You noticed we deliberately avoided the punditry this morning. Section Leader DeMille letting Meat keep the grill cool and ordered breakfast delivery from Punera which was a relief. Nice croissants with some folded egg, frommage and sausage was the approach to safe digestion of the accounts appearing on the tablets next to the still-steaming mugs of Chock Full O’ Nuts.

Consensus was that there had been nothing either new or devastating as the pundits woke up. Which went to the heart of why the messaging was crafted to message it.

There is a tendency to attribute the clumsy nature of the Harris start-up campaign to something new, rather than the product of a group that recent staged a successful coup d’etat against a sitting President. Granted, he wasn’t sitting on much, but you know messaging. It is about retaining the capability to have the power to issue the messages.

These are very smart people we have to deal with, and what is happening must reflect what they already know and have set as the way ahead. They realize they have a good candidate who seemed viable but turns out to be sub-optimal for the times. She is attractive and relatively articulate, though not particularly adept on the fly. Not insurmountable, but inconvenient in the current affray. Her ethnicity was useful on the last campaign, but not sufficient to serve in her role as emergency relief pitcher for an only marginally successful starter.

An example? In a swiftly changing world with a lot of moving pieces, Harris had one interview in two months. Clearly, she is not the dynamic leader to step in and inspire with spontaneous demeanor. So, there may be a strategy in play that acknowledges the 2024 election is lost and preparations are underway to cement the advances achieved with Mr. Obama in 2028 with a fresh new candidate and years to groom the message for a new start to preserve and advance the agenda.

So the background messaging about how a Debate Without Bombshells was planned. Trump was described as off-balance and a bit cranky. He had a funny moment early on, which was calculated to pre-empt a scripted line from Harris we had seen previewed through the week.

She reportedly was going to use that viral “I’m talking” moment at some point with that head tossing flourish, Instead, Trump dropped the phrase on her as she mouthed something unintelligible into her muted mike, saying: ““She was big on Defund the Police, in Minnesota, she went out…” then he looked over, paused, and dropped an obviously scripted: “Wait a minute, I’m talking now. Does that sound familiar?”

Pundits this morning said fans claimed ‘Her face was priceless,’ though it was on free electronic media so the price is what you pay.

That caused some discussion around the table and not all of it was about lunch. Taken with the surprising admission from a DoJ spokesperson that some of the LawFare conducted non-stop against Trump’s office, family and person over the last nine years might have had some partisan motivation, it looks like some pre-emptive self-defense by people who are preparing for some lean times in the years to come.

Or it is just a hedge, in case things don’t work out. So the game continues with a peek at the way the people who devise and manage the rules want it to. We’ll see.

Our current problems are all Trump’s fault, right? So will the next ones, if it is managed properly, so we need someone with a decent hair cut from a sunny state to carry us forward with joy to that new horizon. The one that works this time!

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com