Morning Glory: Defining competence down

‘Kamala Harris: Weak. Failed. Dangerously liberal.’

That’s the tag line on the first campaign ad put up by former President Trump this week. Those closing phrases of the 30-second hammering of Harris ought to run a thousand times between now and November because they provide a great and memorable summary of the Vice President’s tenure in office. Until and unless Harris confronts her own record of failure and weakness, she will begin a steady drift down in the collective mind of the electorate. 

Since Joe Biden got the hook almost two weeks ago, Vice President Harris has not given an interview with a serious journalist, much less held a press conference.  If she and her handlers had even minimal confidence in her ability to make it through even softball interviews with reliable Beltway anchors, she’d be on the air attempting to get ahead of the Trump Campaign’s definition of her as ‘weak, failed and dangerously liberal.’

But she doesn’t and they don’t. They know that one ‘typical Harris interview’ will cause the ice beneath her to break and the delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago from August 19th to the 22nd to bolt. 

The ‘party’ is relieved that Biden got yanked, but more than a few of the party elders were angling for a ‘compressed primary’ because they know Harris is a terrible candidate. Former President Barack Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have been tipped as among those in the ‘Not Kamala Camp.’ Too bad. Once the embittered Joe Biden, kicked to the curb again by Obama, endorsed Harris, it was her nomination to lose. And she is not going in the harm’s way of an interview until she is formally nominated.

We know why. We have watched her occasional media appearances over the past four years, and they seem to almost always end in laughter: her’s and the audience’s. Her’s is nervous laughter, a sort of giggle that attempts to mask her awareness of her own vacuity. The audience’s laughter is the sort of uncomfortable ‘ha ha ha’ that accompanies confusion if not cringing. 

Harris is just not very good at explaining anything, much less expanding on her world view or her vision for the country’s future. Even her cliches land with a clunk: All the ‘unburdening,’ Venn diagrams and school buses cannot make up for a lack of unrehearsed rhetorical ability of the sort necessary in an interview or a presser. 

She can, however, reliably read from a teleprompter which makes her a far better candidate than Biden. The ‘relief rally’ Harris benefited from in her poll numbers after Biden got tipped overboard was inevitable given that Democrats knew they were doomed if President Biden was renominated. Those relatively strong numbers will last through the end of August as the Democratic convention, even if interrupted by protests, will give Harris continued energy. Unless she gives an interview. She doesn’t have to as she can coast through these weeks of the Olympics with a rally here and a tarmac question there. Once the nomination is locked up, then the real campaign begins. 

Eventually though, Harris has to talk to the press, even if it is the tame Manhattan-Beltway media elite. If she is not deterred by the deep anti-Israel and often anti-Semitic impulses of her party’s left wing and selects Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate, Harris will have a stand-in who is both smart and comfortable in front of a camera. Even with the estimable Shapiro as her sidekick, however, Harris is still going to have to talk about complex subjects at some length. That’s going to be her undoing. 

The American electorate got head faked into a Biden presidency by the basement campaign he ran, one enabled by the COVID lockdowns. ‘We won’t get fooled again’ is more than an old rock-and-roll lyric. It’s a deeply held conviction among voters. 

It is unclear to me why former President Trump would agree to debate Harris. He’s done the job already and she hasn’t.  His positions and record as president on the big three issues of inflation, immigration and Israel are well known. The electorate remembers the Trump years pre-COVID—correctly—as low inflation, high growth years, years of expanding peace and stability in the world. The Biden-Harris years? Not so much. 

Harris, of course, hasn’t done the job for even a day. She’s shadowed it, though at arm’s length as Team Biden knew from the 2020 campaign forward that they had chosen poorly when it came to Harris. All that buzz about clearing a Supreme Court vacancy for her was not because of her reputation as a legal scholar. They wanted an electable understudy, not Harris. Justice Sotomayor didn’t take the hint. 

Trump has the record and the confidence of his party and most independents. Harris has a much higher mountain to climb when it comes to credibility. On everything. With everyone. If she can’t knock out an interview a week beginning after the convention, the game will be over before it is begun. 

‘Weak. Failed. Dangerously liberal.’ Add in ‘San Francisco Democrat’ and it’s all that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance need.

Hugh Hewitt is host of ‘The Hugh Hewitt Show,’ heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990.  Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.