Chris Cillizza Very Disappointed In Kamala Harris For Not Agreeing With Him That She’s Terrible
There’s a new Kamala Harris scandal because today is Wednesday. According to Chris Cillizza, the world’s leading mediocre white man, Harris won’t accept responsibility for how much mediocre white men think she sucks.
During an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle’s Tal Kopan, the vice president said she wouldn’t be distracted by bullshit stories about her old-school headphones or badass copper pots. Cillizza claims what stood out for him is what Harris didn’t say, which makes me wonder how irrelevant his high school book reports were: “The Great Gatsby is not a book about dancing Jellicle cats, and that’s what I find most interesting.”
Here’s Cillizza dumb tweet where he expresses shock that Harris apparently can’t think of anything she would’ve done differently than year. (Maybe she should’ve bought two copper pots because honestly how often do you get to Paris?)
"Harris twice did not directly answer a question about lessons she had learned and whether she wished she'd done anything differently over the past year."https://cnn.it/320eXMc— Chris Cillizza (@Chris Cillizza) 1639526333
Here's the line from Kopan: "Harris twice did not directly answer a question about lessons she had learned and whether she wished she'd done anything differently over the past year.”
What did Harris sound off on? That the press coverage of her has been "ridiculous.”
Harris is barely a year into a four-year term as vice president. This isn’t the time for an exit interview. Besides, the question was an obvious trap and further evidence of the media’s objectively absurd coverage of the first woman vice president who is also Black as fuck. She didn’t need to volunteer for an impromptu therapy session.
There's something important in there. Harris seems to be writing off her struggles as vice president — and there is no debate that she has struggled more than many thought with the duties of being second-in-command — solely to how the media has covered her.
This is America, sir. There’s debate over which version of clam chowder is superior (it’s Rhode Island). There's only consensus among the white-male-dominated press that Harris spends every day as vice president walking into rakes. Even her currently low approval ratings show enduring strength among Democrats and Black voters specifically. Unlike her predecessor, Mike Pence, she’s trusted with actual responsibilities in areas that are public and contentious, such as immigration and the COVID-19 vaccine. There’s plenty of material for substantive criticism yet the media has focused on frivolous shit. You don’t cover the vice president’s choice of headphones if the country’s actually on fire and she’s holding the match.
In December of 2017, Cillizza wrote about Pence’s toadying obsequiousness to Donald Trump and somehow concluded this was good news for John McCain Pence’s political future.
There’s strategy here, of course. (Unlike the President, Pence has displayed a keen sense of strategic positioning – and execution – all the way back to his days as a member of the House.)
Harris might not possess Pence’s “keen sense of strategic positioning” (shameless, morally bankrupt ass licking) but at least she won’t have to worry that Joe Biden will encourage her execution.
In reality, Harris has delivered key tie-breaking votes in the Senate and helped restore relationships with our allies, but the media wants to nag her about TPS reports. The press argues that Harris is treated no worse than past vice presidents, including Dan Quayle. That’s an unfair comparison considering Harris actually won her vice presidential debate and can spell “potato" unprompted.
It’s also revisionist history. The media didn’t go out of its way to take down Quayle or promote a certain narrative. His gaffes were simply unavoidable and directly relevant to his job. During Quayle’s first year in office, Maureen Dowd at the New York Timeswrote a fairly glowing profile that presented Quayle as a voracious reader of books about historical world leaders.
But the Vice President was particularly struck by the description of Napoleon's military technique in Charles de Gaulle's discourse on war, "The Edge of the Sword," presented to him by Nixon after the election. The three essentials of Napoleon's style in the field, de Gaulle wrote, were "to grasp the situation, to adapt himself to it, and to exploit it to his own advantage."
"The chapter about Napoleon certainly reflected the way I went about the campaign and perhaps the way I'm doing the job now," the Vice President says. "As I was reading this after the election, I felt that I had sort of adopted those techniques myself, which were somewhat successful."
After five months on the job, J. Danforth Quayle remains a subject of some fascination. "There's still an interest and intrigue on exactly who I am," he says, sounding pleased. . . .
You’ll struggle to find major profiles of Harris that directly counter her perceived weaknesses. Instead, the media prefers to pick at the very wounds they’ve inflicted.
[CNN / New York Times]
Follow Stephen Robinson on Twitter.
Do your Amazon shopping through this link, because reasons.
Yr Wonkette is 100 percent ad-free and entirely supported by reader donations. That's you! Please click the clickie, if you are able.
Stephen Robinson is a writer and social kibbitzer based in Portland, Oregon. He writes make believe for Cafe Nordo, an immersive theatre space in Seattle. Once, he wrote a novel called “Mahogany Slade,” which you should read or at least buy. He's also on the board of the Portland Playhouse theatre. His son describes him as a “play typer guy."
