Three Versions of Kamala Harris Can Run for President. Only One Can Win. (But Also: Why None of This May Even Matter)
PLUS: A review of "Passage du Desir" by "Johnny Blue Skies"/Sturgill Simpson
I leave this town for one month and the whole nation goes crazy.
My family and I took off for Iowa the day after Biden’s disastrous debate performance. We began our journey back to DC the day after Biden ended his presidential campaign. And in between? Those were some wild times for the ol’ U.S. of A.
So after a tour of Mammoth Cave, an overnight in Nashville, and a jaunt up to New York City, I am now re-ensconced in the nation’s capital, which I can only assume has been restored to its regular DEFCON-3 level of political ferment by my return. With all due respect to Nancy Pelosi, what would this country do without me?
It’s been a little over two weeks since I last wrote (and by the looks of my homepage, that seems like a century ago) so I owe readers my thoughts on a Kamala Harris candidacy.
As I see it, there are three versions of Kamala Harris who can run for president. The first version can’t win. The second version would ensure the race remains a toss-up through November. The third version should win.
But it’s also possible none of this will matter in the end.
The first version of Kamala Harris who could run for president is the left-wing version. Republicans desperately want to run against this version of Kamala Harris, and make no mistake, Harris is vulnerable on this front. When Harris ran for president in 2019, Harris did what most Democratic aspirants did that cycle and ran to the left. That resulted in a trail of comments and clips Republicans can use to brand her as a liberal extremist. She’s had moments since then that have added fuel to that fire. This article by Andrew Sullivan—a pro-Obama, anti-Trump conservative who is no fan of Harris—tees up the attack lines Republicans will inevitably use against the vice president.
You may or may not think those criticisms are fair or disqualifying, but they’re red meat for a Republican Party that has a predatory instinct for stoking the American public’s disdain for “wokeism,” which boils down to the loaded idea that America’s elites have unfairly “rigged the game” to favor the interests of the undeserving, untraditional, and non-American at the expense of “ordinary” Americans. And while it is hard for Republicans to paint Joe Biden—an established white male politician—as either woke or the beneficiary of wokeness, Harris’ background as the multiracial daughter of non-European immigrants who grew up in and returned as an adult to the most liberal part of the most liberal state in the union can amplify the charge.
Harris will be careful not to invite accusations of wokeism on the campaign trail. It would be wise for her to campaign alongside running mate Tim Walz in the “Blue Wall” states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to reinforce the idea that the big-tent Democratic Party is indeed a big tent. (BTW, who has two thumbs and wrote this
If Harris wants to pick someone with ties to the Midwest, Walz may be her best option. Walz has a long record of accomplishment as Minnesota’s governor. He was able to keep the progressive-populist, urban-rural Democratic coalition together in his home state. As chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, he’d be able to bring some gravitas (although maybe not a lot of wow factor) to the ticket. Still, he’s the sort of candidate I’d want campaigning for Democrats in small towns and medium-sized cities in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
about Walz’s VP prospects three weeks before Harris picked him to run with her? This guy. I wrote that before Walz first uttered the word “weird.” Before anyone who lived more than six hours from Bemidji had ever even heard of the guy. Only thing I got wrong was the line about the “wow factor.” Just gonna take a moment for myself:
Skol!)
But anyway, the main problem for Harris is Republicans will eventually make wokeism a major issue. Democrats should not underestimate the power of this line of attack. Just consider what happened during the 2022 elections. The party that occupies the White House usually doesn’t perform well during the midterms, but Democrats exceeded expectations that year, including in battleground states like Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. In those states, Democratic candidates defeated MAGA-affiliated challengers. The one exception was in Wisconsin, where Democratic Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes lost by a point to Republican Senator Ron Johnson in that state’s senate race. Yes, Johnson was the incumbent, but he’s also an insurrectionary MAGA Republican who’s dumber than an empty gallon of milk. Voters were ready to reject him. Barnes led during the summer, but his calls to “defund the police”—which the Democrats running in the other toss-up states were not saddled with—came back to haunt him. It was definitely a winnable race, too: In another statewide contest that year, incumbent Democratic Governor Tony Evers—who could deflect accusations he was beholden to his party’s woke left-wing—won by 3.4%.
