Election-related sundries

In this post, I want to highlight articles written by two of my longtime friends, Stanley Kurtz and Tevi Troy. Stanley’s article is about an internet ad that a pro-Trump group is running in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. The ad focuses on Macalester College professor Brian Lozenski. He’s the Tim Walz education appointee who calls for the overthrow of the United States. In September, Stanley broke the story about Lozenski’s radicalism and his tie to Walz. I wrote about it here.

The ad plays video of Lozenski describing the United States as “irreversibly racist” and calling for America’s overthrow. It finishes by noting that Walz’s education expertise was one of the reasons Harris selected him as her running mate.

In his latest piece, Stanley writes:

Harris has no education experience. Walz, on the other hand, as both a governor and a former social-studies teacher, has plenty. It’s a near certainty that a President Harris would delegate the education portfolio to Walz, just as vice president and former Indiana governor Mike Pence managed the education transition under President Trump.

Given Walz’s track record in Minnesota putting Lozenski and his radical followers in charge of education, we should expect disastrous results. A Harris-Walz administration would tie strings to federal education grants designed to force Minnesota-style education radicalism on every state.

So the new ad isn’t a cheap gotcha about some crazy outlier professor. Sadly, the ad is an all-too-legitimate warning about what will happen to American education if Harris and Walz reach the White House.

I congratulate Stanley for bringing attention to this matter and injecting it into the campaign.

Tevi Troy’s piece is a modern history of sitting vice presidents who have run for the presidency. Kamala Harris is the fifth to do so in my lifetime. The others, of course, are Richard Nixon (1960), Hubert Humphrey (1968), George H.W. Bush (1988), and Al Gore (2000).

Bush was the only vice president to win — hence the title of Tevi’s article, “Uphill Battle.” However, the margins in the other three races were razor thin.

Nixon, Bush, and Gore were attempting to succeed presidents who were generally perceived as having done reasonably well. Only Humphrey was trying to take the baton from a president with very low approval. Harris resembles Humphrey in that regard.

Tevi shows that its difficult for any sitting vice president to win promotion from the electorate. Obviously, it’s especially difficult if the sitting president is viewed as a failure.

The vice president’s own image should also matter. Two of the four VPs Tevi discusses — Humphrey and Bush — came to the vice presidency with very impressive credentials. And neither Nixon nor Gore was widely considered a lightweight.

Harris, by contrast, is generally considered a flop as vice president. Even many Democrats held that view during most of her term.

Tevi concludes:

[Harris] must navigate the difficult path between her “I am not Joe Biden” comment, Biden’s claim that she has been “a major player in everything we’ve done,” and her comment that “there is not a thing that comes to mind” that she would’ve done differently from Biden. She also has to deal with the fact that policy positions associated with Biden, none of which she has disavowed, poll lower than the same positions when not associated with Biden.

I’ll add only that Harris’ difficult path is made easier by the fact that she’s running against Donald Trump.