Just a quick one today (I’ll have a longer post tomorrow). But I wanted to flag something that I’m going to be doing on Monday. Here’s Politico’s report:
Kamala Harris is making another run at disaffected Republicans in the swing states.
The vice president will be joined by anti-Donald Trump Republicans, including former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), as she makes campaign stops Monday in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Harris and Cheney will appear with conservative radio host Charlie Sykes and Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, according to a senior campaign official granted anonymity to preview the schedule.
The events will be held in a trio of suburban counties where Nikki Haley performed strongly during the GOP primary: Chester County, Pennsylvania; Oakland County, Michigan; and Waukesha County, Wisconsin.
I will be moderating the conversation between Harris and Cheney at an event in Brookfield, Wisconsin, in the heart of our so-called WOW Counties.1 And, yes, I am deeply honored to be asked to participate.
Harris and Cheney in Ripon, Wisconsin. They’ll be back in Wisconsin on Monday.
There are just 16 days left until Election Day. Happy Saturday.
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The battle for disaffected voters
The Harris campaign continues to aggressively reach out to Trump-skeptical Republicans in key suburban counties. Why? The Harris campaign runs the numbers:
Harris’ events with Cheney will take place in the key suburban counties of Chester County, Pennsylvania; Oakland County, Michigan; and Waukesha County, Wisconsin, the day before in-person early voting begins in Wisconsin.
In each of these counties, Nikki Haley earned thousands of votes in this year’s GOP primary, revealing real discontent among suburban voters with Trump.
In Oakland County, Michigan, Haley won nearly 50,000 votes (33%). Statewide in 2020, Michigan was decided by 150,000 votes.
Even after Haley dropped out, in Chester County, Pennsylvania, Haley won more than 9,000 votes (24%). Statewide in 2020, Pennsylvania was decided by 80,000 votes.
Also after Haley dropped out, she still won more than 9,000 votes (14%) in Waukesha County, Wisconsin. Statewide in 2020, Wisconsin was only decided by 20,000 votes.
The Harris campaign sees these suburban counties as key target areas for undecided or persuadable voters, including many Republican former Haley supporters – aiming to capitalize on places where Trump has seen a steady erosion of support over the past decade.
Trump went from losing Chester County by 9 points in 2016 to 17 points in 2020.
Trump lost Oakland County by 8 points in 2016, then 14 points in 2020.
Between 2016 and 2020, Waukesha County swung 7 points away from Trump.
These events with Cheney come ahead of Harris’ live CNN town hall Wednesday in Delaware County, Pennsylvania
An embarrassment for the church
The man has been found liable for rape. He is a convicted felon who paid hush money to a porn star. Perhaps more than any political figure in memory, he is shredding the norms of democratic comity and morality. He incited a violent mob to try to overturn the last election and is threatening to use the military against his fellow Americans. He is threatening to deport millions of migrants, separating children from their parents. He calls his enemies “vermin,” and promises a presidency of “retribution.” He is a man who bears false witness and covets his neighbor’s ass the way other men breathe.
And yet, when Donald Trump stood on the dais at last week’s Catholic Charities dinner, it was as if it none of it had ever happened.
As if the lies about Haitian immigrants eating dogs didn’t count; the racist insults are of no consequence. As if no line had been crossed, or standard of decency needed to be upheld.
Trump was Trump; bitter, vulgar, insulting, deeply unfunny. Flop-sweaty unfunny. But the assembled Catholic hierarchy pretended that it was all so normal. Just another occasion to wink at enormities.
By now, of course, we should be used to all of this. We are, after all, just two weeks away from an election in which half of the country will vote to return Trump to power. Even so, watching Cardinal Timothy Dolan fawning on this pathetic Judas…. stung.
A personal note: There are very few men for whom I have more respect or affection than Cardinal Dolan. I got to know him well when he was the Archbishop of Milwaukee. After my mother died in a fire in 2007, Dolan called me and offered to officiate personally at her funeral. I explained that she wasn’t Catholic, but his gesture was gracious and deeply appreciated. Trust me when I tell you that he really is the best of men.
But there he was Thursday night.
Undoubtedly, he thought that he was doing the proper and the decent thing. It was tradition. For a good cause. But in fact, it was an embarrassment for the church; and a cringeworthy milestone in our sleepwalk toward moral numbness.
“Dolan suffused the impious Trump in the pious glow of Catholic charities,” Maureen Dowd writes. “Dolan looked on with a doting expression as Trump made his usual degrading, scatological comments about his foils, this time cloaked as humor.”
Dolan could have stood up and told Trump “Enough!” We have been longing for that voice of authority who could deliver the Joseph Welch line — “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” — to our modern Joe McCarthy. It is the church’s job, after all, to teach right from wrong.
Instead of telling Trump he was over the line, Dolan enabled him in his blasphemous effort to cast his campaign as a quasi-religious crusade and himself as a saintly martyr saved by God. The conservative cardinal didn’t care about soiling the legacy of the great Democratic patriot Al Smith.
The message of the Al Smith dinner was that politics is kabuki theater and our differences are actually quite small.
Donald Trump has inverted this proposition. His presence at the Al Smith dinner last night turned the event itself into kabuki theater, in which everyone participating pretended that the man who attempted a coup, says he wants to be a dictator, calls his opponents “vermin” and “the enemy within,” and has raised the possibility of using the military against American citizens is normal.
No different than Mitt Romney, or John McCain, or Hillary Clinton.
Trumpism corrupts. And Trumpism has turned events like the Al Smith dinner—which used to be balms for democracy—into weapons against it.
The people running the dinner thought they were using Trump to raise money for Catholic Charities. The reality is that he was using them to normalize his authoritarian project.
