Kamala's Interview Was A Permission Slip

Back in June, I noted that Joe's episodes on his trips to Europe early in the month amounted to a "permission slip" that allowed polite opinion to address openly the issue of Joe's increasingly apparent cognitive decline that had been on everyone's mind, but nobody up to then had been allowed to discuss. What I noted at the time was that Gutfeld had begun to incorporate Biden poopy-pants jokes into almost every night's routine -- and even a comic needs permission for this sort of thing. But just last night, Gutfeld said,

Some people dispute the claim thatt Kamala Harris worked at McDonald's in the past. Meanwhile McDonald's claims their records show just one clown working here.

He ran a acreen shot of Ronald McDonald. Even a comic needs permission for this sort of thing. The extent of the damage from Kamala's CNN interview slowly began to be visible only over the course of yesterday. For instance, at The National Review,

National Review senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke, on today’s edition of The Editors, told listeners that Kamala Harris’s Thursday interview with CNN “was a catastrophe because it exposed the case against her as being true.”

“I’m going to dissent from the ‘it was fine’ judgment that I’ve seen around the web and heard on this podcast — and rendered after her convention speech myself — and say that this was a catastrophe,” said Cooke.

“That was the best she could do.”

As Cooke pointed out, “All of the advantages that were conferred upon her by Dana Bash’s easy questioning, by the editing, by the combination of interview and infomercial that they put together, yielded that. The word salad you just mentioned was the first clip CNN released, the highlight. . . . That. That was the best that she could do.”

. . . “Harris is clearly absolutely incapable of doing anything impressive. And that interview showed it.”

Oddly, Cooke's take that the interview was supposed to provide her with every advantage, but she blew it anyhow, echoes the general impression observers drew from Biden's disastrous June 27 debate -- the muted mics, lack of audience, and hostile moderators were presumably set up to favor Biden and put Trump at a disadvantage -- but Biden blew it anyhow.

Brandon Morse at Red State points out the basic problem:

Every time the Harris campaign exposes their candidate to the public, the public reacts negatively. It happened after the DNC as well.

The syrupy tone, the nasal voice, the phony black accent, all rub people the wrong way, but they're hesitant to admit it. After all, she's the Vice President of the United States, a female, and notionally African-American. People need special permission to acknowledge what everyhone is nevertheless thinking.

The same thing happened with Biden. What people saw was a doddering, vain, querulous old man who just wasn't likeable, but they weren't going to admit it, especially not to a stranger over the phone. The polls changed hardly at all after the June 27 debate, when the insiders seem to have concluded, polls notwithstanding, that Joe had to go. And Joe kept arguing up to the day before he withdrew that the polls showed the race was a tossup.

I think we're going to see the polls continuing to show the race is a tossup, but there are events that nevertheless give people a permission slip to think otherwise. My guess is that Gutfeld is going to have a lot more Kamala jokes.