Why Harris Is Quiet

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, September 09, 2024

 

It’s not because she’s been hamstrung with overly cautious ex-Biden staffers; it’s because she is flatly incapable of effective extemporaneous speaking.

 

The New Republic’s Alex Shephard has confirmed what all but the most myopic of political observers have by this point been forced to acknowledge: That it is the official strategy of the Kamala Harris for President campaign to “avoid the press at all costs, even when asked questions that should be layups.” “The Democratic ticket, or perhaps those who advise them,” Shephard wrote yesterday, “seem to believe that nothing good can come from talking to the media.” “If this sounds familiar,” he concludes, “it’s because President Biden employed the same media strategy in his reelection campaign. That didn’t work out so well for him — and it may not for Harris, either.”

 

This is all true. But Shephard’s conclusion — a conclusion that I have seen echoed fairly broadly across the left in recent weeks — is not. Harris’s silence is “troubling,” Shephard deduces, “because it suggests that the people running the Biden campaign still have influence in the Harris campaign.”

 

Does it? In Shephard’s estimation, the core problem here is that Joe Biden had a team around him that was unusually captivated by the electoral benefits of reticence, and that, because that team is incompetent or lazy or deluded or unduly motivated by vendettas, it has erroneously transferred its preference over to Kamala Harris. “Biden,” Shephard submits, “wasn’t being hidden from the press because he was old but because his advisers were engaged in a self-destructive feud with the media.” I disagree. I think that Joe Biden was being hidden from the press because he was old — or, more accurately, because he was senile, and because the only course of action that his senility left available to his team was what New York magazine eventually came to describe as a “conspiracy of silence.” Rationally, if disgracefully, Biden’s campaign determined that if the choice was between Joe Biden being presented to the country and Joe Biden being turned into a mute avatar, the mute avatar was more likely to yield a win. Had the presidential debate of June 27 not blown up this scheme, Biden’s team would be trying it still.

 

Why has this pattern continued with Harris? That’s simple: Because, for different reasons but with broadly the same results, Harris is as flatly incapable of speaking effectively in public as was the last guy. Since Harris was anointed in August, we have witnessed a concerted attempt to convince voters that they are not seeing what they are, in fact, seeing. “Kamala Harris’s razor-sharp debate skills have powered her political ascent,” the New York Times claimed last week. Really? Is there anyone with ears who believes that? From top to bottom, Harris is an unalloyed disaster. She has no useful thoughts in her head, and, in consequence, she has no useful words in her mouth. She’s a rambler, a meanderer, a peregrinator extraordinaire. Where good communicators convey a whole meal in a few words, she imparts crumbs in an avalanche. She cackles for no reason, she slips into faux seriousness at inopportune moments, she mistakes indignation for gravitas, and, when pushed, she makes any bad situation considerably worse. Her response to the question of why she had conspicuously failed to visit the border was to say, “I haven’t been to Europe.” Her explanation of why all her policies had changed was to contend that “my values haven’t.” She is Charles Dickens’s futile Circumlocution Office in its final, human form.

 

Harris’s team knows this, as do her acolytes and her partisans. If pressed, they will deny it, but, just as they knew that Joe Biden was senile, so they know that Kamala Harris is a twit. The natural response to being given a candidate who can talk is to put her on every stage in the world. That the Harris campaign has taken the opposite course is not the product of its devotion to bad habits or of its phantom feud with the media, but of its ability to discern what all other observers can see. It is true, as her friendly critics now insist, that Harris’s chronic silence bears a tangible opportunity cost, but given her remarkable lack of talent, that is a problem that could be solved only by the Democratic Party choosing someone else as its nominee. Once Harris was selected and installed, her team had only two realistic choices: to hide her, or to take the risk of letting her free. That it has assiduously embraced the former option ought to tell us all we need to know.