Right Place, Right Time

A lot of it comes down to luck.

On June 15, 1999, Variety magazine published that “Dougray Scott X’d a contract including a sequel option, with Fox brass confident the Scottish actor can become a franchise lead.  Scott became the lead contender last month, despite being known only for the prince role in ‘Ever After.’  Fox president Tom Rothman called him ferocious in ‘Twin Town,’ and said he has the necessary edge to play the brooding buttkicker…”

Scott’s career was rising.  At the time he signed the contract, he was playing the villain in Mission: Impossible 2—the Mission: Impossible sequel fans now affectionately-ish refer to as “the one that sucks”—a role for which he was personally selected by Tom Cruise. 

Fast forward a few months to October.  Scott suffered a minor motorcycle injury filming a chase scene, and production on MI2 was going long.  Production on the other film had already started—they had to pivot.

*************

And that’s how Hugh Jackman, an Australian who had never appeared in a movie released in American theaters and had most recently performed as Curly in a West End production of Oklahoma, became Wolverine.

Fast forward nearly 25 years and Jackman has played Wolverine ten times, most recently in Deadpool & Wolverine, now printing an absolute mint in theaters.  Scott, meanwhile, is a respected but relatively unknown actor who will be remembered as much for nearly playing Wolverine, nearly playing James Bond (Daniel Craig), and nearly playing Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) as for any character he actually did play.

Right Place, Right Time - Part One (Fmr. President Trump)

Luck, of course, also plays a massive role in politics.

Former President Donald Trump struck a nerve when he came down the escalator in 2015—he addressed issues that hadn’t been addressed, and spoke to people that felt they hadn’t been spoken to or for in a long time.  In the primaries, he beat a full stable of Republican candidates that might have been competitive at any prior point in recent memory: Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, and Rand Paul, among others.  Could Trump have won four years earlier, when Mitt Romney took the nomination?  

He certainly explored the possibility: he appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2011, and gave speeches in states with early primaries.  He formally announced in May 2011 that he would not seek the nomination, saying “[a]fter considerable deliberation and reflection, I have decided not to pursue the office of the presidency. This decision does not come easily or without regret, especially when my potential candidacy continues to be validated by ranking at the top of the Republican contenders in polls across the country.”  He added that he maintained the strong conviction that, if he were to run, he would win the primary and, ultimately, the general election.

I, similarly, maintain a strong conviction that, had I run and successfully convinced everybody I was 35, not 22, I totally could have won the 2012 primary and general election, but I will admit that Trump’s claim looks a good deal more credible given that, in terms of participation in the next election in 2016, he won while I merely voted.

But the point is that Trump came along at the perfect time: he dodged a popular incumbent, instead facing a relatively divisive, unpopular candidate in Hillary Clinton.  A significant portion of the country was ready for his message—especially now that he wasn’t leading off with anything about the president being from Kenya, which genuinely was one of his main points a few years earlier. He ran after eight years of Democratic leadership—the odds favored a change.

We won’t ever really know the full impact, the multivariate effects, of Trump’s win. The same, of course, is true of every president’s win—chaos theory uses as an illustration the flap of a butterfly’s wings changing the path of a tornado weeks later in a distant place, and the American president is no mere butterfly.

But I’ve written before that one of those impacts was to give Trump and many members of the Republican Party the impression that he was more successful, a better candidate, than he actually was.  His airing of grievances this week against Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is a good reminder, for one, that Trump’s occasional shows of message discipline are, well, occasional, and, for two, that when Trump feuds with popular Republican governors, it seems to decrease his chances of winning, not increase them:

• Trump narrowly lost Georgia; Kemp won it by 7.5%;

• Trump won Iowa by 8.2%; Kim Reynolds won it by 18.6%

• He lost Virginia by 10.2%; Glenn Youngkin won it by 2%;

• He lost New Hampshire by 7.4%; Chris Sununu won it by 15.5%;

• He narrowly lost Arizona; Doug Ducey won it by 14.2%; 

• He won Florida by 3.3%; Ron Desantis won it by 19.4%; and

• He won Ohio by 6%; Mike DeWine won it by 25%.

Some of that is unfair—voting for state offices doesn’t always track all that closely to voting for national offices—but not all of it.  The way Trump campaigns—the way he is—attracts a lot of people.  A whole lot of people!  Frankly, the rallies are probably part of why he keeps going—if your only gauge was the rally crowd reaction, you’d think his jabs at Kemp were brilliant.  But does feuding with Brian Kemp expand or contract his voting base?  The numbers point to the latter.  Trump lost Georgia in 2020.  Georgia.  He won it by 5% in 2016.  Romney won it by nearly 8%.  McCain won it by over 5%.  Bush won it by over 16% in 2004 and 11% in 2000. 

I don’t mean to credit Democrats’ recent string of successes in Georgia entirely to Trump holding Republicans back, but the races have been very tight, and it’s hard to imagine Democrats enjoying the same streak without Trump casting doubt on the integrity of the vote and feuding with popular Republican elected officials.  This November is going to be revealing, one way or the other.

Right Place, Right Time - Part Two (Vice President Harris)

2020 was not a great time for a Democratic candidate with any connection to law enforcement, and that was true well before George Floyd’s murder sparked widespread protests and the popularization of the Defund the Police slogan.  This likely came as bad news to then-Senator Kamala Harris, who spent (i) the early years of her career primarily as an assistant district attorney in Alameda County and San Francisco, (ii) seven years as District Attorney of San Francisco, and (iii) six more years as the Attorney General of California.  Her campaign initially generated great enthusiasm—she tied the record set in 2016 by Bernie Sanders for most money raised in the 24 hours after announcing a candidacy—but eventually floundered.  She was heavily criticized for tough-on-crime policies she pursued as attorney general, including defending California’s death penalty in 2014, and came off as insincere and opportunistic as she tried to distance herself from…uh…most of her working life.  She ended her campaign on December 3, 2019.

