Pun Salad

Katherine Mangu-Ward notes Hanlon's Razor Is Getting Rusty in the 2024 Election.

Kudos to KMW for crediting Heinlein. (But were Heinlein and Hanlon ever seen in the same room together?)

Our regular Sunday feature shows that Kamala did herself no favors with the CNN interview, at least not with the folks betting their own money:

So basically, it's a coin flip.

Also of note:

• But what if her plan is to have no plan? Jim Geraghty is wonderfully old-fashioned about some things: Kamala Harris Breaks the Taboo on Running for President without a Plan.

  Does anything a presidential candidate says on the campaign trail matter? Or is the Harris campaign “ahead of the curve” in a way, by behaving as if there’s no point in laying out policy proposals during a presidential campaign, because once she’s in office, she can and will do whatever she wants, and whatever she has enough congressional support to pass?

  My Washington Post colleague Jason Willick argues that while new presidents can break promises they made on the campaign trail, the point of getting them to make these promises is to fence them in once they’re in office, and to create a penalty for deviating from their stated positions:

  The mainstream media has significant power to shape the behavior of Democratic presidential candidates, as the frenzy that expelled Biden from the race showed. If liberal outlets could embarrass Biden into stepping aside, they could also embarrass Harris into engaging in a modicum of policy discussion.

  But it’s important to be clear-eyed about the reason such discussion is urgent and necessary: to box Harris in, extracting commitments not only of what she would do but of what she wouldn’t. Of course, Harris is not interested in having her mandate limited in this way, but with political guardrails eroding, that’s precisely the purpose of a free press.

  Like the old poster on Fox Mulder’s wall in The X-Files, “I want to believe.” But I’m not sure I believe.

  Speaking about what we don't believe: I don't believe Kamala has any guiding principles. Her only guide is her ambition.

• Remember the "phony campaign"? Those candidate-name links in the above table still go to Google's search result to the name plus "phony". And the top link for Kamala's result is Tim Murtaugh's op-ed at the Washington Times, headlined Harris' problem: She's a complete phony.

  Why that's right up our (old) alley!

  Her political problem was always simple to identify but difficult to solve. Her policy positions, many of which have been part of her public record for decades, are radically out of step with those of most Americans, and trying to renounce them won’t be remotely believable.

  So, in the lead-up to the CNN interview, her staff laid the groundwork for her and notified reporters on background that the candidate had allegedly changed her views on some big things.

  Mind you, these new positions aren’t true or accurate because, as a California Democrat, she has never believed such things. But this will be her strategy, and it is dishonest.

  For example, how will she ever convince natural gas workers in western Pennsylvania that she supports fracking to protect their jobs when she hasn’t and doesn’t?

  In fact, she was adamantly and emphatically against fracking when she ran for president early in the 2020 Democratic primary cycle (she bowed out in December 2019), and she was an original co-sponsor of the Green New Deal, which sets its sights on eliminating fossil-fuel use.

  A list of her other flipflops follows. Bottom line:

  he truth is that Ms. Harris has never held any of these points of view, and she doesn’t hold them now. There is no reason for anyone to take her word on any policy pronouncement because she has often lied about her intentions.

  Breaking her media boycott in a joint CNN interview with Mr. Walz, serving as a human shield of sorts by his presence, does nothing to alleviate all of this, because the facts are what they are.

  Ms. Harris has a problem. She’s a San Francisco liberal pretending not to be one. And no one should buy it.

• Vacuity, thy name is Kamala. She doesn't hold those "San Francisco liberal" positions out of some long process of thoughtful consideration, though. Jeffrey Blehar takes the single revelation from her CNN interview: The CNN Interview Revealed Only That Kamala Harris Is as Vacuous as Her Campaign.

  We have been waiting ever since the day Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race for Kamala Harris to sit down in front of a camera and take questions from an interviewer. And if nothing else, we have learned why: In the friendliest possible format — a joint interview with VP nominee and emotional-support midwesterner Tim Walz, conducted by Dana Bash with the delicacy of an ornithologist gently hand-feeding hatchling chicks — Harris has revealed that her gaseously mindless word-cloud of a campaign is in fact an accurate reflection of her own personal vacuousness.

  To be sure, Harris did not memorably self-destruct tonight. Whatever her failings, they are not those of Joe Biden, who couldn’t even articulate his words without slurring by the end. Her inarticulateness tonight was of the sort already known to be a Harris trademark, the endless jumble of nonsensical, comically vapid stock language. When she could fall back on a memorized list of talking points, she presented somewhat normally; the second she was required to respond directly to a question, then she began to spin out otiose nonsense like a pasta chef catering a Sicilian banquet. You could practically see the gears turning inside her head as she cast her eyes downward, stared laser-beams into the floor, and groped for cliches. She was more muted tonight than usual — her aides clearly ordered her never to display mirth under any circumstances, for fear the Kamala Kackle might emerge — and as a result, while she simulated sobriety for the most part, her body language was pronouncedly downbeat.

  And if you're into food metaphors, Blehar also mentions the interviewer's "cream puff" questions, and Kamala's resulting "word salad".

• Same place as her interview bounce, I think. Ed Morrissey has a (rhetorical, I think) question: Say, Where's Kamala's Convention Bounce?

  Did the Democrat convention boost Kamala Harris' poll numbers? Yes, and also no. Or no, and also yes, depending on what one watches.

  It's been a while since we took a look at polling in the race, and honestly, perhaps it's still too soon to look at the numbers for any conclusions or predictions about where the race is heading. The replacement of Joe Biden with Kamala Harris five weeks ago turned this into a new contest, and until Harris sets out her agenda for a new term as president, most of the numbers are just, well ... vibes.

  Of course, that's why Democrats keep hiding Kamala from reporters. Vibes may be all they have for victory after four years of Bidenomics and foreign-policy disasters.

  Confession: I'm not feeling any vibes. From either candidate.

• I'd like to make something out of all this. Maybe Veronique de Rugy can help out: What to Make of Harris Campaign's Embrace of Freedom.

  Democrats are embracing freedom and love of country as their campaign message. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz took the stage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and announced that the difference between Republicans and Democrats is "freedom." Similarly, Vice President Kamala Harris insisted that Democrats "believe in freedom, opportunity, and the promise of America." She added that her greatest privilege is being an American.

  With the GOP's old mix of freedom and optimism no longer front and center, I am just glad that someone, anyone, in these elections is willing to loudly say that America is indeed the greatest country there is. Millions of immigrants like me have left everything behind precisely because they believe this to be so. And many millions more would love to come and experience the American dream.

  At least there's one candidate that's willing to at least pretend that the USA is the greatest country in the world.