It’s astonishing Republicans haven’t successfully mainstreamed this attack yet. Trump, who usually has a dirty brawler’s sense for the jugular, is fumbling around for nicknames for Harris (“Kamabla?”) when “Woke Kamala” is just sitting there for the taking. (I’m catching and killing that sobriquet, BTW.) This was always the risk in switching candidates mid-race: The new nominee would need to define herself before the GOP did. Maybe Republicans got too hung up fending off attacks on JD Vance or were distracted by the sudden appearance of Governor Walz, but I’m sure this attack is coming. Harris and her team better know how to respond.
Democrats should not, however, attempt to counter the ultraliberal woke version of Kamala Harris with a version of Kamala Harris that would attempt to assure voters a Harris presidency would merely be a continuation of the Biden administration. This version of Kamala Harris would borrow her campaign slogan from Roger Daltrey: “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss.”
This pivot makes some intuitive sense. Biden was able to win in 2020 by narrowing margins among older white voters in the Blue Wall states. Even in 2024, he was still running surprisingly strong with this demographic. If Harris concludes Trump’s attacks on her record could stick and alienate these voters, she could opt to frame her campaign as nothing more than a request for four more years of a non-radical Biden-style presidency. And why not? Biden had a decent record to run on (inflation has been tamed, unemployment is low, crime rates are plummeting, illegal immigration is down, etc.) and his legislative accomplishments—which include an infrastructure bill, lowering the cost of prescription drugs, gun reform, and a major climate change law—are popular and far from radical. It was always said the problem with the Biden ‘24 campaign wasn’t the substance of the campaign but the messenger.
But running to carry on the Biden administration isn’t a winning strategy. To begin with, despite Biden’s accomplishments, he isn’t popular. (His numbers have actually recovered recently, but that’s tied to his decision not to run for re-election.) If Americans think Trump is exhausting, they think Biden is exhausted. It would be unwise for Harris to hitch her star to a politician most Americans—including most independents and Democrats—want to retire.
It also puts voters in the wrong mindset. It’s one thing for Biden to run for re-election on his record, as that also implies an assessment of his stewardship of the nation, which he could leverage against Trump. But if Harris were to frame the election as a choice between something Biden-esque and Trump, she would turn Trump the monster into an abstraction. It would also prompt Americans to weigh Trump’s pre-pandemic economy against Biden’s post-pandemic economy. While Biden deserves credit for the recovery, the economic tumult of the past four years makes many voters nostalgic for the more stable pre-pandemic economy.
More importantly, though, running as a continuity candidate would deflate the spirits of the many voters who have recently been energized by Harris’ entry into the race. Heading into this election, poll after poll found voters were not looking forward to a repeat of the 2020 election. Harris offers a fresh start, and she should capitalize on that. “More of the same” just isn’t a winning slogan. To keep her momentum, Harris’ team needs to be focused on the future while drawing a contrast with Trump’s backward-looking campaign. Voters need to know Harris is more interested in leading the country into the 2030s than she is in taking the country back to the 2010s. That’s a way to inspire and rally voters around a campaign for president.
If Harris wants to avoid running as either an ultraliberal candidate or a continuation of the Biden administration, what version of Harris should run for president? I’d argue Harris should run for president as an unapologetic, straight-down-the-middle-of-the-party generic Democrat. Polling suggests that’s what voters want: Throughout this election cycle, even as Biden was either deadlocked or losing to Trump, voters have expressed a preference for a generic Democrat over Trump by about ten points.
But what exactly is a “generic” Democrat? Ideologically, it would be someone who doesn’t hail from either the left- or centrist-wing of the party and is therefore less likely to disengage members of the party’s broad coalition. That will rally the base. Furthermore, by attaching herself to the party generally rather than with a faction within the party, a generic Democrat can identify herself with a mainstream American political brand that is acceptable to most Americans, expanding her appeal beyond the party.
Now I’ll be the first to admit that the idea of a Goldilocksian “generic Democrat” is so vaguely defined and idealistic that it’s practically meaningless. But Harris is in a unique position and could pull it off. Because she didn’t need to run in a primary and distinguish herself from her Democratic rivals, Harris doesn’t need to commit herself to a personal political platform. Instead, she can adopt the Democratic Party’s platform—designed to smooth over differences within the party, appeal to voters outside the party, and supply leaders with a legislative agenda—as her own and run on that. Furthermore, if she does become president, Harris wouldn’t need to serve as an entrepreneurial chief executive but could preside instead as a legislative facilitator, filling the role that Nancy Pelosi has played within the Democratic Party for much of the past two decades. That could lead to more productive and responsible governance organized around the party’s (rather than the president’s) agenda.