But in March 2020, Joe Biden committed to picking a woman as his running mate, and amid the George Floyd protests, pressure intensified for it to be a Black woman.  To be clear, Harris was not a “DEI” candidate in the most pejorative sense—she was not selected in spite of a lack of qualifications.  Harris would likely have been on any list of possible vice presidential candidates: she had sixteen years in elected office, had won three statewide elections in the most populous state in the country, and was young, but not too young—in her mid-fifties.  Her experience in public office dwarfed that of Trump’s current running mate, Senator JD Vance.  But there is no question that Harris, with her Jamaican father and Indian mother, was selected when, for the first time in American history, the presidential candidate was looking for someone who looked exactly like her to join him. 

Then,

• Biden and Harris beat a historically unpopular incumbent running for reelection during a once-in-a-generation pandemic;

• Biden aged like he chose poorly when trying to correctly identify the Holy Grail at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (if you haven’t seen the movie and don’t want to click the link, think “quickly and not well”);

• Biden managed to stay in the race long enough both to (i) win the primary and (ii) basically eliminate any possibility of a replacement primary; and

• Biden also managed to stay in the race long enough to convince Trump he wasn’t dropping out, leading Trump to go full heat check mode post-assassination attempt by selecting a running mate who, to put it somewhat gently, does not seem to be bringing in meaningful levels of additional support to the ticket.

Plus, now everyone seems to be in agreement that Harris needs a white man to balance out the ticket, which, for better or worse, in a country which has seen a fair amount of intense discussion over the number of white men in office, does give her kind of a lot of options with extensive traditional qualifications.  She is expected to make her announcement later today.

Point is, the timing was absolutely wrong for Harris in 2020, but could hardly be more right now.

But That Could Totally Change in Very Short Order

I get the sense that Democrats, overjoyed at having a clearly living candidate, excited by the prospect of a stereotype-defying governor as her running mate, and giddy at Vance’s apparent difficulty in catching on and Trump’s annoyance about it, are taking some things for granted: namely, that the next few months will generally go pretty well for America and Earth; that inflation will drop, wages will rise, and there will be less fighting in the Middle East, not more.

Well, about that.  

First, on July 31st, hours after killing Hezbollah’s top military commander in a Beirut air strike, Israeli Mossad killed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh while he visited the Iranian government official residence in Tehran.  Hamas and the Iranian government claimed that he was killed via an airstrike or missiles fired from outside Iran, but the real story appears to be that he was killed via an explosive device planted in the room months in advance of the assassination.  The massive success of the Israeli intelligence services and corresponding failure of the Iranian intelligence and security apparatus is not going over well in Iran, and the Revolutionary Guards have said that Tehran’s retaliation to Israel will be “severe.”  The United States is adding to its military presence in the area as it works to deescalate tensions and return the focus to a ceasefire in Gaza.  Wider war would be catastrophic, and, domestically, could rapidly change the course of the presidential race.

Second, it has been a rough few days for the stock market.  On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued the July jobs report.  The US economy added 114,000 jobs in July, well short of the projected 175,000, and unemployment rose from 4.1% to 4.3%.  Wage growth also decelerated, with the annual rate falling to its lowest point since May 2021.  The jobs report, which came one day after the Bank of Japan raised rates to their highest level since 2008, was one of several factors that prompted a market sell-off that began Friday and continued Monday.  Many have argued that the Federal Reserve waited too long to lower rates.

We will get further into the financial background soon, but for today’s purposes, the very basic gist is that the Federal Reserve System, or Federal Reserve, or Fed, is the central banking system of the United States.  Higher rates at the Fed mean higher rates everywhere: home mortgages, car loans, and credit card payments get more expensive.  Lower rates at the Fed make big borrowing cheaper.  High rates curb inflation, but also spending.  Low rates juice spending, but also increase the risk of inflation.  

In December 2008, the Fed slashed rates to zero in an unprecedented attempt to help the US economy cope with the fallout from the financial crisis.  It wasn’t until seven years later, in December 2015, that the Fed gradually began to increase rates.  Rates were lowered again in 2019 in response to concerns that a trade war with China would hurt the economy, then again lowered to zero in March 2020 to deal with the pandemic.

It wasn’t until two years after that, in March 2022, that the Fed began raising rates again to combat rising inflation, but it then raised rates to 5.5%, the highest point since before the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, in just sixteen months, reaching that 23-year peak in July 2023.  Rates have remained unchanged since.

The general expectation is that the Fed will lower rates at its next meeting in September, and some are calling for an emergency lowering before then.

But the point for today isn’t that the economy is screwed, or that war in the Middle East is assured: it’s that nothing is assured. We can be reasonably confident that one candidate in November will be asking for votes because of, and the other in spite of, what’s happening here and abroad.  We just don’t yet know which candidate is which. 

Random Fact

Twelve American astronauts walked on the Moon from 1969 to 1972.  Their footprints are still there—and are expected to remain for another 100 million years.

Side note: a number of non-human animals have orbited the Moon, including two tortoises, several turtles, and five mice. 

Random Recommendation

Don’t take a shortcut and cook frozen pre-cooked shrimp in an air fryer together with frozen pre-cooked chicken nuggets.

Subscriber Challenge

Time for another fitness challenge: I’m going to do some pull-ups on Friday.  For every subscriber received before then, I will add a pound and a rep up to a max of 100 pounds and 50 reps (so, 50 subscribers means 50 reps with 50 pounds; 100 subscribers means 50 reps with 100 pounds; 4 subscribers means a short workout).