"What are one or two specific things you have in mind" to bring down prices, Brian Taff asked Kamala Harris. It's the first solo interview with Harris since her nomination nearly two months ago, and she still has no idea how to answer that question. Taff, a reporter for an ABC affiliate in Pennsylvania, then sat through the longest non-answer of his career.
"Well, look, I was raised in a middle-class neighborhood..."
And so it went on for three full minutes, in which the Democrat presidential nominee didn't discuss any specific things in mind to bring down prices. She started with her biography, threw out clichés like "opportunity economy" a few times, talked about tax credits for new businesses, came back to her biography ... and never mentioned prices or inflation at all.
At the end of that substance-less filibuster, Taff noted that Harris campaigns on a "new way forward," even though she's been Vice President for the past three-plus years. "Some people wonder how different you are from Joe Biden," Taff says, asking for "one or two" specifics demonstrating the difference.
"I offer a new generation of leadership," Harris says, and ... then starts talking about an "opportunity economy" again. (The White House has been using that term since at least April.) Harris mentions "investments" into "aspirations and dreams," attempting to string together as many clichés as possible to sound intelligent. She then claims that her plan to expand the Child Tax Credit is new, when Joe Biden has flogged it for three years, including in March's State of the Union speech.
"My approach is about new ideas, new approaches," and "new policies to be directed at the current moment," she then states, without being able to name a single one. "My focus is very much on what we need to do over the next ten to twenty years," she adds, "to catch up to the 21st century around capacity and also challenges."
So what have she and Joe Biden been doing the last three-plus years? Using 20th century ideas? (Answer: yes, and it's called 'redistributionism.')
That comprises about seven minutes of this eleven-minute interview. Not a single specific new idea has been broached, and Harris never even addressed inflation or the Biden-Harris record. Next, Harris floats the same old playbook on guns by calling for an assault-weapons ban and universal background checks, which again is no different than Biden's position, and which he has done little to nothing to push through Congress.
Taff lets that slide, moves on to Trump's popularity in Pennsylvania and asks how she can change their minds. Harris trots out some of her Republican endorsements and claims to be a uniter rather than a divider, which is ... also what Joe Biden claimed in 2020, too. At least that segment was coherent, but then Taff tries to do Harris a favor and returns to her biography, asking her what she wishes people knew about her that hasn't been said.
And Harris doesn't seem to know what to do with that either, talking about how she loves to cook -- a point everyone knows from her YouTube channel -- and that "I love my family." She wraps up by surprising us all by revealing that she's "a career prosecutor," as though Harris and her campaign haven't made that their main theme for this election, and seemingly forgetting that she just talked about that while discussing the assault-weapons ban.
It's a tour de force of vapidity. Truly, one has to work hard to get this far out of one's depth. Clips of this interview roared across Twitter/X last night, and it's easy to see why. But one has to watch the whole interview to truly appreciate just how bad Harris is at answering questions by herself, even after two months of prep and drawing a relatively friendly interlocutor. So here it is in full:
There is just no getting around Harris' incompetence now. The debate may have given her a chance to "prosecute" Donald Trump, but that's about the only skill she has. Not only does she look and sound unprepared for the job, Harris is unprepared for the job. The more Harris has to answer questions on her own, the more apparent that will be. And voters will quickly realize it, and probably already have begun to do so.
Readers know how much I enjoy cinematic references, so I'll add this ironic clip to the post. When My Fellow Americans hit theaters in 1996, the political zeitgeist included Dan Quayle as a supposed intellectual lightweight. Dan Aykroyd played the current president who was continually embarrassed by his VP; at one point he asked his staff to remind John Heard's character that a diplomatic delegation had arrived from the Netherlands and not "the nether regions."
In the end, though, VP Matthews is revealed to be the 'genius' behind a conspiracy, leading to this laughable penultimate climax:
I've been thinking about this clip since Harris' "price gauging" claim. It's pretty clear that Harris herself is "the big fakade." Quayle, always an intelligent man, looks positively Einsteinian in comparison. My Fellow Americans is surprisingly watchable and not terribly partisan, either (and far better than The American President, especially on partisanship).
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