The Patriot Post® · The CNN Interview: Harris Finds a Fallback

If we had one word with which to describe yesterday’s CNN interview with Kamala Harris and her chaperone, Tim Walz, it’d be this one: Meh.

We say this because Harris didn’t do anything to disabuse discerning viewers of their belief that she’s a forward-falling empty pantsuit. Nor did she emit any cringeworthy cackles. Nor did she make any major gaffes that might cause the oh-so-narrow sliver of the undecided electorate to disqualify her.

Longtime Republican strategist Alex Castellanos went the mixed-metaphor route to note that Harris had “a month of adulatory media coverage and hiding from the press, but she didn’t quite reach escape velocity [and] never made it across the 50-yard line.”

We knew we were in for a rigged deal from the start. This, after all, was the Thursday before the long Labor Day weekend, and CNN has long been the least-watched of the cable news networks. Furthermore, anchor Dana Bash told us right at the start that we’d be seeing the interview “in its entirety.” But we know the interview lasted an hour, and yet it was over in less than 50 minutes with multiple commercial breaks. Compounding the deception from “The Most Trusted Name in News” was a “LIVE” indicator on its broadcast chyron — you know, the sort of indicator that a news network might use when its coverage is occurring live and unedited as opposed to pre-recorded and tweaked to the satisfaction of its interviewee.

If there was one big takeaway from Harris’s first prolonged exposure to a journalist since “transformative” Joe Biden anointed her more than a month ago, it’s this: Her values haven’t changed. We know because she kept telling us this during the interview. Indeed, it seemed like every time Bash gently pressed Harris on a matter in which she’d flip-flopped, she reflexively said, “My values have not changed.”

But that’s a lie. Unless she can somehow explain how she can go from bragging about prosecuting illegal immigrants when she was California’s attorney general to saying that illegal immigration shouldn’t be criminalized. Unless she can somehow explain how she goes from scoffing at Donald Trump’s vow to build a border wall to saying that she’ll sign the “bipartisan” immigration bill, which includes funds for constructing that very same scoff-worthy border wall.

She’s flip-flopped on the border wall, on the criminalization of illegal border crossings, on the abolition of ICE, on fracking, on offshore drilling, on doing away with private health insurance, on an electric vehicle mandate, and on mandatory gun buybacks confiscation. These are serious issues, serious matters of policy. And she’s opportunistically changed her position on all of them. From left to right. But not her values. She hasn’t changed her values. At least, that’s what the focus groups told her to say. So that’s the fallback we’ll be hearing between now and Election Day.

As the Trump campaign quipped, “Kamala said her values ‘have not changed’ three separate times. She’s still a San Francisco radical.”

Or, as the Wall Street Journal editorial board put it, “We take it as a studied wink to her left flank that she’s on their side but can’t say so clearly until she’s elected.”

In another example of this effort to race away from her radicalism and appeal to the mainstream of the American electorate, Harris said she’ll name a Republican to her cabinet. (Memo to Kamala: Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger aren’t Republicans.)

Bash failed to press Harris on the border catastrophe, and she let her get away with saying, “In this race, I’m the only person who has prosecuted transnational criminal organizations who traffic in guns, drugs, and human beings. I’m the only person in this race who actually served a border state as attorney general to enforce our laws. And I would enforce our laws as president going forward. I recognize the problem.”

If only Bash had followed up: But Madame Vice President, you’re the border czar of the current administration. Why haven’t you been enforcing our immigration laws and securing our border all along?

Harris’s emotional support dog, deployment-dodging, valor-stealing, ChiCom-sympathizing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, was there by her side throughout, and Bash, to her credit, asked him about his, er, misrepresentations of his military record.

CNN prepped these questions with a mini-profile of Walz, describing him not as the Mao hat-wearing, gender-cult radical but as “a folksy father of two from rural America.”

“You said that you carried weapons in war,” said Bash, “but you have never deployed actually in a war zone. A campaign official says that you misspoke. Did you?”

Walz dodged the question, just like he dodged his unit’s deployment to Iraq:

Well, first of all, I’m incredibly proud. I’ve done 24 years of wearin’ uniform of this country. Equally proud of my service in a public school classroom, whether it’s Congress or — or the governor. My record speaks for itself, but I think people are coming to get to know me. I — I speak like they do. I speak candidly. I wear my emotions on my sleeves, and I speak especially passionately about — about our children being shot in schools and around — around guns. So I think people know me. They know who I am. They know where — where my heart is, and again, my record has been out there for over 40 years to — to speak for itself.

In the end, Walz implied that his critics are just a bunch of cheap-shot artists: “If it’s not this, it’s an attack on my children for showing love for me, or it’s an attack on my dog. I’m not gonna do that, and the one thing I’ll never do is I’ll never demean another member’s service in any way. I never have, and I never will.”

Fine, Tim. Don’t demean the service of others. But don’t lie about your own service, mmmkay?

On the topic of Joe Biden’s unfitness for office, Bash asked Harris, “Do you have any regrets about what you told the American people?” Harris’s answer was telling: “No regrets.” Translation: I’ll readily lie to the American people if it serves my political purposes. She added, “I think history is gonna show a number of things about Joe Biden’s presidency. I think history is gonna show that in so many ways it was transformative.”

She can say that again.

After the interview, former Obama strategist David Axelrod had this to say: “I think she did what she needed to do. What she needed to do was be the same person that people had seen on the stage for the last month. … I think, on the whole, this was a good night. I don’t think she moved the ball that much forward, but she certainly didn’t fall back.”

Like I said: Meh.

CNN’s lone conservative, the amiable Scott Jennings, was more insightful: “She is making it clear that she will embrace and be a continuation of Biden’s economic policy, his record, what they’ve done. She offered no remorse, no regrets, no introspection about anything they’ve done. She continued to blame inflation on this fantasy price-gouging idea. She had no additional thoughts on the economic situation in the country, or what they’ve done beyond just saying, ‘Joe Biden and I have done a great job.’”

How might the Trump team capitalize on Harris’s embrace of her decrepit boss? Jennings continued: “If I were the Trump people, I would be salivating over the idea that that’s how they are going to run the race. I don’t believe it’s tenable.”

We in our humble shop agree that Harris can’t have it both ways. She can’t embrace the current administration while claiming to be the change agent.

It’s one or the other, Kamala. It can’t be both.