Grading the parties, the candidates, and the media
FOURTH AND FINAL IN A SERIES ON
THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
By JOHN KEREZY, eyeoncleveland.com founder
(NOTE: Knowing this is a long read, I’ve also made two MP3 files which you can download and listen to at your convenience. They are linked just below.)
CLEVELAND, OCTOBER 29, 2024 — How did this happen?
Many of us will be looking for an answer to that question after the November 5 election. I believe Donald Trump will be returning to the White House with a narrow popular vote victory and a mini-landslide (60 percent plus, or 320 or more) electoral college vote.
Yet there isn’t a simple explanation of how the American democratic republic got to the point of having to choose between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris to become its next president. There will be many retrospective examinations of the process. Here’s some of what should be included in that examination.
Shielding of a Frail President
What is the mental acuity level of the 46th president of the U.S., Joe Biden? What is his physical state? We don’t know. We haven’t known for nearly five years now, because the American media along with leaders around Biden have shielded him from public scrutiny. In fact, the media failed to vet Biden’s physical and mental state in the run-up to the 2020 election.
Writing in the U.K media outlet The Guardian, David Smith chronicled two dozen examples of falls, gaffes, mistakes, and other obvious signs of his loss of acuity – all prior to the disastrous June 27, 2024, presidential debate against Donald Trump. Just below is a link to Smith’s work.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/05/joe-biden-verbal-decline-warning-signs
In Smith’s story, Jill Abrahamson, former editor of The New York Times, is quoted as saying that, “It is simply astounding for the entire country, including its most seasoned reporters, to be as shocked as everyone was by the ugly and painful reality of Biden’s debate performance.”
Today – more than four months after the debate debacle – the White House has still not provided a thorough assessment of President Biden’s physical and mental state. We learned from visitor logs published in July 2024 that a doctor specializing in Parkinson’s disease has made many trips to the White House to treat an unnamed patient going back to 2023. Is that patient Joe Biden?
Leaving aside the obvious (doesn’t the public have the right to know the health of its president?) there’s an even more important question: Who was involved in shielding the true physical and mental health of Joe Biden from the public? Doesn’t the president’s cabinet and the vice president have a 25th Amendment constitutional obligation to take steps if the president is not fit for office? If they had taken action in 2022 or 2023, we wouldn’t be in the situation we face today.
And what about the media? Why was it that we first saw stories in the U.S. peppered with questions about Biden’s health AFTER the June 27 debate? In particular we witnessed Abrahamson’s former paper due a 180-degree turn, from not writing about Biden’s health in news stories to editorializing that he should drop out of the election on June 28, one day after the debate. This leads one to question what the New York Times editors and reporters knew of Biden’s health in the many months before late June.
Finally on this point, there’s the powerful reality that when the public became fully aware of Biden’s frail physical and mental health by July, VP Harris was saying publicly that Biden was ‘sharp as a tack’ and still capable of serving as President. She did this right up until Biden’s July 21 announcement that he was dropping out of the campaign. That is a land mine around VP Harris’s campaign as we’re the home stretch to November 5. Any Biden health issue or gaffe in the last week reminds the voters that the VP and many others shielded the president’s true condition from the public.
Four years ago? Eight years ago?
That’s one part of the two-fold problem for Kamala Harris which is causing her popularity to decline as Election Day nears. Here’s another: Joe Biden has held elected office and received his paycheck from the taxpayers since 1972, or 50-plus years. Kamala Harris is in the same vein, having served in government positions since 1990. They’ve spent a combined 77 years as government employees.
Voters have long memories. They saw their quality of life improve when Donald Trump – who had never held a government position – was president in 2017-2020. He has a long track record of success as a business owner prior to entering the White House. Good wages and job growth, low energy prices, peace abroad, and affordable home ownership are what people remember of Trump’s tenure in the White House. Record numbers of women, Blacks, Latinos, and other minorities had well-paying jobs when Trump was president. If the economy is the No. 1 issue or concern of voters, there’s really nothing Harris can do to match the career experience of Trump and the reality of economic prosperity many enjoyed in the first Trump administration.
