Vice President Kamala Harris struggled mightily with — and ultimately failed to answer — the first question put to her at the ABC News presidential debate that took place on September 10: Do you believe that the American people are better off now than they were four years ago?
Nearly two weeks later, during a Monday morning appearance on CNN, the Harris campaign’s senior spokesman Ian Sams made it clear that they were no closer to finding the answer to that particular question.
WATCH:
CNN: Kamala was asked at the debate if Americans are better off now than 4 years ago, and she refused to answer. So, are they?
HARRIS INTERN @IanSams: *incoherent word salad*
CNN: You didn't answer the question.
SAMS: She has a plan to bring costs down.
CNN: But they went up… pic.twitter.com/msNaQuA9pd
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) September 23, 2024
“The bottom line, here, when you look at a metric like grocery prices, they’re up still 20% compared to four years ago,” the CNN anchor pointed out. “And Harris was asked recently on the debate stage whether she thinks Americans are better off now than four years ago, and she didn’t directly answer that question. So I’ll ask you: Does she think Americans are better off now, or not?”
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Sams did not directly answer the question either, instead delivering the typical talking points — namely that Harris had an as-yet undisclosed “plan” to bring prices down — adding no details and giving no explanation as to why, despite being in office herself for the last three and a half years, no plan had yet been implemented to tackle that issue.
The anchor pushed back, noting that prices had, in fact, gone up under the Biden-Harris administration, and pressed Sams to answer the direct question.
Sams ignored the question entirely, saying that people who were running for president should be looking forward and telling the people what they planned to do rather than looking backward at the way things used to be and why that might be the case.
He concluded by suggesting that questions like that shouldn’t matter anyway, since the alternative to Harris was former President Donald Trump — whose time in office, it should be noted, was marked by record-low unemployment numbers, wage growth, and manageable inflation rates.
