Yesterday, finally, the kween deigned to engage with her subjects. Yes, Kamala Harris did her first sit-down media interview since replacing Joe Biden on the Democratic presidential ticket nearly 40 days ago. For more than a month she’d maintained a monarchical distance from the grubby presses, flat-out refusing a one-to-one with any of its probing hacks. Now she’s relented and had an exclusive chat with CNN’s Dana Bash. The end result? Only one word will do, and it’s a word normally aimed at the other side: weird.
Seriously, can we talk about this sh*tshow? It is hands down the oddest ‘first big interview’ I’ve seen with a candidate for high office. It took place at Kim’s Cafe in Savannah, Georgia and none of it made sense. Even the lighting was off – it’s the first time I’ve seen Kamala look bad. The angles were all wrong, meaning Harris, the supposed colossus of joy who will transform America, looked scrunched and tiny between Tim Walz and Ms Bash. And what was VP pick Walz even doing there? Chaperoning? ‘Strong, Capable Woman Asks Man To Come With Her To Job Interview In Case They Ask Any Hard Questions’, quipped the Babylon Bee.
They had no worries on that front. There were no hard questions. The ass-kissage was off the scale. Bash didn’t only give Harris easy questions – she gave her the answers, too. The most extraordinary moment was when she gently prodded Harris on her flip-flopping over policy. Finally, I thought, a tricky query. But then she told Harris what to say. ‘Is it because you have more experience now and you’ve learned more about the information?’, she wondered. The way Harris’s face lit up when she was handed this oven-ready excuse for her chameleon-like politics – even in the bad lighting you could see her glee at CNN’s servility to the Kamala cause.
A more objective broadcaster – hell, a kid with a camera fresh out of journalism school – would have dragged Harris for her vagueness. She issued flat platitudes. She engaged in Orwellian gobbledygook about how her policies might have changed but her ‘values’ haven’t – eh? She spoke in tongues about climate change – it’s ‘an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time’, she said, like a schoolkid padding out an essay with superfluous adjectives. And Bash just sat there, smiling. Maybe everyone in DC speaks like this?
Some of Harris’s volte-facing really is extraordinary. She once said she would ban fracking, now she says she won’t. And how on Earth did she go from comparing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the KKK and saying ‘an undocumented migrant is not a criminal’ to now saying we must sternly enforce our nation’s borders? ‘I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed’, she said. There’s that padding again. Sixteen words in that sentence are unnecessary. And the remaining five – ‘My values have not changed’ – are not true.
Clearly something has changed. She once called the border wall ‘un-American’, now she looks set to fund it. She once praised the ‘defund the police’ movement, now she’s promising to get ‘tough on crime’. She was once chilled about the border and who was crossing it, now she says she’ll get ‘tough’ down there. CNN might slavishly offer up that Harris’s flip-flops are a result of her ‘learning more about the information’, but to the rest of us it looks like empty-vessel syndrome – that is, it’s because Harris fundamentally stands for nothing that she can be filled with anything.
It seems to me that it is her technocratic hollowness that means she must constantly shop for virtue and policies that might impress whatever base she presently has in her sights. So four years ago she made anti-cop noises to try to win over the TikTok revolutionaries of the graduate elite, and now she says she will fight crime because she needs the support of America’s ‘normies’ who have never darkened the door of an Ivy League campus and who can’t afford to tweet ‘fuck the police’ because they don’t live in lovely leafy suburbs where crime is rare. It is Harris’s opportunism, born of her moral and political vacuity, that I find scary.
But CNN doesn’t, clearly. Nor does the BBC – its coverage of Kamala is without fail fawning and glowing. CNN and the Beeb always have a field day of pontificating when the Trump camp flip-flops or makes gibberish-based statements. Yet when Kamala does it, they don’t even notice. They just keep on gushing. Kamalamania is now so widespread in the media that they’re even making excuses for her haughty refusal to speak with them. ‘Why should a candidate for office need to regularly answer questions publicly, anyway?’, asks a columnist for the Washington Post. Erm, there’s this thing, some of us call it ‘democracy’, you should look it up.
What Kamala’s media cheerleaders are really saying is that it’s so important she gets to the White House that democratic norms – including the democratic norm of speaking to journalists – can legitimately be suspended if it will assist in this crucial mission. Witness their relief this morning that Harris’s belated, begrudged sit-down with a reporter was, well, boring. They’re delighted. She was ‘solid and unspectacular’ and did ‘herself no harm’, says a gleeful Guardian. She ‘said nothing likely to cause her serious political trouble’, says a grateful New York Times. They’re thrilled, not that their candidate finally put herself forward for a democratic grilling, but that it was a safe, dull, uninspiring affair that won’t put anyone off. Yay!
Our gal came across as ‘radically normal’, says the Guardian. Radically normal – what a soul-frying phrase. The Kamala crusade is a new and chilling form of post-democratic politics. The belief seems to be that the less exposure she has, the better. As the Washington Post puts it, ‘Enough voters might prefer a candidate to whom they have had relatively little exposure when the alternative is Trump’. Debate be damned. Scrutiny, forget about it. Accountability? Pfft. All that matters, it seems, is playing it super-safe so that no voter is made to feel either angry or excited about Kamala and instead thinks: ‘Oh, she’ll do.’ These people want a smooth coronation, not the rough and tumble of democracy. Now that, Ms Harris, is ‘un-American’.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
They had no worries on that front. There were no hard questions. The ass-kissage was off the scale. Bash didn’t only give Harris easy questions – she gave her the answers, too. The most extraordinary moment was when she gently prodded Harris on her flip-flopping over policy. Finally, I thought, a tricky query. But then she told Harris what to say. ‘Is it because you have more experience now and you’ve learned more about the information?’, she wondered. The way Harris’s face lit up when she was handed this oven-ready excuse for her chameleon-like politics – even in the bad lighting you could see her glee at CNN’s servility to the Kamala cause.
