Like grief, it seems that election campaigns must go through several steps before resolving into, well, governing or slinking away.
So, in this 2024 campaign, we see our presidential candidates going through denial, blame, flailing, or accusing when ideas and promises of service don’t land with voters as reasons to support their efforts. With each attack comes counterattack and so the ugliness gets worse.
In the meantime, partisans blame the news media for not headlining the right label on campaign craziness in a way that would boost their preference. Is Donald Trump just a habitual liar — that label seems to stick — or is he now “delusional”? Is Kamala Harris just trying to complete her hurry-up current round of battleground state appearances or is she avoiding the press in an extended attempt to shun taking critical policy positions?
Political fans are unrelenting in wanting to see promotion of their candidate.
With reports of dwindling numbers of “undecided” voters, most of the daily blah that we hear from reporting on each Trump social media post or the size of Harris turnouts for repeated readings of her standard stump speech feel a waste of time.
Do the Flaws Matter?
The current part of the cycle within this 2024 campaign seems to dwell on finding unnecessarily harsh personal critiques of candidates and running mates — as if the flaws being exploited really reflect the policies that these candidates would carry out.
So, Trump and JD Vance, apparently still surprised that they are having trouble running against Harris and Tim Walz, are overly focused on Walz’s military status when he left the Army National Guard after 24 years. They object to Walz claiming to have reached a command sergeant major rank at retirement — he was awarded the rank but officially retired one step less for not completing paperwork — and his decision to pursue his new congressional election rather than go to Iraq at age 41 — some 20 years ago.
Even granting all of that, the question remains, what are we supposed to conclude that affects the direction of this nation, the preservation of democracy, consumer costs, immigration, international peace and abortion issues? The answer is nothing, especially as the accusers conveniently forget that Trump ducked the army altogether and that Vance’s service was desk duty. Walz uses his military time to indicate his interest in service, and his ability to understand something about guns, not to brag about rank.
Likewise, Vance’s inept remarks about “childless cat ladies” may have been offensive but say little about how he and Trump would bring about lower prices at the supermarket. Trump’s daily blasts about the relative sizes of crowds who show up for himself or Harris or whether her airport crowd was created by artificial intelligence (it wasn’t) are simply nonsense as well as incorrect. Trump’s offensive attacks on how Harris identifies her mixed ethnicity seem to have fallen on thankfully deaf ears.
Here’s the point: Who could possibly care?
Indeed, we should read these never-ending slaps as attempts to distract the opponent and to unduly cast doubt on personal character. If we are going to set the candidates side by side and judge their personal character, Trump will not like the results.
Facing Better Questions
Each candidate has real issues that won’t go away easily. Each should get better questions from the press, from one another, and from voters.
For Harris, the issue is that she seems not to want to define goals for her presidency unless pressed, preferring general themes of freedom and joy in most contentious beyond reproductive health choice. It is doubtful that even a planned Sept. 10 debate will answer questions about whether she fully follows or veers from the Biden administration policies on economics and inflation, immigration, war support or health care or how she will pursue it with a Congress that looks to continue to be split. Walz may be important as a campaigner and an adviser, but not as author of governing policy.
For Trump, the main pillars of policy are eroding. He talks crime, immigration and inflation. The most recent reports show violent crime down, border crossings lessened, and inflation as measured by the government nearer solution than worsening. As a person, he is showing signs of wild flailing, slurred speech, and the litany of behaviors that he tried to tag Joe Biden as unable to function. As a legally fraught candidate, the most troubling issue is the degree to which he already is sanctioning plots towards withholding certification of votes should he lose.
However this 2024 campaign moves forward, what we don’t need are irrelevant tiffs over details of the number two guys.
