Posted on 06/28/2019 1:22:45 PM PDT by Kaslin
Whether you watched the various bits of media analysis of last night’s debate in real-time or are catching up this morning, you’re probably sensing two themes emerging from the various liberal expert analysts. The first is that Joe Biden did terribly, looked old and tired and was outmaneuvered at every turn. The second theme can be summed up in a far more digestible soundbite. Wasn’t Kamala Harris AWESOME?!?!?!
Despite most of the candidates only receiving a paltry amount of screen time to make their marks (Yang got less than three minutes total), journalists across the band are zooming in on one exchange. It was the moment when California Senator Kamala Harris got all up in Joe Biden’s grill over his claims of comity with a couple of his openly segregationist colleagues and his opposition to bussing back in the days before Mayor Pete Buttigieg was even born. (Associated Press)
Kamala Harris spoke slowly but bluntly as she stared at Joe Biden, then began treating him as a hostile witness.
The former federal prosecutor turned California senator started by saying she didn’t think the former vice president “was a racist.” But she criticized him for recently “defending segregationists” in the Senate and for once opposing mandatory busing of students to desegregated public schools.
Harris described a young girl in the 1970s who boarded such buses before dramatically offering, “That little girl was me.”
Here’s the video from CNBC. The exchange in question starts right near the top.
The part of that exchange that the Associated Press coverage, along with a number of other outlets left out was when Harris said that hearing Biden make those statements was personally very “hurtful.” It’s in the video above, however. But if this is the moment Harris is relying on to break out of the middle of the pack, it’s problematic at best.
Why? Because if you’re angling to be the leader of the free world, I’m not sure that your best defining moment is saying insufficiently woke man hurt my feelings. What are you going to do when Nicolas Maduro calls you the daughter of Satan? Hide in the West Wing and sob?
Getting back to the dueling themes unfolding this morning, I can understand why the liberal bastions of the commentariat desperately want to give Harris her moment while finding ways to slow down the Biden juggernaut. Many of them still haven’t recovered from their nagging case of 2016 poutrage and very much want to see a woman in the Oval Office. If it can be a woman of color, that’s just a bonus. But their options are rather limited at this point. As of Wednesday’s RCP average, only two women (Harris and Elizabeth Warren) are registering support above one percent. Warren has been showing some surprising juice in the last couple of polls, but it remains to be seen if that’s real momentum or a couple of outliers.
Also, Warren tends to be a terrible candidate on the stump, generally coming across like she’s lecturing you more than engaging you in a conversation. She seems fragile, and it’s not hard to imagine her folding like a wet paper bag in the face of a blustering Donald Trump in a head-to-head debate.
So that leaves us with Harris. She’s a bit better on the stump than Warren, but she hasn’t caught fire in the imagination of the primary voters, so the establishment media needs to give her a push. It’s true that she’s doing better than twenty of the other nomination hopefuls, but that’s not saying much. There’s still a 25 point gulf between her and Joe Biden in the RCP average. Certainly not impossible to make up with all the time that’s left, but the challenges are obvious, so she’ll need a little help from her friends at MSNBC and CNN.
And what of poor Joe Biden, the insufficiently woke, painfully white, definitively cisgender, straight septuagenarian Christian male? I tend to agree with our friend Jim Geraghty’s assessment. Biden is still in good shape but he’s looking a little less invincible now than the prior polls might have led you to believe.
One night won’t sink the Joe Biden campaign, but boy, did he look like he had a glass jaw, and he also seems to have aged a decade since he left the vice presidency. When asked what his first priority as president would be, Biden answered that it would be defeating Donald Trump.
This night shouldn’t have gone this badly for him. “Build upon what we’ve done” is probably a more reassuring and appealing message than completely scrapping the entire existing system of private health insurance.
Biden supporters shouldn’t be heading for the panic room just yet. One single debate has probably never definitively killed the electoral hopes of any candidate with the possible exception of Richard Nixon in 1960. Of course, that race was also between a Vice President and a Senator, so who knows?
That’s a pretty low blow—to ex wives.
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Kamala Harris is being talked up as a firebrand who will destroy Trump....only in the protected DNC-media world where tough questions are not asked and no one pushes back.
Biden is doddering and cannot work without a teleprompter - he dies on the stump. He foams zombie like, with a thousand yard stare. He should have attacked her segregationist nonsense with: “Look, leaders don’t have the luxury of hating half of our country, Hillary tried that and you saw how it worked out. We cannot refuse to talk with deplorables, or whites from West Virginia or coal miners from Kentucky, and yes keep it up and get Trump elected again as sure as night follows day. So you can go on with your hate orgy, because your closed minded followers love it and you happen to be good at it, but I am talking with the enemy and going to educate them and get something done positive for this country - because that is how things got done once upon a time in America. Stop your hate and work for the greater good. Or you can stay in LaLa land and be happy in your hatred for everyone who doesn’t think like you. But I am taking back the White House!”
He could have shut her up, but he is too brain dead. He may have stopped thinking years ago.
(Remember - those segregationists were Democrats of course, but that could remain unsaid.)
BTW - busing sucked for everyone. And it is fundamentally racist at its core - that black children can only learn in the presence of white children. What racist imbecile wrote that law into the books. It is nonsense then and nonsense now. And it caused a lot of animosity unnecessarily while the rich sent their kids to private schools and tut-tutted comfortably above it. Give it up, its a bad plan and didn’t work.
I call bullshit on her busing story.
Her parents were grad students at the time. Where exactly did they live on Bancroft?
Thousand Oaks Elementary school was only 2 miles away from Bancroft.
I want to see PICS of the 99% Black school near Bancroft that KamelHo would have attended.
Hell, I wouldn’t doubt that her PARENTS found a way to get her into Thousand Oaks. Probably used Berkeley connections.
Horizontal Harris.
I dont think we’ll win that battle.
The lie has been told often enough
that it has become accepted truth.
If we couldnt stop Obambi, Kamala
will sail right thru the
requirements.
This goes back a ways...
“pompous prosecutor”
/////////////////////////
Good accurate term.
I’ll try to remember to give you credit when I use it in the months to come.
Thanks Kaslin.
So when did she get bused for her race? Did they have racial busing in Canada? Or was it in first grade at 6 years old for one year, could have happened, scarred for life in one year of busing?
Wonder if any press person knows she did not attend any American schools, till she went to Stanford in CA at age 18?
So once again we have a non American, who never celebrated Fourth of July or Memorial day parades as a child, running for President of a country she does not like at all.
She was born in Oakland California. By past supreme court rulings that makes her an American (not that I agree with them). That her mom took her to Canada at seven years old did not change that. I did not find in the Wiki entry if either parent had obtained American citizenship before she was born in Oakland. If they didn’t, and if we had a different ruling from the supremes on “birth right” citizenship, he American citizenship would be questioned. Unfortunately we have a current status of the law that does not do that.
She moved to Canada at age 7 with her divorced Mother where she attended all her schooling until high school graduation in Quebec, Canada. When was she bused? In Canada?
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