A more objective broadcaster – hell, a kid with a camera fresh out of journalism school – would have dragged Harris for her vagueness. She issued flat platitudes. She engaged in Orwellian gobbledygook about how her policies might have changed but her ‘values’ haven’t – eh? She spoke in tongues about climate change – it’s ‘an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time’, she said, like a schoolkid padding out an essay with superfluous adjectives. And Bash just sat there, smiling. Maybe everyone in DC speaks like this?
Some of Harris’s volte-facing really is extraordinary. She once said she would ban fracking, now she says she won’t. And how on Earth did she go from comparing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the KKK and saying ‘an undocumented migrant is not a criminal’ to now saying we must sternly enforce our nation’s borders? ‘I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed’, she said. There’s that padding again. Sixteen words in that sentence are unnecessary. And the remaining five – ‘My values have not changed’ – are not true.
Clearly something has changed. She once called the border wall ‘un-American’, now she looks set to fund it. She once praised the ‘defund the police’ movement, now she’s promising to get ‘tough on crime’. She was once chilled about the border and who was crossing it, now she says she’ll get ‘tough’ down there. CNN might slavishly offer up that Harris’s flip-flops are a result of her ‘learning more about the information’, but to the rest of us it looks like empty-vessel syndrome – that is, it’s because Harris fundamentally stands for nothing that she can be filled with anything.
It seems to me that it is her technocratic hollowness that means she must constantly shop for virtue and policies that might impress whatever base she presently has in her sights. So four years ago she made anti-cop noises to try to win over the TikTok revolutionaries of the graduate elite, and now she says she will fight crime because she needs the support of America’s ‘normies’ who have never darkened the door of an Ivy League campus and who can’t afford to tweet ‘fuck the police’ because they don’t live in lovely leafy suburbs where crime is rare. It is Harris’s opportunism, born of her moral and political vacuity, that I find scary.
But CNN doesn’t, clearly. Nor does the BBC – its coverage of Kamala is without fail fawning and glowing. CNN and the Beeb always have a field day of pontificating when the Trump camp flip-flops or makes gibberish-based statements. Yet when Kamala does it, they don’t even notice. They just keep on gushing. Kamalamania is now so widespread in the media that they’re even making excuses for her haughty refusal to speak with them. ‘Why should a candidate for office need to regularly answer questions publicly, anyway?’, asks a columnist for the Washington Post. Erm, there’s this thing, some of us call it ‘democracy’, you should look it up.
What Kamala’s media cheerleaders are really saying is that it’s so important she gets to the White House that democratic norms – including the democratic norm of speaking to journalists – can legitimately be suspended if it will assist in this crucial mission. Witness their relief this morning that Harris’s belated, begrudged sit-down with a reporter was, well, boring. They’re delighted. She was ‘solid and unspectacular’ and did ‘herself no harm’, says a gleeful Guardian. She ‘said nothing likely to cause her serious political trouble’, says a grateful New York Times. They’re thrilled, not that their candidate finally put herself forward for a democratic grilling, but that it was a safe, dull, uninspiring affair that won’t put anyone off. Yay!
Our gal came across as ‘radically normal’, says the Guardian. Radically normal – what a soul-frying phrase. The Kamala crusade is a new and chilling form of post-democratic politics. The belief seems to be that the less exposure she has, the better. As the Washington Post puts it, ‘Enough voters might prefer a candidate to whom they have had relatively little exposure when the alternative is Trump’. Debate be damned. Scrutiny, forget about it. Accountability? Pfft. All that matters, it seems, is playing it super-safe so that no voter is made to feel either angry or excited about Kamala and instead thinks: ‘Oh, she’ll do.’ These people want a smooth coronation, not the rough and tumble of democracy. Now that, Ms Harris, is ‘un-American’.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
2 comments:
Similarities between Harris, Starmer and Ardern ( ex- NZ PM) are terrifying.
Harris is smiley and vague about her manifesto. Starmer has lied outright about the real Labour agenda - with his large majority, he could quickly transform the UK - for the worse.
I would propose the point - " that Kamal Harris, has been shoulder tapped, by The Democratic Party Hierarchy (those monied people, whom dwell in the shadows, pulling strings, pushing buttons, speaking quietly to all & sundry - their word is Gospel) and since that shoulder tap, she has been closely monitored, being brought up to speed on speaking, told what to say & when, told who the 'running mate would be' [smile Kamala and get on with it] - to the extent with the 'interview' she was told when & how [Kamala hates the media hence the stay away attitude] - and that ' the running mate would be there', no ifs or buts.
If any person thinks that she will " make a difference", well sorry, should Kamala "win", she will be but a puppet in the Oval Office, just like depart Joe Biden was.
Should Kamala become the next President - God Save America.
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