WITH just weeks to go, it’s still too close to call. I’m talking of course about the US presidential election. If the latest polls are anything to go by, then Kamala Harris would certainly still seem to have the edge – just.
But now that Democratic Party euphoria has started to wane after Harris’s mangling of Republican rival Donald Trump in last month’s debate, there has been a distinct slowing of momentum in the Harris campaign.
This, it will come as no surprise, is making her team just a tad edgy. In fact, with this presidential contest going down to the wire, both sides, Democrats and Republicans alike, are all too aware that it would take little to tip this election either way.
That’s why many in both campaign teams are casting around trying to anticipate what last minute breaking news story or damaging revelation might just scupper their respective candidate’s chances and whether it’s possible to head that threat off at the pass.
Some things of course are near impossible to anticipate, let alone gauge their political impact.
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Hurricane Milton, which as I write, is making landfall along the west-central coast of Florida is a case in point.
Yes, I know that the prime concern when faced with a potential natural disaster of such magnitude should be the preservation and protection of human life. But hey, this is a US presidential election we’re talking about here, and one scarcely without parallel in its significance during modern times.
The early warning signs of harnessing Milton’s impact for political gain were all there in its recent predecessor Hurricane Helene, which Trump pushed hard to exploit using his usual predictable strategy of disinformation.
Flooding, evacuations and death might have come from Helene, but it was the US federal government’s “negligence” under the Biden administration that was Trump’s focus. Even the weather it seems according to the former president is Harris’s fault.
Hoping to head off Trump’s onslaught, Harris quickly pointed out that this should not be an issue of partisanship or politics and told the American people that once again: “It’s about him, it’s not about you.”
But if the vagary of extreme weather is one thing that both Republican and Democratic campaign teams will be conscious of having a potential last minute tipping influence on the election’s outcome, then there are other factors too that are perhaps a little less obvious.
Try this one for size. How many readers I wonder have clocked the about to be published book by legendary American investigative journalist, Bob Woodward?
Yes, that’s the same Woodward who along with Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein back in the early 1970s broke the famous Watergate scandal story that led to numerous government investigations and the eventual resignation of then President Richard Nixon.
Well, Woodward’s new book entitled War, set to be released next week, is a warts and all insight into the battle for the presidency against the backdrop of the two “other wars” right now having a global impact – the Middle East and Ukraine.
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If early indications are anything to go by, then the book’s content has some revelatory insights about both current president Joe Biden and his predecessor Trump, that both sides might want to quickly turn to their political advantage or prepare damage limitation for as the election nears.
THE Democrats for example might want to highlight how Trump had as many as seven conversations with Vladimir Putin after he left the White House, according to Woodward, raising explosive fresh questions about the former US president’s relationship with the Russian leader.
During this Trump-Putin dialogue, the former is said to have secretly sent Putin Covid-19 test machines for his personal use at the height of the pandemic.
Already you can see why some are running scared of the revelations in this book, with Trump’s campaign communications director, Steven Cheung, rejecting the reports and launching a personal attack on Woodward, calling him a “truly demented and deranged man”. Meanwhile, for her part, Harris in a US radio interview said that the reports demonstrated, “who Trump is”.
“People in America were struggling to get tests and this guy is sending them to Russia, to a murderous dictator for his personal use?” Harris said, quick to make political capital of the book’s claims. “It’s about him, it’s not about you,” Harris later doubled down.
That pandering to Putin line, could well become an even bigger issue the closer American voters get to casting their ballot next month.
Oh, and before anyone things that Woodwards’s book might only serve to benefit the Democrats, Biden himself comes out of the revelations quite clear in his view of both Putin and Israeli leader Benyamin Netanyahu.
“That fucking Putin,” Biden is said to have commented to advisers in the Oval Office not long after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to Woodward. “Putin is evil. We are dealing with the epitome of evil.”
In what has been described as the most, “hair-raising moment of the whole war”, by September 2022, US intelligence reports deemed “exquisite” revealed a “deeply unnerving assessment” of Putin, the book also reports.
Putin was so desperate about battlefield losses the book says, that the White House believed there was a 50% chance Russia would use a tactical nuclear weapon.
As for Netanyahu, “that son of a bitch, he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad fucking guy!” Biden declared privately about the Israeli PM to one of his associates in the spring of 2024 as Israel’s war in Gaza intensified, Woodward writes.
It’s really not difficult here to see how Biden’s comments could well come back to haunt the Democrats at the ballot box next month in terms of some of the Jewish vote.
Right now, everything it seems is a political weapon and the content and timing of Woodward’s book only adds to the arsenal.
Just as with Hurricanes Helene and Milton, both sides are keen to get in first to exploit campaigning potential. Poised on a knife edge, almost nothing is off limits in this battle for the White House, and rest assured, it’s about to get even nastier.
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