Stephanie Ruhle Plays Tee-Ball, Kamala Harris Still Swings and Misses

AP Photo/Paul Sancya

Every day Kamala Harris attempts to do media, it stuns me that Julia Louis-Dreyfus isn't suing the Vice President for intellectual property theft. At the very least, the Veep star should be legally allowed to claim royalties from the actual Veep. 

Harris' Hump Day frolic through Pittsburgh consisted of a speech to the Economic Club, followed by a 24-minute and change sit-down with MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle. How did Ruhle score such an exclusive? By interceding on Bill Maher's Real Time on HBO last Friday night when New York Times columnist Bret Stephens dared to note that there is no there, there with Kamala Harris on policy. 

Here's that exchange. 

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It was that sort of hard-hitting journalism out of Ruhle that attracted the attention of the Harris camp, and so the interview was hastily arranged. It was every bit the train wreck you'd imagine. And you don't have to take my word for it. Here's Stephanie Ruhle, on her own MSNBC channel, defending why it doesn't matter that she didn't answer one question directly and straightforward. 



Ruhle may have convinced herself, being a resident of the Manhattan-Beltway media bubble for a long time, that a plurality of the country believes not being Donald Trump is the biggest issue on which people will cast their vote, not silly, little, unimportant subjects like the economy, inflation, immigration, the growing war in the Middle East, gas and energy prices, the housing affordability crisis, crime, and education. And not being Donald Trump probably works in California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York. But my guess is the other issues matter a whole lot more to the rest of the country that's going to decide this election. 

We'll get to the "substance" of the Harris-Ruhle interview in a bit, but in case Ruhle's promo wasn't enough to grab you, here's another hit Ruhle did on MSNBC earlier in the day with Nicolle Wallace. 

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When you have to keep admitting that technically speaking, Harris didn't answer any question directly but it doesn't matter, guess what? It matters. More in a bit, but we've got to work methodically through the day to understand the magnitude of how bad it turned out to be for Kamala.

Earlier Wednesday morning, Joe Biden, being in New York for the United National General Assembly, dropped by the ABC studios to tape a session of The View. If there still are any remaining neurons firing in Joe Biden's brain, they seem unhappy with the fact that the Democratic Party kicked Biden to the curb, because every time the President tries to "help" Kamala, stuff like this comes out. 

Can you imagine the expletives coming out of the Harris campaign headquarters when he said this? They have no problem with praising Joe as long as it's in the context of him already put out to pasture. But when he hangs the albatross that is the Biden track record around her neck, it's not helping. Here's CNN's Harry Enten looking at the polling dynamics that show Biden is still very much a drag on Harris' electoral chances. 

A few hours later, Kamala Harris gave her vaunted Economic Club of Pittsburgh speech. It was a rehash of her first attempt two days before the start of the Democratic National Convention. Donald Trump's team, as they've done with a lot of Harris media appearances of late, effortlessly turned out a campaign ad. 



Now, we come to the main event - the interview with Stephanie Ruhle. If one were a Republican operative playing Jim Carey's role in Bruce Almighty, inserting fun stuff into the teleprompter in order to trip up Steve Carrell's Evan Baxter character, you couldn't do it much better than how it played out, um, holistically.



Pollster and focus group guru Frank Luntz famously coined The Luntz Rule, which is you have to say the name of something seven times in order for people to remember that something, because if you don't say the name of that something seven times, people will never remember the name of that something, so you have to constantly repeat the name of that something for people to remember the name of that something. So for God's sake, say the name of that something. This is Kamala Harris employing the Luntz Rule on a Democratic Party focus group-tested word that her campaign believes will convey her intelligence to low information voters. 



Kamala Harris claiming she's the serious candidate because she uses the word serious to cover up the hypocrisy of maintaining Donald Trump's tariff policies isn't serious. It's play acting. 



The plan. Her plan. The plan that has no elements of a plan within it, outside of the fact that the plan allows her to say there's a plan without actually having to explain what's in the plan or how the plan works. I'm totally serious. This is what the Democratic Party is offering up as their candidate for the presidency of the United States. 

Speaking of the plan, or more specifically how to pay for the plan, hold on to your wigs and keys, small businesspeople and/or stockholders out there. Kamala is coming. 



