I’m not sure there was anyone who ever spoke from the podium in the press briefing room at the White House during the Trump administration who didn’t have someone complain about them violating the Hatch Act – the prohibition on federal employees engaging in political activity while on the job or using federal resources to do so. Even the press complained about administration officials “getting political” while answering questions back when we had an administration that would answer questions. Now we have an entire White House being mobilized for the electoral benefit of the sitting Vice President, and no one cares. And the saddest and funniest part of it all is, with everything laid out to her advantage, Kamala Harris is already terrible at pretending to do the job.
I bet you’ve never seen a video of a Vice President getting on and off a plane, have you? Probably not, but if you have, I bet it’s only been once or twice in your whole life – you’ve seen lots of footage of a President “deplaning,” as they say, but local news crews aren’t really dispatched to watch a Vice President walk down some stairs, even for b-roll purposes. Kamala Harris is the exception.
Since the Democratic Party establishment shoved Grandpa Joe Biden down the proverbial flight of stairs, Kamala Harris has played the President in public more frequently. With that came footage of her walking up and down the stairs for Air Force Two.
Something struck me as odd the other day while watching her pretending to be on a phone call as she ran away from the press: She’s saluting and being saluted by the military members at the bottom of the stairs. She’s not President. Whoever the President is at any given moment is the Commander-in-Chief of the US military, but a vice president has no military rank whatsoever; they’re not in the chain of command.
I don’t know if former VPs were routinely saluted or not, as there isn’t a trove of footage of them leaving planes, but I couldn’t help but wonder if the military has been ordered to salute Harris as part of the campaign to make her come off as presidential?
I only had that thought because Kamala Harris has often played President in public lately. She sat at the table in place of President Biden at FEMA after Hurricane Helene, which, were it not political, would be humiliating for an egomaniac like Biden. After fundraising and before campaigning in Wisconsin, she even went to North Carolina for a photo-op and to announce a $750 “grant” for people who have no stores left standing to spend it.
Playing President, hoping that the public gets used to the idea, is a good strategy, but only for someone up to the job. Kamala Harris is not up to the job. Very few people in politics are as uniquely horrible off-script as she is.
This week, her teleprompter malfunctioned, and she couldn’t remember enough of her stump speech, one she’s likely delivered a dozen times, to say anything other than repeating the number of days until the election.
In another interview with local media in the Pittsburgh area, she was asked a basic question about US Steel being sold to Nippon Steel, a Japanese company, and her answer was singularly awful. It’s THE issue in the area, as the livelihoods of thousands of families hang in the balance. Even though she’s weighed in on it in the past, her answer sounded like a kid writing everything they can remember on a topic hoping to get partial credit on an essay test they didn’t study for.
Asked about how she’d keep the jobs in Pittsburgh, something the company says is unlikely to happen without the influx of cash from the sale, Kamala said, “I feel very strongly that U.S. Steel needs to remain a U.S. company and that the people working there need to be American workers. I think that is also why I'm proud, and I do have the support of the Steelworkers Union. Because, I just think when you think about it in term of a historic American industry, not to mention what it means to the workforce and the economy of Pittsburgh, of Pennsylvania, but also from a national security perspective, it is important that we have US manufacturing of US steel. And, listen, I’ve been Vice President now for four years, I’ve traveled around the world, and I start my day every day being briefed on hotspots worldwide and threats to our national security. When I think about the importance of supporting US workers and US steel, it is through the lens of not only what we should do to protect that workforce, but what we should do to protect the US and American interests.”
I hope you were hungry for a salad because Kamala just tossed you a big one made out of words.
The reporter wasn’t hungry, apparently, and asked more specifically how she could guarantee protecting the jobs without the infusion of cash Nippon was offering. Her response to that was even more empty calories than the first go-round. “It is my priority to keep the jobs in Pittsburgh, understanding again that the folks doing that work are doing hard work, good work,” she said. “It is part of not only a tradition of American industry to do that work but also part of what we need to invest in the future.”
What does that even mean? How could she be so unprepared for what is an obvious question? The possible closing or collapse of US Steel is THE ISSUE in the Pittsburgh area, and the “acting” President can’t give a coherent answer to a softball question in a softball interview. The choice is pretty simple: allow the sale to a company from an ally country – where, by the way, the physical production facilities will remain where they are (Japan isn’t going to dismantle them and move them to the other side of the planet) and functioning, or risk them closing and decaying because there are no other viable suitors. You go to the prom with the only person who asked you, or you don’t.
Maybe there’s something in the water Democrats drink in Pennsylvania that causes them to become feckless blobs unable to offer anything other than non-answer platitudes on essential issues, as hopefully-soon-to-lose Senator Bob Casey did when he fired off a letter to a Pennsylvania glass-making company that just announced 300 job cuts. Many of those jobs just so happened to be represented by the United Steel Workers Union, the same union that opposes the Nippon sale (which is why Kamala opposes it) and does not seem to care about the 3,000 jobs lost if that sale is blocked. It is always a little shocking just how oblivious politicians and unions are when their anti-capitalist policies end up hurting businesses and, ultimately, the very people they claim to care about most.
To add to the absolute absurdity of the entire Democratic presidential campaign, while running from serious interviews where someone might ask her an important question, and as millions upon millions of Americans are suffering without water, electricity, and homes, Acting President Harris carved out time to sit down with the “Call Her Daddy” podcast. This sexually explicit show is basically what a drunken 19-year-old boy would come up with if they’d been tasked with putting together what they hoped hot twenty-something women talked about and like when they weren’t around, only dumber.
Kamala Harris is not ready for prime time. Even when everything is laid out for her and choreographed more meticulously than the Lee Harvey Oswald prison transfer (apologies to Dennis Miller for butchering his joke), she can’t even convincingly play Pretend President. God help us if she actually gets the job.