On today’s edition of The Editors, Noah asks Charlie if the Harris–Walz “joy” campaign angle will succeed, and Charlie is skeptical.
“This isn’t a joyful campaign — unless you redefine joy to mean Democratic politics,” he says.
“And we’re told by people who talk a lot about diversity that it’s important to have different sorts of people in a given room . . . because that allows those at the margins to say, ‘No, I don’t see it like that.'”
Charlie points out that this “doesn’t work in practice, because when people talk about diversity these days, what they mean is immutable characteristics, not viewpoint. But there is something to be said for having people in each room who have different viewpoints. . . . And the media doesn’t have that. And so what it cannot see is that everybody believes that their own particular political ideology is the correct . . . one.
“Well, Kamala Harris may indeed represent that to a certain subset of the population, but an enormous number of people hate her.
“I know significant numbers of Trump voters who think he is joyful,” Charlie says. “I don’t, in any way, but they do. They think he’s a happy warrior. . . . They don’t understand why the press says that he’s so dark. They think Kamala Harris is dark and depressing and downbeat. And you could do it with anything.”
Charlie argues the “joy” narrative is only achieved by cherry-picking certain elements of the Democrats’ campaign. “You could not parachute someone into the current American political moment who had no interests or background and ask them to describe that campaign and have them say, ‘The word I would come up with is joy.’ This is a word that has been picked because it is popular among progressive activists.
“Ultimately what joy describes here is . . . people who are watching in disbelief as the disaster that was Joe Biden has been replaced by the disaster that was supposed to be Kamala Harris, but is still beating Donald Trump.”
The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.