Tuesday, 10 September 2024

“Why Harris is quiet” | Charles C. W. Cooke

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In advance of tomorrow morning’s (Hong Kong time) debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, the National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke has some words. Why has Kahh-mla (careful how you pronounce her name, lest you be deemed a racist!) been kept locked in the basement as they did with Joe? All together: Because she’s hopeless!

From top to bottom, Harris is an unalloyed disaster. She has no useful thoughts in her head, and, in consequence, she has no useful words in her mouth. She’s a rambler, a meanderer, a peregrinator extraordinaire. Where good communicators convey a whole meal in a few words, she imparts crumbs in an avalanche. She cackles for no reason, she slips into faux seriousness at inopportune moments, she mistakes indignation for gravitas, and, when pushed, she makes any bad situation considerably worse. 

Her response to the question of why she had conspicuously failed to visit the border was to say, “I haven’t been to Europe.” Her explanation of why all her policies had changed was to contend that “my values haven’t.” She is Charles Dickens’s futile Circumlocution Office in its final, human form.

Harris’s team knows this, as do her acolytes and her partisans. If pressed, they will deny it, but, just as they knew that Joe Biden was senile, so they know that Kamala Harris is a twit.

The natural response to being given a candidate who can talk is to put her on every stage in the world. That the Harris campaign has taken the opposite course is not the product of its devotion to bad habits or of its phantom feud with the media, but of its ability to discern what all other observers can see.

It is true, as her friendly critics now insist, that Harris’s chronic silence bears a tangible opportunity cost, but given her remarkable lack of talent, that is a problem that could be solved only by the Democratic Party choosing someone else as its nominee.

Once Harris was selected and installed, her team had only two realistic choices: to hide her, or to take the risk of letting her free. That it has assiduously embraced the former option ought to tell us all we need to know.

We shall soon see.  Tomorrow morning, our time, Hong Kong, 09:00 Wednesday 11th September. Aka. 21:00 American ET, Tuesday 10th September.