KAMALA'S DANCE PARTIES.

For the past couple of weeks, the Democrats' nominees have delivered closing remarks at rock concerts.  I'm not sure, though, the extent to which people are turning out for the politics or for the local performers-made-good who offer in-kind campaign contributions in the form of free concerts.  I'll leave it to people who pay closer attention to such things to work out whether people who come for the concert and leave when the pep rally starts are likely voters.

Rather, it is to the relative absence of substance I turn.  At least since Hubert Humphrey and perhaps since the days of Happy Days are Here Again, the Democrats have bundled their allegedly free stuff with the politics of joy.  Thus does the Fourth Turning unfold.

It shouldn’t be that surprising that a regime that has held power almost as long as FDR, dominates every area of American society, enjoys a full-court propaganda press corps, and would have the arrogance to simply install Harris to potentially make history for the fifth time as the first woman and woman of color president. If they couldn’t achieve their utopia with democracy, they’d do it with abuse of power.

That's not to say the pep rallies don't offer substance.  If you're going to have sex, drugs, and rock-'n-roll you'd better have that backup plan, er, right to choose, er, reproductive health.  And yes, the candidate yells out "We've got to fight to win!"  If the current Democrats weren't allergic to cute girls, you'd likely have high school cheer squads getting the cadence going for that chant.  Plus no tax on cash tips.

During a rally in Las Vegas on Saturday night, Harris said that, as president, she would end the IRS collecting tax on tips.

If that sounds familiar, that's because Donald Trump took the same policy position back in June. In true Kamala Harris fashion, after going almost a month with no policy platform, her first move was to steal a plank from her opponent's platform.

I don't have enough Sprecher for this. "Look, it's amusing to see the Harris team attempting to position their candidate as a bit more like Trump on matters like border enforcement and antitrust policy, but if you fight the campaign that way, why should anybody vote for a fake Trump Lite when there's a real Trump running?"

That noted, the candidate promised to offer a statement on economic policy sometime this week.  We'll see.  She could run on the Jarrett regency's record, or so Washington Monthly contributor Phillip Longman suggests.

As Kamala Harris campaigns for president, one of her challenges is the economic record of the administration she still serves. Of course, she can point out that we have the strongest economy in decades, seen in metrics such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average, GDP growth, and jobs paying a living wage. She can also highlight the administration’s success in passing landmark economic legislation, which has resulted in massive investments in long-neglected infrastructure, rebuilding America’s hollowed-out industrial base, and regaining America’s competitive edge in critical technologies.

Anytime somebody says "landmark economic legislation" there is a good chance he is talking rot.  Those "infrastructure investments" don't come close to making good this year's wear and tear on the roads and bridges, and the projects are liabilities to the localities on the hook for maintaining them.  (Nor is the historical record of government spending on internal improvements that encouraging, but I'll defer that for another day.)  Likewise, those industrial policies have been much better for rent-seekers and government employees than they are for, oh, people looking to charge the electric car Our Political Masters have scolded them into buying.

Mr Longman, though, is not done huffing his supply.

So what can Harris do? Continuing to tell voters they are better off than they think they are risks seeming out of touch. Defending the status quo is dangerous when the electorate is desperate for change.

However, Harris has a profound opportunity to present herself as a change agent while embracing Joe Biden’s legacy. To do that, she must do a better job than the president in explaining how their administration has been rebalancing power in favor of the little guy. It’s a populist revolution that most people have never heard of.

Ah, Dementia Joe's wonderful transition. Read on.

One reason most voters and much of the media are oblivious to this story is that Biden has always viewed himself, and been viewed by others, as an institutionalist who values regular order and working across the aisle. Yet when Biden first sat behind the Resolute Desk in 2021, he made appointments and policy changes that challenged principles that elites in both parties have used for 40 years to entrench their power and privilege.

These principles have gone under different banners in different decades. In the 1990s, policy wonks often referred to them as “the Washington Consensus.” Today, the mindset is called “neoliberalism,” a core belief that market capitalism is a self-stabilizing system and that if left undisturbed by government regulation, it will spread broad prosperity and freedom across the globe.

Just as fish don’t know they are in the water, it can be easy to miss how completely the governing principles behind this mindset have transformed America’s political economy over the last two generations. An early example was Jimmy Carter’s administration’s sharp turn from the New Deal order when it joined Republicans in deregulating key industries like airlines and railroads.