Americans everywhere of all classes and political parties are unhappy with the status quo. Around 80 percent of the public (according to polls) would answer the Reagan question of “Are you better off now than four years ago?” with a resounding NO.
From the costly and deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022 (with Vice President Harris casting one of her many tie-breaking votes in the Senate to secure its passage) to evermore burdensome regulations and rules, the public believes that the Biden Harris Administration has not governed well. Voters contrast that with what happened to their wallets and their careers after the 2016 presidential election, eight years ago, and are inclined to want to return to that prosperity under Trump.
On her own as a presidential candidate in mid-August, Kamala Harris’s first major policy announcement was an economic plan of price controls to stop “gauging” (she meant gouging). Many in the public saw it as further evidence that Harris is a career politician not in touch with reality. The economic proposal was widely decried by many economists and even some in the media normally friendly to Democratic policies. Story after story pointed out how price controls in other countries have led to rampant inflation at the grocery store, gas pump, etc.
Harris has come out with more sensible economic plans since then. But Trump’s three main campaign themes — the border (immigration), crime, and the economy – have stayed intact both when running against Biden and now against Harris. The Republicans’ simple closing argument, Trump Will Fix It, seems to carry a lot more believability with voters than the Democrats’ reckless demagoguery against Trump. (More on this later.)
Lawfare Backfires
It’s obvious that the Democratic Party, media leaders, and government bureaucrats in and around the Washington DC area wanted to never see Trump in power again after November 2020. This is not an analysis of what happened on January 6, 2021, save to state two obvious facts: It was a dark and tragic day in American governance, and those who wanted Trump out of the way, permanently, devised a scheme to do just that by giving the demonstrations and protests of that day a name and a theme – insurrection.
That word was not an accident. It was deliberately chosen because of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed just after the Civil War, to prohibit those who had taken up arms for the Confederacy and fought against the Union in the war from holding office. Never mind that Trump had advocated for protesting “peacefully and patriotically” in his speech that day. But raising “insurrection,” and adding one more impeachment of Trump as he was leaving office, was only the beginning of this line of attack.
In 2022 and early 2023, in coordination with the Justice Department and using a ‘special prosecutor’ (Jack Smith) — who was not appointed in accordance with the Special Counsel Act of 1999 — Donald Trump began to face criminal indictments, eventually 91 all told. An objective observer might ask this: How many times was Trump indicted for crimes prior to then? After all, he’s a billionaire whose been behind hundreds of business dealings for decades prior to his decision in 2015 to run for president.
The answer – zero.
What the Biden Harris Administration chose to do, strategically, is engage in a practice that’s known as lawfare. “Until Joe Biden’s debate fiasco, no narrative in the 2024 campaign had dominated the news cycle like the multi-pronged liberal effort to use the legal system and government power to slander, impoverish, and ultimately imprison Donald Trump,” wrote Shane Harris in an article titled “LAWFARE: The Sinister Plot to Get Trump,” which appeared in the Association of Mature American Citizens (AMAC) Magazine in July 2024. (A link to the article is just below.)
https://amac.us/newsline/society/amac-magazine-exclusive-lawfare-the-sinister-plot-to-get-trump/
The AMAC story chronicles the legal maneuvers which the Biden-Harris Administration undertook to attack Trump in great detail. What’s relevant though here – in political terms – is that the lawfare had the exact opposite outcome. Biden, Harris, and others believed that news media coverage of Trump’s indictments and legal woes would encourage Republican voters to back candidates such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
Wrong strategy would be an understatement. Instead, Trump’s poll numbers and fund raising grew which each indictment announcement. Most of Trump’s primary opponents left the campaign by early 2024, when the Biden-Harris lawfare strategy began to unravel.
(Parenthetically, some ‘never Trumper’ Republicans argue that DeSantis or Haley would be far ahead of Harris in an election right now. Perhaps that’s true. We’ll never know.)
