Everything you never wanted to know about Kamala Harris
I watched parts of a video of Tucker Carlson interviewing attorney Harmeet Dhillon about Kamala Harris’ early days as a prosecutor and DA in San Francisco, and then AG in California. Dhillon knew her back then. The video is very long and I didn’t watch the whole thing, although I plan to do so. But it’s the most comprehensive look I’ve seen at Harris’ history prior to holding office at the national level.
Here it is:
In Dhillon’s opinion Harris was primarily interested in advancing her own career, which was helped along by a combination of ingratiating herself with powerful men in San Francisco’s Democrat machine politics and checking the favored identity boxes. If you think about it, that’s pretty much how she got to her present position, as well.
Perhaps the part of the video that interested me the most, though, was Dhillon’s opinion on what’s been going on with Harris lately in terms of her problems answering questions. One good thing Dhillon says about Harris is that the Kamala Harris she knew back then was smart, articulate, and highly confident. Dhillon says she doesn’t even recognize the Harris of today as that same person, she seems to have changed so much. Dhillon has no idea what happened to Harris to cause the change; drink, drugs, a blow to the head, something entirely different? But whatever the cause, there’s been a big switch, and not for the better.
Dhillon adds that some people who did opposition research on Kamala back in those days found that as a prosecutor she had tried eight cases in Alameda and two in San Francisco. They couldn’t find a record of any more than that, although it’s possible they missed some. I include this because people here were wondering a while back about how many cases Harris has actually prosecuted.
You can also see some discussion of the issue of “what happened to Kamala?” in this tweet and the responses to it.
It would be interesting to see how much information there is about Kamala’s support or not to California sending male prisoners into female prisons.
Trump should make a huge deal out of this. There is a video I saw a while back of Biden supporting transgenders in women’s prisons.
I made it to the 21 minute time marker, and have been meaning to return to it.
Harmeet answers Tucker’s question about those 8 cases in Alameda: She says it’s a very low number or rate of prosecution.
Also interesting are the several highly paid, little work, patronage jobs that Willy got for Kamala.
That’s fascinating that that Harmeet thinks that Kamala was intelligent and motivated, and then something changed.
I hated her performance at the Kavanaugh hearings, but she was, in that instance, the hard-charging prosecutor type. Even in her 2019 presidential run, she landed a zinger on Biden. Dhillon is pointing to a change in Kamala we can all see.
Re: the change in Kamala,
My impression is that currently she and the media staffers she chooses, think that the people they are trying to reach in public statements, interviews, and appearances are dumber than a bag of rocks. They seem to be targeting an intellectual age of about 8 – 15 year olds.
A secondary factor seems to be that the policies she is really interested in implementing are political losers. So she has to hide what she’s up to.
A third factor might be that she maybe believes that she can off-load all the heavy lifting to her staff, and she can just coast along most of the time. This is a rather key issue in various types of leadership. It’s a reason why voters need to look for a proven history and track record, rather than simply vote on single issues or identity politics.
Re: the change in Kamala,
I’ve noticed the same thing. I believed that Kamala was Obama 2.0 in terms of political talent until she crashed and burned in the 2020 Dem primaries (not even making it to 2020). Maybe the stage is just too big.
Another (related) theory – she just doesn’t have much experience in politics outside of deep, deep blue California. She was actually surging in 2019 until Tulsi nailed her and she couldn’t respond. Maybe Tulsi’s shot was the first time she’d ever actually taken a political punch, and she’s been rattled ever since. It would be a heck of a thing to spend 30+ years in public life only to discover that you have the political equivalent of a glass jaw.
My recollection of the “pre-VP Kamala Harris” is that she was mentally sharper then than she is now. She just plain will NOT answer questions now. Even questions that she should be able to answer with a quick yes or no. It’s like she’s afraid Barack or someone will call her up after an interview and tell her to shut up. Truly different.
And yes, the policies she supports now are indeed losers.
But remember what Glenn Reynolds says: don’t get cocky. Make sure you vote.
One last word: Biden should have passed over her as VP just on the basis of how she treated Kavanaugh. Women knew they could do that without any repercussions, though, because of “Me too”.
Biden probably picked her in part *because* of the way she treated Kavanaugh. That’s how Democrats roll.
But remember what Glenn Reynolds says: don’t get cocky. Make sure you vote.
The early voting center in my neighborhood has a long line. A friend told me she stood in line for an hour.
