In a painfully awkward moment, Kamala Harris avoided answering a question about the Democratic presidential ticket in the next election during an interview with NBC’s Craig Melvin.
“Are we going to see the same Democratic ticket in 2024?” he asked her.
Harris appeared stunned by the question and sat there frozen like a deer in headlights for a few seconds.
“I’m sorry. We are thinking about today,” Harris finally responded. “I mean, honestly I — I — I know why you’re asking the question, because this is part of the punditry and the gossip around places like Washington, D.C. Let me just tell you something. We’re focused on the things in front of us. We’re focused on what we need to do to address issues like affordable child care, what we need to do to ensure that —”
“So there have been no conversations about 2024?” Melvin interrupted.
“The American people sent us here to do a job and right now there’s a lot of work to be done,” Harris said. “And that’s my focus, sincerely.”
NBC: Are we going to see the same Democratic ticket in 2024?
Kamala Harris, slow to answer: “I’m sorry, we are thinking about today…”
Harris is the Vice President, so one would think she would have a firm answer on this obvious question.
pic.twitter.com/ddu8LGvuxb— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) January 13, 2022
Harris’s response to the question was a complete disaster. And it’s not as though she shouldn’t have been prepared for it. Last month, she told the Wall Street Journal she and Biden haven’t talked about the next election yet—prompting media speculation about Biden not running for reelection. Her gaffe forced the White House to clarify her remarks and insist that Biden is, indeed, running in 2024.
Despite trying to maintain the illusion that Joe Biden will run for reelection in 2024, Biden admitted just before Christmas that he’d run again if he is in good health.
But it seems unlikely Harris hasn’t been coached on how to respond to questions about 2024, and what happened with Craig Melvin could not have been anything at all like how she was supposed to respond. Instead, she seemed flustered, unprepared, and frankly, full of it.
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