A new word salad forward

Maria Shriver moderated a series of conversations with Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania on Monday. Someone cruelly mocked it as a roundtable of women whose husbands knocked up their nannies. To do that, however, you have to leave Cheney out of the picture. Her participation in the roundtable is its own form of punishment.

Below is a clip from one of Monday’s events. Vice President Harris advised the audience: “We cannot despair.” Why is this counsel necessary? One may infer that the joy has temporarily gone missing from the Harris presidential campaign. Not to say it won’t return, but one cannot miss the pall that has settled over her at the moment.

The counsel to resist desperation is accompanied by Harris’s exposition of “the duality of democracy.” She wants to sound smart, but her comments are stupid. The form of our government is a constitutional republic. It seeks to protect us from the perils of majority rule.

On a personal note, the thought that we might get four years of this hash with Harris in the office of the presidency brings me to the verge of despair, but I survived eight years of Barack Obama. As Obama’s return to the stump reminds us, he has yet to say anything smart and he does not go down smoothly either. He mixes hectoring and condescension in roughly equal proportions. However, Harris adds a maudlin sing-song that aggravates our resistance, to borrow a term.

Seeing Liz Cheney suffer through this and applaud at the end is a saving grace. What rank humiliation.

The Obama handlers on the Harris campaign must be immune to the Harris word salad phenomenon that makes her a laughingstock. Has no one advised her that she should knock it off?

Our incumbent vice president holds herself out as offering “a new way forward.” I’ll call this a new word salad forward, but it sounds familiar. She’s recycling her deep thoughts in a newly somber tone.

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