Kamala Harris Doesn’t Even Know Her Own Stump Speech
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Last Friday, Harris rolled her traveling circus act into Flint, Mich., to deliver her canned stump speech in a state she is fighting desperately to win. There, the Harris campaign discovered that things can go comically wrong for their candidate as a speaker even at a tightly scripted rally: The mere second that Harris no longer has a prearranged script to follow carefully, she’s at an utter loss for words.
It was a 24-minute-long speech to an adoring throng of committed fans, and Kamala stumbled almost immediately. She opened with a few pleasantries and then praised her new endorsement from Earvin “Magic” Johnson, a name surely beloved by all Pistons fans. “Remember his number? Thirty-two! Today we got 32 days until the election.” What happens next is authentically difficult to watch . It is while Harris is glancing away that the teleprompter breaks down — and the panicked bewilderment on her face as she turns back to find it blank must be seen to be properly appreciated. It is cinematically expressive, like Harry Dean Stanton turning around in stunned silence in Alien to find a giant leering xenomorph behind him.
Harris’s brain then simply seizes up and crashes. (One imagines a blue screen of death flashing in her retinas.) “So 32 days . . . 32 days . . . okay we got some business to do, we got some business to do, all right. Thirty-two days . . . and we know . . . we will do it . . . and . . . and . . .” (Again, the silences in between words should be heard in all their wince-inducing agony.) At this point the prompter returns and she is able to return to the all-important policy point she forgot to make: “This is gonna be a very tight race until the very end, we are the underdog.”
I understand that teleprompter malfunctions are the nature of the business, and some people deal better with them than others. (Donald Trump, for example, often doesn’t even bother paying attention to whatever’s written on his.) But Harris’s meltdown was particularly pathetic for a person who has supposedly been delivering speeches for 20 years and was a “strong prosecutor” before that. (Or so we are asked to believe.) It is also somewhat inexplicable. This was her stump speech she was delivering — something she has given, and presumably practiced, countless times by now.
That sort of thing typically becomes “automatic” for a politician, a grouping of themes and one-liners that can be delivered from muscle memory. (Ask any campaign reporter — many can deliver a candidate’s stump speech from memory themselves , simply from hearing it over and over.) So how on earth does Kamala Harris not know what to say next in this situation? Why is she so spectacularly incapable of voicing even a single unscripted thought? And most of all, why on earth didn’t she have a written copy of her speech with her there at the podium, just in case? It’s amateurism and carelessness stacked in multiple layers.
Biden’s Ghost Returns to Haunt the Democratic Campaign
Harris has bigger problems than malfunctioning teleprompters, though, such as the nagging and continued public existence of President Joe Biden, apparently under the impression that America still wants to hear from him. When Biden sought consolation for the humiliating end to his presidency from the ladies of ABC’s The View a few weeks ago, he tossed a grenade into Harris’s purse near the end of his appearance: “As vice president there wasn’t a single thing that I did that she couldn’t do, and so I was able to delegate her responsibility on everything from foreign policy to domestic policy.”
It was the sort of bear-hug that Candidate Kamala was desperate to avoid: one explicitly associating her with the Biden administration, in every aspect, almost as if tailor-made for Trump ads aimed at angry Pennsylvanians and disaffected Michiganders. At the time, I wondered whether Biden was up to something. Imagine how embittered Biden must be behind the scenes. (Imagine the insensate rage of Doctor Jill alone.) A perverse part of me thought maybe that sentence wasn’t just the over-enthusiastic endorsement of a senile old man but merely disguised to be excusable as one: The old bastard might have been doing it on purpose .
It turns out I am in good (bad?) company, for the Harris campaign is beginning to suspect this itself. CNN reports that Team Harris is fuming about Joe Biden’s recent attempts to “keep injecting himself into the campaign” and is contemplating retaliating against Ol’ Joe — whom they suspect of malign meddling — by publicly breaking with him on one or more policy issues.
It is to laugh. I’m sure these last-minute policy-position switches, if they happen, will be announced the same way they always are: by an unnamed aide to Politico . And truly, what a profile in courage from the Harris campaign: They want it to be known they are now contemplating publicly repudiating Biden’s policies only because the addled old coot can’t keep his trap shut in public and keeps reminding people that Harris was his vice president.
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She so bad at this...
Her shrill nasalness really grates on the auditory nerve, even more so than Trumps high pitched blather.
Can't stand to listen to either of them.
Imagine the insensate rage of Doctor Jill alone.
The pettiness is pretty funny. Biden shows up at the press briefing room for the only time in his Presidency just as Harris goes live at a televised campaign stop. Biden praises DeSantis immediately after Harris claims DeSantis is playing politics with the hurricane response. Kamala whines that DeSantis won't talk to her and Biden responds "I gave him my cell! We're working great together!".
Jill is mad....
My guess is he accidentally stumbled in there and KJP had no choice but to let him in.
Here's CBS editing the Harris interview to try and salvage her idiocy.
One thing that's become obvious over the years, he who controls the editing controls perception. Reality TV stars talk about getting "bad edits" to make themselves look like a villian, or dumb or something along those lines. As we saw during the Biden "he's really fine" era of democratic boosterism, the media's job is to make a Democrat look as good as possible and editing interviews is a huge part of that.
Reinforces why Trump is correct in never sitting down for a taped interview with such a flim-flam operation again.
How anyone who supports Trump gets off talking about any other politicians "idiocy" is a constant mystery.
Lets say for the sake of argument that Harris is an "idiot". Does this make Trump come within a million miles of being fit for office? LOL. The right wing had 3 years to dump Trump and they couldnt find the guts to do it. Now they have a lunatic as their presidential candidate.
Now its too late . Whether or not Harris is an "idiot" (and that is clearly not true) she is still a thousand times better than Trump.
Harris's idiocy and inability to answer a simple question is completely unrelated to Trump. Trump's problems don't make Harris any more able to answer a simple question or recite her stump speech without it being spoon fed to her.
And yes, Trump can answer answer questions about Israel much better than Harris can even with CBS desperately editing an interview to protect her.
The thing about desperation is that it smells like desperation. Good job ... @!@!
It sure does. When progressives start whining because anti-Trump authors point out Harris's inability to talk, you know they are getting worried.
Jeffrey Blehar is an anti-Trump reporter? Who knew ... /s
Clinton once gave a speech from memory when his aides loaded the wrong one into the teleprompter, Harris is an idiot.
Bill had a photographic memory. Maybe it's not Kamala who is the idiot.
There is no such thing,
Sure there is.
Here I always thought Bill had a pornographic memory.
Would you be happier if it were named 'Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory'.
Prove it
What does a photographic memory have to do with being able to recite from memory a stump speech she's given dozens of times ?
I thought she was hiding ... /s
The Harris campaign just changed strategy. Her internal poll numbers must be horrendous.
This week they have her out doing easy interviews. The first one was with 60 Minutes in which she fucked up royally.
Did she forget she was raised in a middle class family who was proud of their lawn?
Oh my, that nevuh happened before. Winning campaigns are organic, you know this. Use cheap talking points on someone who likes the gas please.
I thank you in advance.
You're the fool who said there was no such thing. Disprove it.
Here , there satisfied.