We have to talk about Kamala Harris.

After I wrote about why Tim Walz is weird, many asked me to analyse Harris in the same way. This turns out to be a tall order. To begin with, Harris is a much more credible performer than Walz. She is merely an actor playing the part of a politician and not – like Walz – some kind of confused AI automaton aping the mannerisms and rhetoric of other actors playing the parts of politicians. To that comes the fact that most of Harris’s appearances have been highly scripted. She’s benefited from sympathetic interviewers, and in the last presidential debate, the moderators and even Donald Trump mostly failed to knock her off script. It’s no good merely to study lines that other people have written. The Politically Incorr... Brion McClanahan Best Price: $2.06 Buy New $9.95 (as of 05:25 UTC - Details)

Recently, though, the clouds have parted. The Harris campaign, worried about narrowing polls, have scheduled various conversational interviews, including one with a “television personality and comedian” who goes by the name of the first Frankish emperor and who also calls himself God. Amazingly, there is some worthwhile material in that appearance, but it’s sparse. Our god almost never follows up on his challenges and the informal setting allows Harris to just talk and talk and talk. Harris, you’ve surely noticed, really likes to talk; she is one of those people for whom speaking is primarily about expressing emotion and mood, and only secondarily about communicating anything.

Anyway, I was afraid I’d have to analyse that interview; you can imagine my trepidation and reluctance. On Wednesday, though, the heavens took pity on me, finally granting my wish in the form of the Fox interview with Bret Baier. This has everything I’ve been asking for: An aggressive and confrontational interviewer who presses his points, a format that denies Harris the opportunity to rehearse predigested scripts and fight her way out of corners with tides of tiresome verbiage, and questions that go beyond what our candidate is prepared to talk about.

Harris has a lot of trouble in this appearance. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it lays bare the central enigma of her candidacy. This is that Harris does not seem to be in charge of her own messaging. It is as if the American political establishment, in its zeal to defeat Trump, has produced via some benighted lab process his exact opposite, namely somebody who lacks all capacity for extemporaneous discourse. The Baier interview was indeed hostile, and even laden with some clever traps; the idea was clearly to give Harris the same kind of treatment that Trump usually receives. At the same time, Baier’s questions all addressed eminently predictable topics. None of them would’ve been remotely hard for a Hillary Clinton or a Barack Obama to deal with. Harris, however, just can’t say anything that hasn’t been approved by her campaign. The words literally won’t leave her mouth, which leaves her completely defenceless in the face of spontaneous challenges. It’s a quietly bizarre spectacle. Military Memoirs of A ... Alexander, Edward Porter Best Price: $11.65 Buy New $18.99 (as of 03:57 UTC - Details)

Equally bizarre are all the things Harris just isn’t prepared to discuss, even in a short interview of highly limited range. Her immigration talking points are so sparse that it’s comical. She wants to distance herself from the Biden administration but she can’t describe any concrete political differences between herself and the current president. And at the end, when Baier brings up Iran, she has almost nothing definite to say at all, although (as Baier himself notes) she claimed that Iran was America’s greatest adversary in her 60 Minutes interview just a few weeks ago. Beyond some standardised words about her wonderful plans to help young people with small businesses buy houses, all Harris has in her quiver is a great bundle of anti-Trump talking points. These crowd out literally everything else, and they also intrude on almost everything else Harris does talk about. To hear Harris speak, you’d think the forty-fifth president never left office, that he remains the dominant force in American politics, and that aside from the odd plans, being against Trump is the only thing Harris really stands far. She is a strange, hollow, low-resolution crayon candidate, and what is more, she may well win the election.

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