By Jeffrey Blehar
Tuesday,
October 08, 2024
Last
Friday, Harris rolled her traveling circus act into Flint, Mich., to deliver
her canned stump speech in a state she is fighting desperately to win. There,
the Harris campaign discovered that things can go comically wrong for their
candidate as a speaker even at a tightly scripted rally: The mere second
that Harris no longer has a prearranged script to follow carefully, she’s at an
utter loss for words.
It
was a 24-minute-long speech to an adoring throng of committed fans, and Kamala
stumbled almost immediately. She opened with a few pleasantries and then
praised her new endorsement from Earvin “Magic” Johnson, a name surely beloved
by all Pistons fans. “Remember his number? Thirty-two! Today we got 32 days
until the election.” What happens next is authentically
difficult to watch. It is while Harris is glancing away that the
teleprompter breaks down — and the panicked bewilderment on her face as she turns back to
find it blank must be seen to be properly appreciated. It is cinematically
expressive, like Harry Dean Stanton turning around in stunned silence in Alien to find a
giant leering xenomorph behind him.
Harris’s
brain then simply seizes up and crashes. (One imagines a blue screen of death flashing in her retinas.) “So 32 days
. . . 32 days . . . okay we got some business to do, we got some business to
do, all right. Thirty-two days . . . and we know . . . we will do it . . . and
. . . and . . .” (Again, the silences in
between words should be heard in all their wince-inducing agony.) At this point
the prompter returns and she is able to return to the all-important policy
point she forgot to make: “This is gonna be a very tight race until the very
end, we are the underdog.”
I
understand that teleprompter malfunctions are the nature of the business, and
some people deal better with them than others. (Donald Trump, for example,
often doesn’t even bother paying attention to whatever’s written on his.) But
Harris’s meltdown was particularly pathetic for a person who has supposedly
been delivering speeches for 20 years and was a “strong prosecutor” before
that. (Or so we are asked to believe.) It is also somewhat inexplicable. This
was her stump speech she was delivering — something she has given, and
presumably practiced, countless times by now.
That
sort of thing typically becomes “automatic” for a politician, a grouping of
themes and one-liners that can be delivered from muscle memory. (Ask any
campaign reporter — many can deliver a candidate’s stump speech from memory themselves,
simply from hearing it over and over.) So how on earth does Kamala Harris not
know what to say next in this situation? Why is she so spectacularly incapable
of voicing even a single unscripted thought? And most of all, why on earth
didn’t she have a written copy of her speech with her there at the podium, just
in case? It’s amateurism and carelessness stacked in multiple layers.
Biden’s
Ghost Returns to Haunt the Democratic Campaign
Harris
has bigger problems than malfunctioning teleprompters, though, such as the
nagging and continued public existence of President Joe Biden, apparently under
the impression that America still wants to hear from him. When Biden sought
consolation for the humiliating end to his presidency from the ladies of ABC’s The
View a few weeks ago, he tossed a grenade into Harris’s purse near the end of his
appearance: “As vice president there wasn’t a single thing that I did that she
couldn’t do, and so I was able to delegate her responsibility on everything
from foreign policy to domestic policy.”
It
was the sort of bear-hug that Candidate Kamala was desperate to avoid: one
explicitly associating her with the Biden administration, in every aspect,
almost as if tailor-made for Trump ads aimed at angry Pennsylvanians and
disaffected Michiganders. At the time, I wondered whether Biden was up to
something. Imagine how embittered Biden must be behind the scenes. (Imagine the
insensate rage of Doctor Jill alone.) A perverse part of me thought maybe that
sentence wasn’t just the over-enthusiastic endorsement of a senile old man but
merely disguised to be excusable as one: The old bastard might have been doing
it on purpose.
It
turns out I am in good (bad?) company, for the Harris campaign is beginning to suspect this itself.
CNN reports that Team Harris is fuming about Joe Biden’s recent attempts to
“keep injecting himself into the campaign” and is contemplating retaliating
against Ol’ Joe — whom they suspect of malign meddling — by publicly breaking
with him on one or more policy issues.
It
is to laugh. I’m sure these last-minute policy-position switches, if they
happen, will be announced the same way they always are: by an unnamed aide
to Politico. And truly, what a profile in courage from the Harris
campaign: They want it to be known they are now contemplating publicly
repudiating Biden’s policies only because the addled old coot can’t keep his
trap shut in public and keeps reminding people that Harris was his vice
president.
