By Jeffrey Blehar
Thursday, August 29, 2024
We have been waiting ever since the day Joe Biden dropped
out of the presidential race for Kamala Harris to sit down in front of a camera
and take questions from an interviewer. And if nothing else, we have learned
why: In the friendliest possible format — a joint interview with VP nominee and
emotional-support midwesterner Tim Walz, conducted by Dana Bash with the
delicacy of an ornithologist gently hand-feeding hatchling chicks — Harris has
revealed that her gaseously mindless word-cloud of a campaign is in fact an
accurate reflection of her own personal vacuousness.
To be sure, Harris did not memorably self-destruct
tonight. Whatever her failings, they are not those of Joe Biden, who couldn’t
even articulate his words without slurring by the end. Her inarticulateness
tonight was of the sort already known to be a Harris trademark, the endless
jumble of nonsensical, comically vapid stock language. When she could fall back
on a memorized list of talking points, she presented somewhat normally; the
second she was required to respond directly to a question, then she began to
spin out otiose nonsense like a pasta chef catering a Sicilian banquet. You
could practically see the gears turning inside her head as she cast her eyes
downward, stared laser-beams into the floor, and groped for cliches. She was
more muted tonight than usual — her aides clearly ordered her never to display
mirth under any circumstances, for fear the Kamala Kackle might emerge — and as
a result, while she simulated sobriety for the most part, her body language was
pronouncedly downbeat.
And all throughout she offered no answers to any policy
questions whatsoever, nor any explanation for her various changes of position
between 2020 and now. In theory, Bash asked most of the “right questions”; in
practice, the way she solicitously asked them — sometimes even helpfully
offering in advance a multiple-choice list of acceptable answers for Harris to
choose from — turned them into cream puffs that Harris immediately used to
serve up word salad.
Bash’s most pointed moment was when she pushed Harris
about why she changed her position on a national fracking ban between 2020 and
the present campaign. Harris’s answer was little more than, “Well, because I
changed my mind when I became Joe Biden’s VP.” In the real world, anyone
familiar with politics well understood that her “position” changed because Joe
Biden — the presidential nominee — demanded it, and no other reason. Which of
course is why it’s impossible to believe her when she says this is now her
sincerely held view, as opposed to something to later be discarded once she can
set her own priorities.
Throughout most of the interview, Walz sat like a
chaperone, mostly unaddressed until the second half of the interview, when Bash
asked him about his exaggerations regarding his military record and use of IVF
to conceive. His answer was a predictable dissimulation: “I speak like they do,
I speak candidly, wear my emotions on my sleeves.” In other words, he just got
a bit worked up and claimed to have served in a war zone a time or two.
I can pretty much guarantee that Harris partisans will
now flood Twitter and the mainstream media to pronounce today’s CNN interview
the most successful media interaction in presidential politics since George H.
W. Bush castrated
Dan Rather live on air in 1987. Obviously I am not a persuadable voter in
this case, but I remain a decent judge of what will and will not sell to
American voters in general, and this interview did nothing whatsoever to
advance Harris’s case. It was a good night for her only if you believe she is
already set to win — and I do not.
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