The question is how long Harris can remain a generic Democrat. So far, she’s benefitted from the excitement generated by her promotion to the top of the ticket and her selection of Walz as her running mate. She’s due for another polling bump following next week’s Democratic National Convention, and if that goes well, she should coast through Labor Day weekend in pretty good shape. But heavier scrutiny will eventually come from the press, Trump will go on the attack, and more Americans will begin paying closer attention to her record and comments. She’ll go from being that generic, idealized Democrat to a more defined candidate, and that’s bound to turn off some potential supporters. When that happens, it will be critical for her to cling hard to the center of the party. She can’t become a Sanders-style socialist Democrat or a Manchin-style moderate Democrat or a Biden-style old-school Democrat. She needs to remain a big-tent Democrat’s Democrat who can rally the nation around the Democratic agenda.
But it’s also possible none of this will even matter in the end.
Look, I know Donald Trump has been counted out dozens of times over the past ten years yet has still somehow always found a way to stay in the ring. He has a fanatical political following and Republicans who should know better—even those who say the man’s unfit for office—always find a way to justify voting for him. The country remains deeply and closely divided, with cultural divisions reinforcing our political divisions. There’s little reason to believe this election won’t be a nail-biter like nearly every other election over the past twenty-five years.
But this year does feel different now that Harris is in the race, doesn’t it?
With Harris in the race, there’s suddenly a candidate a whole lot of Americans feel like they can vote for. They don’t have to rationalize their vote as a choice between the lesser of two evils. They don’t have to feel like they’re settling for a candidate. They don’t have to trudge to the polls out of nothing more than a sense of duty or to put the brakes on someone they don’t want to be president. Instead of casting a vote for a stop-gap measure, they can vote for someone who inspires them, who is future-oriented, who will be a history-maker, who they can take pride in voting for.
And have you noticed Trump lately? He had this thing all wrapped up about a month ago. Now he’s got to work for it again. He doesn’t look like he’s having fun anymore. A month ago he was the young, energetic candidate. Now he looks tired and old. Maybe he’ll get his second wind, but Trump seems flummoxed by Harris, who seems more interested in needling him than slugging it out with him. Unlike 2016, he no longer has the advantage of novelty. Unlike 2020, he no longer possesses the advantage of incumbency. People seem worn out by him. He feels like a spent commodity.
I’m not predicting a landslide here, but my gut tells me that so long as Kamala Harris carries herself as a plausible potential president, she’ll win. MAGAism is a powerful political movement centered on a cult of personality, but as we’ve seen in the UK and France this year and in battleground states and districts during the 2022 midterms, populist right-wing politics has limited appeal. More than anything else, though, I just sense a majority of Americans are not only ready to turn the page on Trump but are eager to get behind someone who promises to bring something new and positive to our politics. In the end, policy and ideology may not prove decisive in this election. It may come down instead to which candidate is the most inspiring and offers the biggest break with the past. If that’s the case, advantage Harris.
Signals and Noise
The 2024 Presidential Election
By Lorraine Ali of the Los Angeles Times: “Harris Has Ushered in a New ‘F’ Word for Democrats: Fun”
I don’t usually agree with this guy’s reading of American politics, but Patrick Ruffini wrote a good article titled “Polls Can’t Measure Hypotheticals”, which basically argues that polls can’t accurately measure how people might respond to an event (like Trump getting indicted or Harris replacing Biden as the Democratic nominee) before the event actually happens. As Ruffini writes, “Polls are a reflection of the political moment when the poll is taken. And merely asking a hypothetical can’t begin to approximate the dynamics of a change once it actually takes place.” I would only add to the argument that savvy politicians have a sense (the word these days is “vibe”) for how the public will respond to an event.
