Bill Maher on the unlikelihood of an ”October Surprise”

October 20, 2024 • 11:30 am

Here’s Bill Maher’s monologue from his most recent Real Time show, arguing that voters should not expect an “October surprise”.  He argues that because Trump has been so persistently awful in familiar ways, that there will be no change in his character before the election (remember that it’s just about two weeks away).  He’s in five lawsuits, there’s all of his awful treatment of women, and he keeps doing bizarre things. None of this has markedly helped or hurt his polling numbers. So. . . no surprise with Trump. (There are some funny asides, though.)

This, he urges Democrats and liberals not to put any stock in something bad happening that will knock Trump out of the race, dismissing several possibilities (see 4:15).  He adds this:

“This is Kamala’s great dilemma: Trump is invulnerable to an October surprise, but she is very vulnerable, because she is the one who is still undefined. And as she showed in this week’s Brett Baier interview, her go-to when attacked for her own actions is usually ‘Trump is worse’. Okay, we know that, but now undecided voters want to hear about you. They want someone to vote for. . .  the voters’ big doubt about Kamala is ‘Are you part of far-left insanity?”

I saw the Fox interview, and watched Harris bob and weave rather than specify position she holds, especially ones that are different from Biden’s. (He shows a video.)  Harris cannot simultaneously argue that she is not Joe Biden, and will not have the same policies as Biden—but then refuse to tell us what those policies are.

Maher then (9:40) then recites an answer that Harris could have given in response to a question about the immigration system but didn’t (she waffled).  That answer, says Maher, would help her (he’s pro-Harris). But does admitting that something could be improved over what it was really going to help her? After all, she wants to be unburdened by the past.

 

23 thoughts on “Bill Maher on the unlikelihood of an ”October Surprise””

  1. This quote repeats in my mind regularly the past year :

    “The line dividing good and evil cuts not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either— but right through the heart of every human being.”

    Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
    The Gulag Archipelago
    1958-1968 <-when it was written, apparently

    I'm not sure what that means in this case – but I think it has mattered all along and I was ignorant of it.

    … still waiting for a copy to materialize so I can triangulate the quote.

    1. The good part of Trump’s heart is very, very, very small. Microscopic, even.If only he’d have a Grinch moment.

      I think I came across that quote in “The Coddling of the American Mind.” I wanted to remember it, so I typed it into a word-processing document, printed it, and taped it to my refrigerator door.

    2. Bryan,
      I went to Google Advanced Book Search
      https://books.google.com/advanced_book_search
      put this into the box for Find with all of the words:
      “The line dividing good and evil cuts not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either” [with the quotation marks]
      then entered the word gulag in the title field and the name Solzhenitsyn in the author field
      Result: no hits.

      When I remove the word gulag from the title field and leave the rest as is, then I hit pay dirt, getting several books by Solzhenitsyn that contain your quote.
      Conclusion: your quote does not seem to be from the book The Gulag Archipelago.

      1. Peter & Bryan, check Volume 2, Part IV of “The Gulag Archipelago.” (If you have the HarperPerennial paperback version it is on page 615 of the 2007 reissue. The relevant paragraph begins “It was granted me to carry . . .”) The passage about the “line separating good and evil” passing “right through every human heart” is best read with the paragraphs that both precede and follow it, I think. The translation is slightly different than what Bryan posts above, which probably explains the Google search failure.

        Nice (and surprising) to see another reader of “The New Criterion” here. As to Gary Saul Morson, he’s a treasure. As you are likely aware, his latest work, “Wonder Confronts Certainty,” is a superb journey through the Russian literary canon. The earlier works on Bakhtin, along with “Narrative and Freedom,” were what finally convinced me that perhaps not all lit crit written by scholars is sh!T. (To be fair, I had been wallowing in postmodern hell for a couple years before I found GSM.) I’ve since discovered others I find worth reading, but I doubt many of them find much place in the curriculum anymore.

      2. Peter & Bryan, check Volume 2, Part IV of “The Gulag Archipelago.” (If you have the HarperPerennial paperback version it is on page 615 of the 2007 reissue. The relevant paragraph begins “It was granted me to carry . . .”) The passage about the “line separating good and evil” passing “right through every human heart” is best read with the paragraphs that both precede and follow it, I think. The translation is slightly different than what Bryan posts above, which probably explains the Google search failure.

