It must be exhausting at Morning Joe, constantly tapdancing on the DNC party line, celebrating how Kamala Harris is tremendous again today.
It turned upside down on Friday. In The World According to Morning Joe, Kamala is Reagan, Trump is Biden.
Joe Scarborough kicked off today's show by approvingly quoting this bit from Peggy Noonan's current Wall Street Journal column [emphasis added]:
"For the first time this week I thought people were wondering about the impact of Mr. Trump’s age. He is 78. He hasn’t been able to focus, make his case. Is he, in another irony of 2024, turning into Joe Biden?"
What an insight. The Democrats dumped Biden, and now they shamelessly say Trump is the Cognitive Decline Guy. A bit later, Katty Kay claimed:
"There's a lot more kind of sunny Reagan about the Democratic ticket at the moment then there is about the Republican ticket. "
This is also the official DNC song sheet that's going around. Reagan was sunny in large part because he wanted to get government, which in his 1981 inaugural address he described as "the problem," out of people's lives, letting them pursue their own notions of happiness. The far-left Kamala-Walz agenda is all about more government, all the time—except when it comes to protecting the lives of unborn children.
Kay then mentioned a "weird" story Trump had told during his press conference yesterday. She then stopped herself, as if surprised by having used that Democrat trope, "weird," in talking about Trump-Vance. Right.
What's "weirder" than Kamala's word salads, and her deep thoughts about "the passage of time" and other ethereal matters?
Kay also described Trump as being "holed-up" in Mar-a-Lago. But as she was aware, he held a freewheeling, hour-long press conference there yesterday in which he responded to a wide range of questions from an often-aggressive press corps. In contrast, Kamala Harris is "holed up" behind a teleprompter. And 20 days into her campaign, neither she nor Tim Walz has sat down for a press interview, let alone held a press conference.
There was another irony to Scarborough's citation of Noonan's anti-Trump animus, in which she said of Harris:
"The woman isn't creating a movement, but a movement is creating her. And they are showing up."
Scarborough failed to acknowledge that a key element of that movement "creating" Harris is the liberal media itself. And Morning Joe is "showing up" every day to wax ecstatic over Kamala while continuing to trash Trump. It's not organic or grass-roots. It's some powerful Astroturf.
Scarborough also praised Harris for her positive comments about the country, versus Trump's gloomier view. Guess what, Joe? When you're part of the current administration, of course you'll talk up the state of things. Would you expect Harris to say, yeah, we sucked, and dragged the country into a ditch?
And the job of the candidate running against that administration is to point out its shortcomings. Remember the 1992 campaign, in which Bill Clinton's key slogan, invented by James Carville, was "It's the economy, stupid," suggesting it was in bad shape? In fact, during that last quarter of 1992, as the New York Times admitted:
"The economy expanded at a robust pace of 4.8 percent in the final three months of 1992, the best quarterly performance in five years."
Back then, the networks proclaimed the positive numbers didn't match the mood of the people. ABC's anchorman Peter Jennings announced "All over the country, millions of people hardly need any statistics to tell them what is happening."
Scarborough also managed, yet again, to work into his spiel a reference to having run for Congress. Nicely done!
Here's the transcript.
MSNBC
Morning Joe
8/9/24
6:03 am EDTJOE SCARBOROUGH: Peggy writes, I continue to believe the woman isn't creating a movement, but a movement is creating her. And they are showing up. And, man, are they showing up. Mr. Trump spent most of the week having what a GOP strategist told Politico is a public nervous breakdown. Donald Trump.
And then finally, another telling quote from Peggy, and this is fascinating, for the first time this week, I thought people were wondering about the impact of Mr. Trump's age. He is 78. He hasn't been able to focus, make his case. Is he, in another irony of 2024, turning into Joe Biden?
. . .
JOHN HEILEMANN: It is just the case that the split screen now is a split screen that is much mor punishing to Donald Trump than the split screen when it was Joe Biden on the other side of that screen. And again, you can talk about how you want the world to be. I'll tell you about how the world is. That's the reality.
SCARBOROUGH: Yeah. So, it's so funny you said that. Last weekend, you know, last weekend, Katty, my kids and I were watching the Olympics. And there was a local news break. And they showed a -- it was one of these, you know, poll came out, and it showed the split screen and the two candidates on both sides. And it was the first time that I had seen Kamala Harris, 59-year-old Kamala Harris, I think she's 59, next to 78-year-old Donald Trump.
And it was, it was actually quite jarring. You know, politics is all about contrast. That's what I learned in the first campaign school I went to 30 years ago. They said, the campaign is about contrast. The visual contrast is striking. You look at the press conference yesterday, and the exaggerations and the outright lies that were told in Donald Trump's press conferences. Also talking about us being on the verge of a depression, when the United States is more powerful economically relative to the rest of the world than it's been in 20, 30, 40 years. And I could go down that list again, but there's no need. People know that that's the truth.
But you have Kamala Harris saying we love our country, we believe in our country, on one side. And then you have Donald Trump on the other side, saying our country's lousy. That is -- again, going back to Peggy Noonan and her life's work. Regardless of ideology, Americans want optimism. They want hope. They want someone looking to the future. And boy, that is another stark contrast that you see. In yesterday, and in the previous few weeks.
KATTY KAY: Yeah, there's a lot more kind of sunny Reagan about the Democratic ticket at the moment then there is about the Republican ticket. And you see that in all the rallies. I mean, you see it in the fact that Donald Trump is not really holding rallies. He's holed up in Mar-a-Lago. He's doing one rally today in Montana, a state he is 15 points ahead. So that's kind of head-scratching. But it was a case of grievance, and that's what we're seeing from the campaign.
And case in point about Donald Trump's mental acuity. During yesterday's news conference, he told this sort of weird story about--weird--about nearly dying during a helicopter ride. But as the New York Times points out, there was only one problem with the story, or maybe two or maybe three problems.