By Ronald Brownstein of The Atlantic: “What the Convention Could Do for Kamala Harris”
Here’s the guy Republicans are going to try to brand as too liberal for America:
By Dan Pfeiffer: “Why Trump's Plan to Brand Walz as Too Liberal Will Fail” (“When it comes to politics, identity > ideology, Tim Walz is a veteran, gun-owning football coach from rural Minnesota. He doesn’t code as an extreme liberal. The guy screams American values. He exudes decency and common sense. Everyone knows a Tim Walz. Maybe he was their coach or teacher. Maybe he was their neighbor or the guy they ran into at the hardware store.” Pfeiffer also points out the populist progressive bills Walz signed in to law in Minnesota—20 weeks of paid family and medical leave, tuition-free college for those earning less than $80,000, junk fee bans, free breakfast and lunch for all Minnesota students, and legalized marijuana—are all very popular.)
Aimee Picchi of CBS News digs into Republican attacks on Tim Walz for signing a bill providing free menstrual products to Minnesota public school students and the claim that the bill requires those products to be available in boys’ bathrooms. (“The Minnesota law, however, doesn’t specify in which bathrooms the menstrual supplies must be located; instead, it requires school districts to develop plans to ensure all students who menstruate can access free tampons and pads, Lacey Gero, director of government relations at the advocacy group Alliance for Period Supplies, told CBS MoneyWatch. Her group advocates for free tampons and pads in schools, prisons and other institutions and eliminating the so-called tampon tax….While it’s unclear how many transgender children could benefit from free menstrual supplies, the impact is mostly felt by the millions of girls who experience so-called ‘period poverty,’ or the inability to afford pads and tampons. About one in four teenagers who menstruate struggle to pay for period products, according to a 2023 study from the advocacy group Period. ‘We’re hearing from somebody who was a teacher, that [Walz] recognized that students need school-supplied period products, and this issue is something we hear about from students across the country today,’ Gero said. ‘My hope is that this being in the public eye brings attention to an issue that many people might not know about or may have never thought about.’”
Rebecca Traister writes in New York magazine about the two parties’ different projections of masculinity. (“On the one hand is the Republican Party’s view of manhood: its furious resentments toward women and their power, its mean obsession with forcing women to be baby-makers. On the other hand is the emergence of a Democratic man newly confident in his equal-to-subsidiary status: happily deferential, unapologetically supportive of women’s rights, committed to partnership.”)
A new poll suggests Harris is restoring the lead Democrats have held in recent presidential elections among Latino voters in battleground states. Trump had narrowed that margin significantly when Biden was in the race. Harry Enten of CNN also finds Harris is currently polling better than Biden among white working-class voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
The hospitality workers union endorsed Kamala Harris for president (ditto for the culinary workers union) dismissing Trump’s pledge to make tips tax-free. (Alan Rappeport of the New York Times notes Trump actually tried to take tips away from workers and give that money to their employers, a plan that would have cost tipped workers $5.8 billion annually. Harris this past week also came out in favor of tax-free tips. Nick Niedzwiadek and Bernie Becker of Politico write about the problems with tax-free tips, most notably the possibility that it sets up a loophole for the wealthy to exploit.) Adam Cancryn of Politico reports on how Harris has consolidated the support of the nation’s labor unions. Shawn Fain of the UAW has come out strong for Harris as well; the UAW also filed federal labor charges against Trump and Elon Musk after they backed firing workers who threaten to strike (which is against the law) during Trump’s interview with Musk on X/Twitter.
Ben Smith of Semafor wonders if Harris’ hundred-day campaign will become a new norm.
Ouch. By Amanda Marcotte for Salon: “‘Bringing Back the Joy’: Kamala Harris’ Rally Blows Away JD Vance’s Weird Appearance Across Town” (“Vance’s event was small, mean, and yes, weird, featuring the unjustified sarcasm of the candidate and a desperate feeling reminiscent of the mood at a strip mall shot bar at 2 AM on ‘ladies' night.’”) MORE: By Joan Walsh of The Nation: “JD Vance Is on a Stalker Tour of Swing States”
Dionne Searcey of the New York Times writes about the differing outlooks on small town America exhibited by Tim Walz (largely positive) and JD Vance (often pessimistic.)
Laura J. Nelson of the Los Angeles Times reports JD Vance argued in 2021 it was good for spouses to stay married even if those marriages were violent, as divorce was not good for kids.
