Kamala Harris Is on Autopilot

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, September 18, 2024

 

Kamala Harris spent the hour she devoted to only her second “high-profile national media interview since announcing her presidential run,” according to Politico, “carefully parrying” her interlocutors’ questions. That’s a diplomatic way of describing her evasive, equivocating, deliberately ambiguous performance in an interview with representatives from the National Association of Black Journalists. Keeping voters in the dark may be a civic sin, but, for now, it’s a winning strategy. And for the political press, whatever gets Harris across the finish line first is permissible.

 

Harris’s penchant for “parrying” notwithstanding, the answers she did provide her interviewers were far more illuminating than those she did not. What Harris’s responses revealed was a plodding lack of dexterity from the candidate — the practiced sort. The vice president often appeared to be operating on assumptions that were overtaken by events by the time of her remarks. Indeed, she seemed to be intentionally clinging to outdated information to avoid confronting discomfiting new facts that undermined her arguments.

 

When it came to Israel’s defensive war against Iran’s terrorist proxies, for example, Harris appeared to have internalized no new inputs since the spring. When pressed to articulate a policy toward Israel that departs from Joe Biden’s — something Israel’s critics have long demanded from Harris — she refused to answer directly. Rather, she stressed that she was “entirely supportive of” the “pause that we’ve put on the 2,000-pound bombs.”

 

The Biden administration’s “pause” on shipments of that ordnance — as well as 500-pound bombs, some artillery shells, and the Joint Direct Attack Munitions kits that transform unguided “dumb” bombs into guided “smart” bombs — represents what Harris called the “leverage that we have had and used.” That leverage was designed to dissuade Israel from embarking on its long-delayed incursion into the town of Rafah in the Gaza Strip, where Hamas held a number of hostages and ultimately executed some of them (including a U.S. citizen) when Israel finally bucked the pressure imposed on it by Biden’s White House.

 

Harris didn’t acknowledge the rationale for that “pause,” nor did she explain why it has since been lifted for some of the ordnance Biden withheld from Israel in the spring. If she had, her support for its continuation would make no sense.

 

The flawed assumption articulated by anti-Israel activists was that the yield on those bombs was too great for use in densely populated urban areas (where Hamas takes cover among the human shields it cultivates precisely to stoke the outrage of anti-Israel activists). But, as the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’ David Adesnik and Mark Montgomery explained, the weapons’ blast radius is smaller when they’re used, as Israel intended to use them, to penetrate the tunnel networks beneath Gaza.

 

There was a live debate over the utility of these weapons in April and May, but there isn’t one now. The civilian population in Rafah was temporarily relocated in June, and major ground operations in the Gaza Strip concluded months ago. Israel’s focus is now shifting north to meet the threat posed by Hezbollah, a foreign terrorist organization hosted by the sovereign government of an internationally recognized state. Harris may have thoughts on the evolution of the conflict that erupted on October 7 of last year, but she hasn’t updated her talking points.

 

The panel interviewing Harris appeared to become frustrated with her vagueness when she was asked to explain what her administration would do to curtail gun violence. The vice president retreated to the need for “universal background checks” when her interlocutor noted that her go-to on the issue of guns, an assault-weapons ban, would only “address a significant but small part of the problem.” But Harris was interrupted when she extolled the virtues of “reasonable” checks on firearms purchasers. “I’m asking specifically about handguns,” said NPR host Tonya Mosley. To this, Harris established her bona fides by reminding voters that she herself “protested at a gun show” in opposition to “the gun-show loophole.”

 

Harris repeatedly cited the potential for would-be criminals to evade detection by purchasing firearms at “flea markets” — a specter the Biden administration invoked when it tasked the Justice Department with crafting new rules designed to extend the new background checks passed into law in 2022 to all for-profit gun sales. A federal judge blocked that rule in May on the grounds that it violated “safe harbor provisions” for most gun owners who engage in private transfers. Harris didn’t reconcile the unconstitutionality of her policy preferences with her desire to see Congress do what the White House could not. Rather, Harris once again defended her failure to think through the issue more deeply. “There are very few solutions that we haven’t thought of,” she insisted.

 

The same could be said of the bullet points Harris brought to bear when she was tossed a softball regarding the Republican presidential ticket’s unfounded claims about the supposed plague of pet-eating migrants descending on Springfield, Ohio. The vice president waxed nostalgic about the virtues of “picture day” in elementary schools, which she noted was interrupted when Springfield’s educational institutions were targeted with bomb threats. She chided Donald Trump and J. D. Vance for spreading allegations they had not themselves verified and attacked the substance of the allegations as racist. They were “spewing lies that are grounded in tropes that are age old,” she said.

 

Harris either hadn’t processed or declined to internalize the news that Ohio governor Mike DeWine has been telling anyone willing to listen. “Thirty-three threats; thirty-three hoaxes,” he told reporters during a Monday press conference. “I want to make that very, very clear,” he said of the many threats that disrupted civic life in Springfield over the last week. “None of these had any validity at all.” It is worrisome that “some” of these hoaxes were allegedly “coming from one particular country,” likely a hostile foreign power. But that discomfort is mitigated by the revelation that our fellow citizens are not actively seeking to attack municipal facilities or schools. Harris engaged in a sin of omission by failing to inform her audience of this context. In attacking Trump and Vance over their baseless effort to stoke voters’ fears, she committed the same offense.

 

When Harris wasn’t promoting utterly — at this point, likely knowingly — false narratives, she showcased her failure to update her firmware so as to give the public an accurate reflection of the country she seeks to lead and the world she hopes to influence. Americans didn’t learn much about Harris from this interview, though they may have gained a fuller understanding of why she doesn’t do many interviews.