The campaigns of Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are arguing in advance of their high-stakes Sept. 10 debate over whether microphones should be muted except for the candidate whose turn it is to speak. The former president on Sunday suggested he might not show up for the ABC-hosted debate.
Trump on Monday zeroed in on Harris’ roles in foreign policy, tying her to the chaotic Afghanistan War withdrawal on the third anniversary of the suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members.
Meanwhile, Harris’ campaign said it has now raised $540 million and saw a surge of donations during the Democratic National Convention last week.
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Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic nomination “on behalf of everyone whose story could only be written in the greatest nation on Earth.” America, Barack Obama thundered, “is ready for a better story.” JD Vance insisted that the Biden administration “is not the end of our story,” and Donald Trump called on fellow Republicans to “write our own thrilling chapter of the American story.”
“This week,” comedian and former Obama administration speechwriter Jon Lovett said Thursday on NBC, “has been about a story.”
In the discourse of American politics, this kind of talk from both sides is unsurprising — fitting, even. Because in the campaign season of 2024, just as in the fabric of American culture at large, the notion of “story” is everywhere.
This year’s political conventions were, like so many of their kind, curated collections of elaborate stories carefully spun to accomplish one goal — getting elected. But lurking behind them was a pitched, high-stakes battle over how to frame the biggest story of all — the one about America that, as Harris put it, should be “the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.”
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When Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz strolled onstage to welcome a conference of clean power advocates to Minneapolis in May, he was quick to note that his state is now getting a little over half of its power from renewables. In the next breath, Walz said Minnesota would never get to 100% — a goal he helped set — without changing what he called “outdated” permitting laws.
“There are things we are doing that are too cumbersome, they don’t fit where we’re at, they add costs, and they make it more prohibitive to get where we need to go,” Walz told the industry group American Clean Power.
A few weeks later, he signed legislation to speed things up. Developers no longer have to demonstrate that a clean energy project — that is, solar and wind, storage and transmission projects — is needed as part of Minnesota’s energy system. And they no longer have to study alternative sites and transmission line routes — a requirement that had effectively doubled the possible opponents for a project.
Walz’s effort to resolve a major obstacle to the clean energy transition nationwide is getting new attention since he was tapped as Kamala Harris’ running mate. His experience enacting such laws in Minnesota could position him as a leader on climate issues if Harris wins in November.
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