“My attitude is, it doesn’t really matter, as much as this hits my ego.”—JD Vance, debasing himself once again by arguing that vice presidential picks don’t matter. It’s kind of true—no one votes for president based on who the vice president is—but the selection of the vice presidential nominee does reflect on the presidential nominee’s judgment. The obvious follow-up question: If vice presidential nominees don’t matter, why didn’t Trump pick Kid Rock or Hulk Hogan?
“We are in a late republican period. If we’re going to push back against it, we have to get pretty wild, pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”—Vance, in 2021, urging conservatives to push constitutional bounds to hang on to power. Is that why Trump picked him?
Trump’s Thursday news conference was another dumpster fire. (He’s very sensitive to matters of crowd size.) NPR counted 162 misstatements in 64 minutes. Perhaps the most notable news made during the presser is that Trump won’t rule out revoking access to the abortion drug mifepristone. He also wouldn’t say how he intends to vote on the Florida abortion amendment.
More: “What On Earth Did We Just See?” by Charlie Sykes (“Most media accounts do not come close to capturing the wretched shambolism of it all, and some reporters scrabbled desperately for nuggets of coherence in the former president’s rolling gibberish….If this had been Joe Biden, the media would have been on fire with speculation and about his cognitive decline and mental health. If Kamala Harris turned in a performance even remotely like this, it would be regarded as a full-on disaster. But since this is Trump, it’s just another Thursday.”)
Jeff Greenfield of Politico writes that Trump is no longer the change candidate while, paradoxically, the sitting vice president is.
Trump reopened his feud with Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of Georgia.
Taegan Goddard of Political Wire has a theory as to why Trump keeps talking about Hannibal Lecter: Because he thinks “asylum seekers” come from “insane asylums.”
Celine Dion is upset with Don Trump for playing “My Heart Will Go On” at his Montana rally, but the Internet quickly pointed out the song, which is from the film Titanic, could be a metaphor for his campaign.
There’s also a photo of JD Vance in drag. And another.
Don Trump keeps claiming he knows nothing about Project 2025, but the Washington Post got ahold of a photo with Trump and Kevin Roberts, the architect of Project 2025, aboard a private jet in route to a Heritage Foundation conference where Trump said of the group, “They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt hammered Tim Walz for backing policies that would restore voting rights to convicted felons.
“I know Gov. Walz is on the phone, and we spoke, and I fully agree with the way he handled it the last couple of days. I was very happy with the last couple of days, Tim. You called up big numbers and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins.”—Trump, praising Walz for his response to protests in Minnesota following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. The Trump campaign has been hitting Walz for his handling of the unrest.
When Republicans slam Harris for her rate of staff turnover, remember this: The Washington Post reports only half of Trump’s former Cabinet members have endorsed their former boss. (Three—including his former vice president!—actually oppose him.)
The Trump campaign was hacked by foreign operatives, but, unlike in 2016, when the Clinton campaign was hacked by Russia, they don’t like it.
It looks like Trump is back on Twitter/X, which has to be bad news for his own social media company, its valuation, and Trump’s personal finances.
Politico reports governments are searching for ways to rein in Elon Musk (the world’s richest man) who has turned Twitter/X into his own personal platform to spread misinformation. David Ingram of NBC News writes about how Musk’s misleading election posts on Twitter/X have garnered 1.2 billion views. Popular Information calls Musk’s purchase of Twitter “the most expensive political ad of all time” and rebuts many of Musk’s misleading attacks on Harris.
“I’m for electric cars. I have to be because Elon endorsed me very strongly. So I have no choice.”—Donald Trump, essentially admitting he was bribed by the world’s richest man.
In an interview with [checks notes, checks notes again] Roseanne Barr, Robert Kennedy Jr. confessed to placing a dead bear cub in Central Park ten years ago.
In 2014, Kennedy was travelling north of New York City to go falconing when he saw a driver strike and kill the cub. He intended to skin and eat the bear, but when his falconing excursion ran late and he had to rush back to the city for dinner (preventing him from stopping at his home in Westchester to put the bear in the freezer) he recalled a series of stories about recent bicycle accidents in Central Park and chose instead to place the dead bear there. The discovery of the bear in 2014 caused a minor stir in New York City at the time and even led to an article in the New York Times written by the granddaughter of John F. Kennedy.
