‘Word salad city’: Media liberals recognize that Harris’ CNN town hall was a total disaster
Kamala Harris’
Potemkin town hall with Liz Cheney Monday in Michigan was not the winning performance her campaign was likely banking on. She had yet another opportunity this week, however, to convince voters that she deserves their vote and to do so without tossing more word salads.
Unfortunately for the vice president, her CNN town hall in Aston, Pennsylvania, Wednesday was an unmitigated disaster — with even friendly talking heads and former Obama adviser David Axelrod hinting as much.
Former Trump campaign adviser David Urban
told CNN’s Van Jones, “Republicans would take another hour of Kamala Harris. We just press play and let her keep going. We’d pay for another hour … let her keep not answering the questions.”
The Trump campaign has already turned at least one of Harris’ responses from the town hall into a mock ad.
While Harris spokesman Ian Sams later
claimed his boss “isn’t afraid of voters or real questions,” the vice president dodged questions about the border wall, Israel, raising taxes, decriminalizing border crossings, subsidizing benefits for illegal aliens, expanding and stacking the U.S. Supreme Court, expensive groceries, and banning fracking.
‘It’s nothing, nothing, nothing.’
“What I’m hearing from people who I’ve been talking to,” CNN host Dana Bash
noted afterward, “is that if her goal was to close the deal, they’re not sure she did that.”
“On the question of who she is, people are understanding that a little bit more,” continued Bash. “But what she will do, the question about her legislative priorities — ‘name one’ —
there wasn’t one.”
CNN panelist Scott Jennings
noted, “She’s a true double threat. She’s terrible on her feet when she gets unexpected questions, and simultaneously, she can’t even answer the expected questions. It’s nothing, nothing, nothing.”
When Harris did decide to provide answers, they were frequently labyrinthine and borderline nonsensical.
Democratic strategist and former Obama adviser David Axelrod
told his fellow CNN panelists, “The thing that would concern me is when she doesn’t want to answer a question, her habit is to kind of go to word salad city, and she did that on a couple of answers.”
When CNN’s Anderson Cooper
asked, “Is there something you can point to in your life — political life or in your life from the last four years — that you think is a mistake that you have learned from?” Harris responded:
I mean, I’ve made many mistakes. And they range from, you know — if you’ve ever parented a child, you know you make lots of mistakes too. In my role as vice president, I mean I probably worked very hard at making sure that I am well versed on issues, and I think that is very important. It’s a mistake not to be well versed on an issue and feel compelled to answer a question.
Axelrod noted that Harris also said a whole a lot about nothing in particular when asked about Israel.
“Anderson asked a direct question, would you be stronger on Israel than Trump? And there was a seven-minute answer, but none of it related to the question he was asking,” said Axelrod. “And so, you know, on certain questions like that, on immigration, I thought she missed an opportunity because she would acknowledge no concerns about any of the administration’s policies.”
When Anderson asked Harris whether she regretted working with President Joe Biden to eliminate Trump’s effective border policies and open the floodgates, Harris
said, “I think we did the right thing.”
“And that’s a mistake,” continued Axelrod. “Sometimes you have to concede things, and she didn’t concede much.”
Instead of intelligibility and policy, Harris appeared focused on attacking President Donald Trump, who has begun
eclipsing her in the polls. Not only did she employ the kind of incendiary rhetoric that set the stage for two known assassination attempts, at one point Harris indicated that she thinks her opponent is a fascist.
Jake Tapper
said, “[Harris] focused a lot more on Donald Trump, I think it’s fair to say, than she did on many specifics in terms of what she would do as president.”
Harris’ abysmal performance caused some supporters to melt down online.
Former Vox associate editor and journalist Aaron Rupar tweeted, “The Kamala Harris town hall was fine. She’s more than capable. Vote against the fascist, for god’s sake. The end.”
Blaze News senior editor Cortney Weil responded to Rupar, “‘She’s good enough! She’s smart enough! And gosh darn it, Trump’s a fascist.'”
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