It’s been fun to watch the MAGA propagandists scavenge for ammo from Kamala Harris’ CNN sitdown. They were locked and loaded before it began. They wound up firing blanks.
Trump said it was “BORING!!!” (which means she focused on policy and ignored him). Fox News’ Howard Kurtz said the optics were bad because she looked “very short.” (She’s five foot four.) Ben Domenech, another MAGA media enabler, said that her “collar” was “askew.” Rich Lowry, the right-wing commentator who actually believes that Trump’s character is an asset in this race, basically gave up last night and said that Harris’ interview was “fine and forgettable.”
Oh wait! They did find something! One particular soundbite, plucked from amidst all her well-articulated responses, is making the rounds in the wingnutsphere: “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.”
As spoken sentences go, that was absolutely a clunker. But let’s put it in perspective. Since the election is a binary choice between this lady and a lunatic, we need to compare that cherry-picked sentence with what we’re routinely hearing from the lunatic.
Here’s one from his rally yesterday in Michigan: “Some people don’t eat bacon anymore. This was caused by their horrible energy. Wind. They want wind all over the place. When it doesn’t blow, we have a problem.”
Hang on, this one was better. I listened and transcribed. This is verbatim: “She destroyed the city of San Francisco it’s and I own a big building there I shouldn’t talk about this but that’s OK I don’t give a damn because this is what I’m doing I should say it’s the finest city in the world ‘sell and get the hell out of there’ but I can’t do it and I don’t care you know I lost billions billions of dollars you know somebody said ‘what do you think he lost’ I said ‘probably two three billion’ that’s OK I don’t care they said ‘you think he’d do it again?’ and that’s the least of it, nobody – they always say that’s uh I don’t know if you know Lincoln was horribly treated uh Jefferson was pretty horribly Andrew Jackson they say was the worst of all that he was treated worse than any other president and I said do that study again because I think there’s nobody close to Trump…”
Team MAGA can’t focus on Harris because Trump is always getting in the way, with all the piffle that exits his pie hole. Last night his MAGA allies were jonesing to jump on Harris for shifting positions on some key issues – she told CNN that she no longer wants to ban fracking, because it’s possible to have “a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking” – but just when the Trumpists were gearing up to yell “flip flop,” their own candidate undercut them…by flip-flopping for the umpteenth time on abortion.
He started out years ago as a pro-choice guy who gave money to Planned Parenthood, then he morphed into a pro-life guy for the ’16 Republican primaries, kept his promises by crafting a MAGA Supreme Court that killed Roe v Wade, kept bragging about what he did until a few weeks ago, then suddenly he tweeted that “My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights,” then yesterday he signaled in a media interview that he’ll vote for Florida’s pro-choice ballot initiative, then his campaign sought to clean things up, insisting that he “has not yet said how he will vote on the ballot initiative.”
Bottom line: I couldn’t have cared less whether Harris mangled some phrases or rationalized some policy shifts, because nothing she said could’ve possibly trumped her opponent’s routine batshittery – like this beaut, shared in a recent sitdown with Dr. Phil: “I guarantee that if Jesus came down and was the vote counter, I would win California.”
If anything, Harris’ hyped first interview as a presidential candidate was dull and anticlimactic. Which suits her fine, because she said nothing that would sabotage her upward trajectory. Some policy preferences have changed, but her abiding “values” have not; she and Joe Biden had to dig the economy out of the pandemic, things are better now but need to be better still; she wants a $6000 child tax credit “for families for the first year of their child’s life to help them buy a car seat, to help them buy baby clothes, a crib.” Etcetera.
But elections aren’t decided by the nuances of policy. Last night Harris pitched a potentially winning theme, a quest to “turn the page” on nearly 10 years of MAGA: “I’m talking about an era that started about a decade ago where there was some suggestion – warped I believe it to be – that the measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you beat down instead of where I believe most Americans are, which is to believe that the true measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you lift up. That’s what’s at stake as much as any other detail that we could discuss in this election.”
The MAGAts aren’t quoting that one.
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By the way, here’s a response to the question of whether there’s been a shift in position on nuclear weapons:
“At least this was my whole attitude toward disarmament, still is, and this inspection is only one of the fringe subjects – I mean the nuclear tests – the fringe subjects on the whole field of disarmament. So, I think there has been no basic difference, except to this extent, that if we could go so far in setting up these reciprocal intelligence – not intelligence, inspectional – systems, that underneath the so-called threshold we could certainly have a continuation of a moratorium that would permit opportunity for a joint or coordinated study and program for permanent elimination of those tests.”
That was President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1960. He talked that way all the time.