Everything about Kamala Harris is fake - her joy, her pseudo-intellectual rhetoric, her policy positions as espoused by unnamed staffers in her campaign. Wednesday in New Hampshire, another glaring example of the phoniness of Harris-Walz was on full display in North Hampton.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, holding a town hall on Fox News with Sean Hannity. This date was offered by the former President as a potential third debate with Kamala Harris - one on ABC, one potentially on either NBC or CBS, and this one on Fox News. Kamala Harris refused to participate, because she does not possess even a modicum of political ability to handle a debate on a network that will press her on the dozens of policy U-turns she has taken in the last six weeks. Trump showed up and turned the event into a town hall. Trump currently leads in the interview count, 37-1 over Harris, and the Harris camp, after the disaster in Atlanta with Dana Bash, is not in a hurry to close that gap. That leaves regime media and surrogates to do all of the leg work getting her message out, in addition to rallies and speeches by Harris and Walz.
With the one debate scheduled on ABC News coming up next week, Harris did one final rally in the Granite State before going into isolation in Pittsburgh for five days to prep. The ABC debate was technically given the final go-ahead just a day ago after the Harris team wrote a letter to ABC News accepting the terms as agreed to by Joe Biden and Donald Trump months ago. But the kicker, according to CNN's M.J. Lee, is that Harris believes the existing rules, muting your microphone when the other candidate is on the clock speaking, puts her at an unfair disadvantage. Really.
In their letter to ABC News, Harris campaign wrote in part:
— MJ Lee (@mj_lee) September 4, 2024
"Vice President Harris, a former prosecutor, will be fundamentally disadvantaged by this format, which will serve to shield Donald Trump from direct exchanges with the Vice President."
The disadvantage to this former prosecutor is that she will not be able to have her viral moment of telling Trump, "I'm speaking." The fact that she will have time to answer questions without interruption apparently puts her at a disadvantage. Just ruminate for a moment what that she's signaling about her own abilities as a candidate. She has no confidence in her own skills to think in real time, loathes the prospect of defending her dozens of flip-flops, and knows she cannot speak in coherent sentences without a teleprompter nearby.
For his part, Trump at the Pennsylvania town hall said that even if ABC pulled another Donna Brazille stunt and gave her the questions in advance, it still wouldn't help.
So let's go up to New Hampshire and check in on Kamala's big rally in North Hampton. As far as content, even with a teleprompter, it was mostly nonsense.
The 'broad shoulders' Harris is referring to in this freshly-tossed word salad could mean Joe Biden, who spent most of the previous 40 days on beaches in Southern California and Delaware after getting kicked to the curb by Harris' political party elites. Broad shoulders, to Kamala Harris, is a colloquialism for the speed bump over which her bus goes. And speaking of buses...
Donald Trump had hundreds of people at the town hall in Harrisburg. There wasn't a bus in sight. The room was filled with people that stood in line and wanted to be there. Contrast that with Harris' rally in New Hampshire. She did have hundreds of people there to see her speak cringeworthy gems like this.
You people are part of this community's glue, she says. Technically, horses are part of the glue, but I digress. Let's examine for a moment whether this flowery claim is true. This is Beth Germano, reporting from the parking lot at the venue in North Hampton, for WBZ, the Boston CBS affiliate.
Buses. A dozen of them. Shuttling campaign volunteers, Democratic Party staff, and union members to serve as rally-goers from out of state in order to present a facade of joy, that's how the Harris campaign rolls. Nothing speaks to values New Hampshire locals care about more than 500 Bostonians bused in. And by the way, the buses did not go unnoticed by people in North Hampton.
What could these 12 buses possibly be doing leaving Kamala's event in New Hampshire? pic.twitter.com/ua4kuUBrkt
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) September 4, 2024
Steven Cheung, who follows Harris around on behalf of the Trump campaign to report on what really happens at these rallies, said that after the gig, the spontaneous crowd of supporters would be delayed leaving by half an hour...because the bus company was late re-deploying the buses to the parking lot for the return leg home to Boston.
SCOOP: the @KamalaHarris campaign has told people at the rally they can’t leave because the busses they used to bus people in from out of state are not operational for another 30 minutes.
— Steven Cheung (@TheStevenCheung) September 4, 2024
The announcement just came over the speakers at the rally and the crowd, already waiting…
Once the buses did arrive, the line formed.
Crowds are massive to see @KamalaHarris in Portsmouth this morning #NHPolitics the enthusiasm is contagious @NHDems @KamalaforNH pic.twitter.com/Mf4p8ePf5r
— Sebastian Fuentes (@SebFuentesNH) September 4, 2024
Yes, just look at these enthusiastic local New Hampshire Kamala Harris supporters...waiting in a single-file line to board charter buses back to Massachusetts. The worst part? The buses, all dozen of them, are not electric buses. She's willfully contributing to New England's climate change in order to gaslight you about how much joy there is for her candidacy.
