Commentator
Election, Election Interference, Ukraine, Gaza
Dear Friends,
I’m sharing a ‘Commentator’ post. This is a fairly regular news analysis I do. The idea is to read widely from across international media and the partisan spectrum and to spotlight the more noteworthy stories.
Best,
Sam
IS THERE A POST-DEBATE BUMP?
This is the frustrating part of every election cycle. The candidates have clearly announced and differentiated themselves. It feels like time to count the votes…but instead we have to wait two months.
During that time, one wouldn’t expect all that much to happen. There may be another debate, but likely not. There may be an October surprise of some kind or other, but it’s hard to know what can possibly shift voters’ underlying perceptions of the two candidates. And then of course there are the unknown unknowns — things like our apparent new normal, of wingnuts taking their bimonthly shots at Trump.
In his usual elegant way, David Brooks has clarified what I would take to be the underlying dynamic of the election — that it should be the Democrats’ year. MAGA had its moment in the 2010s, trying to shake up established norms. What seems to have reasserted itself is what More in Common calls “the exhausted majority.” These are the largely suburban voters who waved through the figurine of Joe Biden in 2020, who like normalcy, and who describe themselves as being tired of all the drama. As Brooks writes, “The wearier we grow with American carnage catastrophizing, Trump seems not just monstrous but, worse, stale.”
That probably should be enough, but, from the Democrats’ point of view, there is still a great deal to worry about — and the media’s overly rosy picture obscures how brutally tight this race is likely to be. For one thing, the electoral college vastly favors Republicans — and the media’s tendency to just cite Harris’ popular vote advantage misses that the race will turn on a handful of fairly poll-opaque swing states.
Then, Harris has failed to:
Find a simple, cogent message that resonates deeply with low-information swing voters;
Steal the spotlight and make herself the protagonist of the election;
Produce an utterly compelling narrative about herself;
Lay out concrete policies that let swing voters, particularly males, know how their lives will be better in a Harris administration;
Roll out a media blitz where Harris both makes herself inescapable and reaches undecided voters through new media.
I had a glimpse of how wide the disconnect may be between the media bubble and the minds of undecided voters through a pair of post-debate pieces by The New York Times and the BBC. This was at a moment when the Times declared that Harris “dominated” the debate, and Charles Blow asked if it was Trump’s “Waterloo,” and The New Yorker wrote, “Donald Trump Had A Really, Really Bad Debate,” and Vanity Fair wrote that “Harris Made Trump Look Silly and Small.”
But the BBC and Times’ reporters had to acknowledge that from the vantage-point of swing voters in battleground states, it wasn’t nearly so one-sided. “Trump’s pitch was a little more convincing than hers,” a Milwaukee woman told The Times. “I guess I’m leaning more on his facts than her vision.” “I like her, but we don’t know what she’s going to do,” a Michigan woman told the BBC, adding, astonishingly enough, that Trump seemed like “a man of his word.”
My suspicion is that this second assassination attempt, in Florida, may have negated whatever advantage Harris accrued from the debate. But, within the debate coverage, there is what still may be the key signal for the Harris campaign. “There was a lot of drama with Trump,“ a Michigan cop, Chuck Brenner, told the BBC. “And the legal issues. I kind of got sick of that.” That’s the voice of the ‘exhausted majority’ — which aligns with Brooks’ analysis — and that well may prove to be the narrow difference.
Still, Harris’ reticence to hit social media and hit the podcasts continues to have me worried. The Democrats, as they have from the beginning, are running this race as if they are the frontrunner. If they lose, it will be that caution and complacency that are to blame. On The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last made the trenchant point: “Trump needs to be the main character. Trump’s grand unified theory is that politics, like entertainment, is an attention economy.…This theory may be callow, dangerous, and/or immoral. But it is not crazy.”
And that’s the real issue here. The chaos at Arlington Cemetery, the arguments about cats-and-dogs in Springfield, Ohio, are ways of doing something so outrageous that the media is forced to turn its attention to Trump. That’s the playbook. It’s worked many times before and the Democrats still really don’t have an answer to it. The most obvious answer — now that they have a dynamic, younger candidate as opposed to ol’Joe — would be to put her in front of as many cameras and studio mics as possible. It’s still baffling to me why that’s not happening. As the cliché has it, every vote counts in this election. To get them, Harris has to aggressively — through new media — put herself in front of as many voters as humanly possible.
ELECTION INTERFERENCE — AND THE WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS
It’s very difficult to think about this topic without sounding crazy — or starting to feel like you’re going crazy yourself.
