Kamala Harris and her campaign strategists must be trying to get their breath back after losing the endorsement of two major Democratic supporting newspapers last week. With an election tied in the polls, Harris’s loss of endorsements from two such influential newspapers raises more questions than it answers. Occurring almost simultaneously, what were their underlying reasons for withholding endorsement support from their long-preferred Party’s candidate?
Eleven days before the election, The Washington Post said it would not endorse a candidate for president. In every election for the past 36 years the Post has endorsed the Democratic candidate beginning with Jimmy Carter in 1976. The Post stated it will continue to endorse candidates for other elective positions.
The Post’s publisher and CEO William Lewis stated the decision was not “a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another…..We see It as consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.”
The Los Angeles Times announcement was more pointed in that it was announced as a decision not to publish its planned endorsement of Harris. The Times is California’s most widely circulated newspaper and one of the country’s largest. It has endorsed Democratic Party presidential candidates since 2008, but the paper endorsed no candidates between 1976 and 2004.
Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong stated, “The Editorial Board was provided the opportunity to draft a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate during their tenures at the White House, and how these policies affected the nation.” According to Nika, the daughter of Soon-Shiong, the endorsement was withheld because of Harris’s support of the Gaza War.
On October 25 the Wall Street Journal carried an opinion piece by Cass Sunstein entitled “On Jan. 6, Will Vice President Harris Certify the Election?”. The article discussed the contested election of 2020 when then Vice President Mike Pence refused President Trump’s request to intervene in counting the electoral votes. It then went into an intricate discussion of the Electoral Count Reform Act and theoretically or practically whether Vice President and presidential candidate Kamala Harris could or would count the votes that would put Donald Trump as the 2024 electoral college victor back into the White House.
If Sunstein was only a professor at the Harvard Law School specializing in constitutional law, which he is, this would be just another item for legal eagles to discuss and of little interest to WSJ’s general readers. However, Professor Sunstein served four years in the Obama Administration as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs – Obama’s Regulatory Czar. In this role for Obama, he put creating new federal regulations on steroids to match with his theory of nudging citizens into marching “Hup-Two, Get in the Regulatory Truck” as a major plank in Obama’s transformation of America program.
More significantly, Sunstein is married to Samantha Power who also served in the Obama Administration from 2013 to 2017 as the 28th United States Ambassador to the United Nations. After Barack and Michelle, they were among Washington’s next most powerful couples. Now working in the Biden/Harris Administration, Ms. Power is the head of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) which is responsible for administering civilian foreign aid and development assistance. According to Wikipedia, “With a budget of over $50 billion, USAID is one of the largest official aid agencies in the world and accounts for more than half of all U.S. foreign assistance—the highest in the world in absolute dollar terms”.
In this independent agency role, Power exerts tremendous influence within the Administration and around the world in such spots as Ukraine, European Union, and Russia; the Middle East, Israel, and Iran; and the Pacific, Asia, China, Japan, and North Korea. Many think she is an influential member of Biden’s shadow government that has been making executive decisions during the mental and physical absences and diminished governing capacity of President Biden.
The above roles of this power couple might suggest that the Cass Sunstein piece was a cautionary pre-announcement from Washington’s power elites to expect a Trump return to the presidency. Otherwise, why even bring up the issue of Harris counting the electoral votes for his victory?
In the Wall Street Journal’s weekend edition October 26-27, Peggy Noonan wrote an item entitled “The U.S. Can Take a Tough Election” . In it Noonan stated “If your side loses, recommit to it and see that it wins next time…..that the most meaningful struggles are long term”. She is the ultimate Republican “Never Trumper” making Liz Chaney look like an inarticulate third grader. Never in her weekly WSJ opinion pieces did Noonan miss expressing her extreme disdain for Donald Trump.
Is Noonan telling her like-minded anti-Trump readers to get ready for another Trump four years? Also, major Democratic voices are seemingly calling the election early without going into panic mode. Both suggest that they know that Harris’s last-ditch claims about Trump being a Fascist, or worse, are just the dying gasp of a campaign created upon illusions.
The bad week for Harris ended Sunday night when Donald Trump invaded solidly Democratic New York City. Filling Madison Square Garden and overflowing outside into the Manhattan streets with tens of thousands of enthusiastic Trump supporters further added more insult to injury to the Harris campaign.
In an election too close to call just days prior to final voting, which candidate will Lucy be pulling the football from November 5? The voters will decide!
TW3
John Whitmore Jenkins
October 31, 2024
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