Release The Kraken, Kamala Harris –

“The best defense is a good offense.”
— Glynn Wilson

A caricature of First Lady Jill Biden and President Joe Biden on the wall in the Hay-Adams Off the Record bar by the White House: Glynn Wilson

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The morning broke clear and cold on Monday after some light rain overnight, and the late fall wind was whipping in the 10 to 20 mph range in the Mid-Atlantic region. But it was toasty warm in the media camper van and the water was hot in the kitchen sink.

At noon, I had an appointment to get a Pfizer booster shot to ward off Covid for another year. I’ve made it 18 months without becoming infected, so hopefully if we make it to spring and more people get their shots and keep wearing masks around here, we can begin to move past this worry by spring or summer.

Meanwhile a long-time friend of mine was in town from Birmingham, Alabama, staying downtown in the Hay-Adams, a 5-star hotel right across H Street from the White House on the north side by Lafayette Square in President’s Park. It was good to see the park open again. The last time I was there the former president inside had Covid, and had surrounded the building with ugly black fencing, a line of militant cops and a plywood wall which got covered in graffiti.

Autumn color 2021 in Lafayette Square by the White House, across the street from the Hay-Adams 5-star hotel: Glynn Wilson

Related: Not Since Nixon Has a President Been So Isolated and Hated

President Donald Trump is so unpopular and afraid of protesters surrounding the White House that the perimeter had to be extended out with ugly fencing, which is now covered with BLM graffiti: Glynn Wilson

This is one of the great things about camping in the D.C. area. The ability to get downtown in no time to enjoy scenes in the nation’s capital all year around from one administration to the next.

This year getting downtown has not been as easy, however, since the Metro Green line was closed down for most of the summer and early fall. It reopened a couple of months ago with renovated stations in College Park and Greenbelt, Maryland. But when one train car partially derailed, they discovered a problem with the wheels on the new cars, so the older cars were put back into service.

So for now, the Green line is only running six-car trains every 20 minutes, compared to every five minutes before. There is a parking fee in the station lots, and the senior discount doesn’t kick in until you turn 65. To get an Uber car you have to wait, in the wind, so I decided what the heck, “I’ll just drive downtown.”

From here it only takes about 20 minutes on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway maintained by the National Park Service, and parking is not as hard as you might think. Much of the federal work force is still working remotely from home. And since many venues such as the White House, the Capitol and the Supreme Court are still not open for tours, there aren’t that many tourists in town either.

Related: Explore Washington, D.C. from Greenbelt National Park’s Campground

So I found a four-hour parking space two blocks from the National Gallery and the Smithsonian’s American Museum of Natural History near the Georgetown Law Center for $9. Since I had already visited the National Gallery of Art back in August, I tried for the natural history museum, only the sign said it was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. Luckily, the National Museum of African American History and Culture was open next door, so I was able to spend a couple of hours perusing the exhibits before our scheduled dinner reservation at 5:30 p.m. at Old Ebbitt Grill.

Tom Campbell, a successful attorney who was president of the Student Government Association at the University of Alabama in 1981-82 when Paul “Bear” Bryant was still the legendary football coach in Tuscaloosa and I was writing about politics for The Crimson White daily campus newspaper, had invited me to join him and his three great kids for dinner. He once lived in D.C. back in the 1980s while working for U.S. Senator Howell Heflin, but had not been back to the city since, he said.

As I was riding in the taxi cab on the way from the museum to the grill by the White House, Campbell texted me and invited me to have a drink in the hotel bar before dinner. Interestingly enough, the name of the bar is “Off the Record.” I guess they called it that long before the slogan that in recent years has come to be synonymous with Las Vegas: “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”

It’s a throwback to another time, when there were a number of striving newspapers competing for news sources in Washington, willing to pick up any information they could get for stories, even if the information was “off the record.” I guess what happened in the Hay-Adams mostly stayed in the Hay-Adams, as well as The Willard just around the corner and down the street.

The front entrance to the Hay-Adams Hotel: DuckDuckGo

I ordered a Bloody Mary and we talked for about an hour before dinner as the kids rested upstairs in their rooms. I noticed a caricature on the wall of President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden, and we lamented the state of the union, the partisan divide and our broken communications system. People do not turn to newspapers for information anymore, and the misinformation that gets all the controversy and attention on social media just contributes to the American people being mislead and confused.

A caricature of First Lady Jill Biden and President Joe Biden on the wall in the Hay-Adams Off the Record bar by the White House: Glynn Wilson

While democrats of all kinds celebrated the election of the Biden-Harris ticket in November, 2020, and the victories in the House and Senate giving the Democratic Party the edge in both houses, there is still a feeling around the country that the Trump Republicans may be able to mount a comeback in the mid-term elections in 2022 and maybe even recapture the White House in 2024.

While everyone who is keeping up with the news has seen the poll numbers showing Biden’s approval rating well below 50 percent, a few pundits are also taking pot shots at Vice President Kamala Harris, who recently became the first woman to assume acting presidential duties while President Biden underwent a colonoscopy.

