E.J. Dionne is right:
The sudden and radical shift in the trajectory of the 2024 campaign owes to more than the replacement of President Joe Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate. To a degree that’s still not fully appreciated, Harris has embraced an entirely new strategy: She’s not just pushing back against Donald Trump’s politics of cultural division. She’s bidding to transcend it.
Choosing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate reinforces the move away from clichés about “coastal politics” and “cultural elites.” Instead, she wants to fight on specific, practical measures government can take to improve lives, from family leave to expansions of health coverage. Both Harris and Walz are speaking a soothing and — to pick up on Democrats’ favorite virtue these days — joyful language of patriotism and national unity.
You could tell the Trump campaign was thrown off by the Walz pick when the GOP’s vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, attacked the camo-wearing, gun-owning, small-town Midwestern schoolteacher as a “San Francisco-style liberal.”
Never mind that Vance lived in the Bay Area for about four years while Minnesota’s Walz visited the place for the first time only last month. The tired misfire speaks to how dependent the GOP is on stereotypes about who “liberals” are and what “liberalism” means.
Trump and Vance want liberals to be Ivy League-educated people (which describes both members of the Republican ticket but neither of the two Democrats) who look down their noses at “flyover country” and disrespect the values of small towns and the countryside. They absolutely do not want to deal with a liberalism that extols “community” and “freedom” (two of Harris’s favorite words) and favors a government active in areas where most voters favor more public action to ease their circumstances.
All the ink spilled about who was a more “centrist” or “liberal” pick for the VP job lost track of the fact that while Walz is, indeed, the second kind of liberal he is the very antithesis of the first, the variety that Republicans love to parody.
My favorite indicator of the campaign’s cultural revolution: For years, social scientists have noted that Starbucks drinkers are more liberal while Dunkin’ drinkers are more conservative. But the Harris campaign started selling T-shirts with “Harris-Walz” in the colors and typeface of Dunkin’. So much for “latte liberals.”
Read the rest here.