Probably the most judicious thing is to say that several factors seem to be converging at once and with the result that, for all kinds of reasons, the election process comes under more scrutiny than it has for about a half-century.
China and Russia really do seem to be engaged in active espionage within the US and have found that their most effective means of espionage (or one of them) is to muddy waters and attempt to influence public opinion.
China’s case seems more clearcut, and the arrest of New York State governor’s aide Linda Sun is of a piece with what intelligence officials have described as China’s attempts to infiltrate Western societies. In an op-ed in 2022, former MI6 director of operations Nigel Inkster wrote, “China can best be described as an intelligence state. The party views the business of acquiring and protecting secrets as an all-of-nation undertaking.” In a joint press conference between MI5 and the FBI, held at that time, FBI head Christopher Wray described China’s efforts as “immense” and “breathtaking.”
At the same time, though, China’s efforts are more about pervasive, society-wide efforts as opposed to directly manipulating election results. A recent DNI estimate held that, “China, for its part, is focused on influencing down-ballot races and is still not attempting to influence the presidential race.”
Russia, on the other hand, seems to have moved on from troll farms to pumping money into right-wing influencers — as in the Justice Department’s case claiming Tenet Media operated as a Russian front-company. From the outside, it seems bizarre and sort of a waste of money — the social media stars the Russians supported were already speaking to a Republican-voting audience and likely would have hit the same talking points without Russia’s direct support. As The New York Times put it, “The indictment underscored the growing ideological convergence between President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia and a significant portion of the Republican Party.” What this seems to speak to, though — assuming the underlying validity of the Justice Department’s case — is that Russian intelligence is flexing itself, trying to identify weak points in the US’ democratic process, and is willing to hurl staggering sums at influencing American political discourse.
At the same time, though, that these foreign intelligence operations seem to be very real — by the way, Iran also is in on the action and, if the FBI is to be believed, has taken its own shot at assassinating Trump — they very much play into the hands of US intelligence officials who would like to paint anything they don’t like as foreign disinformation. This really does seem to have made the difference in 2020, with intelligence agencies foiling the October surprise of the Hunter Biden laptop disclosures by pressuring Facebook and Twitter to deamplify The New York Post’s story under the pretense that it was ‘Russian disinformation.’ There is absolutely no reason to think that US intelligence agencies won’t pull off some similar trick this time around as well.
So what results is a wilderness of mirrors, a spy v. spy situation, where intelligence agencies all over the place are trying to shape public opinion going into the election. Has it always been this way? — or has there been a kind of gentleman’s agreement to not interfere in US elections, which is now defunct in the era of social media and the opportunities that that affords?
I have no idea.
But I guess what should be noted is that we really are in a bizarre moment in terms of election manipulation, and everything that happens going forward needs to be subject to immense scrutiny.
On this subject, I have very little to add about the second Trump assassination attempt. My hunch is that it likely is as it seems — another wingnut trying to take a potshot at Trump — but the Secret Service protection (like the FBI investigation into the Crooks shooting) raises red flags. And I feel like we do need to note in passing that, uh, by the way, 9/11 apparently turns out to have been orchestrated by Saudi Arabia?
According to material released in a long-running lawsuit filed by 9/11 survivors, the FBI had in 2017 concluded that Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi graduate student in California who helped the 9/11 hijackers with the bank accounts and apartments they needed to establish their lives in the US, was, in fact, a Saudi spy — and then the FBI neglected to tell the public for five years. The lawsuit seems to trace responsibility for the attacks to Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Islamic Affairs, although, as Tim Golden modestly concludes for ProPublica, “Exactly whom in the Saudi government Bayoumi was working for remains unclear.”
Anyway, this stuff starts to make you a little crazy. It’s just worth acknowledging that our little interregnum of innocence is over, that the new Cold War is very much at full force but that means that — just like in the old Cold War — one’s own security services are never to be trusted either.
UKRAINE’S ESCALATION
‘Commentator’ is only as good as whatever stories are in the media in a given cycle. I don’t do any original reporting; I just try to spotlight the good journalism I find around the web. But the US election cycle seems to have taken so much heat and light away from everything else that there is precious little coverage either of Russia/Ukraine or of Israel/Gaza. And this at a time when Ukraine has been strikingly changing the rules of engagement, both seizing land in Russia and launching drone strikes on Moscow and coming close to securing permission from the West for more long-range weapons.
It’s hard not to be sympathetic to the Ukrainians, who have had their civilian centers pulverized with impunity for two years and have had to fight with one hand behind their backs, but the timing of their escalation is surprising.
