We had three reporters and an opinion writer in Chicago last week, and if you want to see first-hand what happening inside and outside the United Center, you can check here and here and here and here.
I watched the way millions of other people did: On TV. So my reflections represent less of a first-hand view than the perspective we got through live coverage and news media reports.
MSNBC and CNN both showed many of the speeches live, without interruption, which was valuable. The talking heads on those networks were largely a waste of time.
Here’s some observations from my living room couch.
Vice President Kamala Harris did what she had to do: She introduced herself to the voting public (after a pretty low-profile vice presidency). Her acceptance speech was upbeat, appropriately inspirational, and not too long. (Bill Clinton would leave his audience numb and exhausted after his hour-or-more orations.)
The news media largely ate it up. The Chron even had a special four-page print section with photos of Harris. Jack Ohman, the former Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for the Sacramento Bee, raved, saying Harris came off like the star of a blockbuster movie.
I noted a few things. She mentioned the “war” in Gaza, and after talking about how Israel has the right to self-defense, said:
What has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.
Parse that for one second. “What has happened” in Gaza. “Innocent lives lost.” That’s all passive voice, with no agency. She could have been talking about a massive hurricane, or flood, or fire. Who killed all those people? Not named.
Still, unlike Biden, she acknowledged that Israel’s war has had massive deadly consequences for the people of Gaza, many of them civilians.
And other than saying that she is working for a ceasefire, which is true, she didn’t say anything about how she thinks this war will end and what will happen afterwards, except:
Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.
In fact, other than a few minutes here and there, she didn’t propose much in the way of programs or policies. It was a speech heavy on vibe and low on specifics.
Harris on taxes:
[Trump] intends to enact what, in effect, is a national sales tax, call it a Trump tax, that would raise prices on middle-class families by almost $4,000 a year. Well, instead of a Trump tax hike, we will pass a middle-class tax cut that will benefit more than 100 million Americans.
(I’m sure a lot of Trump’s right-wing economic advisers would love replacing some income taxes with a national sales tax; that’s been a far-right concept for decades. It’s also horribly regressive.
Trump so far hasn’t actually proposed that. What he has called for is high tariffs on imported goods, which would, in fact, raise prices on a lot of what American consume. Note she used “in effect” a national sales tax. She’s probably right.)
She didn’t mention that Biden has had a tax plan for some time that Harris supports, which would indeed cut taxes on the middle class and would not raise taxes on any income below $400,000. But it would raise income taxes (a little bit) on the rich and raise taxes (a little bit) on capital gains.
There is nothing wrong with that plan, except that it’s way, way too limited and doesn’t include a wealth tax. But I guess the political consultants are so afraid of saying “raise taxes,” even on billionaires, that they advised Harris to only talk about cuts.
A few specifics:
And when Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom, as president of the United States, I will proudly sign it into law.
In this election, many other fundamental freedoms are at stake. The freedom to live safe from gun violence in our schools, communities and places of worship. The freedom to love who you love openly and with pride.
The freedom to breathe clean air, and drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis. And the freedom that unlocks all the others: the freedom to vote. With this election, we finally have the opportunity to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.
Harris on immigration:
As president, I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that [Trump] killed, and I will sign it into law. I know — I know we can live up to our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants and reform our broken immigration system. We can create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border.
(Many immigrant rights and civil rights groups opposed that bill.)
She also talked about US military might:
As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.
Also: The most expensive.
Notably, other than “the pollution that fuels the climate crisis,” she didn’t even mention climate change. Four years ago, this was a huge issue for Democrats. Today, it’s even more critical, and completely missing from her message.
The news media keeps talking about polls, and strategy, and insider stuff, which makes reporters feel important. But in the end, this election is about people’s lives, about the future of the planet, about the economic systems that should keep society functioning.
If you assume, as I do, that the two existential crises facing humanity are climate change and economic inequality, and that they are directly related, and that only collective, profound, government action to slow the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and to redistribute wealth from the rich to the rest of us will prevent catastrophe, Harris has a lot of work ahead of her. That’s policy, tough policy, difficult policy, standing up to immensely powerful people and institutions policy.
I believe—and hope—US voters are ready to hear that, and to hear the programs that will make it happen.
The SF Standard says that Harris could be the first “Yimby president.” From the lead:
Amid a worsening housing and homelessness crisis, the defining political fight in San Francisco for more than a decade has been between pro-development YIMBYs and slow-growth NIMBYs.
Now, with a Bay Area politician as a major party nominee, Kamala Harris may become the first YIMBY president of the United States.
