Last Friday, Kamala 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.
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