Jonny Thakkar in The Point:
“Thank you for bringing back the joy,” Tim Walz grinned at Kamala Harris during their first joint rally back in August 2024. It was a theme he returned to often in the weeks that followed. At the DNC it was the crowd themselves who needed to be thanked for “bringing the joy to the fight”; later we learned that while Trump had “tried to steal the joy from this country,” Harris was giving us “a politics of joy.”
This didn’t turn out well, needless to say, and it was world-class cringe even at the time, partly because Walz was clearly trying to vaunt his own folksy jolliness but also because a moment’s thought would have revealed that a campaign whose main strategy was to mobilize anxieties—“we are not going back”—was anything but joyful. That said, I’ve come to think Walz was onto something.
More here.
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