Harris Lost Not Because She Didn’t Do Joe Rogan’s Show, but Because She Couldn’t Do Rogan’s Show

By Jeffrey Blehar

Friday, November 15, 2024

 

You’d think we’d have wrapped up all the recriminations over the 2024 election by now — I certainly got no more use for either Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, or Tim Walz. But of course the Democrats aren’t done gorging themselves on misery, even as I’ve already turned toward my own personal plate of winner’s regrets. (Matt Gaetz as attorney general? RFK Jr. canceling my Lucky Charms over at HHS? Regardless of outcome this cycle, I knew I was ultimately going to eat a loser’s portion.)

 

So the most recent ball the Left is kicking around as they mull over the reasons for their loss is the Joe Rogan Factor. Yes, why didn’t Kamala Harris “go and do Rogan,” and appeal to all those desperately needed missing Democratic-leaning bros? Why didn’t she sit down for three hours of freewheeling conversation with a man whose interests — mixed martial arts, stand-up comedy, and UFOs — are likely as inexplicable to Harris as Harris’s love of Venn diagrams is to the world at large?

 

Well, Harris’s campaign staff are now at great pains to embarrass themselves by trying to come up with retrospective explanations that avoid the elephant in the room. Emhoff adviser Jennifer Palmieri put herself out there this week to explain to the Financial Times that Harris ditched the Rogan appearance because she feared the reaction of her own young staffers. “There was a backlash with some of our progressive staff that didn’t want her to be on it, and how there would be a backlash [if she did it].”

 

I weep tears of utter joy to read this. Watching Harris’s campaign crippled from within by unruly, upjumped, spoiled brat Zoomers who think they have a right to dictate the candidate’s political decision-making is like watching the glorious climax to a black political comedy. All I can say, after having written my piece about The Nation’s interns going to war with The Nation (over their endorsement of Zionist pig sellout Harris), is that I believe staffers on a presidential campaign have as much right to pilot the ship as the galley slaves of Ben-Hur. (You want to make campaign decisions, kid? Get a job as a campaign strategist. Otherwise shut up and get back to door-knocking.)

 

Even funnier, Palmieri later then tried to clean up the mess she’d made in saying this — suggesting a campaign so pulled around on a nose-ring by its own staff as to yield to their utterly irrelevant idle gripes — and went on to Twitter to claim, “VP didn’t appear on Rogan because of schedule (hard to get to TX twice in a 107 day campaign).” Is it really that hard to get to Austin, Texas? It’s not like trying to drive to Juneau, after all, and especially when Harris otherwise spent the day she would have taped the show doing no events in Washington, D.C.

 

Of course, the reason Harris’s people are falling back upon these explanations — the one humiliating, the other laughably false — is because they simply cannot (at least so soon after the election) admit the real reason Kamala Harris was never going to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast: because Harris would have given the most disastrously bombing performance in the history of campaign appearances. We all saw just how poorly her CNN town hall went. Now imagine her having to try and appear human and relatable to the Joe Rogan fanbase, for God’s sake; imagine how long it would take her to simply halt and catch fire the moment she’s asked an unusual or difficult question. (Which, given Harris’s talent level, would probably have been immediately — now imagine two hours and 55 minutes more of the interview.)

 

No, Harris was never going to do the Joe Rogan podcast because Joe Rogan’s podcast is limited less by ideology than by the ability to finish complete sentences and express coherent thoughts on the fly. That quality, rather obviously, is what Kamala most conspicuously lacks, even more than her complete inability to relate to the Rogan demographic. Forget about pretending to be a “bro”; the next Democratic candidate who wants to have a chance needs, at the very least, to be able to carry on a normal conversation.