A few months into Kamala Harris's 2024 presidential run, her handlers faced a dilemma. Should they continue cocooning the candidate or unleash her on the public? Both options came with serious political risks.
Sure, Democrats could keep pretending Harris was a generational talent, but her refusal to sit down for an interview, much less give a press conference, was eroding this fantasy.
On the other hand, as her handlers surely understood, the more people hear from Harris, the more concerned they tend to get.
Indeed, Harris is a thermonuclear platitude dispenser. Few people in American history have expended so many words to say so little.
Her turns of phrase are often so cartoonishly ludicrous they should be used in college textbooks to explain what a "tautology" is to students.
After watching Fox News' Bret Baier interview Harris, it is clearer than ever that extemporaneous speaking isn't Harris' strong suit. The presidential candidate has an uncanny ability to respond to straightforward questions in circuitous, mind-bending arrays of irrelevant non sequiturs.
To work around this problem, Harris' "media blitz" was initially curated to ensure the candidate would never find herself in the vicinity of a tough inquiry. Before going on Fox, she visited sycophants like sex podcaster Alexandra Cooper and one-time shock jock Howard Stern. She spoke to allies at MSNBC and the cheerleaders at "The View."
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Even in these friendly venues, Harris could barely generate a substantive answer to any questions.
During an unscripted Univision town hall, non-journalist audience members finally pressed her on inflation. Harris let everyone know she was not just of middle-class stock but working-class stock. Which is to say, no one in the audience heard anything new.
And maybe they were the lucky ones.
During a pre-recorded interview with "60 Minutes," correspondent Bill Whitaker threw a bunch of reasonable, if predictable, questions at Harris. No gotchas, no deep dives into policy. Yet, when the Israel-Palestinian situation came up -- it's been in the news, I'm sure you've heard --Harris unleashed such a torrent of gibberish that CBS News had to go back and splice in an answer.
Surely, in a healthier political era, a presidential candidate incapable of articulating a lucid foreign policy worldview would find themselves put under tremendous scrutiny. These days, though, political journalists literally rearrange the Democratic candidate's words to make her sound normal. I can assure you former President Donald Trump, who is also often at war with syntax, was never afforded such favorable treatment.
So, the important question is, why does Harris always sound like a ninth grader biding time during an oral exam?
No one can speak fluently on a topic relying solely on scripts and talking points. She doesn't know what she thinks. She doesn't know what you want her to say. She has no reserve of knowledge to pull from.
Judging from her meandering nonanswers, it is highly likely that Harris has never thought about any of these issues in a serious way. Indeed, Harris' most memorable quote on foreign policy reads as so: "Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country."
Then again, if she's offered anything beyond a banality on the economy or faith or governance or culture or constitutional law or anything else, I've yet to run across it. This is a woman who, for years, was under the impression that the phrase "what can be, unburdened by what has been" made her sound like the next Martin Luther King Jr.
I've also heard people contend Harris is probably stifled by imposter syndrome, a crushing self-doubt about her intellect, knowledge and skills compared to those around her.
What if her anxiety doesn't stem from a feeling of inadequacy but inadequacy itself? Take the incessant cackling. This tic is probably symptomatic of a well-earned lack of confidence. Her awkward syntax often betrays an imposter desperately attempting to convince you she's a deep thinker.
Obviously, most politicians triangulate, flip-flop and "evolve" on policy. It's unlikely, however, that any major politician in history has dropped as many positions as dramatically and as quickly as Harris. The likelihood she has a cogent explanation for guiding moral or political philosophy is slim.
Unless, of course, by a belief system, we're talking about "empowering Kamala."
The Bret Baier disaster was the crescendo, but it was nothing new. If you carefully listen to Harris' words, you are confronted with vapid political creation in way over her head. Though, alas, if history is any guide, she has all the qualifications we expect of a president.
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