Current Events > NYT board endorses Harris for president; pleas for more unscripted press talks.

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/opinion/editorials/kamala-harris-2024.html

It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump. He has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest. He has proved himself temperamentally unfit for a role that requires the very qualities wisdom, honesty, empathy, courage, restraint, humility, discipline that he most lacks.

Those disqualifying characteristics are compounded by everything else that limits his ability to fulfill the duties of the president: his many criminal charges, his advancing age, his fundamental lack of interest in policy and his increasingly bizarre cast of associates.

As a dedicated public servant who has demonstrated care, competence and an unwavering commitment to the Constitution, Ms. Harris stands alone in this race. She may not be the perfect candidate for every voter, especially those who are frustrated and angry about our governments failures to fix whats broken from our immigration system to public schools to housing costs to gun violence. Yet we urge Americans to contrast Ms. Harriss record with her opponents.

Ms. Harris is more than a necessary alternative. There is also an optimistic case for elevating her, one that is rooted in her policies and borne out by her experience as vice president, a senator and a state attorney general.

Over the past 10 weeks, Ms. Harris has offered a shared future for all citizens, beyond hate and division. She has begun to describe a set of thoughtful plans to help American families.

While character is enormously important in this election, pre-eminently so policies matter. Many Americans remain deeply concerned about their prospects and their childrens in an unstable and unforgiving world. For them, Ms. Harris is clearly the better choice. She has committed to using the power of her office to help Americans better afford the things they need, to make it easier to own a home, to support small businesses and to help workers. Mr. Trumps economic priorities are more tax cuts, which would benefit mostly the wealthy, and more tariffs, which will make prices even more unmanageable for the poor and middle class.

Beyond the economy, Ms. Harris promises to continue working to expand access to health care and reduce its cost. She has a long record of fighting to protect womens health and reproductive freedom. Mr. Trump spent years trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and boasts of picking the Supreme Court justices who ended the constitutional right to an abortion.

Ms. Harris recognizes the need for global solutions to the global problem of climate change and would continue President Bidens major investments in the industries and technologies necessary to achieve that goal. Mr. Trump rejects the accepted science, and his contempt for low-carbon energy solutions is matched only by his trollish fealty to fossil fuels.

As for immigration, a huge and largely unsolved issue, the former president continues to demonize and dehumanize immigrants, while Ms. Harris at least offers hope for a compromise, long denied by Congress, to secure the borders and return the nation to a sane immigration system.

Many voters have said they want more details about the vice presidents plans, as well as more unscripted encounters in which she explains her vision and policies. They are right to ask. Given the stakes of this election, Ms. Harris may think that she is running a campaign designed to minimize the risks of an unforced error answering journalists questions and offering greater policy detail could court controversy, after all under the belief that being the only viable alternative to Mr. Trump may be enough to bring her to victory. That strategy may ultimately prove winning, but its a disservice to the American people and to her own record. And leaving the public with a sense that she is being shielded from tough questions, as Mr. Biden has been, could backfire by undermining her core argument that a capable new generation stands ready to take the reins of power.

Ms. Harris is not wrong, however, on the clear dangers of returning Mr. Trump to office.

Thats not to say Mr. Trump did not add to the public conversation. In particular, he broke decades of Washington consensus and led both parties to wrestle with the downsides of globalization, unrestrained trade and Chinas rise. His criminal-justice reform efforts were well placed, his focus on Covid vaccine development paid off, and his decision to use an emergency public health measure to turn away migrants at the border was the right call at the start of the pandemic. Yet even when the former presidents overall aim may have had merit, his operational incompetence, his mercurial temperament and his outright recklessness often led to bad outcomes. Mr. Trumps tariffs cost Americans billions of dollars. His attacks on China have ratcheted up military tensions with Americas strongest rival and a nuclear superpower. His handling of the Covid crisis contributed to historic declines in confidence in public health, and to the loss of many lives. His overreach on immigration policies, such as his executive order on family separation, was widely denounced as inhumane and often ineffective.

And those were his wins. His tax plan added $2 trillion to the national debt; his promised extension of them would add $5.8 trillion over the next decade. His withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal destabilized the Middle East. His support for antidemocratic strongmen like Mr. Putin emboldened human rights abusers all over the world. He instigated the longest government shutdown ever. His sympathetic comments toward the Proud Boys expanded the influence of domestic right-wing extremist groups.

In the years since he left office, Mr. Trump was convicted on felony charges of falsifying business records, was found liable in civil court for sexual abuse and faces two, possibly three, other criminal cases. He has continued to stoke chaos and encourage violence and lawlessness whenever it suits his political aims, most recently promoting vicious lies against Haitian immigrants. He recognizes that ordinary people voters, jurors, journalists, election officials, law enforcement officers and many others who are willing to do their duty as citizens and public servants have the power to hold him to account, so he has spent the past three and a half years trying to undermine them and sow distrust in anyone or any institution that might stand in his way.

Most dangerous for American democracy, Mr. Trump has transformed the Republican Party an institution that once prided itself on principle and honored its obligations to the law and the Constitution into little more than an instrument of his quest to regain power.

In 2020 this board made the strongest case it could against the re-election of Mr. Trump. Four years later, many Americans have put his excesses out of their minds. We urge them and those who may look back at that period with nostalgia or feel that their lives are not much better now than they were three years ago to recognize that his first term was a warning and that a second Trump term would be much more damaging and divisive than the first.

Kamala Harris is the only choice.

Persuasive. I like how they took an unbiased non-partisan critical approach and still came to the conclusion that Harris is far and away the better candidate.

So why did CE keep saying they were Republican or favored Trump. That was an odd time period on CE.

We all know you didn't post this with good intentions, your secret is out.

BlueTigerLion posted...

So why did CE keep saying they were Republican or favored Trump. That was an odd time period on CE.

This changes nothing about the Trump/GOP favoring slant of the mainstream media coverage of this election.

Every so often, the NYT will run an opinion piece like this that tells a small part of the truth about Trump, with the inevitable conclusion that he's totally unfit for office.

At all other times, the NYT runs as straight news all sorts of crap intended to promote the illusion that this election is (and should be) an exciting horse race with two acceptable results with candidates from two legitimate political parties.

The rest of the mainstream media is much the same.

The mainstream media wants Trump to lose, but they fear he could win and if it happens he will go after them. And he will. So they are trying to play nice.

creativerealms posted...

The mainstream media wants Trump to lose, but they fear he could win and if it happens he will go after them. And he will. So they are trying to play nice.

That's pitiful for the "All the news that's fit to print" and "Democracy dies in darkness" crowd.

BlueTigerLion posted...

So why did CE keep saying they were Republican or favored Trump. That was an odd time period on CE.

This thread is a useful example of just how hollow this endorsement is in the broader scope of the Times' coverage of the race:
https://bsky.app/profile/mtsw.bsky.social/post/3l5fb7xp5wl25

MarcoRubio posted...

We all know you didn't post this with good intentions, your secret is out.

Exactly.

Apocalypse Edge isn't fooling anyone.

GrandConjuraton posted...

Exactly.

Apocalypse Edge isn't fooling anyone.

Thats who Diceheist is?

Damn, my topic existed but failed to take off

wackyteen posted...

Damn, my topic existed but failed to take off

I actually searched for a topic about the matter before posting but couldn't find one.

For obvious reasons it's better for almost anyone else to make important topics instead of me. >_>

Orosuke posted...

Thats who Diceheist is?

Yep.