Of course this sent Tucker Carlson of Fox News over the edge, and even conservative columnists in The Washington Post are finding it news fodder to take pot shots at Harris.

Related

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A former speech writer for George W. Bush even suggested that the democrats might want to consider nominating West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin as their presidential pick in 2024, along with Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema as his running mate.

“Now that’s a Democratic ticket that would terrify the GOP,” wrote Marc Thiessen, a fellow at the arch-conservative American Enterprise Institute and former chief speechwriter for President Bush.

But of course he was kidding, right, since as of now, for throwing monkey wrenches into the legislative process and cutting and delaying two key bills in Biden’s domestic policy agenda, Manchin and Sinema would have a hard time getting any democrats to vote for them. They’re raising more money from corporations, lobbyists and Republican donors than democrats.

So no, that’s not really the problem, or the solution.

Kamala Harris, an experienced prosecutor, was one of the toughest members of the United States Senate before being pulled out of the legislative Congressional hearing game and named Vice President. I say take the mask off and release Kamala Harris on the Republicans, on Twitter and Facebook.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, setting a positive example by wearing masks: Google

Here’s the problem.

The Biden-Harris administration was welcomed with open arms by all kinds of democrats and independents at first, and the American people breathed a sigh of relief seeing a return to normal, boring political speeches after four years of Trump’s crazy Twitter chaos.

Unfortunately, after four years of Trump, two years of Covid, the death of many American newspapers all over the country and 12 years of Facebook, our brains have been rewired. Even many conservative Republicans don’t pay any attention to The Wall Street Journal or The Economist magazine anymore, or even Fox News, Campbell pointed out from personal experience.

We agreed that what passes for information and talking points these days among the masses is a Facebook post about a tweet from what someone supposedly said on a cable news talk show. Just as people are not reading news stories anymore, they are not all watching the actual shows either. They just see and repeat on social media what was allegedly said.

So we really are living in Plato’s Cave now, with people talking about shadows on the wall and whispered voices from the road, where the people can’t be seen. I wrote about this 13 years ago to describe what was going on in Alabama then.

Sunday School: Plato’s Parable of the Cave

The Alabamification of the United States is now complete.

How do we get out of this cave?

Here’s what we came up with sitting across from the White House in the Hay-Adams, and this is NOT off the record.

Rather than keeping the Vice President under wraps, trying to prevent making the political right go crazy, would it not be better to unleash The Kraken, in this case Kamala Harris?

Clearly Biden is not able to grab the attention of the people as Trump did, totally dominating the national discussion on a daily basis. It would not work for Biden to even try to do this.

But what if each and every day, the media staff for Kamala Harris came up with a new tweet to make fun of someone on the political right? She could become the lightening rod to turn the tables and take the attention away from Steve Bannon and the crazy clown car of Republicans who are all trying to be the next Trump.

Instead of running away from Tucker Carlson and trying to ignore him, what if she came out on Twitter and called him a big fat racist, fascist baby?

I guarantee this would take over the media news, and put the ba-ba-ba-staad on the defensive. He would probably lose even more advertisers, and make Fox News even less relevant.

If you can’t beat the crazies with factual reporting, why not try beating them at the game of Twitter Tweet?

Seriously, it couldn’t hurt.

It may not directly help Kamala Harris if she decided to run for president in 2024 or 2028. But it would damn sure change the media narrative on a regular basis these days and put the Republicans on the defensive.

Even Steve Bannon knows this, as he showed the other day after being released from jail after facing an arraignment hearing on a charge of contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate in the House Select Committee investigation of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Related: Trump Adviser Steve Bannon Indicted for Contempt of Congress for Refusing to Cooperate in the House Capitol Insurrection Investigation

“This is gonna be the misdemeanor from hell for [Attorney General] Merrick Garland, [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi and [President] Joe Biden,” he said. “We’re tired of playing defense, we’re gonna go on offense. Stand by.”

George Washington knew it too. In 1799, he said, “… offensive operations, often times, is the surest, if not the only … means of defense.”

In the martial arts, especially wing chun, a style of kung fu, practitioners emphasize the maxim: “The hand which strikes also blocks.”

Sun Tzu, the Chinese general, military strategist, writer, and philosopher, wrote: “Attack is the secret of defense; defense is the planning of an attack.”

A parallel philosophy is also attributed to Machiavelli, the Italian diplomat, philosopher and historian.

The Democrats are not going to win by playing it safe, using old school political rhetoric and boring people to death.

Why not take the initiative and dominate the daily social media and press agenda by going on the offensive?

Just showing up every day, leading by example and showing people you can govern is not good enough anymore. Just ask Doug Jones, the miracle candidate in 2017 who won Jeff Sessions’ old seat in the United States Senate as a Democrat from Alabama. Proving he could do the job did not convince Republicans to vote for him in 2020 with Trump on the ballot and millions spent on radio and TV ads attacking him.

Maybe instead of spending more than half a million dollars on boring, middle of the road Facebook ads, he could have fired up the base to vote for him by going after Trump full throttle. That public opinion math may not have worked in Alabama either, but at least he would have gone down fighting for truth and democracy.

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