What I’d sort of assumed was happening was that it’s like the moments where the clock is winding down at the end of a football game and both sides try to ever so slightly improve their field position before an attempted field goal — with the field goal in this case being the US presidential election and its results to a great extent determining what a negotiated settlement would look like. But, apparently, that’s not right, and the Biden administration in its waning days is taking some of the restraints off and letting the Ukrainians seriously escalate the war.
Some of that can be understood as the Ukrainians just doing what they want without asking permission — as was the case for the Kursk offensive — and some of it may be the same impulse that allowed the Biden administration to entertain a court-packing scheme in its closing summer, a sort of devil-may-care attempt to get ahead of events and then put an incoming administration in the position of having to dial things back.
That seems to be the right way to understand what’s happening now, with the hawks within the Biden administration getting the upper hand. Jake Sullivan’s statement that Biden is "determined to use the four months [until the inauguration] to put Ukraine in the best possible position to prevail” sounds to me like code for trying to change the balance of the war, and which likely means giving the Ukrainians permission to use foreign-made long-range weapons and, as former British defense official Sean Bell told Radio Free Europe, to “inflict the maximum possible pain”on Russia.’
That is a departure from what has been the Biden administration’s hyper-cautious approach to Ukraine and means, actually, that the stakes in Ukraine have never been higher since the start of the conflict. The West is testing Putin’s red lines, and fantasizing again about Putin’s regime collapsing around him, but right at a moment when Ukraine is staring at the possibility of four years of Donald Trump and, with that, the tap turned off for US aid. It’s almost difficult to imagine an election where more has been directly hanging in the balance.
DEADLOCK IN GAZA
In terms of Israel/Gaza, the only thing to really note at the moment is how little has changed. We’ve been waiting for months for something to give way in the war — for Netanyahu to step down, for Sinwar to be killed, for Benny Gantz to challenge Netanyahu, for a brokered deal — and nothing at all has materialized.
The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece explaining why Sinwar has been as elusive as he is — communicating entirely through a system of handwritten coded messages that leave no digital footprint. The shooting of an American citizen at a protest in the West Bank gives once again a sense of what the US/Israeli relationship has turned into — basically, a baby minder with a charge that it can’t control. “It’s not acceptable. It has to change. And we’ll be making that clear to the senior-most members of the Israeli government,” Anthony Blinken said at a news conference. But he knows, and everybody knows, that that kind of scolding gets nowhere. The US would seem to be in the senior position in its relationship with Israel, but there is no obvious point of leverage — Netanyahu has been perfectly willing to isolate Israel within the international community and to drag the US along into Israel’s preferred management of the conflict. Meanwhile, there seems to be no possibility whatsoever of a peace deal — particularly after Israel assassinated Haniyeh — and a moment of reckoning in Israel after the discovery of six murdered hostages led nowhere either.
Netanyahu reacted…well, exactly the way you would expect him to react. "These murderers executed six of our hostages; they shot them in the back of the head,” he said. “And now, after this, we’re asked to show seriousness? We’re asked to make concessions?”
And then, despite an outpouring of frustration from Israelis, protests fall far short of the sort of meaningful public movement that would compel Netanyahu to change course. “A one-day general strike, called by the country’s labour union, was very patchily observed — even in Tel Aviv, the country’s beach-side liberal heartland,” the BBC observed.
So there we have it. Two wars stretching on indefinitely — and this one, I’d expect, not even particularly affected by what happens in November.
This line gave me a chill: "But I guess what should be noted is that we really are in a bizarre moment in terms of election manipulation, and everything that happens going forward needs to be subject to immense scrutiny." Having thought and read somewhat deeply about Czech history under Communism, and having witnessed the lingering effects on people there -- even now old men sniff each other out to see if they might be Communist sympathizers -- it's a truly alarming prospect. But it seems like a not-illogical outcome of political polarization. Once that lid of a totalitarian government slams shut, it is incredibly difficult to open again.
I would like to think that America is just too large, too unruly, to control in that way. But it all begins with media, which is wielding precisely that kind of control -- to the point that you can scarcely have a conversation like this with anyone. I've spent some guilty moments feeling like I ought to quit splitting hairs with Harris and just be glad about how well she's doing. But I also recognize that some of what she's saying about price controls is pretty alarming, and that this is not some Golden Age of matriarchy that we're about to enter. Historic firsts should not require us to stop thinking critically, and neither should the relentless specters of crisis. I deeply resent my hand always being forced by the feeling that if we don't rally behind so-and-so, we better watch out.
When future historians look back at our era they will be mystified by just how key, often politically entirely unaccountable and mostly hidden from public knowledge, national Intelligence Services were to the control of both economies and individuals within all of our nation states.