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Is Right-Wing Media Giving Kamala Harris a ‘Bad Rap’? The Word-Salad Transcripts Speak for Themselves

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Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at an abortion rights rally at Howard University in Washington, D.C., April 25, 2023. (Julia Nikhinson/Reuters)

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson argues that Harris ‘connects powerfully with audiences.’

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Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we take a look back at Vice President Kamala Harris’s most absurd ramblings, question the Washington Post’s Covid-related news judgment, and cover more media misses.

Kamala Harris’s World-Famous Word Salad

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson claimed last week that Vice President Kamala Harris “gets a bad rap.”

“The first duty of the job is to avoid upstaging the president, which means surrendering any political autonomy and never being out in front of the West Wing on any issue,” he wrote in defense of Harris last week after President Biden formally announced the pair’s reelection bid.

He added that Harris had been assigned the unenviable task of being in charge of the border “at a time when there was absolutely no possibility of getting Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform that might reduce the flow of would-be migrants.”

But he didn’t stop there. Robinson went on to argue that Harris’s critics are actually wrong about her propensity to deliver meaningless diatribes.

It’s not that Harris is incapable of saying anything of substance when called upon to deliver a speech or sit for an interview. No, she has just “sometimes lost her way in the wilderness of syntax.” She is a victim of the “right-wing echo chamber” accusing her of speaking in “word salad,” according to Robinson.

“It is true that she often burdens her sentences with more dependent clauses than they can bear, and verbatim transcripts of her extemporaneous remarks can sometimes be hard to follow,” he writes. “But she also connects powerfully with audiences and communicates her message, even if it might be hard to diagram.”

The column came just days after Harris was roundly criticized online for what many called her worst word salad yet.

Harris spoke at a pro-abortion rally at her alma mater Howard University on Tuesday. She urged Democrats to “stand and fight” against Republicans’ “national agenda” to limit abortion rights, voting rights, and LGBT rights.

“So I think it’s very important, as you have heard from so many incredible leaders for us at every moment in time and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past but the future,” Harris said.

The convoluted quote is an updated version of an earlier Harris rambling on the concept of time: “The significance of the passage of time, right? The significance of the passage of time. So when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time,” she said in March 2022 while speaking in Louisiana about bringing high-speed internet to communities.

Harris has also made a number of exceedingly vacant comments while addressing the topic of abortion.

In July, she infamously responded to a question about the overturning of Roe v. Wade by saying: “I think that, to be very honest with you, I do believe that we should have rightly believed, but we certainly believe that certain issues are just settled. Certain issues are just settled.”

On what would have been the 50th anniversary of the landmark precedent, Harris said, “I think of this moment as a moment that is about great momentum.”

In March she made an equally redundant comment about Women’s History Month: “So, during Women’s History Month, we celebrate and we honor the women who made history throughout history, who saw what could be unburdened by what had been,” Harris said. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.) noted at the time that Democrats “can’t even define what a woman is.”

Harris offered several other confusing messages in March, including during a White House event with Jamaican prime minister Andrew Holness, held to discuss the Biden administration’s plans to help the country deal with Covid.

“We also recognize just as it has been in the United States, for Jamaica, one of the issues that has been presented as an issue that is economic in the way of its impact has been the pandemic,” Harris said. “So to that end, we are announcing today also that we will assist Jamaica in COVID recovery by assisting in terms of the recovery efforts in Jamaica that have been essential to, I believe, what is necessary to strengthen not only the issue of public health but also the economy.”

Back in January 2022, Harris made a similarly nonsensical remark about the pandemic: “It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day,” she told NBC News at the time. “Every day it is time for us to agree that there are things and tools that are available to us to slow this thing down.”

The vice president offered a comparably incoherent plan for tackling the “climate crisis” in May 2022.

“That is especially true when it comes to the climate crisis, which is why we will work together and continue to work together to address these issues, to tackle these challenges, and to work together as we continue to work, operating from the new norms, rules, and agreements that we will convene to work together on to galvanize global action,” she said.

That same month, Harris gave a speech at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., about the mental-health crisis affecting American children and adolescents. “You know, when we talk about our children — I know for this group, we all believe that when we talk about the children of the community, they are a children of the community,” she said.

In September, she offered another meandering observation about community during a roundtable discussion with students at Claflin University: “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.”

In March 2022, she was tasked with promoting the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. “That’s why we’re here today. Because we have the ability to see what can be unburdened by what has been and then to make the possible actually happen.”

Months later, she spoke about expanding access to transportation. “It seems like maybe it’s a small issue; it’s a big issue. You need to get to go and need to be able to get where you need to go to do the work and get home.”

More recently, she was asked during an interview with Stephen Colbert if there was any discussion in the White House about what the blowback would be for approving the Willow Oil project. She replied: “Well, I think that the concerns are based on what we should all be concerned about. But the solutions have to be and include what we are doing in terms of going forward, in terms of investments.”

And while some Republicans, including GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley, have warned that a second term for Biden would likely end in a Kamala Harris presidency, Robinson claims that those fears are overblown.

“Fact-check: Biden is in good health, according to his doctors, and I know of no reason why he should not be expected to live through a second term,” he writes. “But one of Harris’s important tasks during the campaign will be to demonstrate that she is prepared to assume the awesome responsibilities of commander in chief if necessary.”