Evidence clearly ties the Biden-Harris administration to the lawfare campaign. Due to the revelation of a romantic relationship between hired lawyer Nathan Wade and Fulton County (Georgia) Prosecutor Fani Willis, the public learned that Wade had gone to Washington on November 18, 2022, and spent hours that day meeting with top attorneys in the White House Counsel’s office. After that meeting, it was then Wade who did all the legal work to prepare and file criminal RICO charges against Trump in Georgia.
Nearly all of this strategy ended on July 1, 2024, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Trump and all U.S. presidents have a broad cloak of immunity from criminal prosecution for the acts they conduct under constitutional authority as president, and presumptive immunity for all official acts while in office. Below is a link that Supreme Court ruling in Trump vs. U.S. This ruling will apply to Joe Biden and all future presidents as well.
Supreme Court Decision here:
Of course, the lawfare did have one effect which the Biden-Harris administration wanted – negative publicity for Trump. Trump’s New York trial for falsifying business records in April-May 2024 was one of the most covered media events of the year. Major media network outlets ran “breaking news” interruptions of their programming to run the Trump Guilty jury verdict on 34 indictments in late May. But the Supreme Court ruling essentially ended the lawfare attacks. By comparison, media coverage was far milder when President Biden’s 54-year-old son Hunter, was convicted of violating federal gun registration and possession laws in June.
Missed Opportunities
Did Kamala Harris have to become the Democratic Party’s nominee for president? No.
Immediately after the June 27 Biden debate fiasco, two prominent Democratic Party leaders named Rosa Brooks and Ted Dintersmith widely circulated a proposal to have Biden step aside in favor of a “Blitz Primary” campaign. Brooks and Dintersmith wanted the Democratic National Committee to select Kamala Harris and five other candidates, and have them engage in a “positive only” combination of Town Halls and regional primary elections. They proposed that stars such as Oprah Winfrey and Taylor Swift would be involved in the Town Hall process.
A top candidate would emerge from this process, and this candidate would then be selected by delegates at the Democratic National Convention in August and promoted on the national stage with former presidents Obama and Clinton and Biden making the official announcement.
This first became publicly known on July 7, but the concept had been circulating widely at least a week before then. Here’s a link to the story about it in Semafor magazine:
In hindsight, such a process would have positioned Harris (or any other person emerging as the nominee) in a much better position to oppose Trump. As this campaign has unfolded, Harris’s lack of preparedness for the spotlight has become obvious. In a Blitz Primary mode, she would have received ample opportunities to practice and hone her themes and messages through Town Halls and press interviews.
Additionally, it is a stretch to expect the general public to believe that your opponent is a “threat to democracy” when tens of millions have voted for that opponent multiple times in primaries and general elections in 2016 and 2020, and you have never earned a single vote in your own right in a presidential election. Harris was a a candidate in 2019-2020, but she received 1 percent or less support in the polls and dropped out of the Democratic primaries before the first votes were cast in 2020.
* * * * * * *
When you are “one heartbeat away” from the Oval Office, it’s very helpful if you demonstrate competency to the public. Former VP Mike Pence did that in many areas, especially with Covid-19 in Trump’s last year in office.
The most obvious opportunity for Harris to do so was with the important role President Biden gave her as border czar, in charge of handling the flow of millions of migrants pouring into the United States without authorization. It was especially important as it touches upon two of the key themes which her opponent, former president Donald Trump, has stated he’ll address immediately after taking office again – controlling the U.S. southern border and reducing crime.
Every time an unauthorized migrant into our country commits a grievous crime, it’s a reminder of Harris’s inability to handle this vexing problem.
Another example came when Hurricane Helene struck the Southeast U.S. on September 26. Harris – who made a brief stop at the US-Mexico border that day — flew on to California for some fund raisers that weekend. Helene did horrific damage along a 500-mile path in six different states, killing 240 people, while Harris was in California.
But it wasn’t just where Harris was or wasn’t that’s the problem. Past presidents and vice presidents have participated in FEMA pre-hurricane season briefing sessions. By doing so, they learn more about FEMA’s plans. They can ask tough questions which can improve preparedness. Both Trump and Pence attended these briefings. Biden attended the briefings in each of the past three years.
