I didn’t watch the Harris Town Hall on CNN. My friends and I were busy laughing to old George Carlin and Lenny Bruce records that likely proved much more enlightening. We heard George’s monologue about farting in school on Class Clown, which brought to mind Donald Trump’s farting in the courtroom.
One reason these old comedians are funny is that their remarks are so specific and pointed. Kamala, in contrast, often speaks in generalities, and I think generalities bore people or even turn them off. She reinforces General Kelly’s charges of fascism. Well, what does fascism really mean to most voters, especially young ones? She is vague on border issues and the environment.
As reported in the NY Times, on CNN she tended to give long, circular, winding answers to pointed questions.
Would she expand the Supreme Court? Would people who make $500,000 see their taxes increase? Would Americans pay for benefits for migrants crossing the border? How would she codify Roe v. Wade into federal law? And what about Gaza?
Her answers boiled down to: Donald Trump would be worse.
Giving direct and specific answers seems to threaten her. Shadi Hamid of the WaPo says: “I think she’s so afraid of alienating people with the wrong answers, but this can lead to the worst of both worlds, where she ends up offering answers that satisfy no one.” She punts once again on Gaza and the Palestinian disaster. She is just too cautious.
And Harris is not talking to the kitchen-table issues of working people, the constituency that used to provide the very basis of Democratic support. Have the Dems in fact written off the working class, giving them over to Trump? They would vigorously deny this, of course. But as commentator Ruy Teixera said, “Harris’s advantage among college-educated voters is more than forty points higher than it is with working-class voters. Her campaign, he felt, was targeting the ’NPR vote.’” Why is she doing this when she will get the NPR vote anyway?
And those on the Left “worry that Ms. Harris—like Hillary Clinton in 2016—is falling into a trap of banking on liberal voters without offering significant policy change.” It seems that a majority of cultural elites now are happy to support free trade and business.
When I worked for the Laborers’ Union in the ‘90s, the president asked my opinion about whether the union should endorse the proposed NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) that President Clinton wanted. We discussed strong pros and cons, and the union finally did endorse the bill. Many, and not just Republicans, now argue rightly that NAFTA was instrumental in losing thousands of jobs to Mexico.
Harris offers plenty of talk about the middle class but very little on the working poor, the people who are really struggling now. In 2021 [latest data] the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 6.4 million people in the U.S. were “working poor,” those “whose incomes still fell below the official poverty level.” We now know how many of these folks will vote.