        Nice (and surprising) to see another reader of “The New Criterion” here. As to Gary Saul Morson, he’s a treasure. As you are likely aware, his latest work, “Wonder Confronts Certainty,” is a superb journey through the Russian literary canon. The earlier works on Bakhtin, along with “Narrative and Freedom,” were what finally convinced me that perhaps not all lit crit written by scholars is sh!T. (To be fair, I had been wallowing in postmodern hell for a couple years before I found GSM.) I’ve since discovered others I find worth reading, but I doubt many of them find much place in the curriculum anymore.

        (Sorry if this posts twice. My first attempt vanished when I refreshed the screen.)

    3. Bryan, I strongly recommend reading this:
      Gary Saul Morson: The masterpiece of our time. On The Gulag Archipelago at fifty [published 1973 in Russian, 1974 in translation]. The New Criterion, June 2024, 42(10)
      (full text available online, ungated; Jerry’s website will not publish this comment with the link to this article in it)
      Gary Saul Morson is an American literary critic and Slavist. He is also the Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University.

      The three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago run to about 1,500 pages. There is an abridged version though:
      The Gulag Archipelago: 50th Anniversary Abridged Edition, with a new introduction by Natalia Solzhenitsyn [his daughter]. Vintage Classics, Dec 2023, 560 p.

      Maybe one can read this abridged edition plus:
      Anne Applebaum: Gulag: A history. Doubleday, 2003, 586 pages of text [won a Pulitzer prize]

      Also recommended:
      The film Within the whirlwind (2008), based on Evgenia Ginzburg’s (1904-1977) memoirs Journey into the whirlwind (1967). I have seen this movie and plan to rewatch it (it’s available on DVD). It is good (Ginzburg is played by Emily Watson). Ginzburg served an 18-year sentence in the Kolyma Gulag, in Northeastern Siberia.

      There is also:
      Anne Applebaum (ed.): Gulag voices: An anthology. Yale UP, 2011 (Annals of Communism series)

      1. Appreciate both comments

        These kickin’ quotes people put up in places … aggravating.

        It took me many months to triangulate that “dialectic” quote I put up occasionally – and then, it was only a certain edition that was most precise.

        BTW Solzhenitsyn spoke at PCC(E)’s graduate degree commencement and the talk is on YouTube! There’s a post a while back with it.

        1. I had some second thoughts on your Solzhenitsyn quote. I’m not so sure anymore than it is not from The Gulag Archipelago. Google Advanced Book Search is a useful thing. But I’m not sure I fully understand its capabilities. Some books can be previewed, some can’t. If the ones that cannot be previewed were not scanned (possibly for legal reasons), then one could not search within those books.
          Maybe you want to look for some article online that gives a lot of details about the capabilities of Google Advanced Book Search.

          Also, I wrote that a search by name and your quote had yielded results. Well, I actually did not click through the top items of the results list. Sometimes one does a search and none of the results actually fits your search criteria exactly. All I know is that I just repeated the search by name and quote just using Google (not its Advanced Book Search feature), and I only got three hits: 2 for you quoting on the WEIT website and 1 for some facebook site.

          Maybe useful: I have never tried this site:
          https://quoteinvestigator.com

          Maybe of interest:
          Louis Menand: Book review: Notable Quotables. New Yorker, Feb 11, 2007
          Published in the print edition of the Feb 19 & 26, 2007 issue
          Review of
          “Yale Book of Quotations” edited by Fred Shapiro, and
          “The Quote Verifier” by Ralph Keyes…
          https://archive.ph/CYun

  2. The headline that will change everything is “Trump dead of cardiac arrest”. I wouldn’t know if that would screw the Dems or the GOP more…

    1. That would make Vance the nominee, who is, although equally odious, both more electable and more dangerous. So even that wouldn’t help.

      1. Political campaigns take time. When Biden bowed out, the Democrats had no time for anyone other than Harris. If Trump died tomorrow of a heart attack (unlikely, but not impossible), the Republicans would not have enough time to wage an effective campaign on behalf of Vance. This is why I blame Jill Biden and Joe Biden for Harris. Biden should have bowed out in 2023 or early 2024. Obviously not.

