By Jeffrey Blehar
Thursday,
October 24, 2024
The
engines have flared out right at the end of the flight. The tank is out of gas.
The weather is choppy, the navigation system completely unreliable, and the
best guess is that you’re still short of the runway. (Oh, and the captain had a
stroke while in the cockpit a few hours ago, leaving only a flight attendant as
the pilot. She refuses to read the instruction manual or listen to the
passengers.) Yes, it’s easy enough to spin up lovingly bespoke metaphors for
how the Harris campaign is handling the late stages of the 2024 race — a race
they very much could still win, I must always emphasize — but I’ll conclude
this one by saying that if last night’s Kamala Harris CNN town hall (with
Anderson Cooper hosting in the Philadelphia suburbs) is any indication, the
plane may already be disintegrating in midair, before it even hits the ground.
You
may have noticed that I’ve had a decidedly muted reaction to Harris’s other
recent “serious” media interviews, whether Bret Baier at Fox News or Bill Whitaker on 60 Minutes, in the sense that while Harris was
predictably awful in both sit-downs (almost relentlessly so), she was boring
and unrevelatory in her awfulness. In other words, we learned nothing new about
the depths to which she is capable of sinking performatively that we didn’t
already know. They were water-treading exercises for the most part.
Last
night’s CNN town hall, on the other hand, was memorably bad. This is the
moment her campaign dreaded, the moment when the fundamental emptiness and
inadequacy of their candidate was revealed for all the world to see without
helpful edits or someone to bail her out. There Harris stood exposed — with an
unpersuaded audience and a moderator in Cooper who handled his task without
showing any particular solicitude for her electoral fortunes — and she withered
in the spotlight. (As Dylan might have said, “Even the vice president of the United
States sometimes must have to stand naked.”) There are moments
from this event — many moments, oh
so terribly many of them — that will haunt Harris in
retirement forever should she lose, the sorts of ghastly stammering failures
destined to go into YouTube clip reels ten years later explaining “How We Got
Here.” (And if she wins? All is not forgiven, merely set aside — until the
reality of her as president for four years takes its toll on Democratic
fortunes, which will be quickly.)
As
for myself, I found Harris’s answer to Anderson Cooper’s pointed
question about the border fence to be perhaps the
lowest moment of her entire public career to date, and I mean that in the
specific sense that nobody who watches it — not even her fiercest partisans —
will be able to come away from it with anything save a reflex-level revulsion.
(For her friends, the reaction will be shame and desire to change the subject.
For her enemies, it will be glee. For the vast majority of normal voters, it
will simply be: “DO NOT WANT.”)
Cooper
asks Harris: “Under Donald Trump you criticized the wall, over 50 times, you
called it ‘stupid,’ ‘useless,’ and ‘a medieval vanity project.’ Is a border
wall stupid?” And what happens next is enough to make even someone as cynical
about incompetence as me perk up their ears and lean forward in horror: She
adopts a smug rictus grin and begins to half-cackle her way through a series of
completely unrelated digs about how Trump didn’t succeed in building it. “Let’s
talk about Donald Trump and that border wall. [chuckles] So remember Donald
Trump said Mexico would pay for it? C’mon, they didn’t! How much of that wall
did he build? I think the last number I saw was about 2 percent, and then when
it came time for him to do a photo-op, you know where he did it? In the part of
the wall that President Obama built. So c’mon!”
Cooper
then gently reminds her that she is now claiming to support a bill that would
appropriate $650 million to build that wall, and then she remembers to rotely
say she will support “a bipartisan bill” but also “fix our broken immigration
system.” She didn’t even answer the question (“Is the wall stupid?”), but in
another way she answered it with crystal clarity: Of course she thinks it’s
stupid. Why else would she default to making jokes about it? (The photo-op
dig was also devastatingly revealing about how Harris truly thinks about and
conceives of politics: It’s all about optics and flash to her, the most
authentically Californian part of her personality.) Please, watch it all, feel
the pain that every person in that audience and every live viewer on CNN must
have felt in real time. With her sputtering, stammering smirk attempting to
cover for her inability to offer a credible answer to something she knew she’d
been nailed on, those two minutes could well end up serving as the epitaph for
her entire campaign.
What
was most remarkable about the disaster is how even CNN’s own analysts panned
Harris’s performance as well, some with a palpable sense of disgust. Almost all
of them were traditional media types (assume bias accordingly here), and their
reaction ranged from disappointed and bewildered to visibly unsettled. Dana
Bash spoke about “what I’m hearing from people I’ve been talking to” — this is
of course a polite euphemism for “all of my Democratic media friends, including
myself and every one of you in this room” — and said, “If her goal was to close
the deal? [pregnant pause] They’re not sure she did that.”
But
in all honesty I don’t particularly care about what Dana Bash thinks, save as a
media barometer. Former Obama grand strategist David
Axelrod, on the other hand, is a legitimately intelligent observer of
politics and was perhaps the most devastating of all in his analysis, precisely
because Axelrod still has the bones of an old-school Chicago journalist and
therefore cannot bring himself to openly insult people’s intelligence despite
his obviously close associations with Obama and Democratic politics. (“It was a
mixed night,” he euphemistically summarized.) His review is worth both reading
and watching:
When she doesn’t want to answer a question,
her habit is to kind of go to word-salad city, and she did that on a couple of
answers; one was on Israel, Anderson asked a direct question, “Would you be
stronger on Israel than Trump?” And there was a seven-minute answer, but none
of it related to the question he was asking. And so, you know, on certain
questions like that, on immigration, I thought she missed an opportunity,
because she would acknowledge no concerns about any of the
administration’s policies. And that’s a mistake. Sometimes you have to concede
things, and she didn’t concede much. But I’ll tell you something, John King
mentioned Bill Clinton; no one’s going to be Bill Clinton, but you do want to
relate to the people in front of you, she didn’t do a lot of that. She didn’t
ask them questions, she didn’t address them particularly, she was giving set
pieces too much.
Partisanship
inevitably warps perceptions, so I consider it a valuable data point that
Axelrod — whose politics couldn’t differ more from my own — saw the exact same
thing that I saw. (He was far more polite and circumspect about it, naturally.)
In a world where you should always strive to calibrate your own biases against
reality, that’s a solid indication that Harris truly failed last night. Her
friends could only bring themselves, out of charity, to characterize it as a
missed opportunity. But it is October 24. The hour is far too late. Given how
little time she has left to change the story of her campaign, this was Kamala
Harris’s first authentic campaign disaster.
No comments:
Post a Comment