It wasn’t just that Kamala Harris referred in public to something she called the “Harris administration with Joe Biden.” The next day, Mr. Biden himself referred to “a Harris-Biden administration.” Daniel Henninger says that fine by him. “From now on, it’s “the Harris-Biden campaign.”
Law and Order a Big Problem
The bigger issue looming this fall: Will the law and order issue have a material effect on voting? In general, pundits and analysts have minimized the issue.
But results from a Monmouth poll out this week find 65% of respondents say “maintaining law and order” is a big problem, reports Daniel Henninger in the WSJ.
The poll’s self-identified party affiliations are 28% Republican, 41% Independent and 31% Democratic.
- 60+% of non Republicans and blacks civil disorder has become a big issue
- 46% of white non-Republicans see it as a problem.
How Important Is Your Zip Code
“Looks like where one lives explains a lot about the Democratic worldview,” suggests Mr. Henninger.
There’s more bad news at the wrong moment for Harris-Biden: Conclusive evidence has emerged that the American left is certifiably insane.
Open Season on Police?
After the shooting this week of two cops in Compton, south of Los Angeles, a small contingent of antipolice protesters stood outside a hospital chanting, “We hope they die!”
Mr. Biden tweeted criticism of both incidents as “unacceptable” and “entirely counterproductive.”
Up to now, the conventional liberal/media/Democratic story line has been that “most” of the protesters are peacefully objecting to racism and police practices. But it has become impossible not to see something else that falls between carrying signs and looting stores.
It is common practice for these protesters, men and women, to stand inches from the faces of cops, especially black cops, screaming insults and personal obscenities with no letup. This behavior is a phenomenon worth thinking about.
It wasn’t long ago that everyone but the genuinely insane knew that if you did this to a cop, odds were you would be a) arrested and/or b) popped with a billy club.
This is new—a status quo in which there is no fear of the police by protesters or common street criminals. A line in the sand has been washed away.
This condition didn’t happen in the past 100 days. Democratic politics has been building toward precisely this redefinition of law and order for at least 20 years.
In an important political document – the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force – the words “felony,” “homicides” or “gangs” appear nowhere. “Protecting Communities by Reforming Our Criminal Justice System” is almost entirely about one thing—the police and reducing their role. “Shootings” appears once—in regard to “police shootings,” continues Henninger.
Note that it appeared one month after the protests, looting and urban shootings began in May.
The Democrats’ failure at their convention to mention the violence wasn’t just avoidance of an inconvenient reality. It was a conscious ideological choice. To restate a point made previously in this space: There will be no return to normal if Harris-Biden wins.
Harris – President-in-the-Wings
Sen. Harris referred to this summer’s violence as “reimagining how we do public safety in America.” Instead, America now is facing a virtual collapse of the police function.
The result is an abrupt spike in urban crime and mob-like political protesters exploiting official restraints on police. It’s a perfect, still-raging storm of progressive failure. Which now means Democratic failure.
Henninger’s argument is that the “Democratic left has turned certifiably insane, if one definition of irrational behavior is the refusal to recognize the damage being done, primarily to black and Hispanic neighborhoods, by catastrophic violence.”
Voters, it appears, have begun to notice.