But Joe Rogan has endorsed RFK Jr. “He’s the only one that makes sense to me,” the popular but brain-addled podcaster said. UPDATE: Rogan walked that back over the weekend, then added he’s “not the guy to get political information from.” (I would add you should not get political, lifestyle, medical, legal, consumer, sports, factual, or comedic information from Joe Rogan.)
The 2024 Congressional Elections
Democratic Missouri Rep. Cori Bush—a member of the left-wing “Squad” and an outspoken critic of Israel—lost her primary. Bush was also under investigation for misuse of campaign funds.
However, Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar—another Squad member who has been very critical of Israel—won her primary.
Democracy Watch
The Georgia Election Board has empowered local elections officials to conduct “reasonable inquir[ies]” into whether election results are “true and accurate,” a move watchdogs worry may enable those local officials to delay or refuse certification of election results.
An Arizona Republican became the first fake elector to plead guilty to participating in Trump’s scheme to undermine the 2020 election.
Em Steck and Andrew Kaczynski of CNN report Michelle Morrow, the GOP nominee to run public schools in North Carolina, advocated for a pro-Trump military coup in a 1/6 video. (“And if the police won’t do it and the Department of Justice won’t do it, then he will have to enact the Insurrection Act. In which case the Insurrection Act completely puts the Constitution to the side and says, now the military rules all.”)
A 1/6 rioter who assaulted police officers and stood in front of a gallows calling for politicians to be hanged was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
By David Frum of The Atlantic: “Sorry, Richard Nixon” (an article looking back on the Watergate Scandal and Nixon’s resignation, which occurred 50 years ago last Friday.) (“Standards of political morality that tightened in the years before and after Watergate have loosened. Trump did not start the trend, but he benefited from it and accelerated it….From today’s vantage point, the post-Watergate reforms look like another of those jettisoned experiments. We can honor the attempt on this strange anniversary with an ironic salute to Richard Nixon, a president who might have gotten away with it, if he had been luckier in his timing.”)
The Supreme Court
Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney of Politico write about how the Supreme Court’s recent decision on presidential immunity is “littered with ambiguities, ill-defined standards and unanswered questions” that will make it difficult for lower-court judges to apply it to Trump’s cases.
A Senate inquiry has uncovered even more undisclosed private flights provided by a wealthy conservative donor to Supreme Justice Clarence Thomas.
The Economy
Christopher Rugaber of AP writes about how American consumers have dealt inflation its death blow by refusing to purchase products they consider too expensive.
The 30-year fixed-mortgage rate has dropped to its lowest level since May 2023.
A federal judge ruled Google violated antitrust laws by paying other companies to make Google their default search engine on their browsers, which in turn allowed them to establish a monopoly over the advertisements that appear in search results.
Public Policy
Amanda Seitz of AP found dozens of women—some bleeding or in labor—have been turned away from ERs out of fear hospitals may find themselves in violation of state anti-abortion laws after assisting them.
Didi Martinez and Laura Strickler of NBC News report the number of migrants in border towns and some major American cities has plunged. (Alexander Burns of Politico writes about what the Harris campaign can learn from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer about how to handle the issue of immigration during an election campaign.)
Miriam Jordan of the New York Times reports immigrants are becoming U.S. citizens at the fastest clip in a decade.
The Biden administration is going after corporate policies that make it difficult for consumers to unsubscribe to services, seek refunds, submit forms online, and access customer services.
Utah has become the first state to implement a statewide public school book ban. Books by Margaret Atwood and Judy Blume are among those that all public schools in Utah must now “dispose of” (state law prohibits schools from “selling or distributing” them.)
Garrett Shanley of The Alligator reports former Republican senator and former University of Florida president Ben Sasse tripled spending in the president’s office and channeled millions of dollars to consultants and GOP allies for unspecified work during his seventeen months in Gainesville.
International News
The United Kingdom is gripped by the worst civil disorder in over a decade, as anti-immigrant and far-right rioters have taken to the streets in numerous cities and towns after erroneous reports spread that an asylum seeker was responsible for the murders of three children at a dance class. Hundreds of rioters have been arrested.
Ukraine has made an incursion into the Kursk region of Russia. And it appears Putin is struggling to respond to it.
Coming soon to the front lines of the war in Ukraine: Robot dogs.
