In one sense, Vice President Kamala Harris ’s Thursday interview with CNN 's Dana Bash was a success: She did not fail so spectacularly that Democratic operatives called for her to exit the race. So she does have that going for her.
But other than clearing that low bar, Harris failed by every other objective measure.
Going into the night, Axios set a fair standard for judging what was to come: “The central question for Harris in the coming days, can you explain the areas in which you differ from Biden on policy and what you've done as VP to press your case for those views?”
Harris did none of that.
At several points throughout the interview, on issues foreign and domestic, Bash practically begged Harris to differentiate herself from President Joe Biden. The presidential nominee declined to do so every time. Why? Because all her policies are the same as the ones the public has endured for the past four years but worse.
Asked what she would tell voters who believe the economy was better under former President Donald Trump, Harris said falsely that she came into power “during the height of a pandemic” and that the economy had crashed. In reality, by the time Biden took office, lockdowns were ending, the economy was growing rapidly, and literally millions of jobs were being created every month , a pace that slowed after Harris became vice president.
More alarming than Harris’s refusal to identify any policy on which she differs from Biden was her cunning effort to cover up her leftist positions on immigration and energy, which she still holds despite her obfuscation.
On energy, Bash asked Harris if she still wanted to ban fracking, a policy she repeatedly proclaimed in 2019. Harris claimed she made clear on the debate stage in 2020 that “I would not ban fracking.” It is true that in a debate against then-Vice President Mike Pence, Harris said, “Joe Biden will not end fracking. He has been very clear about that.” But that is a statement of Biden's policy, not hers.
As we have noted before, you can tell a lot about candidates by observing where they deploy sleight of hand on a subject they wish to keep occluded. Harris’s dishonesty was further exposed when she tried to explain her shift on fracking. She said the Inflation Reduction Act convinced her that climate change could be addressed without banning fracking. But the Inflation Reduction Act was passed two years after her debate with Pence. It can’t be the reason she flip-flopped on fracking because it hadn’t happened yet!
The reality is that as Harris said repeatedly on Thursday, her “values have not changed.” Take that to the bank. She has not changed from 2019. She is every bit the chuckling radical she was five years ago. The only difference is now she knows she needs to conceal it if she wants to be elected.
We see a similar lie being told on immigration where Harris was one of many Democratic candidates in 2019 to say illegally crossing the border should be decriminalized. Asked about this by Bash, Harris said, “I believe there should be consequences. We have laws that have to be followed and enforced that address and deal with people who cross our border illegally. And there should be consequences.”
This answer is evasive. On the primary debate stage in 2019, there was large agreement among all the Democrats that there should be “consequences” if someone crossed the border illegally. For radical open borders advocates such as Julian Castro, those “consequences” meant civil fines and penalties. Harris agreed with that. At no point has Harris, or any anonymous aide, said she supports keeping existing criminal penalties for illegal border crossing. Her campaign has repeatedly said instead that “unauthorized border crossings are illegal,” which is just a statement of current law. It reveals nothing about what Harris thinks the law should be.
Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) was with Harris and Bash, but he turned out to be a waste of space. He explained away his falsehoods about serving in combat as being the result of bad grammar rather than dishonesty. And he could only manage “I think people know who I am” when Bash pointed out he also lied about his drunken driving arrest and using IVF treatments.
Harris had no blank stares or senior moment pauses, as her current boss does so often, but she did serve up her trademark word salads such as “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.”
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When people speak so unclearly, it usually means they are either thinking unclearly or deliberately covering something up. Harris evidently does not know what she is talking about, although she presented her incompetence in a less embarrassing way than Biden did in June in the debate against Trump, so her campaign did not implode.
But if her goal was to differentiate herself from Biden’s record of utter failure on the economy and the border, she disappointed entirely — which is why voters may not get to see her in another interview before Election Day.
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