Former Obama White House adviser David Axelrod said Vice President Kamala Harris turned in a “mixed” performance at a CNN town hall Wednesday evening, at times offering up an evasive “word salad” as she avoided answering questions from moderator Anderson Cooper.
“The things that would concern me is when she doesn’t want to answer a question, her habit is to kind of go to Word Salad City,” Axelrod told a CNN panel after the event. “She did that on a couple of answers. One was on Israel, Anderson asked a direct question: ‘Would you be stronger on Israel than Trump?’ And there was a seven-minute answer, but none of it related to the question he was asking.”
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“On immigration, I thought she missed an opportunity because she acknowledged no concerns about any of the administration’s policies and that’s a mistake,” he added. “Sometimes you have to concede things. And she didn’t concede much.”
Harris has been criticized for failing several times to clearly answer how her administration and policies might differentiate from President Joe Biden.
Earlier this month, during an interview on ABC’s The View, she said that “there is not a thing that comes to mind” when pressed about what she would have done differently than Biden over the last four years.
Even high-profile political surrogates, like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, have dodged the question.
When Cooper asked Harris a basic question that commonly appears in job interviews—if she could name a mistake in her political life, or even just her life in general—she gave a bumbling reply that began with an acknowledgment that parents “make lots of mistakes” and then ended with her asserting that she is “well-versed on issues.” (In fairness, Cooper noted former President Donald Trump, Harris’ Republican opponent, rarely if ever admits mistakes.)
Axelrod also criticized Harris for failing to relate to the people who asked questions at the town hall. “She didn’t do a lot of that,” he said. “She didn’t ask them questions. She didn’t address them particularly so she was giving set pieces too much.”
Not all was bad, however, on what was a “mixed night” according to the former Obama adviser. He praised Harris for being “very strong coming out of the gate” and for being well prepared to hammer Trump on revelations from his former chief of staff, retired U.S. Marine Corps general John Kelly, who called Trump a “fascist” who wanted to have generals like Adolf Hitler’s.
Harris made sure to agree with Kelly’s sentiment and press the issue. “She was very strong on abortion rights, because she feels passionately about it,” added Axelrod. “She was great on long-term care for the elderly.”
He added that Harris finished the town hall on a note he thought her campaign should capitalize on: “She said ‘[Trump will] have an enemies list and I’ll have a to-do list, and the to-do list is going to be the concerns you mentioned tonight.’ I think that is a fundamental argument here, who is gonna actually work on the stuff that is gonna impact positively on your life.”