The United States has sent a submarine and an aircraft carrier group to the Middle East in anticipation of an attack by Iran on Israel as retaliation for the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
Hamas has named Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the October 7 attack on Israel, its new leader.
The New York Times reports Israel’s position in ceasefire talks has become less flexible at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s urging.
Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled the country in the wake of crackdowns on student protests that led to the deaths of over 300 people. Hasina’s government, which has grown increasingly autocratic over the course of her nearly two decades in power, was accused of using state institutions and laws to entrench its hold on power. Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunis agreed to lead an interim government.
Three Taylor Swift concerts scheduled for this past weekend in Vienna were cancelled after authorities thwarted a terrorist plot targeting the shows.
Raymond Zhong and Mira Rojanasakul of the New York Times look at how close the planet is to reaching climate tipping points that would be impossible to reverse.
Top 5 Records Music Review: Passage du Desir by “Johnny Blue Skies”/Sturgill Simpson
As a representation of rural working-class American culture, country music often warns its listeners to resist the temptations of city lights and faraway places. It’s a matter of survival. When you’re scraping by and struggling to put food on the table, you can’t afford the distractions. People depend on you. Big dreams are risky, especially when you’re living paycheck to paycheck or face ruin if you don’t tend to the daily chores. If you’re looking for meaning or satisfaction in life, country kids are told you can find everything you need in faith and family, work and community, and the traditions that buttress those institutions. Eventually, that message just gets baked into the culture. It’s why so many mainstream country songs celebrate small towns and the joys of home.
It’s also why a common critique of country music is that it is narrowminded, formulaic, and ridden with clichés and platitudes. It has that in common with a lot of musical genres, actually. The difference is that country music is the genre most committed to formula and tradition. Other genres are far more open to innovation. Even the slightest deviations from the country music template can draw scorn from fans, while artists who reconnect with traditional styles are often hailed as innovators. Country can’t stray too far from its roots, as those familiar sounds are what listeners want reinforcing their way of life.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t those out there in rural working-class America who spend their evenings laying on their backs in their front yards staring up at the cosmos as they ponder the nature of the universe and dream about life beyond the county line. Sturgill Simpson, who grew up in eastern Kentucky and was the first male on his mother’s side of the family not to become a coal miner, seems like one of those kids. Did God create the world in seven days? Or did it all begin with a Big Bang? Maybe it’s just turtles all the way down, with “reptile aliens made of light/ [Who] cut you open and pull out all your pain”. It’s a weird world out there. Kind of weird in here sometimes, too.
Simpson has made a name for himself recording psychedelic-influenced country music. His breakthrough came in 2014 when he released the philosophical Metamodern Sounds in Country Music; he followed that album up in 2016 with A Sailor’s Guide to Earth (Simpson is a Navy veteran) which earned a surprise nomination at the Grammys for Album of the Year alongside Drake, Justin Bieber, Adele, and Beyoncé. By 2017, neither of Simpson’s albums had sold more than 250,000 copies, as they’re both a little out there as far as country music goes. (Didn’t mean he hadn’t earned the respect of musicians like Chris Stapleton, though.) Since then, however, Simpson has wandered from his psychedelic country style. The 2019 album SOUND & FURY is a hard rock record that doubles as a soundtrack to a Netflix anime film, while his next three albums were straightforward bluegrass records. He was the rare country musician whom fans hoped would return to his more untraditional ways.
Those fans should be happy then with Simpson’s newest release, Passage du Desir, which came out last month and finds the singer-songwriter re-engaging with his brand of trippy neotraditional country. It’s one of the best albums of the year. The record comes with a few twists, however. First, Simpson has released it under the nom de plume of “Johnny Blue Skies,” which suggests this eternally inquisitive musician has reached a certain level of contentment in his life. More importantly, though, Simpson uses the album to weigh the cost of an expeditionary lifestyle.
One senses Simpson isn’t attracted to country music’s call to stay home but rather its ability as art to transport the listener somewhere else. And why not? If you’re a kid like Simpson coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s, country was but one stop on the dial, sandwiched perhaps between stations playing synthpop (here’s the original) and grunge (here’s the original). And if you have a voice like Waylon Jennings, as Simpson does, you really have no choice but to use country as the vessel for your artistic explorations. Just layer some distortion onto your vocals and you may be able to bring others along on your mind-bending adventures as well.