Missing in action from the briefings: VP Harris.
“Harris hasn’t demonstrated the ability — or desire — to do the apolitical parts of the job that have a huge impact on our lives,” a former Pence official said to a reporter for the New York Post. “Why should Americans trust her to start in the Oval Office?”
Chad Wolf, former Homeland Security Secretary, pointed out the missed opportunity to lead in the same story. “It just fits a larger pattern…. It doesn’t seem like she wants to roll up her sleeves and actually get into the governing of the country, which is hard to do. It’s not glamorous. It’s a lot of briefings.”
“My guess,” Wolf added, “is she would act the very same way [as president], which is hands off — ‘I’m not going to run the country. I’m going to put a team together, and they’ll run it, and I’ll kind of talk about it,’ which is obviously a very different model than what President Trump did.”
PENNSYLVANIA BOBBLE
If the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election comes down to Pennsylvania, and Trump carries the Keystone State, Harris and her campaign strategists can look in one obvious place for why they failed: the mirror. Polling has Pennsylvania moving towards the Republican column, and in many respects this is another missed opportunity.
Pennsylvania is one state where Joe Biden always exceeded expectations. He was born in Scranton, raised in the area, and he attended virtually every major political event in Philadelphia and its southwestern suburbs, adjacent to Wilmington, Del. Biden also drew a lot of Catholic votes in Pennsylvania due to his faith.
By comparison, Harris has no roots or connections to Pennsylvania. She could have chosen its governor, Josh Shapiro, to be her running mate. But instead, she selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Time will tell whether that selection will pay dividends in other so-called “toss up” states such as Michigan and Wisconsin.
For certain, Trump and his VP candidate Senator JD Vance have both campaigned heavily and effectively in Pennsylvania. According to the Real Clear Politics average of polls conducted among Pennsylvania voters, the Keystone state has moved from a “toss up” dead even between the two candidates in the polls as recently at October 2, to an advantage of 1 to 3 points in seven of the 10 polls which this website tracks.
On October 29, the average of these 10 polls has Trump up by 0.5 percentage points in Pennsylvania. That compared to Biden having a 4.3% advantage on the same date in 2020 polling, and Clinton having a 5.0% advantage on October 29, 2016. Bear in mind that Trump won the Keystone State in 2016.
It’s also been in Pennsylvania where Trump has garnered the greatest amount of positive news coverage recently, on October 20, at his short shift making French Fries and handing out meals at a McDonald’s drive through line. Before that, Trump and Vance attracted tens of thousands to the same Butler Farm Show site where Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt just 12 weeks earlier.
In response, the Harris campaign launched a “Real Man Tour” in Pa. featuring Walz and Harris’s husband. The turnout and interest in the tour was underwhelming. Unless the Harris campaign improves its tactics, and quickly, Pennsylvania is headed into the red column come November 5. Right now, it looks like many other “battleground” states will favor Trump at the polls as well.
Trump’s opponents in 2016 and 2020 had appeared on the ballot many times before the general election. They had a base of supporters in many states, and legions of campaign organizers. By contrast, Harris had no base of support outside of California going into the 2024 election process ‘cold’ from mid-July onward. Her top advisers are a mix of former Biden campaigners, Obama advisers, and a handful of her own staffers. From October 2 onward, Harris’s poll numbers have trended downward in Pennsylvania and nearly in all surveys across the country.
Worsening Media Bias
Two of the LEAST trusted sources of information in the U.S. in 2024 are government and the media. According to Populace, only 4% of the public trusts the government to tell it the truth. Only 7% of the public trusts the media to tell it the truth. Something really revealing: Populace reports that 42% of Democrats say publicly that they trust the media, but only 9% do so privately (a gap of 33 percentage points). Other polls (such as Gallup) simple report that public trust in the media is at the lowest point in history in 2024.
