Vice President Kamala Harris took the day off from campaigning on Tuesday to rehearse for her pre-taped interview with NBC News. Judging by her stilted performance during the exchange with correspondent Hallie Jackson, she could have used an extra day or two to prepare. But it probably wouldn't have made a difference. Harris seems content to finish out the final weeks of the campaign with vague talking points and baffling word salads as opposed to giving voters a coherent explanation of what she actually believes.
"I'm asking you to define yourself," Jackson interjected during one of Harris's several attempts to answer a question about her position on transgender medical care. Harris declined the invitation—not just on that one occasion but throughout the interview. "That is a decision that doctors will make in terms of what is medically necessary," the vice president said before quickly changing the subject to Donald Trump. Nearly a minute later, Jackson interjected again: "I don't know if I heard a clear answer from you." What happened to the "full-throated" support for transgender rights Harris had demonstrated until just prior to accepting the Democratic nomination for president? As with every other issue on which Harris has radically altered her position, she insisted nothing had changed.
Harris still couldn't provide a compelling or specific answer to the question of what she would do differently as president compared to Joe Biden. "Here's how I look at it. First of all, let me be very clear, mine will not be a continuation of the Biden administration," she explained, sort of. "I bring my own experiences, my own ideas to it, and it has informed a number of my areas of focus." Harris didn't even try to respond to Jackson's question about why polls show most Americans have a negative view of her administration's policies. Instead, she promised to prioritize "doing what we must do to bring down the cost of living," which doesn't mean anything. On immigration, Harris said her plan would include "strengthening what we must do to ensure that we have an orderly and humane immigration system and that we fix what has been broken for a long time," which doesn't mean anything, either.
Jackson pushed Harris to agree with her that American voters are sexist and that's the main reason why the election is so close. "I'm clearly a woman, I don't need to point that out to anyone," she dodged, quickly pivoting to her focus on "investing in the new industries on which America should lead and be the global leader." Jackson kept pushing and was given a word salad in return. "The experience that I am having is one in which it is clear that regardless of someone's gender, [Americans] want to know that their president has a plan to lower costs, that their president has a plan to secure America in the context of our position around the world," she said.
Harris received the vice presidential nomination after Biden pledged to only consider female candidates, as well as to only consider black women judges for the Supreme Court. Nevertheless, she argued that Americans wanted a president who would "earn the vote based on substance and what they will do to address challenges, and to inspire people to know that their aspirations and their ambitions can and will be achieved through the opportunity to do that." What does it mean? Your guess is as good as ours.
The embattled nominee refused to discuss any concessions she might make as president in the (likely) scenario that Republicans win control of Congress. The issue of abortion "cannot be negotiable," she said. But she probably would have to negotiate, Jackson argued. Harris refused to "go down that rabbit hole." She declined to rule out pardoning Trump as president in an effort to heal the country and move on and continued to portray herself as challenging an incumbent president, which she is not. "The choice before the American people right now is the choice to choose to turn the page," the sitting vice president said. "Let me tell you what's going to help us move on. I get elected president of the United States."
Harris was asked (for the second time in a week) to explain when she realized Biden's fading cognitive abilities made him unfit to serve another four years in office. After all, Jackson said, the president's severe decrepitude was the reason she was running for president now. (Her first attempt in the 2020 Democratic primary ended in disaster.) Harris failed to improve on the awkward response she gave Bret Baier of Fox News. "It was a bad debate, people have bad debates," she said. Harris went on to suggest that Biden might have had other reasons for dropping out unrelated to his abysmal debate performance in June. "Well you'd have to ask him if that's the only reason why," Harris said, somewhat ominously. "I am running for president of the United States. Joe Biden is not."
There was just enough time left for Harris to dish out an inscrutable word salad in praise of the man who is technically still the president even if no one really believes it—not even the Biden administration: "Joe Biden has done the work that has been about being a leader on what we have done to fix so much of what has been broken."