Passage du Desir begins with a romantic string and accordion arrangement vaguely reminiscent of “Shenandoah” that transports the listener to Paris, where we find Simpson attempting to resist the call of the city’s sirens. Simpson seems resigned on “Swamp of Sadness” to once again losing his bearings, but what is an Odysseus to do? This curious soul is supposed to return home, but adventure calls. There is too much in this world of ours to learn, to discover, to experience. He’s not on a journey of denial, so he surrenders:
Pull the wax out of my ears, tie me to the mast headlong
My heart’s free of fear, so let me hear that siren song
Play it loud and sing it proud and make it last so long
’Cause the night goes on and on, forever
Perhaps the good life isn’t found in a country song, or in the hills of Kentucky, or by following the straight and narrow. Maybe you’ve got to go looking for it.
At least for the first few songs on the album, which are built around bluesy guitar lines and a laid-back 70s vibe, Simpson appears to have found that good life. On the light and breezy “Scooter Blues”, we find him dreaming about an island off the coast of Thailand where he can live his best life with his family in tow, the right amount of head space, and the pressures of the modern world nowhere to be found:
Spend my mornings making chocolate milk and Eggos
My days at the beach, my nights stepping on Legos
Wave to the world, screaming, “Hasta luego”
Everybody back home will say, “Where the hell did he go?”
A more conventional country song would have set “Scooter Blues” in Mama’s house. Jimmy Buffett would have set it in Key West. Simpson’s seen enough of this world to know exactly where his paradise is at. It may not seem believable for a kid from Kentucky to find his peace of mind in southeast Asia, but note how the details of the song show Simpson staying true to himself. He’s his most authentic self in a place most Americans would identify as a strange land.
Simpson’s music is frequently about self-actualization, but after “Scooter Blues”, the songs on Passion du Desir begin observing the toll of such an unmoored lifestyle. Simpson never adopts country music’s more cautious moral outlook, but he does concede the experimental life can burn people out. On “Jupiter’s Faerie”, he tries to reach out to a lover he “moved on” from ten years ago but is crushed when he learns she recently “chose to…move on” from her own life. He laments this is what happens when people lose touch with one another, when explorers leave their own stranded far from home:
I hear there’s faeries out on Jupiter
And there was a time that I knew one
But today I’m feeling way down here on Earth
Crying tears of love in the light of mourning dawn
A song later, on “Who I Am”, Simpson confesses to feeling alienated despite his apparent contentment. The life he’s chosen to live is disorienting, and he’s lost friends, heroes, and even his sense of self along the way. “They don’t ask you what your name is when you get up to Heaven/ And thank God”, Simpson sings, “I couldn’t tell Her if I had to who I am”. That wouldn’t have been a problem in the pre-modern world, where people knew exactly who they were and where they were from and didn’t have to worry about wandering aimlessly into the afterlife.
Passage du Desir ends on the epic but heartbreaking “One For the Road” (see Exit Music) which finds Simpson admitting to a lover that “there’s some air we need to clear”: He’s not the man she thinks he is, and that it’s time to part ways:
I’ve been searching
For a way to say that you should move on
And I think we both know
That you’ll be better off after you’re gone
It’s not clear what happened. Maybe he heard those sirens calling and found a way to loosen the ropes binding him to the mast of his ship. Or maybe he and his lover’s journeys are taking them in different directions and he realizes it would be unfair to keep his Penelope (or, given the sound of the song’s guitar, is it Melissa?) bound to him. You have to wonder if that’s what his lover wants, though. Is she a restless soul like him, someone who needs to come to the realization that they’ve outgrown one another so that she’s free to move on with her life? Or is he projecting that restlessness onto her to make up for his own inability to compromise and commit, effectively stranding her on Jupiter? “There’s no happy endings,” Simpsons sings earlier on the album, “only stories that stop before they’re through.” These quests of self-discovery transform the lives of far more than our epic heroes. “One For the Road” finds Simpson attempting to give a relationship a dignified and forthright ending, but the heartache and pain prove overwhelming.
“How I wish that happiness left scars too” Simpson sings on “The Right Kind of Dream”. That’s the kind of line written by a man who fears he’s left something worthwhile behind. Maybe there’s a middle ground between chasing down the good life and settling for one. Sturgill Simpson is still searching for it.