By Dave Andrusko
Well, allow me to cut to the chase. I think it’s fair to say when pro-abortion Vice President Kamala Harris has lost The New York Times, it’s Katie Bar the Door.
Not, you understand, that the uniformly pro-abortion Times cut bait with Harris. But Reid J. Epstein’s and Lisa Lerer’s review of last night’s CNN “town hall” was snarky and brutally honest.
Here’s the headline: “Harris Calls Trump a Fascist: 6 Takeaways From Her CNN Town Hall.” Well, of course. That’s her last resort.
But check out the subhead: “Entering new rhetorical territory, the vice president turned even unrelated questions into attacks on Donald Trump as she offered long, winding answers to questions from voters.” Even moderator Anderson Cooper seemed perplexed by some of her interminably long and winding answers.
Lerer, by the way, co-authored “The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America.” The blurb from the New York Times Magazine says it all: “As [Elizabeth] Dias [also a Times’ reporter] and Lerer write, the fight against legal abortion is tied inextricably to the fight for America’s soul.”
Here are some representative quotes from Epstein and Lerer.
“Over the course of the 80-minute town hall, Ms. Harris was asked about a wide range of policy issues. Her answers often stuck to the same theme.
“Would she expand the Supreme Court? Would people who make $500,000 see their taxes increase? Would Americans pay for benefits for migrants crossing the border? How would she codify Roe v. Wade into federal law? And what about Gaza?
“Her answers boiled down to: Donald Trump would be worse.”
[Actually, that was the sum and substance of her answers.]
“Voters asked direct questions. Harris gave circular answers.”
“Ms. Harris got one fairly straightforward question from a self-described Jewish independent voter about how she would deal with antisemitism on college campuses.
“In an answer that stretched for more than five minutes, she briefly touched on hate crimes but then jumped into a discursive tangent that addressed Mr. Trump’s reported invocations of Hitler, his relationships with Kim Jong-un and Vladimir V. Putin and his actions during the coronavirus pandemic.” …
Finally, “Attacking Mr. Trump, it turns out, is more effective when he’s standing right there.
“Ms. Harris’s strong performance in her first — and only — presidential debate against her rival demonstrated her ability to bait him into a misstep. But without him standing nearby, her attacks on him appeared more like dodges of questions about her own plans than crisp responses about what she would do as president.”
How about CNN? What did Eric Bradner, Gregory Krieg, Arit John and Daniel Strauss have to say about their own town hall? I think it’s fair to say they were skeptical. For example,
By both Cooper and audience members, the vice president was pressed on border security.
She was asked on the record number of illegal border crossings that occurred during the Biden administration in spite of multiple executive orders. That flow had only begun to shrink after a major executive action earlier this year, Cooper noted, and asked why Biden and Harris hadn’t done something sooner.
One more:
Another voter question challenged Harris on her shift to the middle during her three-month presidential campaign. Since becoming the nominee, the vice president has changed her stance on key issues, including backing away from her past support for redirecting police department funds to social services and banning fracking.
Harris said she does not want to ban fracking and hasn’t moved to do so as vice president, while reiterating that her “values” when it comes to addressing climate change haven’t changed. And when directly asked by Cooper if she thinks fracking is bad for the environment, Harris dodged the question.
That was the legacy media’s take. Others were far harsher..
For instance, National Review’s Noah Rothman did not cut her any slack:
Harris’s evolving persona, both in terms of policy and in her personal comportment, have proven jarring. That evolution has left “some voters to wonder about the authenticity of your current moderate positions.” …She was not asked for a rehearsed set of lines that explain why she changed her views — everyone knows why she changed her views insofar as they were designed to appeal to far-left progressives whose policy preferences are anathema to a general electorate.
They want to hear a reasonable, plausible story that could assuage their lingering suspicion that it’s all an act with which she will dispense the minute she’s in the White House. And the vice president just cannot do it!
She either lacks the ability or imagination to craft a narrative that explains why the “values” that informed her subscription to a suite of radical policies are the same values that oblige her to tack to the center. Instead, she looks and sounds like the well-programmed product of an advertising campaign, and voters can see through it.
Their closing message is all about Trump and Hitler (all recycled). Can you imagine how alarming their internal polls are?
Finally Twitchy’s Grateful Calvin really went after her:
Last night, to the abject misery of everyone who watched it, the current vice president appeared at a CNN Town Hall with Anderson Cooper where her primary closing message to voters seemed to consist of ‘Orange Man Bad!’ and ‘That’s an interesting question, so I will proceed to not answer it and just prattle on about nothing for five minutes.’
Harris’s non-answers were so bad, in fact, that ‘Obama’s Brain’ David Axelrod went on CNN afterward and labeled it with a phrase so damning — and accurate — we would not be surprised to see his words in a Trump ad later this week.
Axelrod said,
“When she doesn’t want to answer a question, her habit is to kind of go to word salad city… She would acknowledge no concerns about any of the administration’s policies and that’s a mistake… You do want to relate to the people in front of you. She didn’t do a lot of that. She didn’t ask them questions. She didn’t address them particularly. She was giving set pieces too much.”
Tough night for Harris.
