It was back to the future on Tuesday night as Michelle and Barack Obama spoke at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The former was the clear winner over the latter in the speech sweepstakes, but she made no move to wrest the nomination from her longtime friend vice president Kamala Harris. Instead, she focused on pillorying Donald Trump as the scion of “the affirmative action of generational wealth.” Her husband evocatively likened Trump to the “neighbor who keeps running his leaf blower outside your window every minute of every day.”
Absent some of the more fevered conspiracy theories on the right actually occurring—Joe Biden seizing back the nomination, Michelle Obama tossing her hat in the ring—the convention in Chicago has been drained of much of its suspense. Even the much-ballyhooed protests against the Gaza war seem to have fizzled out, if not turned into sheer farce, now that vice president Kamala Harris has captured the hearts and minds of the Democratic party.
As the convention focused on denouncing Trump as a threat to American freedoms—democracy is apparently now passe—a fresh reminder of the foreign policy stakes arrived with the disclosure that the Biden administration has approved a secret strategy called “Nuclear Employment Guidance” that aims to deter a simultaneous attack from China, North Korea and Russia.
How much either Tim Walz or Harris will focus on foreign affairs in their speeches is an open question. But the geopolitical context that any new president will confront is rapidly shifting, and not always in good ways. Perhaps the coordination between Russia, China and North Korea that foreign policy realists were wont to warn about was likely to occur, but American foreign policy does not seem to have done much to forestall the prospect. Instead, the state of belligerence towards China may, in some measure, have become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Absent a crisis abroad—an attack on Taiwan or war with Iran—it is economics that remains at the forefront of the Harris campaign. If her own campaign is anything to go by, she has a firm mastery of the importance of finances. She reported a whopping $220 million at the close of July in cash on hand in contrast to the $151 million that the Trump campaign disclosed. This reversal of fortune is allowing Harris to hammer home her anti-corporate, pro-labor message in a variety of swing states. Meanwhile, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s finances appear to be in dire straits as he commands a mere $3.9 million with $3.5 million in debts. Small wonder that his campaign is openly flirting with endorsing Trump as long as the former president is willing to promise, for whatever that promise is worth, a post (Secretary of Health and Human Services?) in a new administration to Kennedy. The most likely prospect is that Kennedy, who has not rated a mention at the convention, will drift into insignificance. It’s an amazing testament to the fall of the once-proud Kennedy family.
If there is a star of the convention, it appears to be the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Trump has sought to disown it, but Democrats are highlighting its proposals as a foundation for a new Trump administration. An oversized copy of the “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” is being held up by several speakers including Pennsylvania state Rep. Malcom Kenyatta who deemed the document a “radical plan to drag us backwards, bankrupt the middle class and raise prices on working families like yours and mine.” The term “radical,” once the province of the Left, seems to be vying with “weird” as the favorite Democratic term of obloquy for Trump.
As Harris and her running mate Tim Walz prepare to make their respective big speeches tonight and tomorrow, it would not be surprising to see them flag Project 2025 as a danger to the republic. On July 23, Harris stated in Milwaukee that Trump and “his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class. Like, we know we got to take this seriously, and can you believe they put that thing in writing?” Most book authors could only dream of such publicity, but Trump and Co. appear to be running away from Project 2025 as quickly as they can.
Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He has written on both foreign and domestic issues for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Reuters, Washington Monthly, and The Weekly Standard. He has also written for German publications such as Cicero, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Der Tagesspiegel. In 2008, his book They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons was published by Doubleday. It was named one of the one hundred notable books of the year by The New York Times. He is the author of America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators.
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