Wednesday Morning Rant

The DNC is wrapping up and the Harris-Walz campaign will now begin in earnest. The platform this year is as execrable as expected and the candidates surprise nobody. It was a star-studded show, of course, with both the current Resident taking the stage to bark at the moon and former president Obama being trotted out once again to try to hold things together.

The DNC has been - and will continue to be - covered by people much more attentive and interested than me. What strikes me is that, details aside, the Democrats appear to be running a sequel campaign. This all looks extremely familiar in its broad strokes. This looks like a repeat of 2008 playbook. We have another Obama and Biden on our hands, just dingier and a bit tired. Whether this out-of-time sequel ends up performing like "Ghostbusters (2016)" or "Top Gun: Maverick," however, remains to be seen.

2008: The candidate is a minority radical who underwent a murky and meteoric rise in the Party
2024: The candidate is a minority radical who underwent a murky and meteoric rise in the Party

2008: The running mate is a boring, dull, incompetent, deceitful Party Man with affected folksiness and who claims to be from the Interior and who was selected to play the part of "traditional" and "normal" as a foil for the radical at the top of the ticket
2024: The running mate is a boring, dull, incompetent, deceitful Party Man with affected folksiness and who is from the Interior and was selected to play the part of "traditional" and "normal" as a foil for the radical at the top of the ticket

2008: Platform anchored in racial affairs, cultural revolution and radical economics
2024: Platform anchored in racial affairs, cultural revolution and radical economics

2008: Mean-spirited coronation at the convention
2024: Mean-spirited coronation at the convention

Am I seeing something that isn't there? Because it feels like I'm taking crazy pills. This campaign is looking like a rerun of 2008, especially through the Party automata at the top of the ticket. Harris is Obama and Walz, especially, is Biden. We've already seen this movie. Walz' selection looks to me like it came directly out of the 2008 playbook. We have a non-white communist at the top of the ticket, so get a boring old white guy to act as a counterweight and blend into the background. Also, make sure he's an unlikable, unaccomplished and combative liar who nobody would want in the big chair. It isn't the same in all or even most of the particulars, but the broad strokes look pretty similar, especially with regard to the candidates.

It seems like something along the lines of when Hollywood, bereft of ideas, spins up another entry in some tired franchise in the hope of luring audiences back into the theater, or how AB-InBev went back to the well and tried to run new versions of their "rally 'round the flag" and Clydesdale marketing after alienating its core market. Just go through the motions of what worked before like a bunch of cargo cultists.

Of course, this is not Hollywood or Madison Avenue. This is Washington, and the normal rules don't apply. If this year does indeed rhyme with 2008, however, we can look forward to a Walz Administration in 2036.

posted by Joe Mannix at 11:00 AM

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