Trump/Vance vs. Harris/Walz vs. The Economy vs. The Markets
“I went to a garden party, to reminisce with my old friends.
A chance to share old memories, and play our songs again.
When I got to the garden party, they all knew my name.
No one recognized me, I didn’t look the same.
But it’s all right now.
I learned my lesson well.
You see you can’t please everyone,
So you’ve got to please yourself.”
I’m a baseball fan. During this election, I feel like I am watching two teams that are now tied in the 7th inning. Each team has committed four errors, like they are trying to lose. I’m just watching the last three innings hoping my team doesn’t throw a wild pitch or drop a pop fly to lose a game they could clearly win. And by the way, there are dark clouds on the horizon that might bring rain and change everything. It’s hard to score when it’s raining.
So Kamala Harris chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. I served in Congress with Walz and remember him although I really have no opinion from those days since we did not interact much. That said, I don’t see how he helps the Dem ticket. If Harris loses Minnesota, she will lose nationally by a very wide margin. Holding Minnesota doesn’t really help much. And ideologically, he is a hard leftist like she is. I don’t know if he is a leftist by core belief (like Bernie) or a leftist of convenience (like Gavin Newsom), but a full-blown leftist he is. Minnesota is a state that once had Jesse Ventura as its governor. It has not been easy to pigeonhole in the whole red/blue binary. But two years ago, they reelected Walz as governor and gave him a slim margin in both houses of the legislature. Since then, Minnesota has passed what I call “the full California agenda” on every social, crime, tax, economic, abortion and climate issue you can fathom. Under his leadership, Minnesota has made a hard left turn on policy. This will not go well because the Gopher State does not have the geographic and weather advantages that a California has.
The best choice for her to win the election, would have been Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, in my opinion. Candidates always say they choose the Vice President because of their capability to be president. They all have to say that. But the reality is that they are chosen either to bring a state or a constituency that the presidential candidate might not be able to win on their own. You might think that there also needs to be a compatibility between the top of the ticket and the VP. That is nice, but winning the election is paramount. JFK hated Lyndon Johnson intensely but probably would not have won in 1960 without him on the ticket. Ronald Reagan did not want or like George H.W. Bush but was convinced by his campaign people that he needed him to win the election.
In spite of what the regime media says, it is clear that Shapiro was not chosen because he is a Jew and his many pro-Israel and pro-Jewish statements of late would have been hard to walk back. Anti-semitism today is a fundamental part of the Democratic base. They could not afford to alienate that. I’m not sure why she didn’t choose Senator Kelly from Arizona. He has a good resume is seen as more moderate and is from a state they need to win. Rumors are that she was afraid of being outshone by him. Outshining Kamala is not a high bar.
Regime media is fawning about what a great choice it was to choose “America’s dad” who is a regular sports coaching guy from the midwest with “Minnesota nice” to boot. Nice spin. But he is not going to get rural midwesterners to vote for the Harris/Walz ticket.
But if you are a regular reader of these missives, you know that I don’t think JD Vance helps the Republican ticket for much the same reasons. He is from a state Trump will win comfortably. He is an ideological clone of Mr. Trump. The spin is that he will help with midwestern rural voters but Trump already has them locked up.
The only thing I think Vance adds to that ticket is youth. The only thing I think Walz adds to the Harris ticket is that he is male. As far as I can tell, both were essentially chosen to support and agree with the presidential candidate and to be loyal and reliable as VP. This is very unusual in my lifetime. Every single VP pick I can think of was intended to help win a state or a constituency.
Another potential obstacle for Harris picking a VP was what future that VP might face. If you look since World War II, the losing VP candidates (assuming they were not running as an incumbent) have all disappeared into political nowhere after the race. How many of them can you even name? Who ran with McCain or John Kerry? Neither of those were that long ago.This is a risk for both Vance and Walz. But Harris’ track record with losing staff because she verbally abuses them and blames them for everything that goes wrong, is a potential risk for a Harris VP even if she wins. I have known many members of congress who blew threw lots of good staff members this way. The elected official believes they can do no wrong so if anything goes wrong it is obviously someone else’s fault. Yell at them. Kamala is apparently like that.
