Harris Finally Crashes and Burns on CNN

T he engines have flared out right at the end of the flight. The tank is out of gas. The weather is choppy, the navigation system completely unreliable, and the best guess is that you’re still short of the runway. (Oh, and the captain had a stroke while in the cockpit a few hours ago, leaving only a flight attendant as the pilot. She refuses to read the instruction manual or listen to the passengers.) Yes, it’s easy enough to spin up lovingly bespoke metaphors for how the Harris campaign is handling the late stages of the 2024 race — a race they very much could still win, I must always emphasize — but I’ll conclude this one by saying that if last night’s Kamala Harris CNN town hall (with Anderson Cooper hosting in the Philadelphia suburbs) is any indication, the plane may already be disintegrating in midair, before it even hits the ground.

You may have noticed that I’ve had a decidedly muted reaction to Harris’s other recent “serious” media interviews, whether Bret Baier at Fox News or Bill Whitaker on 60 Minutes, in the sense that while Harris was predictably awful in both sit-downs (almost relentlessly so), she was boring and unrevelatory in her awfulness. In other words, we learned nothing new about the depths to which she is capable of sinking performatively that we didn’t already know. They were water-treading exercises for the most part.

Last night’s CNN town hall, on the other hand, was memorably bad. This is the moment her campaign dreaded, the moment when the fundamental emptiness and inadequacy of their candidate was revealed for all the world to see without helpful edits or someone to bail her out. There Harris stood exposed — with an unpersuaded audience and a moderator in Cooper who handled his task without showing any particular solicitude for her electoral fortunes — and she withered in the spotlight. (As Dylan might have said, “Even the vice president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.”) There are moments from this event — many moments, oh so terribly many of them — that will haunt Harris in retirement forever should she lose, the sorts of ghastly stammering failures destined to go into YouTube clip reels ten years later explaining “How We Got Here.” (And if she wins? All is not forgiven, merely set aside — until the reality of her as president for four years takes its toll on Democratic fortunes, which will be quickly.)

As for myself, I found Harris’s answer to Anderson Cooper’s pointed question about the border fence to be perhaps the lowest moment of her entire public career to date, and I mean that in the specific sense that nobody who watches it — not even her fiercest partisans — will be able to come away from it with anything save a reflex-level revulsion. (For her friends, the reaction will be shame and desire to change the subject. For her enemies, it will be glee. For the vast majority of normal voters, it will simply be: “DO NOT WANT.”)

Cooper asks Harris: “Under Donald Trump you criticized the wall, over 50 times, you called it ‘stupid,’ ‘useless,’ and ‘a medieval vanity project.’ Is a border wall stupid?” And what happens next is enough to make even someone as cynical about incompetence as me perk up their ears and lean forward in horror: She adopts a smug rictus grin and begins to half-cackle her way through a series of completely unrelated digs about how Trump didn’t succeed in building it. “Let’s talk about Donald Trump and that border wall. [chuckles] So remember Donald Trump said Mexico would pay for it? C’mon, they didn’t! How much of that wall did he build? I think the last number I saw was about 2 percent, and then when it came time for him to do a photo-op, you know where he did it? In the part of the wall that President Obama built. So c’mon!”

Cooper then gently reminds her that she is now claiming to support a bill that would appropriate $650 million to build that wall, and then she remembers to rotely say she will support “a bipartisan bill” but also “fix our broken immigration system.” She didn’t even answer the question (“Is the wall stupid?”), but in another way she answered it with crystal clarity: Of course she thinks it’s stupid. Why else would she default to making jokes about it? (The photo-op dig was also devastatingly revealing about how Harris truly thinks about and conceives of politics: It’s all about optics and flash to her, the most authentically Californian part of her personality.) Please, watch it all, feel the pain that every person in that audience and every live viewer on CNN must have felt in real time. With her sputtering, stammering smirk attempting to cover for her inability to offer a credible answer to something she knew she’d been nailed on, those two minutes could well end up serving as the epitaph for her entire campaign.

What was most remarkable about the disaster is how even CNN’s own analysts panned Harris’s performance as well, some with a palpable sense of disgust. Almost all of them were traditional media types (assume bias accordingly here), and their reaction ranged from disappointed and bewildered to visibly unsettled. Dana Bash spoke about “what I’m hearing from people I’ve been talking to” — this is of course a polite euphemism for “all of my Democratic media friends, including myself and every one of you in this room” — and said, “If her goal was to close the deal? [pregnant pause] They’re not sure she did that.”

But in all honesty I don’t particularly care about what Dana Bash thinks, save as a media barometer. Former Obama grand strategist David Axelrod, on the other hand, is a legitimately intelligent observer of politics and was perhaps the most devastating of all in his analysis, precisely because Axelrod still has the bones of an old-school Chicago journalist and therefore cannot bring himself to openly insult people’s intelligence despite his obviously close associations with Obama and Democratic politics. (“It was a mixed night,” he euphemistically summarized.) His review is worth both reading and watching:

When she doesn’t want to answer a question, her habit is to kind of go to word-salad city, and she did that on a couple of answers; one was on Israel, Anderson asked a direct question, “Would you be stronger on Israel than Trump?” And there was a seven-minute answer, but none of it related to the question he was asking. And so, you know, on certain questions like that, on immigration, I thought she missed an opportunity, because she would acknowledge no concerns about any of the administration’s policies. And that’s a mistake. Sometimes you have to concede things, and she didn’t concede much. But I’ll tell you something, John King mentioned Bill Clinton; no one’s going to be Bill Clinton, but you do want to relate to the people in front of you, she didn’t do a lot of that. She didn’t ask them questions, she didn’t address them particularly, she was giving set pieces too much.

Partisanship inevitably warps perceptions, so I consider it a valuable data point that Axelrod — whose politics couldn’t differ more from my own — saw the exact same thing that I saw. (He was far more polite and circumspect about it, naturally.) In a world where you should always strive to calibrate your own biases against reality, that’s a solid indication that Harris truly failed last night. Her friends could only bring themselves, out of charity, to characterize it as a missed opportunity. But it is October 24. The hour is far too late. Given how little time she has left to change the story of her campaign, this was Kamala Harris’s first authentic campaign disaster.