Vice President Kamala Harris’s Fox News gambit failed.
With just a few weeks to go until election day, the race for the presidency remains a toss-up; but it is former president Donald Trump who is riding a wave of momentum according to many reputable surveys. And given the polling industry’s underestimation of Trump’s chances in each of his prior two campaigns, Harris needs to make significant gains in order to feel any sort of confidence about her chances.
It’s unlikely that Harris’s sit-down with Bret Baier on Wednesday will yield anything like that.
To be sure, Harris had a few strong moments. In particular, she did well when assailing Trump’s character and fitness for office. She’s right that Trump blew up a bipartisan border bill that would have done some good. She’s right that Trump’s rhetoric is divisive. She’s right that many members of his last administration caution against entrusting him with another term in office. And she’s right that re-electing Trump is a grave risk.
But that’s just about all she was right about. The ability to point out Trump’s flaws is an ability almost no one – much less a leading progressive politician – should lack. It is less than the bare minimum that Democrats should expect from their candidate. And yet it is evidently the only trick Harris has.
Harris’s broadsides against Trump would resonate more if she occasionally eschewed them for substantive answers to the questions she’s actually asked. But her record is so poor and her ideas so unpopular that she avoids speaking directly about either.
Baier asked about specific choices made by the Biden-Harris administration to reverse Trump-era immigration policies and release migrants into the United States while they await legal proceedings. Harris responded by touting an amnesty bill and attacking Trump.
When asked about her previous advocacy for taxpayer dollars being spent on gender-change treatments for prisoners and treatments for illegal immigrants, she made the ludicrous claim that Trump supports the same.
And when she was interrogated about how her recent identification of Iran as the United States’ greatest foreign adversary diverged from the rapprochement she and Biden had pursued with it, she pivoted to attacking Trump for pulling out of the harebrained Iran nuclear deal.
If the goal was to reassure persuadable independents and moderate Republicans that she is not the far-Left bogeyman that her 2020 campaign platform would indicate she is, the interview was an enormous flop.
The Vice President wants to have it both ways. She’s trying to make inroads with the middle of the electorate without offering them any real concessions that might alienate her base. That’s why she leans on opaque pronouncements like this one: “My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency… I invite ideas, whether it be from the Republicans who are supporting me, who were just on stage with me minutes ago, and the business sector and others who can contribute to the decisions that I make.”
But Baier cut through the fluff to expose her hollow promises. The question he posed to elicit her string of platitudes was “So you’re not Joe Biden, you’re not Donald Trump, but nothing comes to mind that you would do differently?”
And when she answered without answering, he asked the obvious follow-up: “Your campaign slogan is ‘a new way forward’ and ‘it’s time to turn the page’. You have been vice president for three and a half years, so what are you turning the page from?”
“Turning the page from the last decade, in which we have been burdened with the kind of rhetoric coming from Donald Trump…” she replied.
The public as a whole might not have much affinity for Donald Trump the man, but almost every measure we have suggests that they have a whole lot more affinity for his administration than the current one.
Kamala Harris keeps trying to get away with saying instead of showing how her own presidency would differ from Biden’s disastrous one. On Wednesday, someone finally called her out for it.