BEN DOMENECH: Welcome to Word Salad City — the vibes are running on fumes.
Welcome to Thunderdome, or as David Axelrod calls it, Word Salad City. Kamala Harris’s closing argument played out in a CNN town hall last night, and it wasn’t much of an argument at all. On question after question, Harris reverted to talking points that often had little or nothing to do with the query posed to her. On the border? No answer on why the administration took so long to act. On taxpayer funded benefits for illegal migrants? I was a prosecutor. On a border wall? It’s a dumb idea that I now say is a good idea.* On taxes? It’s a very complicated situation. On food inflation? Greedy price gouging grocers. On her weaknesses? They’re actually strengths. On any mistakes she’s made? She’s very well versed on issues. On the one single legislative priority she’ll have as president? Here’s a list to rival the Cheesecake Factory. On the filibuster? Apparently it’s in the House now, and we need to get rid of it to have Roe.
Other than that, everything went off swimmingly.
So here’s what we’ve got: a candidate who really does seem to be incapable of finding her way into bettering her closing message outside of abortion abortion abortion and Trump being Orange Hitler.
This is really all they can come up with? It’s a decidedly joyless way to finish this race, and it has seeped into the minds of Democrats, frustrating their voters as they wish she’d come up with something, anything, to fire back at a Trump-Vance ticket that has settled into a combination of McDonald’s-style showmanship and savage media bashing that is comfortably in their wheelhouse. The late breaking anti-Trump stories aren’t making a dent, and the late night hosts can only do so much covering for her. As Mark Halperin has been saying recently: It’s no longer even a contest between which candidate is having more fun on the trail. And it’s not hard to see why:
* Ace of Spades notes that “The Biden-Harris Administration was so determined that the wall should never be built that they sold off extremely expensive steel purchased by Trump for the wall for pennies to make sure that it could never be used to build a wall:”
The Biden administration is quietly auctioning off millions of dollars’ worth of unused parts from former President Trump’s border wall for peanuts — in an apparent end-run around pending legislation in Congress.
Since April, GovPlanet, an online auction house specializing in military surplus, has sold 81 lots of steel “square structural tubes” — intended for use as vertical bollards in the border barrier’s 30-foot-tall panels — hauling in about $2 million.
On Tuesday, GovPlanet netted $154,200 for 729 of the 28-foot-tall hollow beams, sold in five separate lots for an average $212 apiece.
Thirteen more lots are set to be auctioned on Aug. 23 and Aug. 30.
But just last month, as part of its annual defense appropriations package, the Democrat-led Senate passed a Republican-sponsored bill aimed at forcing Biden to stem the worsening migrant crisis at the US-Mexico border by extending the wall.
Up to $300 million worth of taxpayer-funded wall components have been left to rust since Biden came to office, Republicans have said.
* * * * * * * * *
And while the lot listings scrupulously avoid identifying the tubes’ original purpose, viewers of the company’s Instagram page weren’t fooled.
“Good for building a wall,” a user called honest_jake wrote Aug. 3 under a GovPlanet Instagram post touting the sale of “industrial steel tubing” — an entry that was deleted from the social media site Friday.
“Why don’t you put that up instead of selling it,” added Brian Prewitt. “This is why tax payers are just about done paying taxes.”
More from Jeffrey Blehar: Harris Finally Crashes and Burns on CNN.
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.
When you’re a Democrat who’s losing your mouthpieces at house organ CNN in late October, you’ve got problems. (The cockiness, eschew it, etc.) Or as America’s Newspaper of Record notes: Frustrated Democrats To Consider Letting Voters Pick The Presidential Candidate Next Time.