Of course, she's going to raise taxes. Bernie Sanders just got younger and tucked himself into a pantsuit. So what happens if companies do what they have to do in order to avoid those higher taxes? Kamala Harris apparently will give them the word salad of their lives until morale improves. 



At times, she just flat-out lied about her record compared to Donald Trump's, like this exchange on manufacturing jobs. 



Donald Trump created 414,000 manufacturing jobs during his first 38 months in office before Xi Jinping dropped the COVID bomb on us. What she's claiming is made up out of whole cloth.



Gone are the days of being able to achieve the American dream. Her faux intellectual, poetic talk does not camouflage the fact that the loss of the American dream of home ownership happened on her watch specifically due to her tie-breaking vote in the Senate. That lit the inflation fire and it has ravaged the country ever since. 

This clip is one of my personal favorites. The question, you have to remind yourself as you hear Harris' non-answer, is what do you say to voters that don't feel like they're part of your plan for the future. Here's what she said in response. 



Um, er, well, if you believe what I believe, think what I think, do what I say, you're part of my plan. If not, you're dead to me. It's her way or the highway. It's the Trumps versus the Not-Trumps.



We reach the plagiarism phase of the interview - copying and pasting Joe Biden's policy and rhetoric directly. And like Michael Keaton's #3 dim-witted clone in Multiplicity, which was a clone of a clone, Harris' promise is even harder to believe than Joe Biden's promise, which also did not bear out to be true. People at $20,000 of annual income saw their tax burden, even if only a little bit, go up. 



Go back and review that Joe Biden clip. According to him, there was literally nothing stopping her from accomplishing this goal she's saying needs to be done...only if you vote for her first. 



Another missed fact-checking opportunity for Stephanie Ruhle here. She made this claim during her debate with Donald Trump. The following day on CNBC, Ruhle's sister network, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon denied they had endorsed her economic agenda. Weeks later, Harris is still peddling this nonsense. It's just not true.



Harris was asked about the catastrophic development manifested on her campaign by the Teamsters last week. In case you missed the news, for the first time in 40 years, the 1.3 million-strong International Brotherhood of Teamsters abstained from endorsing the Democratic for president because their rank-and-file members by nearly a 2 to 1 ratio are actually siding with Trump this time. Not only does she not answer the question at all, she doesn't even mention the word Teamsters in her non-answer. 



The fever swamp on the left tried to use this clip as definitive proof that Kamala Harris once worked at a McDonald's. The definitive proof is...Kamala Harris saying she worked at a McDonald's. Again, this is MSNBC and Stephanie Ruhle we're talking about, so it's a journalism-free zone. Which McDonald's? What city? Who was her manager? What questions were asked in the job interview? What was her starting pay rate? How many hours a week did she work? What year or years did she work? Was she ever promoted? Why'd she leave? What were some of the names of people with which she worked? Does she still have any pictures of her in her McDonald's uniform?

She's lied about issues of substance so many times in her public life, it's hard to count. You'll forgive me if I don't hold to the principle that if there's no photographic evidence, it didn't happen. 



Amnesty for illegals, eh? I'm sure that's going to play great all over the swing states. Pathway to citizenship for illegals is amnesty. No other way to sugarcoat it. In normal times, this exchange alone would be disqualifying. 



The Boss will find this clip very interesting, considering he wrote the masterpiece on Kamala's price gauging prescription. Where else but with Kamala Harris can you find someone that flounders through a question about price controls by saying absolutely not, this is not about price controls, it's about price gouging, which can only be fixed by controlling prices? If vacuity were amplifiers, this answer would hit Spinal Tap's '11'. 



We come full circle with Kamala Harris' bad day. Remember Joe Biden on the View earlier in the day. There literally was nothing that prevented her from doing anything she wanted on either domestic or foreign policy. She's the sitting vice president. Why hasn't she done anything about the red tape she promises to address next year? 

Kamala Harris is the first Avatar candidate. Were she blue, I'd be suspicious that James Cameron was actually running the Democratic National Committee. But even though Barack Obama must be plugged into a computer interface somewhere in a back bedroom at his mansion on the beach in Martha's Vineyard, there clearly are significant bugs still in the software. If the Pandora Project were run on Windows Vista, it would produce something resembling Kamala Harris. 

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Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | November 20, 2024
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