A Once Promising, Now Failing Campaign

Amy McGrath, the Democratic Party's candidate in its effort to oust Republican Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R - Ky) from his Senate seat, recently hired a new campaign manager, Dan Kanninen. Kanninen is an old hand at running campaigns and is the CEO of a consulting firm.

Of course, what the Dems really want on the national level is for MConnell to cease to be the Majority Leader. They're not necessarily dead set against his returning to DC next year as the Minority Leader. Although (a) the Kentuckians among them are, and (b) it would look like a nice extra kick from karma if he lost in his own district and didn't return at all.

So ... what do we know about McGrath? We know that she has an appealing biography and that she has raised a lot of money. But she's been trailing in recent polls, even as those polls differ widely in how they depict the size of the margin. Some have her within striking distance, others have McConnell very comfortable at 17 points ahead.

Kanninen replaces McGrath's previous campaign manager, Mark Nickolas. Nonetheless, Nickolas will remain with the campaign to oversee paid media.

Why did she keep him on in that capacity or any other if she thought he was losing the campaign for her? I'm especially curious because his new mandate, running paid media, may be exactly the wrong one. It was paid media that has generated one of the campaign's big problems.

A McGrath ad says that McConnell "made millions from China," suggesting that this is nefarious and explains trade policy positions. That suggestion has backfired on her. The "millions" have an innocent source: his wife, Elaine Chao, inherited them from her parents years ago. (McConnell's in-laws ran a successful shipping company.) Kentuckians don' have a bias against the age-old practice of marrying for money. Heck, Chao got status (including a cabinet post) for the money. That is bluntly transactional, but not corrupt.

In general, I'm sorry to report, McGrath is having trouble getting traction against McConnell, who was first elected to the US Senate on the same day that Ronald Reagan won his second term, and who seems a fact of nature in Kentucky.

The Big Prize, of course, is the Senate itself. I think it is possible that Trump will slip through into re-election due to a contingent of voters I think of as #MeToo Democrats. Given Biden's creepiness, and one charge of actual sexual assault, the #MT Dems will refrain from voting on the POTUS, but will vote Dem down the rest of the line. If so, we may end up with both Houses of Congress in the hands of one paty, the White House in the hands of the other. And any judicial nominees will be subjects to VERY close and lengthy scrutiny, in honor of Merrick Garland.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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