Warning: The sentence you are about to read may lead to some politically existential dread and the sinking suspicion that the apocalypse might finally be upon us. But it’s where we’re at, folks. Here goes:
Is Josh Shapiro brat enough for Kamala Harris?
There, I said it. Once upon a time in America, our politics was a public argument. Manipulative? Yes. Cynical? Check. But at least the scrum for public office was, at some level, about the art of persuasion, the selling of competing stories, the vetting of ideas. From Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” to FDR’s “Four Freedoms,” Reagan’s “Morning in America” and Clinton’s “New Covenant,” visions were proffered, rebuttals made, and some form of uneasy consensus reached.
But among the many things one particular orange-tinged autocrat destroyed in the last decade was that vastly imperfect system of intellectual give and take. Our politics have gone full pop culture spectacle, indistinguishable from the trash-talking facade that is professional wrestling — seriously, Republicans? Hulk Hogan? And here we thought having Clint Eastwood talking to an empty chair was a harbinger of the political end times. How quaint.
Shapiro’s unique mix of liberalism without elitism and populism without racism seems tailor-made for these divided times.
So it is that we find our own governor caught up in this surreal maelstrom of spectacle. The likely frontrunner for the vice presidential nod, there was Governor Josh Shapiro, firing up the rabid faithful at a rally this week, our mayor by his side: “And I have a message for Donald Trump,” he intoned. “I’m getting tired of him shit-talking America! Stop shit-talking America!”
The Rock couldn’t have said it any better. I’m no prude, but explain to me again just how you beat Trump by dumbing down your message to his juvenile, expletive-laden level? Didn’t Biden win four years ago at least in part because we finally heard from an adult?
We need a vision.
To those of us who have long known and covered him, this week’s gritted-teeth Shapiro bore faint resemblance to the man we’ve seen govern over the past two decades or so. One of the reasons Shapiro polls so favorably in solid MAGA legislative districts is that he’s a listener given more to reasonableness than rage, a type of political throwback in the happy warrior mold of Hubert Humphrey — as the new book, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights reminds us. Yet there Shapiro was this week, hurling red meat, Trump-like, to the base…seeming to be auditioning for the traditional attack dog VP role.
Which gets us, again, to the chilling question du jour: Is Josh Shapiro brat enough for Kamala Harris? The mere question looms as a signpost of just how memes and shallowness have ascended in these post-policy times. In case, like me, you weren’t exactly clued into the lingua franca of brattiness, here’s a smart piece by The Free Press’ Kat Rosenfield, dissecting just what the term means; it’s apparently a cool “It Girl” type of thing and has to do with 20-year-old women snorting coke all night long. Thanks to a tweet from singer Charli XCX, Harris’ honorary brat status almost broke the Internet.
It’s great that a set of memes featuring Harris dancing and talking about coconuts woke up young people in the democratic base, but does the death of substance really help us here? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting we return to the era of Lincoln/Douglass debates — an hour each, by the way, with half-hour rebuttals, respectively. I grant that the age of spectacle is upon us. But the smart pol will marry showmanship with a freakin’ point.
That’s precisely what arguably the world’s greatest leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, has done these last years in Ukraine, as brilliantly recounted in The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader, by Simon Shuster. It’s a deeply reported rendering of just how Zelensky — a renowned comic and sitcom star — used his skills as a public performer to do what pols used to do: Bend the public will.
Before he morphed into what one of his aides called a “decision generator,” Zelensky remembers giving himself a pep talk one day early in the war. “They’re watching,” he told himself. “You’re a symbol. You need to act the way a head of state must act.”
Zelensky’s foreign minister described the ensuing playbook, a lesson Harris and Shapiro ought to keep in mind:
You have to follow certain rules if you want someone on the other side of the screen to keep watching you, and to remain sympathetic to you. From time to time, you have to impress them with something big and unexpected, because no one can follow routine. [And] you need a clear character associated with the story to be visible to them all the time, and that’s President Zelensky in our case. And last you need a good story to tell. It’s the story of a smaller nation kicking the ass of a larger nation that invaded it. It’s bad guys attacking good guys, and good guys winning. That’s what people love.
Can Harris compete in this new world of political showmanship? And can Shapiro help her? A recent CNN poll would suggest so, with 25 percent of respondents favoring a VP nominee with chief executive experience; 40 percent seeking a nominee with proven appeal to swing voters; and 28 percent looking for someone providing ideological balance to the ticket — all Shapiro touchstones. More importantly, his “shit-talking America” soundbite notwithstanding, just watch Shapiro’s extemporaneous tribute to the slain victim the morning after the Trump assassination attempt — “Corey was the best of us” — to witness the Zelensky-like mix of emotional intelligence and moral clarity voters say they’re looking for.
