On Wednesday, Kamala Harris participated in a “town hall” meeting on CNN, hosted by Anderson Cooper.
CNN – at least until recently when, possibly stung by criticism of its one-sidedness has been more evenhanded – has been a friendly venue for the Democrat candidate.
But, to Kamala Harris’ disadvantage and, no doubt, chagrin, Anderson Cooper ran the town hall like a professional journalist. He asked questions about real issues, and followed up when Harris did not actually answer them (which was pretty much every time).
In a word, this was a disaster.
When Fox News’ Brett Baier interviewed Harris one-on-one and asked the same kinds of questions – getting the same kinds of non-answers – and firmly following up, he was ravaged by much of the media for being unfairly tough on her. As if asking serious questions and not accepting platitudinal non-answers was some kind of personal affront.
But that farcical criticism is a lot harder to apply to Anderson Cooper, a CNN mainstay who no serious person can claim to have an anti-Democrat bias.
The best article I have seen about this disaster was written by Mark Tapson of frontpagemag.com. Tapson is very obviously a hardline anti-Kamala Harris person. But, his clear bias notwithstanding, he makes a number of excellent points.
Here is how his article begins:
As we enter the final stretch of election season, every day seems to bring another Trump/Vance victory in spite of a hostile media, and another embarrassing loss by the Harris/Walz campaign. Recently, for example, Trump endeared himself to regular Americans by putting on an apron and working the McDonald’s drive-thru; conversely, McDonald’s dealt a fatal blow to Kamala’s claim she had worked for them as a teenager by releasing a statement declaring they could find no evidence of that. She is looking more and more like the most hapless, brainless, inauthentic, unqualified presidential nominee in modern history, if not ever. Even the state media like CNN can’t cover for her anymore, as evidenced by the tepid assessments of CNN commentators in the wake of Kamala’s recent CNN town hall hosted by Anderson Cooper.
To recap: when the Democrats realized that Joe Biden could no longer be propped up as their 2024 candidate, they found themselves painted into a corner. The Democrat kingmakers – Barack Obama, Susan Rice, and Valerie Jarrett – needed to step in and depose the decrepit Biden but didn’t want to fall back on Vice President Harris, whom they knew was devoid of accomplishments, likeability, brains, and presidential charisma, but how could they not go with her? Running the vice president as the nominee would ordinarily be the obvious move; leap-frogging over Kamala and selecting someone else would be a clear acknowledgement that she had never been anything but a diversity hire. And how could the party of identity politics not go with a “woman of color”? It would discredit their entire ideology.
So they rolled the dice and installed Kamala, knowing she was not ready for prime time but counting on a supportive media and a strategy of painting Trump as Hitler 2.0 to get her over the finish line. But in the ensuing months she has not only not risen to the occasion, she and her campaign are flailing to such an extent that all they have left is to fear-monger hysterically about Trump as A Threat to Democracy™.
Then came CNN’s Wednesday evening town hall in Philadelphia. David Urban nailed it when he declared afterward that she lost a one-person debate.
Ouch.
Tapson then goes on to cite several individual instances of Harris’s waffling, pre-scripted, platitude-filled non-answers and how Anderson tried, without much success, to get something – anything – of substance from her. But, trying to do so with the obviously underqualified/overmatched Harris, it was an exercise in futility.
And the worst part for Harris? This wasn’t happening in front of a Fox News Channel audience, it was happening in front of a presumably much more Harris-receptive CNN audience. And the moderator wasn’t a Fox guy that the Harris-friendly media could excoriate for daring to ask real questions and expect real answers, it was CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
I urge you to use the link (here it is again) and read Mark Tapson’s entire piece. It really does encapsulate what a disaster this town hall was…and what a disaster making Kamala Harris the Democrat presidential candidate was.
