Weekly Roundup: Not Up For Debate Edition

Do you suppose that there was a single voter in all of the United States who changed his (or her) mind about anything after watching the Vice-Presidential debate? Why, it's almost too ridiculous to consider such a prospect. This wasn't a true debate, any more than the Presidential one that preceded it was a debate. It was a gladiatorial contest, a football game, a NASCAR race --- all the things that boil down to My Tribe Vs. Your Tribe. A fly landed on Mike Pence's hair. This was very bad, and suggested that Pence was a robot or possibly a human garbage dump. (When it happened to Mrs. Clinton in 2016, the same sources said it was an auspicious sign of emotion.) Oh, and Pence also interrupted Harris quite a bit, yet Harris managed to pull off the trick of speaking for longer than her opponent. Who knows how that was done?

What fascinates me most about this election is the seemingly unequal puissance on display between the two tribes. Biden/Harris has

• all the corporations

• all the celebrities

• all the artists

• all the musicians

• all the rich people whose faces you could identify (which is to say, not Sheldon Adelson or Charles Koch)

• all the media besides Fox News

• all the social media besides some seedy corners of Facebook

• a massive and formidably-funded Action Directe street army capable of burning a dozen cities on a whim in a single evening with virtually no effective opposition

• all minority voters

• most women voters

• all young voters

• Black Lives Matter

• George Soros

• everyone who lives in a city

• everyone who is willing to disclose their voting position at work, at social events, or on social media

• everyone who is voting by mail

• everyone who is voting early

Trump/Pence has

• the people who do the "boat parades"

• monster-truck owners

• bad cops

• third-tier country-music singers and cable-TV stars

• some, but not all, of the "Proud Boys"

• people who have pictures of firearms in their social media

• and that's it

This doesn't seem like it's going to be much of a fight. Yet you have Mrs. Clinton already saying that Biden should not concede the election under any circumstances, which is another way of saying that the election will be settled by means other than the counting of votes. A shadowy organization calling itself the "Transition Integrity Project" held wargames in June to simulate using the military to remove Donald Trump from the White House should Trump choose to take Mrs. Clinton's advice on his own behalf.

It seems difficult to imagine that the infinitely wealthy and supremely powerful Biden/Harris juggernaut might be derailed by the actions of a few million little people who pull a lever in a booth somewhere. Which in turn makes one suspect that nothing short of a 1984 Reagan landslide for one candidate or the other will see the election eventually decided in the courts, in the streets, or by the military. Since that's unlikely to happen, we have a long few months ahead of us. What will the country look like when we come out on the other side?

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For Hagerty, I reviewed a McLaren GT, offered a positive opinion on the future of enthusiast cars, and discovered a V-12 Lexus that never was.