Good morning. It is July 23rd. It's overcast and pretty humid in New York. And this is your Indignity Morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. Once again, the big news owns the whole front page of the New York Times. Yesterday's four -column picture of Joe Biden has been replaced with a four -column picture of Kamala Harris standing at a lectern with the vice presidential seal on it, in which the way the text wraps around the great seal means that the word “vice” is upside down and the eye just sort of naturally starts reading it from “president.” The full page headline is “Starting 15 week dash Harris presses case.” Subhead “Emphasizes past as prosecutor and collects endorsements.” Down below in a row from left to right, headlines just above the fold, there's a piece of news analysis, AKA vamping, “Promise and peril grow out of shift in standard -bearers.” 

That's right. You heard it first from the New York Times. This could go well for the Democrats, or it could go badly. Kamala Harris, as the presidential nominee, might beat Donald Trump, or she might lose to him. Stay tuned for a more essential news analysis. Next over is “Defending Biden legacy abroad now falls to another candidate. Parties diverge sharply in confronting grave global threats.” It opens by describing how Joe Biden recounted his record of foreign policy successes to the leaders in NATO when they met last week, then says, “but Mr. Biden's defense of his record came too late after his shocking debate performance that led to his withdrawal,” which is accurate enough, but misses an opportunity to tie substance more closely to performance in that specifically what was wrong with the debate was Biden couldn't muster the focus or energy to do that work of defending his record on live TV. But yes, now that's Harris's job. Armed with the ability to finish a sentence, she probably ought to be able to manage it. And then last over in the row, “Inside the president's reversal that surprised even his allies,” a four-reporter chronological story. I was going to call it a tick-tock, but that particular journalistic term of art might be completely skunked from now on. So a chronological story of the momentous weekend in which President Joe Biden decided he wasn't going to run for reelection after all. It's still really more of an outside account than an inside account because the story is he got together with a small group of advisors, wrote up his letter withdrawing from the campaign, gave everyone else one minute heads-up and then tweeted it out. So the inside story of how that happened is more or less indistinguishable from the outside story. He did the thing the way that you would have guessed he would have done the thing, based on what everybody saw of the thing when the thing happened. 

Below that on the page is some reporting that gets at a more obscure and interesting part of the process. Under the generic sounding headline, “Wealthy Women Stockpile Donations for Harris,” comes a more specific account of how Harris executed the sharp and decisive political move that made her the presumptive nominee. “For decades, Kamala Harris has been bolstered by a tight -knit group of female donors who rose up with her in Democratic politics. And for weeks, even when she was still insisting that President Biden would be the party's nominee, these allies began to make moves to make sure her historic campaign would not be built on the fly. Quickly and quietly, her biggest supporters worked to rally support around creating enough momentum to effectively stamp out any opposition. They collected money, cut ads in advance, and worked their networks to monitor the moves of other hopefuls.” You have to sit through a word from Michael Bloomberg, representing Democratic donors who are still demanding that everything stop and wait for them to have their say about who the candidate should be, and then take the jump before you get to the names of some of the people who are supposed to have made this happen.

Alexandra Acker -Lyons, a Democratic fundraiser with roots in the Bay Area, and Andrea Dew -Steele, a Democratic fundraiser who served on Ms. Harris's National Finance Committee in 2020. There's a sort of mysterious paragraph about Lorraine Powell Jobs, which says that Harris has a particularly close friendship with the billionaire, but also says that Ms. Powell Jobs has yet to publicly comment on Ms. Harris's bid. Of course, the news value here isn't what happened in public. It's what happened in private to make the public events break the way they did. Other key figures in the Times writes, according to people who know her social circle, include Joyce Neustadt, a bundler who also sits on the board of Emily's List, Quinn Delaney, part of a power couple in the East Bay who is set to host a fundraiser for Mr. Biden later this week, and Stacey Mason, who has been among her biggest fundraisers over the years. Then lower down, there's a dispatch from Loserland about how the donors who don't want Harris tried recruiting Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, and Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who challenged President Biden in the Democratic primaries, but attracted little support. And none of those people wanted to play along. The only non-Harris-Biden item in the news space on page one is a picture of Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheadle testifying before Congress about the assassination attempt against Donald Trump. Both parties want her to quit, and that seems pretty reasonable, given that a random 20-year-old doofus outfoxed the entire productive detail around the presidential candidate, Online, the Times, following the shooter's example, flew a drone over the Butler, Pennsylvania rally site to scope out the layout of the shooting position in which the shooter was protected from being seen by one counter-sniper group by a group of trees, shielded from another counter-sniper spot by the slope of the roof he was climbing, and safe from a third counter-sniper team because they didn't look out the window. They would have put him in plain view. It's all very detailed. One more layer of programming and you could make it really interactive. Maybe the Secret Service would investigate that though. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. And if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.