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Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, your daily dispatch concerning all things politics. As always, it’s foreign policy Tuesday and I’m your host, Julia Ioffe.
What a week it’s been, and it’s only Tuesday. There’s lots and lots to dissect: What is Kamala Harris’s foreign policy? Does the Kremlin love J.D. Vance? How relieved, exactly, are our allies? But first...
🎧 Biden’s fall & Kamala’s rise: On today’s rollicking episode of my colleague John Heilemann’s Impolitic podcast, he was joined by NBC News’s Michael Beschloss, the author of nine books on the presidency, and CBS News’s chief election correspondent Robert Costa, to unravel the internal (and external) forces that compelled Biden to bow out, the overnight anointment of Kamala Harris, and how Donald Trump is likely to react to being stripped of his preferred foil.
🗳️ And a quick note from Tara Palmeri about her exchange with Karen Finney: Shortly before Harris locked up the delegates, I recorded an episode of my show, Somebody’s Gotta Win, with one of Harris’s fiercest defenders, the political strategist Karen Finney, who made the case to Biden in 2020 that he should add her to his ticket. I wanted her to articulate why Harris would make a strong candidate, and the ways in which she might distance herself from a president, no matter how accomplished, with a 36 percent approval rating. “She will have to figure out how she wants to talk about the places where she might’ve had disagreements with the president. We know, for example, behind the scenes, she’s been one of the advocates around changing the classification of marijuana,” said Finney. “I think, largely, the platform is the platform, frankly, at this point of the party. So I don’t think you’re going to see a lot of big changes. She’ll have to outline, over the next hundred days, places where she might deviate.”
Of course, Harris will also have to undertake the unseemly task of cutting the fat from the campaign and bringing in her own people—although, frankly, it’s hard to identify who the “Harris people” actually are. In the meantime, the party will be gritting its teeth for the next 10 days while it awaits more reliable polls—although even Republicans expect that she will get a number of bumps riding into the convention.
Speaking of which, here’s Abby Livingston on the challenges ahead for Harris…
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