I vote on election day. The last time, there was no line whatsoever.
What happened to Kamala (Que mala- so bad)? I like Bauxite’s theory that she never had any substantial opposition in Deep Demo California, and couldn’t adjust to the change from California to the national stage, where opposition to a candidate is a daily occurrence.
There’s been all sorts of rumors about her overindulging in alcohol, perhaps as a way to deal with anxiety. And there are times in various interviews and public speaking events were it certainly *seems* like she could be a little tipsy which may expain some of her strange behavior. But at the end of the day, they’re only rumors and at any rate I don’t know that drinking alone would explain her apparent total lack of ability to properly answer questions without collapsing into word salads or attacks against Trump that are totally irrelevent to the question at hand.
It’s odd. At times it seems as if she’s communicating like a highschool age girl might. Even with the excuse that perhaps she’s just not used to being challenged, it seems to me that any reasonably competent person who is running to be the most powerful person in the free world would at minimum be able to put in the effort to become more media trained and have plenty of answers to likley questions prepared and ready. It’s as if she doesn’t put any effort at all into such things. And if other rumors are true, she doesn’t. It’s as if she expects other people to carry her and becomes recalcitrant when they can’t.
Given all that, it’s a least possible that something else is going on with her mentally, but who knows?
I have not yet listened to the interview, but I will.
Regarding her change; I wrote a month or two ago about a newspaper article where a reporter interviewed classmates from her High School days in Montreal. She sounded great! Bubbly, studious, outgoing, fun and funny, thoughtful, considerate, universally liked. And nothing like the person and personality I see on my TV screen.
I believe Dhillon when she says there has been a major change.
“Too big a stage” definitely sounds like one likely reason for Harris’ “change” if indeed there has been one. That has happened to more than one politician and Harris got if not exactly a free ride a very cushy one in California politics before she had to face the national electorate.
Compounding this may be the fact that she was thrust into the race abruptly at the last minute with no time to prepare and is being advised by people who also made a last-minute change after more than three years of claiming Biden was “sharp as a tack”. Not a recipe for a well-organized, focused campaign. I tend to doubt the “drinking problem” theory. If that were the case it is likely that someone would have known about it, just as they had to know about Biden’s decline. They either would have sucked it up and stayed with Biden or picked someone else to run after dumping him though admittedly it would have been difficult to finesse around Harris.
I was skeptical, but there are clips online of the 2016 California senate debates.
Harris is very well-prepared and well-spoken. In 2016 California’s new electoral system was in effect. Harris’s opponent was another Democrat, Loretta Sanchez, and Sanchez was an incredibly bad candidate. Harris outshone her and, from what little I could see, she also outshone the three Republicans on stage.
Harris has changed a lot since then. One reason may be the Democrats got what they wanted under Biden. There’s not that much left in their agenda now unless they want to go full-on Bernie Sanders, which would lose them votes. Harris has her pet projects, but the Democrats are more of a status quo, stay the course party now and the course they’ve put us on hasn’t been very good for the country. That puts her in a very awkward position, trying to defend what can’t be defended very well, so she falls back on Trump and abortion. What else does she have?
Is there more to it than that? Sure. She is remarkably inarticulate now. I don’t know the reason. Maybe she drove away so many competent staffers that what she’s left with is the bottom of the barrel.
Perhaps a bad marriage? Emhoff sounds like a piece of work.
Well loretta sanchez was a terrible candidate how bad could the gope ones bee.
Regarding her decline, consider the following timing. Make of it what you will.
On Oct. 8, 2020 FiveThirtyEight analyzed the VP debate.
“Who Won The Vice Presidential Debate?”
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/harris-pence-vp-debate-poll/
“The verdict: While the debate didn’t really change how people are planning to vote, Harris did improve her favorability ratings. Debate watchers were more impressed with Harris’s performance than Pence’s, with 69 percent saying her performance was “very good” or “somewhat good,” compared to 60 percent who said the same for him. They were also more impressed with the policies she outlined.”
So Harris was articulate and persuasive enough.
If you have the stomach for it (I don’t) judge her performance for yourself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=GonXpUbJbz4
59 days later this occurred…
Dec 29, 2020
“Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on Tuesday received her first dose of the Moderna COVID -19 vaccine in front of the media as part of a growing effort to convince the American public the inoculations are safe.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhr956rFF64
IF Moderna’s ‘vaccine” did scramble Harris’ brain, I can’t but think it deserving for such a reprehensible person. While also dreading another rigged election resulting in 4 more years of being led by a cognitively challenged, inveterate liar.
