Democrats’ 2024 Paradox and the Future of Cable News

Happy Thanksgiving Eve. This is The Daily Courant, your afternoon guide to the latest and most exciting journalism being produced at Puck.
 

Today, we lead off with Peter Hamby’s deeply-sourced account of the uncomfortable question hanging over the White House as rumors of vice presidential dysfunction leak into the press: If Joe Biden doesn’t run again, does Kamala Harris possess the political skill to fend off a full-scale primary battle for the ’24 nomination?

Plus, below the fold, William D. Cohan and Dylan Byers go back and forth in a scintillating conversation about the dynastic politics, boardroom dramas, and M&A land-grabs that are redefining the media-tech-financial landscape.

The Kamala ’24 Question

Kamala Harris came into office with soaring expectations, at a time of grinding partisanship and huge challenges, but in an office that has only limited power and in a city where she lacks deep relationships. It’s a wild paradox: Harris is the second-most powerful office holder in American history, but suddenly facing nothing but downside.

If you’re jonesing for further proof that Kamala Harris makes for a touchy conversation topic—and heading into Thanksgiving, why wouldn’t you be?—look no further than the fifth paragraph of Mark Z. Barabak’s Nov. 12 column in the Los Angeles Times, the one titled Kamala Harris, the Incredible Disappearing Vice President. Barabak, a mustachioed, sleeve-tattooed Deadhead from NorCal, has covered politics for nearly half a century, with over a decade’s worth of knowledge about Harris dating back to her district attorney days in the Bay. That kind of gravitas usually unburdens a reporter from giving a rip about blowback from internet scolds, especially ones on the left who waste their days tweeting at reporters to “Do Better.” And yet, here was the venerable Barabak in his column, inoculating himself against any suggestion that he was evaluating Harris differently because she’s a woman and a person of color. Harris has shed much of her star power since becoming Joe Biden’s vice president, he wrote, because “it remains a fact that the No. 2 job in the White House is inherently a diminishing one.” And then: “It’s neither racist nor misogynistic to point that out when the jobholder happens to be Harris.”

That much should be obvious to any high school government student. But Barabak, like many other reporters covering Harris, felt compelled to shoehorn this caveat into his copy, a prebuttal to the inevitable accusations of sexism and racism that follow even the gentlest criticisms of the history-making vice president. The press had conditioned itself to this phenomenon during Harris’s lackluster presidential bid, when criticisms of her shaky political instincts, obvious lack of message, and questionable staff management were met with howls of racism and sexism by Harris loyalists and her reactionary defenders in the so-called #KHive. Harris dropped out of the Democratic primary before Iowa, proving her critics, including plenty of people who currently work in and around the Biden-Harris administration, correct. 

Doubts about Harris’ political abilities didn’t suddenly evaporate once Biden added her to the national ticket. But Democrats put whatever concerns they had about Harris on the back-burner…

FOUR STORIES WE’RE TALKING ABOUT