By Dave Andrusko
Guess what? This post will be entirely about last night’s CNN interview with the dynamic pro-abortion team of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Before I start, I should address two things. First, the optics.
Harris was in the middle, Walz to her right, and interviewer Dana Bash to her left. Walz looked positively gigantic and Harris like a tiny child. Not a good look when Harris was already being hammered for bringing Walz along like a security blanket.
Kamala appeared to get the child’s seat, while Walz looked like he was Hagrid sitting next to her.
And she looked exhausted.
Second, as someone said last night, the introduction was like a campaign ad for Harris/Walz.
After watching the taped interview on CNN, I turned to watch Fox News for reaction. Joe Concha was visibly angry and his column reflects that. He began
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz sat down for their first interview as the 2024 Democratic ticket on Thursday and only two words come to mind:
Dishonest.
Trainwreckalicious.
The second word may not be an actual word, but it’s appropriate.
Concha added
We are heading into a holiday weekend now. Kamala Harris took nearly SIX WEEKS to do one interview. And based on her unsteady performance, it is all but certain we won’t see much of her in any capacity before the debate, just as we didn’t see President Joe Biden for days on end as he prepped for the June 27 debate in Atlanta.
Even the Washington Post was, shall we say, measured in their take. They cited “three takeaways.” Number two for Aaron Blake was, “She walked a very fine line on ‘change.’”
She has sought to run as something of a “change” candidate despite her high-ranking role for the past 3½ years as vice president to Joe Biden, who is not a popular or well-reviewed president.
And she certainly massaged that distinction Thursday. She pitched the Biden administration as a successful one that would come to be viewed more positively over time. But she also sought to play up how her presidency could be different and even better.
Perhaps most strikingly, she repeatedly used the kinds of catchphrases you usually hear from a challenger. She twice referred to a “new way forward,” and she twice held up “the last decade” as something to be moved beyond.
Which, of course, was another way of saying she didn’t wish to be burdened with the unpopular record of pro-abortion President Joe Biden…or, even more so, her own record.
HotAir’s Ed Morrissey basically concluded there was no there there:
The event failed to deliver any answers about Harris’ policies, her grasp of the issues, and most importantly, how long and how many people have covered up the fact that the current president has suffered from significant cognitive decline. Bash posed the question but let Harris off the hook, as Adam Baldwin predicted yesterday during our taping of the Amiable Skeptics episode for today, and in other cases “led the witness” to give Harris an easy out on tough questions.
Matt Vespa of TownHall also described the interview as a “trainwreck,” adding shrewdly
Portions of the transcript showed host Dana Bash answering the questions for Harris, along with word salads that provide her camp’s reasoning behind keeping the VP in the bunker. Harris was unrepentant about hiding Joe Biden’s mental health decline.
For what it’s worth, I was struck by the same thing. Harris’s answers were, to be honest, often indecipherable. Why?
Simply because she was denying the piles of evidence that she has abandoned many positions she held before becoming Vice President. It was a variation on “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”
Bash was too polite—alright, too enabling—to call out her blatant inconsistencies.
I could offer up comments from a dozen sources but here’s just one more from Ben Johnson who did a detailed factcheck on what both Harris and Walz said.
He quoted Bash who asked
“Right after the debate, you insisted that President Biden is extraordinarily strong. Given where we are now, do you have any regrets about what you told the American people?” Bash asked.
“No, not at all,” replied Harris, reiterating, “Not at all.”
A mere 63 days earlier, Harris not only described Joe Biden as the picture of health but placed an onus on those who questioned his acuity. Moments after Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate with former President Donald Trump, Harris told ABC News Biden had “a slow start, but a strong finish.”
The President has been MIA for going on two weeks.