Remember, Harris was a terrible candidate in 2020, largely because, as documented in a revealing Atlantic profile, she ran inauthentically, hiding her “smart on crime prosecutor” bona fides during the post-George Floyd primary race. (Providing soundbites Trump will no doubt use against her now, despite the fact that she literally wrote a well-reviewed book at the time titled Smart on Crime.) Until a few months ago, her tenure as vice president was characterized by suspicions of Selina Meyer-like vacuousness, as this Daily Show mashup rehashes.
Shapiro can help provide Harris with the next gen by animating ideas her campaign will desperately need. Hell, in her de facto announcement video, she already borrowed from his riff on “true freedom,” which many others have also taken up. What’s not going to work is just calling Trump and Vance “weird,” as is suddenly fashionable. At some point, you need to present a vision — particularly to White and Black voters who shower after work. As I wrote earlier this year, Shapiro’s unique mix of liberalism without elitism and populism without racism seems tailor-made for these divided times.
Mark this down: The Democrats will not win in November without waging an aggressive campaign for working class votes. Two-thirds of the electorate on election day will be comprised of voters without college degrees — a cohort Shapiro appeals to. (Astoundingly, the governor is polling at roughly 33 percent among MAGA voters and nearly 60 percent in many districts won by Trump.) In a recent CNN poll, Harris lags behind Trump by 15 points among voters with high school degrees; Biden lost to Trump among that sizable group in 2020 by just four percent.
For all the handwringing over J.D. Vance’s stupid cat ladies comment, Democrats commit political malpractice when they don’t acknowledge the degree to which they’ve been captured by a coastal elite and when they fail to counter Republican gains among White and Black working class voters. Vance may be a punchline to New York news producers, but in the Senate he co-sponsored a bill with Sen. Raphael Warnock to lower the price of insulin; regulated the rail industry with Sen. Sherrod Brown after the East Palestine disaster; partnered with Elizabeth Warren to claw back CEO pay of failed banks; and fought corporate mergers with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse.
Vance’s speech to the Republican Convention made this an urgent matter, folks. “America is not just an idea,” he said. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future…when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.”
Shapiro didn’t get it passed, engendering criticism from the left and the right, but his support for school vouchers, while funding traditional public schools at historic rates, plays to Black and White parents who love their kids but can’t afford to send them to higher performing private schools. It, along with his smart industrial policy-like investments in job creation — including his Main Street Matters program — hints at a way of doing things that transcends old left versus right dichotomies.
Shapiro’s critics argue that he’s been better at the poetry rather than the prose of governing. They say he’s only signed a paltry 111 bills into law as governor; but that sounds more like a criticism of a legislature than of a chief executive. What Shapiro has done is laid out an ambitious agenda in two budget cycles, passing historic bipartisan public education funding and criminal justice reform.
Yes, some of his more creative ideas were ultimately rejected by Republicans, like his proposal to reform higher ed, which would have meant free tuition at state-owned colleges and universities for families earning $70,000 or less. Some of us had hoped there was a transformational deal to be had — essentially, school vouchers for a $15 minimum wage — but it turned out that both sides of the legislative aisle just might have preferred their respective wedge issues to actually enacting solutions. In the end, Shapiro proposed big ideas and then compromised on a record $47 billion bipartisan budget. That’s the kind of pragmatism general election voters tend to reward.
We need new ideas.
The promise of a Harris/Shapiro ticket ought to not just be that we have a couple of newer, younger faces on the scene. It ought to also auger for new ideas — lest Harris make it easy for Trump to paint her as just another San Francisco progressive, as he’s already begun to do.
So far, Harris has missed that opportunity to stake out turf in the reasonable, pragmatic center. Economically, she’s still rebutting “trickle-down economics,” as though the Republican party were still led by the country club set. Her recent speech before the American Federation of Teachers could have been delivered by any Democrat of the last decade. Not a mention of education reform, but plenty about LGBQT rights and lots of union pandering. This is not to call for a Sister Souljah moment — 35 years ago, then-candidate Bill Clinton criticized a supposed ally to signal his centrist independence from party talking points in a tight general election — just some fresh ideas that we can all get excited about.
