‘Meaningless tripe’: Kamala Harris slammed for her ‘empty words’ in CNN interview

all right now I'm joined by political journalist John fun to break down everything that's just happened in this extraordinary interview John fund we've now had the big interview your reaction to What could only be called an absolute Symphony of platitudes well Camala Harris has graduated from the word salad School of rhetoric to the meaningless uh tripe School of rhetoric uh I've never heard so many empty words in recently in any interview from any presidential candidate uh the whole thing reminded me of an infomercial except that in an infomercial they actually try to sell the product and they actually often succeed in this case it was an infomercial that was completely void of content then now John I want to get your reaction to some of the specific bits of this here like this particular part which I thought was very telling when she's asked about Joe Biden's condition what she knew and if she regrets defending him you insisted that President Biden is extraordinarily strong given where we are now do you have any regrets about what you told the American people no not at all not at all I have um served with President Biden um for almost four years now and I'll tell you it's one of the greatest honors of my career truly um he cares so deeply he cares that's it's all that we care about it's all the big caring candidacy but this leaves a very big question here I mean how much did she know about Joe Biden's condition for all of these months and years that he was on the decline we're never going to know uh there is something in journalism called the rule of the followup James which is if the if the person you're asking the question of completely avoids the question you follow up to try to nail them down uh the thing that was missing from this in addition to tough hearted in questions was almost no follow-ups yeah and and and we didn't just also hear from comma Harris tonight we also heard from Tim Waltz who was sort of in this weird position to use that word weird um as sort of the emotional support puppy or something like that I was astounded though when we're talking about tough questions by this answer when he was asked about what he had said about whether or not he served in combat you said that you carried weapons in War but you have never deployed actually in a war zone a campaign official said that you misspoke did you my record speaks for itself but I think uh people are coming yet to know me I I speak like they do um I speak candidly I wear my emotions on my sleeve that's the problem John he just cared too much look Tim Waltz not only didn't answer any of the questions really that were asked of him the impression that the whole interview gave was that he was her lawyer accompanying of KLA Harris to a deposition to make sure that she didn't say something wrong or maybe perhaps a parent accompanying a student to a parent teacher conference to try to give as you say emotional support uh there was no reason for him to be there except one the interview would be shorter with two people rather than with one as it was the interview was 28 minutes CNN patted it of course to a full hour yeah no and and you know just talking about f questions there I was amazed that there was no follow-up questions about Tim Waltz and what he said about the rank at which he left the service no questions about him leaving the service and resigning his National Guard post before they shift out to a combat zone in either Iraq or Afghanistan again I feel like they're trying to put this all to bed here with one Pat answer and say now we never have to answer this again is this what they're trying to do well I'll tell you what they're trying to do they are as Mick bany mentioned dropping this interview just before a long Labor Day weekend where we'll get almost no attention then we have a debate on September 10th I think it will happen so there'll be no interviews between now and September 10th September 10th then debate will happen it'll let's just say it's a draw that's the most likely outcome and she will try because there'll only be six weeks left in the campaign she will try to skate and never do a one-on-one interview with a challenging journalist that will be the most amazing lack of transparency and accountability and ability of the American people to evaluate the candidates in since Richard Nixon ran the Watergate re-election campaign of 1972 hide the ball and hide hide the crimes and let me tell you we've had a lot more media since 1972 1972 we had three networks we had two national newspapers now we have the internet we have podcasts we have five six cable channels news channels and she will avoid all of them if she can through the entire campaign well now you know the question is is this going to be a winning strategy or not because I'm starting to look at some of the polls now and they suggest that maybe whatever kind of excitement bounce she got and Convention bounce she got is starting to wear off now there is a Fox News poll which shows that Kamala Harris has had big increases of support in uh Arizona and Georgia and Nevada but at the the same time though we're also seeing other polls such as the Nate silver aggregation of polls put a model in place that says that actually now Trump is more likely to win um where do you take all of these polls at the moment and are you surprised at all that they seem to be coming back some of them at least in the Trump direction we keep seeing polls misjudge the final result in fact in Britain they finally have done an analysis of the poll in the labor party victory last month in Britain what do they show they show the polls were off by four and a half points at predicting the labor party's percentage of Victory uh first of all Donald Trump is probably going to do better than his polls in the final result uh because that's what always happens and there's the shy Trump voter secondly the state polls don't have enough people to really have anything that's meaningful Beyond a margin of error and lastly um we have to get to the first debate for people to actually have an understanding of who this Cala Harris is other than this Pleasant Visage and this politics of joy that we're seeing on the screen uh that people are getting so I say if you have to look at the polls I mean it's like a car accident you know you shouldn't look but you do anyway if you have to look at them go to Real Clear Politics and look at their polling averages which smooth out all the polls not just focus on one and secondly don't look at any of the polls seriously until after the debate John fun thank you so much for your time as always