Kamala Harris: Four Years, One Interview, and the NYT Calls It a ‘First Effort

by Jeff Childers

In another media slip-up, NYT opinion editor Michelle Cottle wrote an overly-optimistic piece about Kamala’s very first (softball) interview on CNN last night, with a headline that is a lesson in being damned by faint praise: “Kamala Harris’s TV Interview Was a Solid First Effort.

A first effort? A first effort at what? Kamala has been taking up space in the White House as the Nation’s second-highest official for almost four years now, and before that, she spent five years in the Senate. Before that, she served as California’s state Attorney General. If you’re praising someone with Kamala Devi Harris’s resume as delivering a “solid first effort” at handling a short, softball interview with Dana Bash, well, you’re really saying something else.

Calling it “solid” implies there’s significant room for improvement, which is not exactly a quality you want in a President. Framing her interview as a “first effort” erased Kamala’s professional achievements and expertise, and would be unthinkably disrespectful if applied to a man.

We should also note Kamala’s insistence on having Tim Walz attend the 18-minute interview. She needed a man? (I assume that’s how Tim identifies, but you never know these days.)

This dumbing-down is so like Democrats. The op-ed’s condescending tone and infantilizing low expectations are what Democrats always wheel out for women and black people. They can’t help themselves. It’s not just me saying that. It’s science. From the Washington Post, 2018:

 
During the interview, Kamala gamely defended her flip-flopping, insisting that, even if her policy positions have reversed, her underlying values have not changed, which is also exactly what billionaire Mark Cuban said, so it’s just a nonsense line they fed her with a silver spoon. What does that even mean?

Not to strain the point, but what’s the big dichotomy supposed to be? Something between Kamala’s ‘underlying values’ and what? Her gut versus her intellectual mind? I don’t get it. She didn’t say her position changed through learning any new facts.

Of course, everybody knows Kamala’s “values” blather wasn’t meant to be meaningful, it was just more politically expedient babble. So today I’m officially suggesting another possible nickname for President Trump to consider: Kamala Chameleon.

It might not have been such a good idea to bring Walz. The Times’ token ‘conservative’ commenter Bret Stephens found Walz’s part of the interview to be even worse than Kamala’s, since the vice-presidential candidate “was transparently evasive in answering Dana Bash’s questions about his misstatement about his military service, false claims about a D.U.I. arrest and misleading statements about his family’s fertility treatments.”

Can a horrible candidate selected at the last minute be successfully ‘re-introduced to the American people’ through heavy propaganda and media lifting? We shall see.

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