Kamala’s CNN Town Hall Was a Masterclass in Political Self-Destruction

AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

Kamala Harris's CNN town hall Wednesday night may just have been the biggest political disaster since Joe Biden's debate with Donald Trump back in June. 

It's been obvious for some time now that Kamala Harris is getting desperate. The polls have been shifting toward Trump for weeks, and her lead in the RealClearPolitics national average has all but disappeared. So, obviously, a town hall event with a friendly network would do the trick, right?

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Not. At. All.

The event failed, just as they all have.

For example, she still didn't have a solid answer to questions about how she'd be different from Joe Biden.

"Considering you have been in the position of vice president for the past four years under the Biden administration, how can we expect you to deviate from the direction of that administration compared to your own?" asked a student from the University of Pennsylvania. "How can we differentiate your policy and your beliefs from that of Biden's?"

"Well, first of all, my administration will not be a continuation of the Biden administration," Kamala insisted. "I bring to this role my own ideas and my own experience. I represent a new generation of leadership on a number of issues and believe that we have to actually take new approaches."

She then launched into some of her policy ideas, which we've all heard before.

 Her answer was clearly not sufficient for host Anderson Cooper, so he asked a follow-up question. "Some voters, though, might ask, you've been in the White House for, for four years. You were vice president, not the president. But why wasn't any of that done over the last four years?" he asked.

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"Well, there was a lot that was done, but there's more to do, Anderson," she replied. "And, and I'm pointing out things that need to be done that haven't been done but need to be done."

Considering that immigration is such an important issue this year, you'd think she would have come up with better answers for questions on this issue. Not so.

"Regarding the rapid increase in the migrant population, how will you ensure that every immigrant is integrated into American society safely?" a student from Drexel University asked. "What benefits and subsidies will you provide them with? And how long will these benefits and subsidies last for an individual? Most importantly, will the American citizens' taxes pay for these benefits and subsidies? And if so, how much — how much money will be allocated?"

Harris answered a different question altogether, using her go-to response that she was a prosecutor.

"Let's start with this. America's immigration system is broken and it needs to be fixed. And it's been broken for a long time. And part of what we need to do is always prioritize what we need to do to strengthen our border," she said. "I will tell you, I'm the only person in this race among the two choices that voters have, I've personally prosecuted transnational criminal organizations in the trafficking of guns, drugs, and human beings."

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Her inability to answer questions was a constant theme of her town hall — like when she was asked who was responsible for high grocery prices.

Even more devastating was her response to her position on the border wall.

She was even called out for her past support of decriminalizing illegal immigration.

She also botched trying to explain her flip-flops on fracking and other issues.

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Some of the most cliche questions you can get, which she should have been prepared for, she couldn't answer well.

This stands in stark contrast to Trump's recent visit to McDonald's in which he realized that preparing fast food is harder than it sounds. You could see Kamala trying to figure out how to answer the question, scrolling through the talking points she'd memorized and failing to come up with anything good.

Related: Kamala Blows It on the Border for CNN *and* Telemundo

In the end, the big takeaway from the town hall was that she managed to go through the entire event without answering any questions and trying to get by with word salads.

Even CNN pundits didn't think very highly of her performance. "She focused a lot more on Donald Trump, I think it's fair to say, than she did on many specifics in terms of what she would do as president," observed Jake Tapper.

"Well, I'll just tell you what I'm hearing from people who I have been talking to, and that is that if her goal was to close the deal, they're not sure she did that," Dana Bash said.

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Former Obama advisor David Axelrod also panned her performance. "The things that would concern me is when she doesn't want to answer a question, her habit is to kind of go to word salad city, and she did that on a couple of answers. One was on Israel. Anderson asked a direct question: Would you be stronger on Israel than Trump? And there was a seven-minute answer, but none of it related to the question he was asking," he said. "And so, you know, on certain questions like that, on immigration, I thought she missed an opportunity because she would acknowledge no concerns about any of the administration's policies, and that's a mistake. Sometimes you have to concede things, and she didn't concede much."

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Kamala Harris ran for president in 2019, has been vice president for four years, and has been running for president for months, yet she seems to have no idea what she's talking about. She can't answer questions; she just rehashes talking points we've heard over and over.

Imagine this train wreck in the Oval Office.

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