Something struck me as odd the other day while watching her pretending to be on a phone call as she ran away from the press: She’s saluting and being saluted by the military members at the bottom of the stairs. She’s not President. Whoever the President is at any given moment is the Commander-in-Chief of the US military, but a vice president has no military rank whatsoever; they’re not in the chain of command.
I don’t know if former VPs were routinely saluted or not, as there isn’t a trove of footage of them leaving planes, but I couldn’t help but wonder if the military has been ordered to salute Harris as part of the campaign to make her come off as presidential?
I only had that thought because Kamala Harris has often played President in public lately. She sat at the table in place of President Biden at FEMA after Hurricane Helene, which, were it not political, would be humiliating for an egomaniac like Biden. After fundraising and before campaigning in Wisconsin, she even went to North Carolina for a photo-op and to announce a $750 “grant” for people who have no stores left standing to spend it.
Playing President, hoping that the public gets used to the idea, is a good strategy, but only for someone up to the job. Kamala Harris is not up to the job. Very few people in politics are as uniquely horrible off-script as she is.
This week, her
teleprompter malfunctioned, and she couldn’t remember enough of her stump speech, one she’s likely delivered a dozen times, to say anything other than repeating the number of days until the election.
In another interview with local media in the Pittsburgh area, she was asked a basic question about US Steel being sold to Nippon Steel, a Japanese company, and her answer was singularly awful. It’s THE issue in the area, as the livelihoods of thousands of families hang in the balance. Even though she’s weighed in on it in the past, her answer sounded like a kid writing everything they can remember on a topic hoping to get partial credit on an essay test they didn’t study for.
