CNN+ may have flopped but CNN? got off to a boffo start Monday afternoon with its exciting new game show, “What the Puck Is Kamala Harris Talking About?”
Harris might have guessed what she’d be asked to talk about, and she was: CNN’s Dana Bash wanted to quiz her about Roe v. Wade, or rather, present an opportunity for Harris to rip into the Supreme Court for nixing it after 49 years. Instead, the “Huh? Show with Kamala Harris” led off with an odd digression about how the Veep was on Air Force Two, flying to Aurora, Illinois to talk about maternal health with someone named Lauren Underwood (a member of Congress) and “chair of the judiciary committee Dick Durbin.”
Every member of Ruth Sent Us must have been grinding her teeth waiting for Harris to get angry. When Harris finally did get around to her feelings about Roe, gently coached by Bash to remember that she is a woman, Harris almost got stuck in an infinite regression to the concept: “As a woman myself. And a daughter of a woman. And a granddaughter of a woman.”
Why say this?
Harris’s primary talking point — this is a fundamental constitutional right for women, albeit the weird kind that no one can seem to actually locate in the Constitution — dissolved as she went off another tangent, about how kids were affected by the end of Roe.
Huh?
No doubt every kid (and adult) in America is glad not to have been aborted, but that didn’t seem to be Harris’s point when she said, “You know, I’ve thought about it as, you know, a parent [Harris’s husband has two children from a previous marriage] . . . and as an aunt of pre-school children.”
Wha?
“Everybody has something at risk on this. First of all, if you are the parent of sons.” [Nods conspiratorially]
Harris thinks this is the first thing on everyone’s minds: how Roe affects the parents of sons?
“Do think about what this means for the life of your son,” she added. [Nod, nod.]
???
Look, Joe “I’m shouty yet whispery” Biden has an excuse: the man is 143 years old, and ran his first Senate race campaigning off the back of a stagecoach. What’s Harris’s excuse?
The best I can do with her random word-generator is that Harris is saying parents of grown men should oppose the Supreme Court’s decision because they are now more likely to become grandparents. Hell, maybe their sons are now even a bit more likely to get married. I can certainly see why the Dave Portnoys of America would be perturbed by the end of Roe: young men like to sow wild oats and not have to worry about showing up for the harvest. But Harris thinks the parents of these men are the ones who should go on high alert?
As a scare tactic, this seems roughly equivalent to promising AARP members free cable TV for life. Among people who are old enough to be grandparents, isn’t becoming a grandparent the single thing they want most?
And if some of their cornered sons actually followed through and married the girls in question, wouldn’t that deliver a net increase in happiness for society?
Keep in mind that this interview was supposed to be a slam-dunk contest with only one contestant. Harris is (as Bash reminded us at the outset), the highest-ranking woman ever elected in U.S. history, and she is supposed to be the most visible and stalwart defender of abortion rights.
Elizabeth Warren, like her or not (full disclosure: put me down for “not”) would have spat hellfire if she had been sitting in that chair, stomping all over “illegitimately appointed Republican justices” who were “turning back the clock on women’s rights,” savaging “forced birth” and possibly setting fire to a picture of Brett Kavanaugh. Harris? Well, as per usual she smiled weirdly, cackled weirdly, and made weird talking points.
And every Democratic consultant in the country had the same thought: Are we really going to be stuck following this nincompoop if Old Joe can’t go on?