So we now have two campaigns with people at the top of the ticket that have a lot of negatives in the eyes of the public with VP candidates who don’t really add much. Trump continues to make many unforced errors by saying things to remind people who want to vote for him but don’t like him about why they don’t like him. Harris is not doing any interviews or serious public appearances because of her tendency to spew word salads and also say leftist things that go against the regime media narrative that she is a competent moderate. By the way, her word salads are the product of an unintelligent person trying to seem intelligent by using big words in long sentences. But she doesn’t really understand what she is saying and just hopes it sounds smart. That said, her first rally with Walz showed a lot of people and enthusiasm similar to what Trump elicits and a far cry from anything Biden ever did.
Even RFK, Jr. is imploding. For a while, it looked like he might win a state or two and then at least hit double digits in his share of vote. But putting dead bear cubs in your trunk and dumping them in Central Park is not a good look. He’s not even looking that good as a protest “pox on both your houses” vote anymore.
And while all this is going on, the economy is showing signs of turning south. The government is still dumping over $200 billion a month in deficit spending out into the economy which is very stimulative. The Treasury is still changing their issuance of debt to also be stimulative. There is still plenty of cash and liquidity out there and the headline numbers like GDP continue to be positive, albeit slowing.
On the other side, there is plenty of evidence from companies that deal with the average consumer that the consumer is stretched. The rate of inflationary price increases is down but price increases continue for most things. So much of our economic growth lately has been driven by debt and leverage rather than productivity and some of that is starting to unwind. The markets these days are ripe not with investment, not even speculation, but pure gambling. When you buy options and leverage those 10 times or more on a 1 day or 1 week bet, you are not investing in anything and are not adding to the economy in any way. I remember challenging high frequency traders on this subject in committee when I was in Congress. I suggested they might have to wait one second between trades. One second. They were horrified and said they provide liquidity that wouldn’t exist without them. They were and are full of crap. But that is much of what is out there and many in government fear what might happen if it all were to unwind. It will be bad, no question. But it must unwind at some point. Better to get it out slowly and controlled rather than 1929-like.
If the economy were to tank before the election, that will be the end of Harris’ chances. Rightly or wrongly, the party that holds the White House gets credit when the economy is good and blame when it is not. If we continue to bump along as we are with only slight deterioration until after November, which I still believe is the most likely scenario, It won’t be fatal to Kamala but still favors Trump a little.
There’s no way I see this economy avoiding a downturn by at least the middle of next year. And of course there’s the potential for a big war in the middle east.
The song I chose this week was written by Ricky Nelson himself. He rarely wrote his own hits. He was a big star back in the late 50s and early 60s. He tried a comeback in the early 70s. He was performing at Madison Square Garden to a crowd cheering as he performed his hits from 10 and 15 years earlier. Then he started to perform some of his new stuff, and the crowd booed. He wrote this song after that incident.
If you are a long time Republican, you may not recognize the party of Trump which is vastly different even from that of George W Bush, not to mention Reagan, Nixon and Goldwater. If you are a long time Democrat, the party of Kamala Harris is nothing close to the party of Bill Clinton, not to mention Carter and Kennedy. You may be booing the new “songs” of your party. But things change. You can’t sing the old songs forever.
You can’t please everyone so you do have to please yourself.
Therefore, in spite of all my problems with Mr. Trump, I will not boo him and am unabashedly in support. However, that support is probably more about how dangerous a Harris/Walz administration would be than how good a Trump/Vance one would be. And when I use the word “dangerous,” I mean particularly on international matters where I think their weakness and misguided policies will lead us to war.
Domestic matters are another issue. More about that next week, barring some other big news item which cannot be ignored.
I remain respectfully,
Congressman John Campbell
Drive Fast & Live Free