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Yes.
Kamala Harris has been a bad speaker for most of her public career. It's like being confused about why a politician known for gaffes continues to make gaffes. The quality is meeting expectation.
In turn, Harris' rise to her current position is largely the result of two things largely indifferent to her public speaking skills: Democratic Party political faction alliances of the 2020 election cycle, and campaign finance laws in the 2024.
In 2020, where Harris bombed pretty early in no small part because of her propensity to word salad, Biden's victory in the Democratic primaries was hinged on the support of the African American wing of the Democratic party, particularly specific political machines. The quid for the quo was rewarding allies of the allies with places in the administration. Part of that was the selection of Harris for Vice President, as she met various political faction interests (most notably known, but oversimplified to, Biden's announcement of his vice president criteria). Harris was a VP selection to balance internal party politics, not her speaking role. If anything, her lack of speaking skills was an asset, as it reduced the threat / feelings of being slighted to those who didn't get an ally into the VP slot, and Harris was so weak as to not threaten to overshadow Biden as a more ambitious VP might have. (Even in his fall, Biden's fall is generally believed to have been much more at the instigation of Party Elders, not Kamala herself.)
In 2024, Harris's ascension largely revolves around campaign finance limitations, in that when Biden was pressured to step down from the race, she was the only potential candidate who could legally utilize the Biden campaign fund without potential legal risk freezing a pillar of the Democratic campaign. As most sitting Presidents do, Biden's control of the presidential campaign relied on control of the money, which was under the legal control of the Biden-Harris campaign, as opposed to the Democratic Party. If, and when, Biden was pressured to drop out, the Democratic Party leaders who pressured him to couldn't demand control of the money already raised. In a choice between a possibly bitterly contested / coalition-fracturing contested convention, in which the huge fundraising sums wouldn't be usable, or between a better funded and smoother party politics, Harris was the beneficiary regardless of speaking skills.
OK, she's a bad speaker, we all knew that: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/09/29/vp-harris-hails-us-alliance-north-korea-speech-gaffe/10460822002/
That's an embarrassing mistake, maybe she could have misspoken. But past a certain point we have to wonder whether there is anything in her head at all.
Kamala enjoys the favour of the media establishment. She had plenty of time to prepare for this. She knew what kind of questions they were going to ask her. She could have given some convincing lies and hope nobody would fact-check her, that's a strategy. A primary plank of her campaign is lying about Trump's plans to ban abortion. Trump himself is no stranger to lies, they're a vital political tool.
But she isn't even capable of that!
It might even be edited to look a little better than it actually was, people have been remarking that the interview was shorter than expected. That was why I was confused, wondering how Kamala could answer the same question twice.
Why, besides academic curiosity? After all, how much does "whether there is anything in her head" even matter? It's not like the President is actually in charge of anything, or serves any important purposes. (Sure, the rules on paper say POTUS matters, but those don't matter, and the rules as actually played in DC are completely different.)
I continue to maintain that this is all irrelevant, because democracy is fake, election outcomes don't really matter, power is all in the hands of permanent, unelected apparatchiks in various powerful institutions, and we're all powerless to do anything about it. "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." Call them "elites," call them "the swamp," call them the "deep state", call them whatever — all that matters is they are the strong, who will do whatever they want, and the rest of us are the weak, who can only suffer.
Isn't it a national humiliation to have a president who can't string a sentence together unscripted? All these people just saying 'oh yeah the country basically doesn't have a leader, this is fine actually' seem bizarre to me.
The whole point of having a leader is that this is the person who makes the calls, the final arbitrator, the one who decides on exceptions, makes quick decisions. A blob can't decide things coherently, a deep state can't plan anything out. Suppose the Pentagon wants to dump Zelensky and the Department of State wants to prop him up - who resolves this? Do they just go and do their own thing? The Department of Energy and big tech want more nuclear plants, the green faction wants more solar - what happens? Does the US buy solar panels from China or not? These questions need to be unambiguously decided by somebody, not left to a bunch of fractious court eunuchs.
