"Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" That's a simple question, and its simplicity clarified a presidential campaign 44 years ago. It has become a standard in elections involving incumbent administrations, and anyone running for another four years in office has had to prepare an answer in the affirmative.

Until now, that is. Kamala Harris has fumbled that question multiple times, including at the very start of her first (and apparently only) debate with Donald Trump. Dana Bash tried to ask it twice in Harris' only interview with a national media outlet, and got nothing but word salads both times. Harris appeared too inept to provide a coherent answer, likely because the only coherent honest answer to that question would be Hell no.

We thought the word salads might come from Harris' inability to extemporaneously craft an answer. If so, that illness is contagious, as Team Kamala spokesman Ian Sams also has a bad case of Rhetorical Saladitis. For nearly six minutes, CNN's Pamela Brown tries to get Sams to answer the question, and Sams simply refuses to address it (via Legal Insurrection):

BROWN: You say you think she's going to close that gap. But the bottom line here, when you look at a metric like grocery prices, they're up still 20 percent compared to four years ago. And Harris was asked recently on the debate stage whether she thinks Americans are better off now than four years ago, and she didn't directly answer that question. So I will ask you, does she think Americans are better off now or not?

SAMS: Well, I think that she talked pretty openly about the mess that we inherited when President Trump left office and the economy and the -- and the crash that happened because of his total mismanagement of COVID and the way that COVID itself created global inflation numbers that were out of control. And so she thinks that the American people have made progress, but that we have to go even further. That's why she has a plan specifically to take on corporate price gouging when they jack up prices and emergencies like that, especially on things like food and at the grocery store. And at the same time, you have Nobel Prize-winning economists who have come out and said that Donald Trump's economic plan would actually blow up inflation and make it worse.

Do you see an answer to Brown's question? Neither did Brown, who gamely presses for Sams to answer the question she asked:

BROWN: But let me just follow up then on that, because you said her plan to bring down grocery costs. As you know, Republicans would argue, well, they have gone up under the Biden/Harris administration. I will ask the question again. Are Americans -- does she think Americans are better off now than four years ago?

SAMS: Well, I think, when people are running for president, they want to see what are you going to do for me? And it's not a retrospective question. It's actually a forward-looking question. And that's what she's doing on the campaign trail every day, is saying, I understand that we have to go further for people. There are still too many people out there who are hurting. Yes, inflation has eased a little bit and prices are starting to come down, but, man, we have got to go even further. And when you look at the choice on the ballot in November, it's either me or it's Donald Trump. And my plan is actually to take on these things and to work for you and to try to help you bring those costs down, whereas Donald Trump is pushing the same old trickle-down agenda that's going to help those people at the very top and billionaires, while jacking up prices on everybody else, including a nearly $4,000- a-year increase on taxes for the middle class. And so that's not going to help bring people's costs down. And so when you look at the future, not the past, but the future, and what these two candidates as president will do if they get elected, she's focused on making sure that people's lives continue to get better and don't go backwards, like they would with Donald Trump.

Sams uses a lot of words to say absolutely nothing at all about Brown's question. Brown decides to take a different tack, attempting to get Sams to discuss the past four years under the Biden-Harris economic policies.

Instead, Sams changes the subject to Harris' debate challenge:

BROWN: Let me just follow up with you, because I hear what you're saying, wanting to focus on the future and not the past. And when you look at this latest poll -- and, again, I know people have their views of the polls, but this is a credible "New York Times"/Siena College poll -- they actually asked voters about policies from both Trump and Harris that they think could impact them in the future. And 45 percent of voters say Trump's policies would actually help people like them, versus just 37 percent for Harris. That's looking at the future, not just the past here. What do you say to that, Ian?

SAMS: Well, again, there's been some Quinnipiac polls just over the last few days that suggest a different picture of the country, of people thinking that her economic or immigration or reproductive freedom plans would help them more. The polls are going to kind of shift around a little bit. I think what we are seeing consistently in this election is that, when voters start to hear the choice between the two candidates, whether that's on the debate stage -- and Vice President Harris is very excited to accept CNN's invitation to debate on October 23.

Sams' filibuster takes up six minutes and never comes close to answering Brown's basic question: Does Harris think Americans are financially better off now than they were four years ago? The filibuster itself answers the question by default: Hell no. As Mary Chastain points out at Legal Insurrection, not only don't they have an answer, but they can't even articulate a specific economic agenda when pressed for one -- less than 50 days before the presidential election.

If Harris and Sams had a case for yes, they would be making it instead of throwing word salads out as rapidly as planes fire countermeasures when under attack. They've got nothing, and so far Brown seems to be the only mainstream media reporter willing to expose it.