Other than her alarmingly strained, labored, and slow speech — what’s that about? — there wasn’t much remarkable about Kamala Harris’s 45-minute interview Tuesday in front of the National Association of Black Journalists. She did do this thing that always, without fail, gives herself away as stupefied and clueless about a simple question’s answer.
“Right?”
That’s the single word out of Kamala’s mouth that lets you know she’s faking her way through an issue in hopes her sympathetic interviewer will help her along, giving some signal that he or she comprehends the absurdity drooling from Kamala’s lips. At the NABJ interview, it went like this during a portion of the event related to restricting gun ownership:
Interviewer: “Are there other solutions that you’re also thinking about that will get at this issue?”
Kamala: “Absolutely. For example, part of what we did with— so we, as vice president and with the president, we were able to pass the first meaningful gun safety legislation in 30 years. And part of what that involved was millions and millions of dollars to put more mental health counselors in public schools. [Pause filled with an audible hard swallow.] Right?”
This was the only moment during the entire, painful slog of an interview in which Kamala got meaningful pushback from her hosts. It was pushback from the political left of the issue, to be sure, but pushback nonetheless. She struggled with it, per usual, and in the same way as always. To compensate, she says, “Right?” in hopes of feedback that she hasn’t lost everyone with her nonsense— a thoughtful nod or even an “Mmm, yes.”
Kamala went on to say, “There are very few solutions that we haven’t thought of. We need to put the resources into them.” That is another way of saying, “I don’t have a real answer to that basic question, but please, oh please, take whatever I just said as one.”
Another memorable “Right?” moment was early in her tenure as vice president, not even a month in, when during an interview with Mike Allen of Axios, she was thrown this fastball: “What are you finding is harder about the pandemic? Like, how are you finding the hole is deeper?”
Mind you, that question was posed to the second-most-in-charge person of the new Biden administration, which was elected in no small part on the promise that it had a plan to “shut down the virus.” If it had been true, Kamala’s answer could have been something like, “It’s a challenge to carry out our solutions on such a massive scale, but we’re making progress and new infections and deaths are already beginning to fall.”
Except they had already been falling (before eventually setting record heights) and the Kamala-Biden duo never had a real plan to “shut down the virus.” So instead, her answer began, “I mean, the challenge, Mike, is, you know, what I explained to the mayors, um, there is no stockpile.” She held her arms up in a wobbly shrug and stared blankly through her mask. “Right?”
Asked to clarify the stockpile, Kamala said again, “Of vaccines— right?”
There would have never been a stockpile of vaccines. They were intentionally rushed from production to distribution. Imagine what would have been said about the Kamala-Biden administration’s predecessors if there had: “Why were you hoarding vaccines while people are dying?!” But Kamala needed to say something and hoped her interviewer would assist in the effort. Right?
A variation of this is when Kamala says, “You know?” In an interview with an ABC affiliate in Philadelphia last week, she was asked about the extreme inflation her administration caused, and how she might reverse the problem she created. After describing her comfortable Canadian upbringing with a university professor mother as “middle class,” Kamala said, “A lot of people will relate to this— I grew up in a neighborhood of folks who were very proud of their lawn.” She then nodded her head while staring at her interviewer for a sign that he might go with it. “You know?”
Surely the anchor understood the concept of a person being proud of his well-manicured lawn, but the suggestion — “You know?” — that he must know where Kamala was going with her insipid metaphor was another version of her self-defense mechanism, a cue to get the person she’s speaking with to play along in hiding her ignorance.
It’s the Kamala telltale. Right? You know?
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