Joe Biden has delegated another job to Kamala Harris. This time it is to work on getting out the youth vote in the November mid-term elections. She spent Tuesday, National Voter Registration Day, in South Carolina with Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. They visited two historically Black colleges and encouraged the students to get out and vote.
At South Carolina State University’s fall convocation, Kamala welcomed the largest freshman class the university has seen in fifteen years. She was the keynote speaker. Democrats hope to keep their majorities in the House and Senate, though that looks like wishful thinking at this point, and Kamala’s job is to motivate young voters who will be voting for the first time in the midterm elections. She asked them to get registered and then to go vote in November.
“Your vote is your voice, and we need your voice. We need you to move America forward,” Harris said. “Today as students, tomorrow as graduates and for the rest of your lives as Americans, you will help to determine our nation’s future.”
She encouraged this group of college students to register to vote and head to the polls. In midterm elections that typically see a smaller turnout than years when the presidency is on the ballot. But she said the races this year are no less important.
“Today we live in unsettled times,” she said. “Domestically, we thought long-settled would be the freedom of voters to decide elections. Long-settled, we thought, would be the freedom of women to make decisions about their own future.”
Naturally she tossed in plenty of hyperbole to emphasize the importance of voting, including focusing on abortion and then reminding the students of Joe Biden’s bribe to young voters – student loan debt forgiveness. The latter produced her biggest applause response from the audience.
Harris received her biggest applause when highlighting the White House’s recent student loan forgiveness announcement and the administration’s goals to pass voting rights legislation, expand mental healthcare, and protect abortion access.
“We need to pass a law to protect a woman’s right to made decisions about her own body … without government interference,” she said.
She also talked to students about the importance of access to education, touching on student loan debt cancellation, PELL grants, and funding HBCUs.
“Joining you this afternoon takes me back to when I was 17 and flew from California to Washington D.C. to start my first year at Howard University,” she said. “And I will always remember walking into freshman orientation to a room very much like this one. And very much like this one the seats were packed with students and faculty and alumni who just like you all look like us.”
Kamala has visited South Carolina three times as vice president. She visited in June for the state Democratic Party’s Blue Palmetto Dinner. She’s the fourth member of the Biden administration to visit the state since December. South Carolina is important in presidential elections, you know. You can bet that Kamala thinks she’ll be running in 2024, probably for the top spot on the ticket if Sleepy Joe isn’t up to the task. The South Carolina Republican Party criticized her frequent visits, given the fact that she isn’t visiting the southern border. Good point. She’s been to South Carolina more times than she’s been to the southern border.
The second HBCU Kamala and Cardona visited was Claflin University. She had a roundtable discussion with student leaders. Kamala spoke about the Biden administration’s investment (code for taxpayer dollars) in community banks. That is when she began serving up a word salad for the students. She got stuck on the word “community.”
“We invested an additional $12 billion into community banks, because we know community banks are in the community, and understand the needs and desires of that community as well as the talent and capacity of community,” she said in a clip that made its way around social media.
She said the word “community” five times in one sentence. That is what she does to cover for the fact that she has no idea of what she is talking about, she just repeats words. Community banks are in communities? Who knew? Responses on social media were brutal.
Screenwriter and columnist Matthew Betley responded: “You would think by now she’d have a copy editor to say, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t repeat the same word five times in the same sentence.'”
“Do we know if community banks are in the community?” mocked the RNC’s Jake Schneider.
Podcaster Nick Givas asked, “If she says community one more time does she win a prize?”
Kamala told students that young voters are needed to make positive change. “We turn to you once again. Your nation turns to you.”
The youth vote was up in 2020 and the Biden administration is hoping that trend continues in November. That was a presidential election, though, and it remains to be seen if their enthusiasm to get out and vote in a mid-term surfaces. Is Kamala the right person to be the point person for such an effort now? I mean, she hasn’t exactly covered herself in glory with the results of other tasks she has been given, has she? Allegedly she is heading up efforts to address root causes of illegal migration, passing voting rights legislation in the Senate, advising the United States Space Force, pushing for ‘reproductive rights’, and so on. We’ll see how effective she is with college students as she serves up more word salads.
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