Kamala Harris isn’t great at answering questions, but is perhaps at her very worst in addressing the border.
This isn’t because she can’t string sentences together (she can, although the results are always mixed), or that she doesn’t know what she’s saying (she’s quite deliberate in sticking to her talking points).
No, she can’t answer for the administration’s failures at the border, because there simply is no good answer.
What is she going to say? Yes, we completely screwed this up, and I regret to say, did it on purpose. I’ve learned my lesson, though, and want to reverse field on this issue going forward.
An answer like that wouldn’t be sincere, but since when has that been an obstacle?
Since she and her team obviously believe that a confession is not in her interests, her only alternative is to deceive, obfuscate and evade, and hope it’s enough to see her through to Nov. 5.
She tries to sound like she’s always wanted to be border hawk — if only she’d been able to get her way.
“The first bill we proposed to Congress was to fix our broken immigration system,” she said on “60 Minutes” a week or so ago, “knowing that if you want to actually fix it, we need Congress to act. It was not taken up.”
Every single word of this, with the possible exception of the prepositions, is misleading. The proposal was a massive amnesty bill.
It was intended “to fix” the system only if you believe the real problem is illegal immigrants in the United States haven’t yet been legalized. The bill had no meaningful border provisions, not even more Border Patrol agents.
By complaining that the legislation wasn’t taken up, Harris clearly wanted to create the impression that GOP obstruction stymied the bill.
Yet Democrats had unified control of Congress at the time and chose to ignore the proposal because everyone understood it was an absurd non-starter.
For all that Harris insists that “from Day 1, literally, we have been offering solutions,” the fact of the matter is that there was no border crisis to solve on Day 1 — because the Biden administration hadn’t unraveled the Trump policies yet.
After roughly three years of an unprecedented crisis that it ignored and excused away, the White House finally decided that it needed to do something for political cover, and turned to a supposedly hawkish bipartisan Senate deal on the border.
After this opportunistic turnabout, Harris pretends that she’s the one who’s putting politics aside for the public good and excoriates Trump for cynically opposing the bill (never mind that the proposal blessed key aspects of an unacceptable status quo).
Harris told Bret Baier of Fox News that the election “will determine whether we have a president of the United States who actually cares more about fixing a problem even if it is not to their political advantage in an election.”
This is head-spinning given how she and Biden blew up the border at the outset of the administration for ideological reasons and now want to brand themselves as newly pro-enforcement for political reasons.
As for her recent radicalism on the issue, Harris brushes it aside as if it were some teenage phase. “I do not believe in decriminalizing border crossings,” she told Baier, disavowing a position she took a few years ago, “and I have not done that as vice president, and I would not do that as president.”
She didn’t offer any explanation for her change in thinking — presumably because there wasn’t one beyond realizing that what once was seemingly a passionate commitment had become a political liability.
That Harris is so tinny and unpersuasive on the border is, in large part, not a product of poor communications skills; rather, it is part and parcel of a strategic choice to try to muddy the waters instead of admitting how and why the administration created an utterly avoidable debacle.
Twitter: @RichLowry