necessarily return the status quo.
I just want to take a moment to recognize your very well thought out nuanced post. The whole thing. Thank you.
It does indeed. Life is short; politics is long.
Yeah, what you say is true, and it’s a complicated issue. Biden was a poor communicator on just about everything, so what his intentions were will remain unclear.
This is the explanation I’ve read. Tariffs are really easy to create, much tougher to unwind.
you make it sound like there were no diplomatic/commercial channels between the US and Japan … it both sides were intersted, that very thing could easily be achieved.
How many voters do you think study the economy as opposed to going with how they feel the economy effects them and only them? Do you think it’s unreasonable for voters to think that their money doesn’t go nearly as far as it did during the Trump presidency?
If you have put yourself in a bubble it’s easy to think that all Trump voters are evil Magats. I try very hard to not limit my world view to only my own. Despite all the other noise coming out of both camps the most consistent thing I see from regular people who are voting for Trump is that they were better off financially under him. The question of the thread remains, how can Trump win? By convincing regular people they were better off on a personal level. That’s more important to people than the overall economy. He needs enough of those people in the right states. That’s how he can win. It’s hard for some to believe that Trump voters may have any other motivation beyond being evil.
It’s just more complicated than that. Once in place, now you have an entire protected industry that would oppose the lifting of the tariffs. What would be more immediately disruptive to the economy? What are the ripple effects? Is the current president willing to pay the political price from a problem created by his idiot predecessor?
It’s now a political problem as well as an economic one. And the other country has the same challenges having installed counter tariffs.
It’s not as simple as making a phone call to the prime minister.
This relates to the thread question in a whole different way: Does Trump often win on policy even when he loses an election? Answer is yes. Most of the news stories on tariffs focus on China:
Biden Administration Ratchets Up Tariffs on Chinese Goods
As this last article states, the administration defends tariffs as saving American jobs. That’s how Harris would answer the question.
There also is some of this dynamic on immigration. The compromise immigration bill that Trump wouldn’t let go through, and that Harris wants, seems to me to be skewed towards GOP priorities. The Dreamers didn’t get a compromise. They got zip. I think this is because of fear of Trump.
I realize that Trump would not see losing the election, but getting his policies enacted, as a win. But some in Trumpworld might.
Yes, that’s an apt post, thank you. Not 100% of Trump’s policies were bad, and he had some accomplishments that were clearly the result of his own thinking and not entirely that of his subordinates (e.g., diplomacy with North Korea). The trouble is that he is the owner of a disorganized mind and cannot coordinate everything into a whole (not a whole that we Liberals would approve of, which is never going to happen, but even a whole that “conservatives” could appreciate).
In addition to what Stratocaser posted, Japan, and our other trading partners, may be reluctant to negotiate a long-term trade deal with us just to see us elect a new president who throws it out and imposes tariffs again.
Ironically, Trump has been touting tariffs as a way to raise money from foreign governments, not as a means of saving Americn jobs. At the end of the debate he said something about raising tariffs on cars assembled in Mexico so they wouldn’t be sold here. I think he just forgot.
I agree with you. That’s why it’s important for the campaign to communicate loud and clear why things are that way and, even more importantly, how Harris’s plan will help them and Trump’s will hurt them. But those people who don’t study the economy just go with what they personally feel will be hard to convince in any case.
Yeah, that’s a point where I disagree with Harris. She no question should be promoting the hell out of Trump killing that bill, like she is doing. But she should not be promising to back that very same bill and sign it into law.
There should be room in her plan to keep our gain in the Senate and gain of not win the House. At which point there is room to renegotiate a better bill.
I suppose the take is that she’s unlikely to overtake the House and will still be stuck with the crazy loons on the right. If so, maybe she hopes to pull a few of those who pulled out to back the bill again once the Trump election is out of play. If so, that might be the quickest legislative victory she could get.