The horse needs a rider, the newspaper needs an editor, the ship needs a captain. Throwing your hands up and saying 'oh well it's a clownshow anyway' misses the point that the clownshow is going to get a lot more chaotic if the ringmaster is unable to grapple with the job and delegates it to... who? The Smoking Man? The chaotic, aimless situation under Biden will keep entrenching and metastatizing as the govt runs away with itself.
And what I keep seeing people argue, in various contexts, is that for many people, you can't give a human being — any human being — this sort of power, not because they can abuse it to do evil things, but because they will abuse it to do evil things. Any authority not carefully laundered through procedures, algorithms, consensus-building, and all the rest of Weberian bureaucratization is, in this view, automatically tyrannical. (Hence why many in this set seem to hold machine rule by AI as their ideal government.)
Looking at the many past conflicts between "the red empire of the bases" and "the blue empire of the consulates" — as the dreaded Jim calls it — nobody resolves it, and, yes, they each do their thing. (Usually, the State Department ends up winning. Because for the Pentagon, the outgroup is whatever enemy we're fighting; while for the folks at the State Department, those guys are the fargroup, and the outgroup is the Pentagon.)
Lawfare, bureaucratic infighting, gridlock.
Yes, it will. It's only going to keep getting worse; that's the nature of government under Weberian rationalization.
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The same thing happened with the Dana Bash CNN interview. They clearly left a lot on the cutting room floor. She is a midwit. Basic 100 IQ person who through a combination of social striving, whoring, and being the right skin tone and gender at the right moment has ascended to almost be president. Sad state of affairs.
I doubt she is 100 iq. She did pass the bar. I would guess 110-115
There have been rumors circulating for a bit, at least on right-wing Twitter, that Kamala has a serious drinking and/or pills problem. That for many public appearances she’s on some combination of substances in order to quell her paralyzing anxiety. I have absolutely no idea if any of this is true, but if it is then it could explain why someone who, in her youth, was fairly cognitively acute could now, decades later, have lost a lot of that acuity or could be unable to demonstrate it when under the influence.
Yes because she laughs a lot and speaks in an odd manner; and seems confused or nervous at times. There was some leak about her asking her staff to put on a role-play dinner to help ease her nerves prior to meeting with some official. But it would be odd for someone so anxious to be also so ambitious and seeking the limelight. And if she was drunk or under medication I think she would seem worse somehow.
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Didn’t she fail the first time?
She is also 60.
100 might be too low but she clearly is lower than 115 IQ.
The California Bar pass rate is about 1/3, including repeat testers.
Edit: Some other sites are giving me different numbers, about 50% here. But still I would argue knowing the general pass rate is important context.
That is for the February bar exam. Most new lawyers out of law school would be testing in July while those who failed in July would retest in February. I suspect that if you fail once the odds are good that you will fail again.
July 2023 pass rate was 51% and the overall pass rate seems to be between 40% and 50% depending on year.
https://www.calbar.ca.gov/Portals/0/documents/admissions/Examinations/July-2023-CBX-Statistics.pdf
Fair. I actually did add most of that in an edit, because I do want to make sure I have my numbers right.
Still, I'm aware Kamala is not liked here, and I'm not that impressed by her either. But it seems a bit much to act like anyone at barely above average intelligence should be able to go to law school and pass the bar on the first try, when half of law school students couldn't.
The problem with bar exams isn't necessarily how difficult they are (the questions will be significantly easier than the ones you've been answering in your law school exams for three years already -- the logistical pain of dealing with the neurotic complaints of 10,000 law grads over every potentially ambiguous questions means everything is presented extremely straight-forwardly). It's that bar exams might ask you about random areas of the law youve never bothered studying because who the fuck wants to waste time in family law when you intend to be a commercial litigator.
Whenever a high-profile politician turns out to have failed the bar on their first attempt (surprisingly common), my assumption is that they were overconfident and/or already busy at whatever prestigious job they had lined up for after law school, blew off the bar prep, then got unlucky when the essay questions were all on subjects they never took.
No one that successful is going to be dumb enough that they can't pass the bar if they bother to actually put in the minimum expected effort. But they are arrogant enough to think they can skip doing the minimum expected effort.
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I didn’t know she failed it, is that official or just a rumour?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fact-check-true-claim-about-harris-failing-bar-exam-on-first-try-and-barretts-law-school-rank/ar-BB1qCPIx
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