GENTLEMEN, YOU CAN’T ASK THE CANDIDATE QUESTIONS, THIS IS A TOWN HALL! Kamala Harris town hall host Maria Shriver says crowd can’t ask questions because they’re ‘predetermined.’
A town hall event with Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday featured a shocking revelation after one voter simply wondered whether she could ask a question.
Former California First Lady Maria Shriver admitted while hosting the event with former Rep. Liz Cheney in Royal Oak, Michigan that she would only include ‘predetermined questions.’
‘Are we going to be able to ask a question?’ asked a woman in the audience.
‘You’re not, unfortunately we have some predetermined questions,’ Shriver replied. ‘And hopefully I’ll be able to ask some of the questions that might be in your head, I hope so.’
Typically, presidential campaigns allow voters at townhall meetings to ask unscripted questions, which lends a level of authenticity to the proceedings and highlights a presidential candidate’s personal touch.
Shriver said she had agreed to moderate the event as a ‘concerned citizen’ but also a ‘journalist.’‘I want this to be like a kitchen table, like just think that we’re sitting around at the kitchen table and we’re jamming about all kinds of stuff,’ she said.
Shriver is a member of the Kennedy family and was an NBC journalist* who was married to former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger before the couple divorced.
Cheney joked that it felt like a Kennedy family dinner table, noting the number of people in the room.
‘It’s raucous, it’s hot but it’s fun, that’s what it’s going to be like,’ Shriver laughed.
It’s a hot, raucous, but very predetermined bit of fun:
YIKES! Kamala caught staging a sham 'townhall' when audience member tries to ask a question
"You're not [allowed to ask questions.] We have some pre-determined questions." pic.twitter.com/4VXUEUMkth
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) October 21, 2024
* And still is, according to Shriver’s LinkedIn profile:
UPDATE: Kamala Harris ‘Town Hall’ With Liz Cheney Blows Up on the Launch Pad, and Just Gets Worse From There.
Nothing says “town hall” like pre-determined questions no doubt submitted by the campaign itself. The statement from the moderator that she might “ask some questions that might be in your head” is especially great. Sure, people showed up hoping to actually garner tangible information from Harris, but isn’t hoping that moderator might ask a question somewhat related to something you care about basically the same thing?
Keep in mind that we are still in the middle of a Democrat freak-out over Donald Trump visiting a McDonald’s, with left-wingers letting it be known the event was “staged.” Well, is a “town hall” in which no one can ask questions “staged?” Asking for a friend.
That’s not even the worst part, though. The worst part is trying to make Liz Cheney into a moral arbiter and campaign resource. I’ve seen presidential candidates do some really stupid things over the years, but this might take the cake.
As Varad Mehta notes, “Did the person who wrote this tweet have a reading comprehension problem? Because the first half of it contradicts the second half. You don’t convince anti-abortion voters to vote for a Democrat by telling them the GOP has gone too far on abortion. Did everyone go brain dead?”
And then there’s the enormous popularity of the Cheneys with Muslim-Americans: “No one despises the Cheney family more than Arab-Americans, many of whom see them as the cause of so much death and suffering in the Middle East. Harris needs their votes, and she’s instead pushing them further away just to get some backslaps from a press that is obsessed with lionizing anti-Trump Republicans.”