She has hardly done a good job to date. But then again, Biden has done little to inspire confidence in his own leadership abilities; he joked over the weekend about his ability to hide from the press.

“In a lot of ways this dinner sums up my first two years in office,” Biden said during the White House Correspondents Dinner. “I’ll talk for 10 minutes, take zero questions, and cheerfully walk away.”

While reporters at the dinner laughed at the joke, CNN political commentator Scott Jennings admonished the press saying, “He’s not laughing with you, he’s laughing at you.”

Reporters in attendance also cheered when Biden mentioned his recent 2024 announcement.

But with Biden being just as well-known for gaffes and straight-up lies as Harris, it’s clear why his team prefers to keep him from the spotlight.

Biden earned a “bottomless Pinocchio” rating from the Washington Post fact-checker recently for his repeated claims that he has reduced the deficit by $1.7 trillion. A statement earns a bottomless Pinocchio when the claim has been given a three- or four-Pinocchios rating and has been repeated at least 20 times. The statement was previously given a three-Pinocchio rating in September.

The figure Biden is touting comes from comparing fiscal year 2022’s $1.375 trillion deficit to fiscal year 2020’s $3.132 trillion deficit. Yet a more accurate way to determine a president’s impact is to compare what was predicted before he arrived with what came to fruition under his leadership. By this measure, Biden increased the national debt by $850 billion more than originally projected by the Congressional Budget Office.

The same week that Biden earned a bottomless Pinocchio, he also came under fire for holding what seemed to be a cheat sheet of a reporter’s planned question during a White House press briefing with South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol. A photo showed Biden’s notes included a question from Los Angeles Times reporter Courtney Subramanian: “How are YOU squaring YOUR domestic priorities—like reshoring semiconductors manufacturing—with alliance-based foreign policy?”

Subramanian, who was called on first, asked: “Your top economic priority has been to build up U.S. domestic manufacturing in competition with China, but your rules against expanding chip manufacturing in China is hurting South Korean companies that rely heavily on Beijing. Are you damaging a key ally in the competition with China to help your domestic politics ahead of the election?”

The L.A. Times said their reporter did not submit any questions in advance. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed it is “entirely normal for a president to be briefed on reporters who will be asking questions at a press conference and issues that we expect they might ask about.”

“It is not surprising that yesterday we would anticipate questions that he did receive on the visit with the South Korean president, as South Korean president was sitting — standing to his — to his right, or about 2024, that was completely expected,” Jean-Pierre said, adding that the White House does not have “specific questions” in advance. She went on to say, though, that the White House does reach out to reporters ahead of press conferences to discuss possible topics that may come up.

Headline Fail of the Week

The Washington Post is clinging to the 2020 mentality that the mere existence of Covid is newsworthy. “CDC meeting, intended to mark covid progress, sees virus cases of its own,” health reporter Dan Diamond wrote in an article published late last week.

The headline — and that the story was considered worthy of coverage at all — is evidence that Washington Post editors and reporters still believe “Covid zero” was an attainable goal all along.

“The staff dedicated to investigating disease outbreaks for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention received a reminder this week of the pandemic’s persistence: confirmed covid cases at their own conference,” Diamond writes.

He goes on to cite an email from a CDC branch chief to staff that read: “several people who attended the [Epidemic Intelligence Service] Conference have tested positive for COVID-19.”

A CDC official told the paper “the cases we’re aware of at this time should not be referred to as an ‘outbreak.’”

“These cases are reflective of general spread in the community. It’s not news that public health employees can get COVID-19,” CDC’s Kristen Nordlund told the Washington Post.

The story ends on what is still a “gotcha” among the Covid alarmists of 2023: “In posts on social media, conference attendees were unmasked as they gathered in person. Some CDC staffers and alumni opted to attend virtually, worried about covid risks, according to people with knowledge of the event.”

Media Misses

• A recent tweet from American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten earned a fact-check by Twitter’s community notes program after she claimed the “Right-wing press and Republicans in Congress want you to think that I tried to keep schools closed. Start in April 2020 I fought to reopen schools.”

The community notes pointed out that, in July 2020, Weingarten “threatened strikes if schools returned in person.” The next month, she pushed to strengthen online learning and “only changed her tune when returning in person was inevitable.”

Another video of Weingarten that received the community-notes treatment showed her saying, “We spent every day from February on trying to get schools open. We knew that remote education was not a substitute for opening schools.” The notes say she is “misrepresenting her prior positions.” In fall 2020 she called attempts to reopen schools “reckless, callous, cruel.” Areas with high union influence remained closed much longer.

 

• NBC’s Meet the Press host Chuck Todd claimed during a discussion with Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy on Sunday that there is “a lot of scientific research that says gender is a spectrum” and that sex is not “binary.”

• Daily Beast columnist David Rothkopf sure had a quick change of heart on how he feels about age and the presidency. In September 2019, he tweeted, ““Donald Trump is 73 years old. He has just had three relatively full (for him) work days and can barely walk or form a sentence. He is too old for this job. Sorry, its has to be noted.” Last week, he was out with a column arguing that “Joe Biden is Old. Get Over it.’ Biden is 80 now and is seeking reelection; if he succeeds, he’d be 86 at the end of a second term.

• From Jen Psaki the “journalist”:

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