Our very dear friend, Salena Zito, has been Tweeting/X'ing and writing in columns for weeks her personal experience following around the Harris campaign at events in her home state of Pennsylvania. This busing thing is nothing new from the Harris campaign. In fact, it's a feature at every event, large or small. Remember a few Sundays ago in Pittsburgh at the Primanti Brothers restaurant? The normal diners were given the boot, and vans of outside Democratic Committee and union members were brought in to serve in the role of patrons so that the traveling press corps would see a packed restaurant that all happened to love Kamala Harris.
At Sheetz, the gas station/convenience store in Coralpolis, the 'spontaneous' Doritos shopping spree that was actually filmed twice to best capture that spontaneity, featured bused-in committee personnel to give the appearance that everyone gassing up was a Kamala fan. It's all Astroturfed nonsense. And it's even worse for Tim Walz.
The Democratic vice-presidential nominee is scheduled to do a rally of his own in Erie, and the campaign is panicked. There's just not enough people in Erie that support Harris to pack the amphitheatre, and so the campaign is hailing all frequencies to Democratic committee staff and unions in Pittsburgh to get on the buses, because they can't have a venue with a bunch of empty seats.
Walz event in will be at the Highmark amphitheater at the Bayfront tomorrow per invites sent to VIP’s in Pittsburgh. pic.twitter.com/hHYBhmX1um
— ZitoSalena (@ZitoSalena) September 5, 2024
Walz is so bad, Democrats couldn't even get a musical artist to give a free concert as a crowd draw.
As the Kamala Harris polling recession continues to unfurl in the swing states, Josh Kraushaar looks at recent analysis by Nate Silver, and makes the following observation.
Hearing lots of rumbling today that Harris camp regretting not picking Shapiro. https://t.co/b45oLCt60l
— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) September 5, 2024
So now we get to the WAS part of the column - Wild-Ass Speculation. Here's a thought experiment with which to leave you this week. Considering the polling trends showing Kamala Harris stalling out, combined with her innate inability to speak coherently and consistently on issues, what happens if the Vice President, as expected, lays an egg in the debate next week? What's next if the slippage in polling turns into a freefall after more Americans see she's just not ready for prime time? Here's a nightmare to ponder.
Joe Biden has already been kicked to the curb, and is for all intents and purposes taking the rest of his presidency off. If the Kamala honeymoon is over and the election continues to slip away from the Democratic Party, why not go for the second honeymoon? Joe already demonstrated he caves to internal pressure from his own party. What if Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi et al. come back to Joe and inform him it's time to take early retirement, and the moving vans will be here tomorrow?
Biden, in the political equivalent of a hostage video, would be forced to give his retirement speech and say something like, "upon further review, I think it's better for the republic if the baton pass happens right now. Here's President Kamala," followed by Harris taking the oath of office with her left hand on a copy of "This Book Is Gay." Now the dynamics have changed again just as early voting commences in North Carolina and several other swing states.
'She's got to be given a chance to show she can be president,' you can hear the media and commentariat say. 'It wouldn't be fair to vote against the first woman president in history after just a couple weeks in office,' would be another refrain. In fact, you would be branded a sexist if you didn't vote to give the woman a chance.
Kamala's first honeymoon period, at a minimum, neutralized the electoral deficit Joe Biden was running against Donald Trump. But she's like the proverbial dog that was chasing the car. She caught it, but doesn't know what to do next, and now she's getting a little tired running behind it with the bumper in her teeth. Barring yet another game-changer in the '24 cycle, I just do not believe that Kamala will pull off the win in November. As my good friend and former Missouri Senator Jim Talent said on my Duane's World podcast Tuesday, you can't beat something with nothing. And you may not like Donald Trump, but you have to admit that Donald Trump is something. And the Kamala Harris campaign has been a textbook example of what running on nothing looks like.
I don't believe that Joe Biden will be too hasty to hang it up before January 20th, 2025. This scenario is a product of the wanna-be novelist side of me kicking into gear. The odds are overwhelmingly in the favor of Biden finishing his term as scheduled. But don't kid yourself into thinking that Democratic Party and Harris campaign managers haven't considered this scenario as the 'in case of polling emergency' option.
I'd rather see Kamala go back to California, defeated, and try to run an electric school bus manufacturer, unburdened by the past four years of anti-fossil fuel energy policies and regulations, in a climate where gas and diesel go back down to pre-2021 levels. Maybe then, Kamala will finally learn the lesson of supply and demand when her company goes bankrupt.
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