That’s not accurate, not even close. The defining political fight over housing in San Francisco for more than a decade has been between people who think the free market, deregulation, and more luxury housing will bring down prices and people who think housing is a human right that should not be controlled entirely by speculators looking to get rich—and who have considerable evidence to show that more market-rate housing doesn’t lead to more affordability.
The term “slow growth” is a misnomer when it comes to housing. There was, for many years, a powerful slow-growth movement in this city, but it was all about commercial office space, not housing. The same folks who wanted to limit new offices (because, among other things, the city didn’t have enough housing for all the new workers) demanded that office developers build or pay new housing for their workers; that was called the Office Housing Production Program. The developers hated and fought it, because they made more money from offices than housing.
(The only reason Delancey Street, which everyone in the city agrees is a world-renowned, effective residential program for people with serious substance abuse issues and often criminal records, was able to construct supportive housing for 250 people on the waterfront was the OHPP. “Slow growth” leader Sue Hestor demanded that an office developer pay for that housing; the late Sue Bierman, who was on the Planning Commission, backed her up. Now: A national model, a city legend, a huge success story. Courtesy of the “slow growth” movement.)
Harris did, indeed, talk about the housing shortage, which is actually an affordable housing shortage. She talked about building 3 million new housing units a year. As Lincoln Mitchell points out, developers about building about 1.2 million units a year already, so maybe she wants 3 million more.
It’s clear that Harris and her allies want to eliminate “red tape” and make it easier for private, for-profit developers to build, particularly in cities. Cutting interest rates might do a lot more than cutting regulations, but whatever.
From Jacobin:
At the core of the Harris-Walz agenda is a commitment to bringing down housing costs by increasing housing supply. This promises to be achieved through deregulation of zoning and permitting, which would facilitate more and quicker construction, and through subsidies and tax credits, which would incentivize the building of homes both to rent and to own. While increasing housing supply is important, the proposal offers few specifications about what sort of housing will be built, where, and for whom, simply stating that the expansion “will make rents and mortgages cheaper.”
Yet assuming an expansion of any type of housing supply will automatically and significantly lower rents and home prices is an exercise in trickle-down economic logic. It makes little sense compared to directly investing in an expansion of the specific kind of housing that is most desperately needed: rental housing that is permanently affordable and off the speculative market, especially for those with the lowest incomes, for whom there is currently a shortage of 7.3 million homes.
For all the Yimby talk, it’s interesting to look at the record of her running mate, Tim Walz. He was, indeed, very pro-housing—but his agenda included a lot of state-funded affordable, non-market housing.
Both of them want to fund “down payment assistance” for first-time homebuyers, which sounds wonderful. It also does nothing to address the cost of housing. In fact, it might even drive up housing costs, since more people will be able to compete in the private market.
The federal government used to put up a lot of money for affordable housing in cities. That started to die with Ronald Reagan and it never came back.
Maybe, if she listens to Coach Walz, Harris will not just be the Yimby president but the social housing president.
I almost—almost—felt bad for Gov. Gavin Newsom this week. Democratic governors of several states had prime-time speaking slots at the convention. The left got to speak, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. AOC, Sean Fain of the UAW. Not Newsom. He was tossed to the sidelines.
All he got was about two minutes of airtime when he announced that the California delegation would be casting its votes for Harris.
That’s it. The governor of the largest state in the nation, and one of the most faithfully Democratic states, wasn’t on the stage.
That’s in part because Harris is from California, and the party operatives don’t want to go too deep on California, because that might give Trump some more reason to attack the nominee.
Newsom has spent decades dreaming about being the president, and if Harris wins, he will have to wait maybe eight years.
Maybe he gets a cabinet post. Maybe that was the deal when he didn’t challenge her for the nomination after Biden dropped out.
Or maybe Harris sees his attack on unhoused Californians as a net negative. Or maybe she has known him for decades and kind of, sort of, wants nothing to do with him.
The New York Times announced last week that it will stop endorsing local candidates, including candidates for mayor of New York. That’s a pretty huge deal. Nobody can quite figure out why, except that in the digital era, The Times wants to be more of a national newspaper, with a huge push toward national digital subscriptions, and less of a New York paper.
But let me, after some 40 years of running endorsements for the Bay Guardian, suggest another possible reason: For a paper like The Times, in a place like New York, endorsements are expensive.
The Times needed to assign staff to interview many dozens of candidates for city, county, and state offices every two and four years. The Editorial Board had to meet repeatedly, then interact with the publisher, to make decisions.
Then the publisher had to take time defending the endorsements and taking calls from powerful people who didn’t like the decisions. It’s not pleasant.
Cheaper and easier to let it go.
Also: Weak sauce.