In that passage might be a nod to the Charles Peters era Monthly and its framing of "neoliberalism" as a less nannyish technocracy.  The term has since taken on a pejorative cast, particularly among English professors.  What, though, has the Jarrett regency accomplished?

Biden pulled other policy levers to undo the long reign of neoliberalism. There was his switch on industrial policy. According to the Washington Consensus, this term was categorically suspect and akin to socialism because it implied that voters and public officials could know better than “the market” where society should put its resources.

Biden not only didn’t hesitate to use the term but also put his shoulder into passing three foundational laws—the Infrastructure and Jobs Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act—that established an overt, well-funded industrial policy of a kind and of a scale not seen the days of Franklin Roosevelt. It wasn’t a matter of picking individual winners and losers. It was a matter of returning to a long American tradition, stymied during the reign of neoliberalism, of using government to channel market competition toward national purposes and socially valuable ends.

That internal improvements bromide sure has purchase, doesn't it?  Meanwhile, those computer chip factories and charging stations are tied up in a thicket of equity constraints.  You really want to reduce fuel consumption in transportation?  Repeal the fuel economy standards, sell the Interstates to toll road operators, and end zoning codes.  Maybe we'll see some of that in the economic policy proposals.  And Nikita Sergeyevich will learn how to talk.

Meanwhile, the same administration that brought back warmed-over Keynesian nostrums brought back the structure-conduct-performance paradigm.  In character for Phil.

In describing “Bidenomics,” the administration often said it was a program to “grow the economy from the middle out and bottom up—not from top down.” That’s so vague that a swing voter might conclude that Bidenomics means taking money from some people and giving it to others, which sounds suspiciously like socialism. Instead, Bidenomics is mostly about rolling back monopoly power so that we can preserve our democracy and compete equally in pursuing the American dream.

The administration also missed an important opportunity two years ago when it did little to connect the price spike Americans felt at the pump and in the supermarket to monopolies.

Yeah, let's see the ditzy valley girl run on that.

The trouble with this narrative is that people around the country are not feeling joy. They’re feeling anxious about their savings, the price of gas, groceries, and housing. They’re feeling worried about the state of the country and the world.

Kamala and Walz can say they feel joy until they’re blue in the face. It’s not going to change the fact that most Americans feel the country is headed in the wrong direction.

It's up to Team Trump though, to call attention and offer better options.

With Biden and Harris at the helm, the U.S. has seen a sharp economic decline, rising inflation, waves of illegal immigration into the country, and increased tensions around the globe. Harris urged voters to elect her so that she could find solutions to the things that have been going on since she was elected. "There is only one way to stop the things that are destroying this country," Harris said. "And that's by electing the person who has been overseeing the destruction of this country.

At publishing time, the Harris campaign released a statement telling voters that restoring the peace and prosperity of the Trump administration could only be accomplished by keeping Trump out of office.

It's going to be on Team Trump to push that message.  Although Jeff Greenfield might think the politics of joy has defanged Trumpian populism, "Trump rode to the presidency in 2016 on a promise to smash the status quo. Now he faces credible charges that he represents the past — and there’s a telegenic, younger contender eager to make that case,"  There is still enough in "We are being governed by terminally stupid people" to be a winning message once again.

Trump represented nothing but change. He lacked every quality usually associated with the presidency: Ignorant of history, a life solely devoted to personal aggrandizement, famous as a figure on the gossip pages and as a reality TV star. But in a time when large numbers of citizens felt aggrieved by the failures of government to protect their lives and fortunes, the very aspects of Trump that seemed like bugs were more like features. No experience in government? Look what the experts did!

Phillip Longman, Jeff Greenfield, and more malaise.  Harris and Walz are the weakest candidates since Mondale and Ferraro or Dukakis and Bentsen.  Alas, Trump and Vance are not Reagan and the elder George Bush.  Mr Greenfield sets the task.  "The Republicans will have a billion dollars or so to remind voters that Harris is still the second-highest official in the Biden administration and to argue that she bears responsibility for the wide dissatisfaction on issues like immigration and inflation."  Because she does.  And the Jarrett regency could have lifted the taxes on tips rather than unleashing more Internal Revenue Service officials to audit wage earners.