Anti-anxiety meds combined with vodka.
I had two Moderna shots in early 2021. Still have unscrambled brains.
The answer may be simpler than we imagine. Perhaps she is suffering from an extreme case of impostor’s syndrome, plus being scared as hell of what happens if she loses.
Or worse, wins?
Re: Whatever Happened to Baby Kamala?
There’s an interesting story here. I hope to read a good account of it someday. Ray+Van+Dune may be right about impostor’s syndrome and fear.
Harris seems to be caught in some sort of Double Bind, Gregory Bateson’s psychological theory from the 60s/70s to explain schizophrenia, in which a person must satisfy contradictory social demands, is unable to do so, and therefore responds with confusion, distress or dysfunction.
Including word salad.
Word salad was not coined for Kamala Harris. It was originally a term to describe the disordered speech patterns of schizophrenics.
Does cheating her way into law school, needing a tutor and being in the 20% of her class that failed the bar square with smart?
Back in 2016, when she was supposedly more with it she failed to get any traction as a presidential candidate because she was too radical. I think she’s been told to tone that down this go round but that radicalism is so part and parcel to who she is she can’t do it. I also think the main reason she’s being run is to get Barak Obama a fourth term in office. I’m starting to believe he’s the one actually calling the shots and that Biden is too mentally compromised. (There’s evidence that he was showing symptoms of mental decline long before 2020.)
Regarding Kamala’s history of mental decline, I can only echo what the great philosopher and box wine connisseur Hillary Clinton once said when asked a question about her role in l’affaire Benghazi, “What difference, at this point does it make?” I care nothing for her past achievements or failures, her mental acuity or deficiencies, but only that she is at present posing an acute and serious challenge to the continuation of America as a viable nation-state. So people need to get out and vote against her as if their lives depended on it, because they do.
Watched the whole thing (at 1.25x). Well worth it.
I think the “change” in Kamala is that she was never really challenged until she entered national politics.
When her achievements were handed to her on a silver platter, she projected strength. But when she began facing real opposition and scrutiny in 2020, her psychological weakness and inability to skillfully lie were exposed.
When you are in a blue state, with a blue generally-supportive media, you can look and sound good. When Kamala is talking to people who are “with” her agenda she sounds comfortable, confident, empathetic — like the clip where they are talking about transing the prisoners — that Trump ad is so effective precisely because it is clearly “her” in her comfort zone.
Coming to DC, she becomes a junior Senator, you aren’t really in charge of anything. You are taking direction from leadership, and your staff and committee staff does all the work; you are just in charge of fundraising and schmoozing, where she was also very successful. She had a fairly lackluster legislative record. In the blue states when you have a compliant media, you move your message through narrative building. Obama came out of IL politics, where you can see the combination of agitation groups get media attention which drives the legislation you had planned which pushes the law forward because of the demand to “do something!” No doubt in my opinion that the Jussie Smollet thing was part of an orchestrated effort to create a media narrative to get her anti-lynching bill passed–but that got screwed up.
The Tulsi thing is probably the first time she ever did have to deal with hostilty from her own side of the aisle, and she flubbed it. She did ok vs. Pence because she had her prepped talking points, and she can clearly repeat the talking points.
Moving into the VP role, she was likewise likely isolated and not in charge of anything, really; staff does everything, and now it has to be dictated by the Biden staffers too.
With Trump, on this go-round, the usual media narrative building approach just isn’t sticking (or the people responsible for helping create it themselves screw something up, eg showing the teleprompter, Maria Shriver admitting the questions are predetermined). I am sure that as part of her desire to be in control, she has been prepped within an inch of her life; the problem is that she knows as part of that preparation that her natural jumping point (we don’t need the Jesus-lovers at this rally) forces her to run from her comfort zone on policy. So it isn’t surprising that when she has to step up she babbles and loses it.
I saw this article this morning about Comrade Harris father. I had assumed he was dead since I have never heard anything about him in the media. Maybe I just missed it, but If his name was Trump we would probably know by now what he had for dinner last night.
https://pjmedia.com/scott-pinsker/2024/10/27/theres-something-weird-going-on-about-the-media-coverage-of-kamala-harris-and-her-marxist-father-n4933690#google_vignette