Harris’s empty words an insult to US voters and democracy

The Harris CNN interview had a suffocating atmosphere of glutinous fluff.

Did you see that interview with Kamala Harris on CNN? Wasn’t it amazing?

As things stand, Harris, and her vice-presidential running mate, Tim Walz, are marginally ahead in the presidential race. If the polls are accurate, and the election were held today, she’d probably be president. On the basis of the epic, fatuous emptiness of her first major television interview, this is a potentially disastrous development.

This column is no unqualified admirer of Donald Trump. America has presented itself with a terrible choice. But on the basis of that CNN interview, it stands ready to elect one of the most spectacularly incompetent and unqualified candidates in its history.

Of course, we must be careful about polls. Trump tends to outperform his poll numbers on election day. So it’s possible that even with the current opinion poll numbers, Trump could win.

The other paradox is that Trump leads Harris over who can better manage most of the key issues, but Harris leads Trump overall in the polls. In other words, a lot of people think Trump can do the job, but don’t like him much.

People are still unconvinced that Harris can do the job, but the Democrat machine, running a Hollywood movie star celebrity image promotion job, has marketed her as a likeable and normal American.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in first sit down interview with CNN.

The CNN interview was unintentionally revealing. Harris, in striking contrast to professional politicians of the past such as Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, has avoided doing any unscripted interviews or live exchanges on camera. No one suggests she’s suffering cognitive decline like Joe Biden, but she is unbelievably hopeless at explaining her policies, or even just talking in sensible English about policy issues.

As Vice-President, she did a disastrous TV interview early in the life of the Biden administration, in which the interviewer was mean enough to ask some polite but modestly insistent questions about her performance in trying to clean up the illegal immigration disaster on the Mexican border.

She made such a mess of it that she virtually went into hiding afterwards, and was never again given primary responsibility for any serious issue by the Biden administration.

But back to the CNN show. The journalist, Dana Bash, did ask some of the obvious and mildly tough questions, but when Harris didn’t answer Bash didn’t press the matter. Instead there was a suffocating atmosphere of glutinous fluff.

Even on the softest possible questions, Harris had the greatest difficulty constructing a normal English language sentence that actually related to the question.

Bash asked Harris what she would do on day one of her presidency and got this reply: “Well, there are a number of things. I will tell you first and foremost one of my highest priorities is to do what we can to support and strengthen the middle class. When I look at the aspirations, the goals, the ambitions of the American people, I think that people are ready for a new way forward in a way that generations of Americans have been fuelled by – by hope and optimism.”

There followed another similar paragraph of mind-deadening word confetti about how Trump had caused divisions.

Bash was polite, but still no clearer on what Harris planned for day one, which is one the absolutely compulsory cliche questions of all American presidential campaigns. So she tried again. Day one?

Harris replied: “Day one, it’s gonna be about one, implementing my plan for what I call an opportunity economy. I’ve already laid out a number of proposals in that regard, which include what we’re gonna do to bring down the cost of everyday goods, what we’re gonna do to invest in America’s small businesses, what we’re gonna do to invest in families.”

Harris seems like the fictional portrayal of Sara Palin in the movie, Game Change. In that film her handlers couldn’t get Palin to fully grasp certain policy issues, so instead they got her to learn by rote a series of topic-specific answers.

It’s tempting to think Harris has done something similar, although it’s hard to believe anyone would actually write, and the get someone else to memorise, such content-free, syntax-mangling, meandering, pointless word assemblages as Harris uttered.

When later in the interview Harris was asked about the causes of inflation, the best she could come up with was alleged “price gouging” by greedy corporations. There was no mention of the budget deficit approaching $US2 trillion, more than 6 per cent of GDP. Nor of the vast regulatory complexity, and accompanying cost, the Biden administration has added to business.

Bash gently asked Harris why she had reversed herself on her passionate opposition, as recently as 2019, to fracking. She got no answer so asked again.

Harris replied: “Well, let’s be clear. My values have not changed. I believe it is very important that we take seriously what we must do to guard against what is a clear crisis in terms of the climate. And to do that, we can do what we have accomplished thus far.”

George Orwell could not have produced a more exquisite newspeak parody, the object of which is to give the appearance of substance to pure wind.

Consider one more immortal Harrisism, as to her radical policy reversals as she, temporarily at least, abandons her ultra-liberal past for a more centrist presentation for the election: “Dana, I think the – the – most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective is my values have not changed. You mentioned the Green New Deal. I have always believed and I have worked on it that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time.”

There were also some wonderfully brazen straight-out lies. Did Biden offer to endorse you in the phone call when he told you he was standing down? Harris: “Well, my first thought was not about me, to be honest.”

Democratic presidential candidate US Vice President Kamala Harris listen to her running mate, Governor Tim Walz.

Walz was if anything worse than Harris. Bash asked him about several blatant lies he’s told, for example claiming he carried weapons in battle whereas during his service in the National Guard he was never deployed anywhere near a battle zone. He responded, Prince Andrew-like, by praising his own exemplary honesty.

CNN did the right thing asking these questions. But Bash responded to the non-answers as if she’d heard a masterful declamation from Cicero. CNN certainly decided not to make an issue of lies or evasions.

Harris’s handlers are hoping she can be anything any voter wants, that she can win just by not being Trump.

That’s partly why they won’t define her program or let her define herself. But refusing to outline any policies, refusing to engage in any serious debate, that’s an insult to democracy. In her own way, Harris embodies the serious, hopefully temporary, decline of America’s political culture.