Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris responded to a question from ABC's Robin Roberts last week, and the way she did signals one of the biggest problems in politics today.
Roberts asked Senator Harris about her 2009 book, Smart on Crime, in which she said that one of the things our nation needed to help deal with its crime problem was more police. "Do you still think that?" she asked. Sen. Harris proceeded to not answer the question in any way, shape or form in a classic example of a politician talking about what he or she wants to talk about, not what the interviewer asked about.
The problem is not necessarily with Sen. Harris's former or current position on what America needs to do in order to get a good handle on crime. People can observe similar situations and collections of evidence and reasoning yet draw different conclusions from them. Nor is the problem really the fact that Sen. Harris chickened out of answering Roberts' softball question. Roberts shouldn't have let her blather on (and to the credit of Averi Harper, the author of the written story, she calls Sen. Harris's non-answer a non-answer), but agreeable media folks have always allowed politicians they liked to weasel their way out of tough questions.
No, the problem is that Sen. Harris could have done something very simple. She could have said, "Well, 2009 was a different time and the issues we face now need a different kind of solution." Or she might have said, "Based on what I knew then, that is what I thought. But we've obviously learned a lot in the last few years that's made me question whether or not I was on the right track." Or something similar.
Hell, she might even have told the truth and said, "Well, I was a district attorney who had an eye on being attorney general back then, so I said things that made me sound like a law-and-order person. Now I'm the Vice-Presidential nominee in a time where large chunks of our most vocal constituents hate cops, so I'm going to say something different." Sure, such a quote would be in every Republican ad buy between now and November. But some of those same large chunks of Democratic voters hate President Trump even more than they hate cops, and if beating him requires them to put a pandering authoritarian even they didn't like very much just one 77-year-old brain-surgery-survivor's heartbeat away from the presidency, well, then that's what they'll do. Sen. Harris openly admitting her duplicity would hardly matter.
But Sen. Harris did none of those things. Her response was a spinal-taffy tap dance she engaged in for one reason and one reason only: To avoid an admission she was wrong. Even though everyone knew that she was either wrong then or wrong now she couldn't admit it. Bill Clinton just couldn't admit he'd smoked pot in the 1970s, so he said he "didn't inhale." Barack Obama just couldn't admit he'd attended a church pastored by a raving bigot, so he said, "Gee, I must have missed those sermons." President Trump, of course, had this problem before he became a politician but he displays it daily.
Nobody likes to admit they were wrong, but for some reason political folks develop a terror of doing so like unto that which Adam Silver feels anytime someone says "Uyghur." And it's really a crippling flaw. The very first time some newbie office holder steps up to the mike in a situation where he or she should say, "I screwed up" but mouths something else demonstrates they are at best unperceptive and at worst cynical fibbers. And nobody, no matter what they say, really votes for such a person even if they mark that name on the ballot.. They just vote against that person's opponent.
No comments:
Post a Comment