High Spirits
After a run of teetotalers, Kamala Harris finds joy in politics in a traditional place.
From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:
Steve Sailer
August 21, 2024
During an unusual stretch in United States history in which many of the candidates for national office, such as Donald Trump, Tim Walz, Joe Biden, Mike Pence, Mitt Romney, and George W. Bush, have been teetotalers, Kamala Harris is restoring American political tradition by finding joy in the bottle.
An oenophile, the California candidate is an ardent personal supporter of her home state’s famous wine industry, while also displaying habituated knowledge of European vintages. The owner of Washington’s Cork Wine Bar enthused in 2020:
“She can talk about different varietals. She can talk about differences between California oak and French oak…. She knows what she likes and doesn’t like, and knows why she doesn’t like it…. She does like her California wines, but she does have a great appreciation for Old World wines as well, because we don’t do domestic wines at Cork.”
We live in an era in which Americans seem more interested in the drinking habits of dead presidents like Ulysses S. Grant than of live contenders.
The first fifty years of American presidents were all hard drinkers by 21st-century standards, but not by the norms of their voters, who consumed remarkable amounts of whiskey.
Read the whole thing there.
I've long believed that Biden was a drunk, but that car accident that killed his first wife and gave Hunter head injuries scared Joe to be publicly sober.
Anyway, Trump's teetotaling was something that made him popular amongst young men, or at least became something his young male supporters liked and emulated about him. Unlike Pence and Romney (dry for religious reasons) and W. (dry due to religion and his admitted alcoholism), Trump never drank because he saw it only slowed him down and he saw how others in the business world would get drunk and screw up-- for Trump, not drinking was a business strategy.
In The Art of the Deal, Trump told a story about meeting some established Manhattan real estate guys when he was young and how they all went out and had dinner and made a deal and then they got drunk at dinner. The next day he called and neither remembered making the deal, so Trump had to take them out again for dinner to get the deal in place. Although miffed, it impressed upon Trump that he could leap well ahead of these guys if he just didn't drink, because they would forget half their business deals with enough wine.
Trump liked winning, and if winning meant no drinking, he didn't drink. Plain and simple.
And it worked.
I don't believe for a minute that Walz has been on the wagon since his DUI. Just look at him for God's sake.