I
ended my newsletter last week by noting that whenever Biden appears in public
these days he seems like Banquo’s ghost, except this time visible to all:
ruining the “joy” of the Harris campaign by reminding everyone present that
Harris indeed was a key part of the last four years. It will be fascinating to
see whether Harris begins to change her political tone because of his stubborn
refusal to simply vanish.
Kamala
Harris and the Practical Limits of Consolation
Of
course, Harris continues to make her own problems. This weekend, the eyes of
America were focused on the unfolding humanitarian disaster in the mountains
and flooded valleys of western North Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Helene.
And there she was: not on the scene, not discussing the floods at all, not
taking questions, but instead tweeting inappositely about how much money in
relief aid she is proud the United States has sent . . . overseas, to Lebanon,
which, given who controls the Lebanese government, is the same as saying “Hey!
We just gave away over a quarter billion dollars of untraceable money to Iran
and Hezbollah! Aren’t you proud?”
As
RedState’s savviest commentator points out, what
rankles is not just that Harris chose to speak about this before bothering to
address a matter much closer to home (her campaign was immediately shamed into
tweeting a statement about hurricane devastation after this one blew up on
social media). It’s the fact that it’s such a transparently naked play for the
Muslim-American and youth voters she is terrified will sit out the election.
The
discourse online about the state of western North Carolina is almost
exclusively about FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) and
allegations of incompetence or outright wrongdoing on the part of federal
authorities. I trust absolutely none of it because the fog of war is still
incredibly heavy right now, and I suspect well over two-thirds of the people
discussing it on either side are doing so for partisan reasons. But once that
fog lifts I would not be surprised to read upsetting stories of official
ineptitude and insufficient resources. (I’ll be shocked if any of the wild
accusations of active malice currently flying around social media are proven to
be true — cruel geographic and logistical realities, as well as simple
incompetence, explain matters well enough.)
But
aside from the Harris campaign’s cack-handed messaging, I just don’t see there
being much to hit her on about this. Natural disasters happen, and they are
awful, but there are severe limits to the power of presidential (or
vice-presidential) consolation. In fact, more often than not, it’s preferable
to not have political big shots — complete with Secret Service retinues
and requirements — around to complicate rescue and recovery functions. Near as
I can tell, the strongest criticism of the Biden administration is that
they were slow to act in sending in the military for disaster relief — not
mobilizing until October 2, five days after Helene ravaged western North
Carolina. But what was Kamala Harris to do?
I
actually wrote about this a year ago, when devastating wildfires
ripped through western Maui, killing over a hundred and razing the town of
Lahaina: In situations like these, it can be helpful for a president or
candidate to visit, but primarily only helpful to them. It is done for
self-serving reasons, as a photo op to signal solidarity. This is important for
the practice of democratic politics, but it is equally as important to remember
that it does not resemble an actual political argument. If anything, the
most coherent political argument I’ve seen made about the North Carolina
flooding is that it proves that disaster response should be centralized at the
state level, with fewer expectations placed on federal assistance (and thus
inviting less meddling). But that is an unpopular position that you would not
see Donald Trump — or any other political candidate for office — endorsing.
I
can understand why Harris is being hit with the fallout to Hurricane Helene —
that’s national politics, pure and simple, and North Carolina is a swing state.
There are those who might even argue it’s political malpractice not to
make hay out of this as a Republican. But I am not a politician or a political
hack, and I have no need to make such calculations. I well remember how
savagely George W. Bush was treated in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina by a
media that still has never sufficiently apologized for its wild hysteria and
transparent political bias. Forgive me if I choose not to further perpetuate
that hypocrisy myself.
Revealing
Understatement of the Week
“Events
held marking one year since start of latest Middle East conflict” read the BBC’s headline over the weekend. I suppose that’s
one way to describe an unprovoked surprise massacre. It is impossible to deny
that the BBC’s choice of words reflects not only the biases of its journalists
and executives but of much of its readership as well.
Hurricane
Alert
As
a final note, very soon the state of Florida will itself be facing its second
major hurricane in as many weeks, this time aimed right at the heart of the
state. So to my Florida friends who will be sheltering from Hurricane Milton:
Stay safe, stay dry, and we look forward to seeing you on the other side. Ron
DeSantis has a pretty decent track record when it comes to restoring power
after a storm. Nevertheless, it remains true: When my conservative friends ask
me, “Why stay in Chicago? Why not move to Florida instead?” I answer that I
don’t know if I’m prepared to live life with an evacuation plan constantly in
place.
And
then I remember that I live in Chicago, and therefore more or less already do.
See you next week.
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