In a recent episode of our How To Really Run a City podcast, former Providence, Rhode Island Mayor and current Democrats for Education Reform CEO Jorge Elorza reports that Democrats used to have a 26 percent margin in the polls when voters were asked who they’d trust to deliver on education. Now, that’s at minus-3, and worse in some battleground states.
So, if vouchers are a non-starter given the proclivities of the American Federation of Teachers (though keep in mind that Shapiro has a close relationship with AFT President Randi Weingarten), how about at least getting in the school choice game by supporting public charter schools, which also polls well with Black and Brown parents? Both Harris and Shapiro, after all, are certainly fervently pro-choice when it comes to other matters. Or, as Michael Petrilli from the Fordham Institute argues, why not call for the banning of cell phones in the classroom, or take to task Harris’ home state for outlawing the suspension of kids who curse out their teachers?
Once upon a time in America, our politics was a public argument. Manipulative? Yes. Cynical? Check. But at least the scrum for public office was, at some level, about the art of persuasion, the selling of competing stories, the vetting of ideas.
Or, given that last year’s Nation’s Report Card found that only 13 and 22 percent of eighth graders were proficient in history and civics respectively, how about calling for a recommitment to a civics curriculum steeped in shared American values? Pundit Matt Yglesias points out that Harris could use her own personal story to strike some daylight between her and progressive orthodoxy by saying something like, “My parents moved to this country because it’s the greatest place on Earth, and I think my party and our school system need to get back to teaching kids patriotism.”
With Shapiro’s help, Harris can redefine what it means to be progressive. She can argue that secure borders and welcoming arms need not be in conflict, as everyone from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan believed. She can acknowledge that forgiving college debt — as opposed to, say, medical debt, as Shapiro has sought to do— is actually a regressive affront to what was once her party’s base. She can launch a Marshall Plan for cities, one that creates a pathway to the middle class derived not from handouts but, rather, based upon investment in industry and the rewarding of work.
It’s still early, but time is of the essence. Harris can’t meme herself to three-dimensional definition in a nation where only 25 percent of voters identify as “liberal.” If Trump has taught us anything, it’s that the old rules no longer apply. So why not break from tradition and announce some Cabinet positions now — say, Mitt Romney for Secretary of State or Liz Cheney at Defense? It will piss off the hard core base, but the prospect of a type of unity government compares quite favorably come election day to a White House full of MAGA criminals like Peter Navarro, whose speech to the Republican Convention on the very day his federal prison sentence ended must have been much better in its original German.
Harris’ opponent has stood up to his party’s establishment and ravaged it. There’s a kind of character in that, a political courage — even if it’s in diabolical service of autocratic ends. In contrast, finger-to-the-wind Democrats pander to interest groups when general election success calls for them to stand for something, even if it means upsetting their friends.
If Harris really wants to be a historic, transformational figure, she’ll pick Shapiro and we’ll finally just have it out. A woman of color and a devout Jew against two White dudes who pine for a past when women stayed home to cook and clean, and Jews may have controlled some banks and media outlets but damn well knew not to run for the highest offices in the land? Let’s finally have the argument we’ve had by proxy for so long. Put it all on the table. Diversity. Merit. Entitlement. Can Trump and Vance muster the intellectual ordnance to convince anyone that Harris and Shapiro aren’t qualified?
This is an urgent matter.
Vance’s speech to the Republican Convention made this an urgent matter, folks. “America is not just an idea,” he said. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future…when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.”
Not an idea? What was the Revolutionary War about, if not a set of ideas unique to this audacious experiment in pluralism? The Civil War? The Civil Rights Movement? And..shared history? What about the E Pluribus part of the unum?
Vance went on to tell this weird story about how, when he got married, he demanded that his wife, the product of immigrants from India, assent to having their burial plots on his family’s Kentucky grounds. (Oh, that poor woman.) Because, you see, his identity is rooted in that soil. Where have we heard that before? Oh yeah, from Putin when it comes to now-blood soaked Ukrainian land. And from those creeps in Charlottesville, chanting about blood and soil.
I’m with the conservative writer Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe, who reminded us that it was as if Ronald Reagan, in his farewell speech as president nearly 40 years ago, anticipated the nativism of Vance and Trump. “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman,” Reagan said. “But anyone, from any corner of the earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”
Let’s do that split screen — the woman of color and the Jew on one side, and the two White dudes on the other — and let them have it out over what kind of country we want to become. Because that’s what’s at stake in this election.