When journalism became a profession at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, we needed the middleman. Americans relied on journalists to find and report on news. As the profession moved to the end of the 20th century and into the modern day, nowadays many journalism schools teach advocacy journalism instead of presenting news and events in an objective manner. At the same time, over the last 50 years, increasing percentages of journalists are either Democrats or self-proclaimed independents in political affiliation. Less than 5% of practicing journalists are Republicans.
Bias – favoring one side over another – has increasingly crept into news coverage. Due (in part) to this, Americans have been all abandoning traditional media outlets by the millions – newspapers, network news, etc. There is a business term, disintermediation, that also applies to journalism today. It’s defined as removing the intermediaries from a transaction. We live this in society today in many ways. You want a new shower curtain or Apple watch? Chances are you go to Amazon, so you don’t need to shop at an online or physical store. That’s what is happening today, as more and more Americans go right to the source and use what they see and hear to make up their own minds about issues and politicians.
Joe Rogan personifies this with his “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. A comedian and UFC color commentator by trade, Rogan presents unedited interviews with newsmakers on his podcast. Donald Trump’s podcast interview with Joe Rogan was viewed more than 26 million times in its first 24 hours on YouTube. This is many times more viewers than tune in to the ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, or Fox News Sunday morning newsmaker interview programs. Rogan and Trump covered a wide range of topics in a three-hour, no-holds-barred interview.
Journalism is in great peril right now, and some of its wounds are self-inflicted. Anyone devoting 30 minutes or more of their time checking out the Rogan podcast with Trump will tell you that the conversation was marked with a large degree of honest and genuine reflection by Trump.
Compare this with coverage. Objective analysis (counting verbs and adjectives) of network broadcasts shows that 80 to 90 percent of stories about Kamala Harris are positive in nature, and 80 to 90 percent of stories about Donald Trump are negative in nature. Trump gets laughs by joking about his debate against “David Muir of ABC” at the Al Smith Dinner earlier this month. This is not a surprise. In fact, members of the media have acknowledged this and realize that there are inherit media biases when such a great disparity between “R” and “D” exists in newsrooms.
Hundreds of journalism professors, past and present, have earned their doctoral degrees by researching about the vital role journalism has played in fair and free elections. The public knows that journalism today isn’t fair, and thus the professional practice of the profession is becoming less relevant. When the Washington Post, the LA Times, and USA Today and the Gannett chain of newspapers announced that they would not be endorsing a candidate for president, it was the “left” — those who usually advocate tolerance and understanding of various viewpoints — which went into action, as more than 200,000 people cancelled their WaPo subscriptions in the first day after the no endorsement news came out.
Perhaps the biggest “X” factor in media in the 2024 election process has been the owner of “X,” Elon Musk. Musk unveiled the strategy and tactics which all the social media giants (Facebook, Amazon, Google, Twitter) employed to slant social media against Trump in the 2020 election. In fact, you might recall that Twitter actually suspended Trump’s account. Musk has been just the opposite, ardently advocating for Trump in this election.
Shortly after his purchase of Twitter, Musk turned over massive amounts of internal Twitter correspondence to a group of authors and journalists, including Alex Berenson, Lee Fang, Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Bari Weiss. This group published what became known as the “Twitter Files” between December 2022 and March 2023, unveiling the (then) business practices of Twitter, which served to prove that Twitter conspired with other social media outlets to suspend accounts telling the New York Post’s stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020.
One telltale practice of fascists governments (such as Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy) is control of the press and employment of the press to tell its side of the story and only its side. By there becoming similar one-sided news coverage in the U.S., the press has further weakened itself.
Democratic Demagoguery
As the 2024 election reaches the end, perhaps the most disheartening aspect of it has been the rhetoric lately coming from the Kamala Harris campaign and top Democratic leaders. The words “Nazi” and “Fascism” are coming out of their mouths in the form of accusations and warnings about what a second Donald Trump administration will be like.
According to the Oxford Languages Dictionary, demagoguery is defined as political activity or practices that seek support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people, rather than by using rational argument. That is an essential part of Harris’s “closing argument” – that a vote for Trump would take the nation down the path of neo-Nazism.
