High Spirits
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 heard from someone in a position to know (secret service detail) that ol W drank quite regularly in private during his tenure. The nickname they had for him was apparently "high ball." Also as a California wine industry guy, I'd be willing to bet my next paycheck that Kamala knows next to nothing about wine. Overexposure to the over extracted Napa style cabs in my opinion destroys any semblance of a palate one may otherwise have, which is a shame because there a lot of genuinely interesting AVAs in California that don't get a lot of love (Santa Cruz, Amador/Dorado, Shasta). People of Harris's type and age generally get into napa oak bombs, then stick with just that.
Always interesting that Washington led troops to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion. It ended somewhat peacefully; maybe Washington felt a kinship with fellow distillers.