It took me a quarter century to bring Charlie Sykes over ‘to the dark side.’
A leading conservative, Charlie was among the most persuasive local journalists shouldering the GOP platform on his top rated WTMJ radio/television shows during his three decade-long stint.
But things imploded when he ‘pimp slapped’ entertainer turned presidential candidate Donald Trump.
If my memory serves me correctly, he interrupted his 2016 interview with the Trumpster by calling him a school yard bully with few redeeming qualities (aside from his penchant for making outrageous and racist comments).
Longtime conservative talk radio host Charlie Sykes behind the mic during his days at WTMJ Radio. —Saiyna Bashir/Cap Times
In a nutshell, Charlie drew a distinction between Republican and conservative when talking about a ‘conservative Republican.’ From Charlie’s point of view, being a ‘conservative Republican’ means you put the people (conservatives) before the party.
Charlie’s attack on Trump earned him the moniker of ‘RINO’ (Republican In Name Only), which indirectly—or directly—led to an erosion of his ‘fan’ support.
And his critical rhetoric against ‘the orange one’ only got more pronounced during Trump’s 2020 campaign, culminating last week when Charlie officially endorsed Kamala Harris for president.
Under no other circumstances would Charlie abandon his conservative causes to endorse what he considered a ‘flaming liberal.’ Except when progressive was pitted against a flaming idiotic Bozo with twisted visions of grandeur.
Charlie’s principled stand might antagonize the blind and deaf Trump supporters who quietly turned their heads the other way when their demigod got caught-up (willingly) in the attempted coup on January 6, 2020, his conviction on dozens of felony charges and his threats to turn the presidency into a monarchy. But principles should outweigh politics.
I could pompously say I convinced Charlie to denounce the most infamous OG (Original Gangster) and do a 180 degree course correction on his sociopolitical philosophy—but I can’t go that far, although I can take credit for offering him an alternative worldview. From an Africentric perspective.
I taught him how to appreciate old school R&B, eat my fiery chicken wings without gagging, and fall in love with my wife’s collard greens.
No doubt, after 20-plus years on his radio and television talk shows, Charlie’s hair have started to nap up, and he strode down the station corridors with an appreciative ‘dip in his hip and glide in his stride.’
I first met Charlie three decades ago when I was moderating a program on school choice.
Following my presentation he approached me about appearing on his top-ranked local radio show. That morphed into an exclusive position on ‘Sunday Insight with Charles Sykes,’ which ran for nearly a quarter century on WTMJ TV, providing me with a degree of notoriety.
Being the only African American on the show, my role was to counterbalance the ‘right-wingers’ (and occasionally ‘missionaries’) while providing a Black Nationalistic sway on the subjects presented on the show. …
While Charlie and I frequently clashed on policies, we found common ground on more issues than you might expect—albeit from different sides of the elephant. On school choice, welfare, erosion of the nuclear family paradigm, we found common ground.
We thus maintained a mutual admiration for each other, and I found myself respecting Charlie more than any ‘conservative’ I’ve known.
In fact, I found myself defending him frequently in the Black community, surmising that what tribal members most disliked about him was rooted in his use of statistics that Black folks refuse to accept.
For example, when he would cite negative statistics–crime, the impact of single-parent households, and educational outcomes–some tribal members called him racist, but were unable to dismiss the facts and thus attacked the messenger.
When we talked Monday evening, he acknowledged my tacit influence over the years, without admitting how I pulled him over to the dark side (which only his fans and followers considered a negative).
Consider that he once was a darling of Fox News, but is now under contract with MSNBC; and since leaving his talk show, he has provided commentaries and analysis for PBS. It’s pretty hard for anyone (especially conservatives) not to acknowledge a transformation.
Not by coincidence, Charlie continues to espouse conservative values, albeit with a more balanced perspective.
Thu,s the new and improved Charlie Sykes—still a conservative, but a more enlightened one—is one step away from being granted a colored/cousin (vs. Black) card.
What he has accepted since 2016 is that the traditional Republican platform must be separated from its leadership.
During our recent conversation, I reminded Charlie of a panel discussion he moderated at Wisconsin Lutheran College prior to the 2016 election, during which Rich Eisenberg of the Wisconsin Institute of Law and Liberty predicted that Trump would win the 2016 election, thus signaling the end of the ‘Grand Old Party’ as we know it.
“Hmm, that was (prophetic),” Charlie said, stressing he doesn’t take his endorsement of Harris lightly.
“I see her (Harris) as being the only way to stop the Trump train.”
Charlie views Trump as a ‘cultural evil,’ a stain on American democracy and an affront to decency.
That most Trump supporters ignore that assessment speaks volumes about the state of American politics, he said.
But they won’t be able to blame Charlie Sykes for what happens if Trump wins. He made a career altering assessment that they should have heeded. And another last week.
Exit take: I’m tempted to point out that he may have exaggerated one or two points, but I’m frankly too flattered by the whole thing.
Charlie, thank you for your article on the Al Smith dinner. I am no longer a practicing Catholic for many reasons and that shameful display of hypocrisy is one of them. To think that a man of faith and hierarchy of the Church would position himself anywhere near the most faithless, despicable man is shocking. I certainly understand why Kamala chose not to be part of it!
Charlie, thank you for your article on the Al Smith dinner. I am no longer a practicing Catholic for many reasons and that shameful display of hypocrisy is one of them. To think that a man of faith and hierarchy of the Church would position himself anywhere near the most faithless, despicable man is shocking. I certainly understand why Kamala chose not to be part of it!
Charlie, you are a national treasurer. Thank you.