Such discourse is dangerous to democracy, whether the words are coming from the mouths of Harris and her surrogates, or (as was in past campaigns) from Trump and his spokespeople. What is especially horrific about this talk is how abhorrent it is to the shrinking number of surviving World War II veterans and Holocaust survivors who saw the evils of Nazism first-hand. It’s doubtful that Kamala Harris would speak face-to-face with an Auschwitz survivor, such as 94-year-old Jerry Wartski.
In an advertisement for Trump, Wartski said that, “I know more about Hitler than Kamala will ever know in a thousand lifetimes.” Wartski pointed out how the Nazis killed his parents. Then he rolled up his sleeve and showed the Nazi tattoo number on his arm at Auschwitz.
Harris and her campaign have resorted to this strategy for one simple reason: She has failed to articulate a vision for herself as president which the public accepts. Abortion won’t be the most defining issue in 2024, although it certainly has motivated many million pro-life Catholics to get involved in the campaign to defeat Harris.
Most voters have become convinced that Kamala Harris is not competent to run the country. When, on interviews, Harris fails to answer any direct questions from reporters, it does not inspire public confidence. Harris has compounded that by refusing to distance herself from Biden. Upon questioning multiple times, she has never stated one action she would do differently from Biden.
Grades, and the Hand of God
On September 11, the Justice Department announced that it had indicted Asif Raaza Merchant for plotting to assassinate former president Trump. The murder-for-hire plot came from Iran. FBI Director Christopher Wray had a stern warning for Iran, saying, “This dangerous murder-for-hire plot exposed in today’s complaint allegedly was orchestrated by a Pakistani national with close ties to Iran and is straight out of the Iranian playbook. A foreign-directed plot to kill a public official, or any U.S. citizen, is a threat to our national security and will be met with the full might and resources of the FBI.”
Never before has a presidential candidate been the target of such vitriol and hatred, and it’s beyond debate that the demagoguery is serving to radicalize people to attempt to kill Donald Trump. We may never know the full extent of all the assassination plots against Trump in 2024.
But the world knows what happened in Butler, Pa. on July 13, when an assassin’s bullets killed one person, seriously injured two others, and came within an inch of killing Trump as well. Many people, including Christian leaders, have expressed the belief that it was God’s providence protecting the former president. Rev. Franklin Graham, son by Billy Graham and president and CEO of the Billy Graham Association, has publicly thanked God for “saving the life of President Donald J. Trump.” Graham added “…It was you (God) and you alone who saved him.”
Many Christians share Graham’s belief.
* * * * * *
So, Professor Kerezy, how would you grade this election season?
As Election 2024 reaches the finish line, this is the most negative and most demoralizing campaign in my lifetime. It’s extremely disturbing that according to the website Open Secrets, there will be more than $16 billion spent on all electioneering (President, Senate and Congress) this year. A vast majority of these funds are purchasing negative ads aimed at opponents.
Our two-party system is broken, perhaps beyond repair. (More about this after the election.)
But that commentary doesn’t assign grades. So here they are:
TRUMP CAMPAIGN: A solid “B” for by and large developing three key themes and keeping its two main candidates (Trump and Senator JD Vance) on target with those themes in messaging.
HARRIS CAMPAIGN: A “D” grade for its inability to articulate a vision for the future which the public can grasp, followed up by late-in-the process excessive negative campaigning and demagoguery as well.
MEDIA: Sadly, an “F” grade for failing to adhere to the first canon of the Society of Professional Journalists: “Seek the Truth, Then Report it”
I am an associate professor of Media & Journalism Studies at Cuyahoga Community College, and before then I worked in government affairs and public relations. The views in this column are my own and not those of my employer. You can reach me at john.kerezy@tri-c.edu. Many thanks to my brother Winston Smith who provided the electric violin music for the opening seconds of the podcast files.
SOME SOURCES USED FOR THIS STORY
https://www.allsides.com/blog/just-3-journalists-identify-republican-how-can-newsrooms-mitigate-bias
eyeoncleveland 