  4. I strongly suspect that most voters, including Democrat voters, are against illegal immigration, DEI, and trans “rights” other than the ordinary human rights. I also suspect that the Democrat leadership is oblivious to the true opinions of the citizenry because the relentless campaigns against free speech have brought people to the point when they censor themselves in opinion polls.

    1. Maya, you are right with your first sentence. You are wrong with your second sentence.
      With regard to the first sentence: There is no need to speculate about what voters think. We can simply read professionally done opinion polls.
      What those polls tell us:

      Our analysis, based on a proprietary survey and publicly available data, reveals which issues each party can use to create a majority coalition.
      Republicans could capitalize on Democratic cultural radicalism—including on immigration, crime, and identity politics—energy realism, and patriotism.
      Democrats, meanwhile, hold clear advantages with their positions on abortion, health care, and adherence to political norms.
      But the key issues of economic prosperity and America’s place in the world lack a defining advantage for either party.
      Stalemate is not the American party system’s natural equilibrium. Both parties have avenues to build a durable majority, but they must first recognize where they have gone wrong. Only then can each consciously build a dominant coalition.

      This quote is from:
      Ruy Teixeira & Yuval Levin: Another Stalemate Election. Oct 17, 2024
      Doesn’t anyone want to win big?
      https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/another-stalemate-election

    2. They may not be oblivious. It may be that they think they are on “the right side of history” and don’t care what the majority of voters think.

    3. The issue of medical transition for prisoners is minor (in my opinion). What US voters are really reacting to is males in female sports (in my opinion). Of course, there was the Isla Bryson case in Scotland. That case forced the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon.

  5. The thing is, it’s not the Democratic Party that pulls October surprises. It’s the Republicans.

  6. If Harris took Maher’s advice and literally said “No, that’s fucking ridiculous.” to any position of the “progressive” left, she’d take all of the swing states immediately.

    1. The Dems already mostly repudiated one position of the progessive left, the most idiotic one (besides the idea that a man can become a woman by identifying as a woman): be soft on crime by significantly reducing policing and/or by district attorneys not charging criminals.
      But I strongly agree: If Kamala were to disavow open borders and promise to put an end to the abuse of US asylum law, and then would promise to end the pursuit of the radical trans agenda by saying that Rachel Levine (or someone like her) would not be part of her administration, if she were elected president, and that she would drop the rewrite of Title IX that is now under court review (and will surely be nixed by SCOTUS; recall: the Biden admin rewrote Title IX substituting gender identity for sex), that would most likely be enough for the Dems to hold onto the presidency.
      Essentially, follow the advice of James Carville and Ruy Teixeira/John Judis and divest from wokism.

    2. Patrick, maybe, maybe no. The risk to that is that she could lose some of the young left voters, which is something the party is trying hard not to do.

      Biden won because he as able to convince independents like me that he represented the sane part of the Democratic party, and he was able to convincingly talk policy, and was fairly likable. He constantly lied about the “fine people” quote, but I knew he was a serial liar, so that wasn’t a deal breaker. I was concerned with policy, and am not pleased with the results on immigration, trans issues & DEI, the Afghanistan pullout, and Israel. On the other hand, I like his support of Ukraine, and he hasn’t messed with taxes on either individuals or corporations.

      Harris is not likable, and she’s a horrible extemporaneous speaker. On top of that she comes across like the empty suit corporate types I run into regularly, people who get promoted because of who they are rather than their ability (it used to be frat-boy types) and sit in meetings without knowing the technical details but act like they do (and those of us who know see though the act), and still have the power to make the big decisions. Harris seems to not have deep knowledge about anything, which is troubling to me. Hillary Clinton wasn’t likable, but you could tell she knew a lot about a lot, and projected an air of leadership. I sense neither of those from Harris, and I haven’t met anyone, even her supporters in my circle, who feel all that differently.

      Therefore, the risk of divesting from wokism is that she still might not win some of us, and may end up losing the young leftists with whom the party is trying to build a future base.

  7. The November surprise may that Jill Stein will take enough protest votes from Harris to have Trump win enough key states to put him into the presidency.

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