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Kamala is an exceptionally dumb politician. She mostly never knows what she's talking about. Even when she does she can't avoid noodles spilling out of her mouth. This was all basically priced-in until August, when for political reasons the Democrat base pretended she was this amazing undiscovered talent. "Joy!" But we knew this already. I predicted in August that it wouldn't last until November, and here we are.
I think Kamala is actually kind of likeable for being so dumb. Her answer the kther week about shooting a criminal with her very real gun is one example. Another is a rumor I saw going around that the once-great White House Cocaine was actually hers, not Hunter Biden's. Well, whatever, probably not, but granted that she's a normal untalented striver who somehow ended up as VP, that implies a different path for her to run on. Briefing her on policy issues way out of her depth isn't working.
I've heard she's deeply unlikeable in private and chews through her staff. Which makes me wonder how she got this far. Somebody has to like her!
Compare Kamala's world salad to other politicians. Trump rambles because he is always juggling three or four different conversations, and he doesn't bother with the political cliches that tie everything together. But he's basically perfectly intelligible, which is how we get regular two-movies-one-screen on partisan lines. Biden rambles because he's going senile, but speaks in perfectly normal sentences when he's having a good day. He was always fairly dumb by Washington standards, but it was an aggressive and belligerent dumbness that made him colorful and interesting. Obama almost never gave word salad unless he was away from his teleprompter at an unexpected moment. Hillary was too smart for this. And it's possible Bush was only incoherent when he wanted to look folksy.
I forget where, but I remember hearing some anecdote about how Bush was really smart and eloquent in private, and he'd talk about how he was usually just stammering when speaking in public because he was terrified and nervously choosing his words, because of how much could go wrong if the POTUS said something incorrect or damaging.
Looking back on his public performances it's clear that he absolutely wasn't dumb even if that was him at his best. The extent to which "Bush is a moron" took off as a meme is actually quite remarkable in retrospect.
Bush was also being compared to the hyper-articulate Bill Clinton, and with memories of his father's media-aided gaffes smoothing the path as well.
Don't you know you're not supposed to call America's first Black president "articulate"?
Randomly, I actually know a guy (who happens to be black) who was in the Arkansas All-State Honor Band with Bill in high school.
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And Al Gore too.
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You hear similar things about how HRC focus tested each word in public to death due to being burned badly in the past.
Not sure how seriously to take it. Or whether or not it's still a failure of intelligence and character worth noting.
HRC would never have gotten "deplorables" past a focus group, even if they'd missed all the other hints in her speeches that pointed in the same direction.
She had more than enough intelligence that she could have done a competent job without anyone double-checking her every word; her problem was that she was aware of her intelligence and she let that awareness fester into contempt rather than compassion for those not so endowed. That is a failure of character which she should have worked on, but of all the people in the world she was probably the most painfully aware that it's possible to be a great politician and a decent president without bothering to work on your failures of character. She just didn't realize that voters who will forgive failings like "contempt for your spouse" still won't forgive failings like "contempt for us". I think it was someone on TheMotte who pointed out that true meritocracy can be actually much worse than ending up with an incompetent candidate, if a competent person picked on merit would be using their competence in opposition to your values rather than in support of them.
IIRC, wasn't that said at a private donor event and someone released a surreptitious recording? That is, it was never intended for a wide or unfriendly audience. Or am I getting it mixed up with Obama's "God, Guns any Gays" remark?
"LGBT for Hillary", Barbara Streisand performing, $1,200 per "Friend"-level ticket for the cheapest seats, so definitely not for a wide or unfriendly audience. But it was still the keynote speech at a gala widely reported a month in advance, not an off-the-cuff unprepared remark among a select group of actual friends. I vaguely recall learning that early 19th century Presidential candidates would make one set of promises to crowds in Northern states and another set to crowds in Southern ones, but that kind of thing shouldn't have survived for very long after the telegraph, much less after the private-recording-device-in-everyone's-pocket.
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I had a vague recollection of the same thing, but I thought I might be confusing it with Romney's 47% remark that was surreptitiously recorded and released. From my Googling, Time doesn't mention any secret recordings for Hillary's remark. Says it was at a fundraiser, but it doesn't seem like it was a closed event, and a full transcript of her speech is also in the article, which points to it not being surreptitiously recorded.
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Her team’s polling models also assured her the “Blue Wall” states weren’t in play, and she ended up losing Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, without much personal campaigning in or money spent on those states. Trump got 258 electoral votes absent those three states, Hillary got 227, and that trio was worth 46.
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Trump is intelligible in the sense that, if you're already familiar with the context he's speaking in, you can follow what he's trying to say. However, of you're not, you'll be lost.
His chatter about the Charlottesville fact check in the Biden debate made it exceptionally clear that he struggles to actually bring a point home and land it. If you knew already that Snopes had changed the status of the fact check then you could follow perfectly well what was going on but, if you were coming in cold, his point came off very weak and diffuse.
Knee-jerk I disagreed. But to test this, I opened up the Lex Fridman interview, which I haven't listened to, and copied a random clip from the transcript without looking at the context:
So, yeah, without seeing what Lex said to prompt this, I have no fucking clue what the main point or thesis of this rambling is, or what it might be responding to. This bit as bad as anything Kamala says, tbh. Looks like total free assoication. (not word salad).
here's another one just to be fair:
This one is quite a bit easier, and pretty coherent.
He's easily coherent (sometimes moreso than Kamala), he just seems to have no concept of the difference between what's in his head and what might be in other people's heads. He often talks as if everyone is just as online and embedded in the right wing echo chamber as he is, referring to people and events off hand and just kind of assuming everyone understands what he's talking about. This works fine at rallies but it really doesn't with general audiences.
I think his main issue is the interview format in general. He's good at rallies because he controls the entire conversation there. He's also good at one-on-one discussion because he'll just overwhelm the person and schmooze them and it usually works very well. But when talking to one person for the benefit of an audience, neither of these work. If he schmoozes the interviewer that does nothing for the audience and if he takes control of the discussion then it looks like he's evading questions. Simply having a conversation on another person's terms, or at least as equals, seems very difficult to him. I can't stand hearing him in interviews.
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