"No, we’re not winning. We’re 10 points behind," my friend and Townhall colleague Kurt Schlichter advised on Sunday when Vice President Harris became the de facto Democrat presidential nominee. "GET TO WORK!"
Fight like you're 10 points down, even when you aren't, is always good election advice. It is not, however, the best advice you'll get during this campaign season. Because there's fighting just to throw some punches, even if some of them miss or end up hitting yourself or your friends. And then there's fighting smart.
On Sunday, Collin Rugg made a perfectly fair comment about Harris. "Kamala Harris is proof that women can sleep their way to the top," he posted. "How inspiring."
It's fair. It's true. But was it smart? "You cannot build a successful political movement by a process of subtraction," Stacy McCain warned during the 2008 presidential race, and I took those words to heart.
Film Ladd is one of my two favorite conservative movie critics (the other is Christian Toto, naturally), and he had a gentle correction for Rugg that stuck with me until the issue cropped up again on Tuesday morning. Ladd posted on Sunday that "From a tactical standpoint men on the right need to stay out of mentioning Kamala's raunchy past" because "women in the know will be more than happy to tell low-information women voters all about it."
"Men watch team sports where valiant men band together to confront the opposition head-on," he added. "Women love to watch other women tear each other apart. Just stay out of it."
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Indeed. That's why when Will Chamberlain posted that "no children" is the "Really simple, under-discussed reason why Kamala Harris shouldn’t be President," Ladd replied with this:
The Women’s Network is real. It is effective. It is even cruel, especially to other women. And it does not tolerate male interlopers.
Re-read that last sentence, I'm begging you.
"Trust me on this," my old friend and conservative education activist Deb Fillman warned. "Continuing down this path is a MAJOR unforced error."
It also distracts from Harris's horrible policy record going back more than 20 years ago to her political start in the Bay Area. If there's one thing the Harris-[BLANK] campaign doesn't want to talk about, it's policy — not hers, not Joe's. Three-plus years of Bidenomics and foreign policy fails need to be hung around her neck like the fetid, decaying albatross they are. All else is distraction and almost certain to backfire with a voting group that can be swayed on policy.
Housewives, working women, single gals — all of them hate inflation and that they or their husbands or boyfriends can't find decent jobs. But few of them appreciate it when men go after one of their own on personal matters. The Willie Brown jokes are funny, I know. But they're worse than ineffective and we've got to play for keeps.
Gentlemen, to put it in purely guy terms, we're in "Rocky III" territory now. That's when the only way for Rocky to beat Clubber Lang was to go to Apollo Creed and learn how to become a boxer instead of a slugger. We need to stay out of Harris's inside-with-women zone where she has the advantage, and hit her from the outside on her horrible record.
I, for one, have been absolutely brutal to Harris on policy, while having some light fun with her word salads and proclivity for stoner speak. And I intend to keep at it, every day, until she's the footnote in history she deserves to be.
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