By Jeffrey Blehar
Wednesday,
October 16, 2024
After
months of avoiding difficult interviews, Kamala Harris finally walked into the
lion’s den today, sitting down for an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier.
When the interview was announced the other day, I noted to my colleagues what a
gamble this was for Harris, the sort of move her handlers would allow only if
their previous strategy of avoiding all unscripted media interactions had
become untenable. It was a gamble that did not pay off for her. That it rated
only as a sad failure rather than a spectacular news-making disaster means that
her partisans are treating it like the greatest public resurrection since
Christ rolled away the stone.
You
can watch the entire interview here
if you like. (The Trump campaign posted it in its entirety, announcing,
“Our newest ad just dropped.”) Harris sat for 26 minutes, taking tough
questions from Baier that she simply refused to answer. When asked about
immigration and the border right off the bat, for example — specifically how
many illegals the Biden-Harris administration has released into the country —
she began filibustering and fell back on vague generalities as she fought with
Baier over the fact that she kept interrupting and doing everything except
answer his questions. (“Let me finish,” she repeatedly said, before reciting
pre-rehearsed non-answers.) It was annoyingly substance-free mush.
Democrats,
of course, will tell you that Harris just delivered a performance for the ages,
a bravura Christopher Hitchens–like masterclass in adversarial interviewing
that puts to bed forever all doubts about her competence. I know this because
several hundred Democrats are currently insisting as much to me on social
media. Others are less considerate, simply accusing me of being a Trumpist hack
blinded by my partisanship.
I
get a chuckle out of that, because as readers probably already well know, I
think that neither Harris nor Trump should ever be president, and I consider
the fact that one of them inevitably will be in the Oval Office as evidence of
God’s judgment on a sinful nation. But that detachment also liberates me to
assess political performances without indulging in the partisan need for
them to be “a win for my team.” Heck, I’d have loved it if Harris had gone out
there and revealed heretofore unsuspected power levels to the nation while
deftly parrying Bret Baier’s questions. It would have been yet another shocking
twist in the craziest presidential election cycle of my lifetime. But she could
not do that. Kamala Harris simply lacks the capacity to surprise anybody,
because, as my colleague Charlie Cooke politely pointed out the other day, Kamala Harris is an idiot.
Instead,
people are so desperate for a change in narrative that they’re mistaking
Harris’s flailing unpleasantness for “fighting spirit.” Perhaps you are as
well, and if so I can only warn that you have gotten too lost in the fog of the
late-stage campaign to step back and take proper perspective of what, in any
set of circumstances other than those of 2024, would instantly be rated a
notable disaster. The countless reviews I see flooding in from the Left along
the lines of “she should do more adversarial interviews, she does better in
them” underline the politics-as-team-sport habit of making the best of a bad
situation. Harris “did good” by this logic merely because she seemed
aggressively snippy. To partisans, that’s at least a sign of feistiness from an
otherwise moribund and intellectually vacant campaign. (Literally: “She
fights!”) What she failed to do, however, is remotely persuade the few
undecided voters out there.
No comments:
Post a Comment