At 79 years old, President Joe Biden regularly misspeaking may be understandable.
But what’s the deal with Vice President Kamala Harris? She’s just 57, and more and more, she throws out bizarre word salads that make no sense.
Her latest came last week following a meeting with the prime minister of Jamaica. The two talked about COVID-19 before Harris addressed the media.
“For Jamaica, one of the issues that has been presented as an issue that is economic in the way its impact has been the pandemic. … We will assist Jamaica in COVID recovery by assisting in terms of the recovery efforts in Jamaica that have been essential,” she told reporters after the meeting.
Say what now?
Harris, whose communications team has been bailing out of her office in droves — her 11th top aide announced last week that he’s leaving — had much the same head-scratching mishmash of garbled words with a bizarre speech in Louisiana.
“We were all doing a tour of the library here and talking about the significance of the passage of time, right?” Harris said while promoting internet access in rural areas. “The significance of the passage of time. So when you think about it, there is great significance to passage of time. There is such great significance to the passage of time when you think of a day in the life of our children.”
So wait, you’re saying there’s a passage of time, right?
It’s not just the word salads. Harris is prone to drop into baby talk when asked a question, as she did on a radio show called “The Morning Hustle” last month. She was asked to put the war in Ukraine in “layman’s terms,” which prompted her to say: “Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine so, basically, that’s wrong.”
And who can forget this great answer: “It is time for us to do what we have been doing and that time is every day. Every day it is time for us to agree.”
Or this one: “We must, together, work together to see where we are, where we are headed, where we are going and our vision for where we should be, but also see it as a moment, yes, to, together, address the challenges.”
Or another, when the vice president was asked about a plan to cut off oil imports from Russia.
“As you know, on this issue, for example, we applaud Germany in terms of what it has done as it relates to Nord Stream 2,” Harris said. “As it relates to what we need to do domestically as well as what we need to do in terms of this issue generally, we have, as the president said, to reevaluate what we’re doing in terms of strategic oil reserves here in the United States to make sure that it will not have an impact, or we can mitigate the impact on the American consumer.”
OK, gotcha.
The whole thing is reminiscent of Michael Scott, the boss in “The Office,” who once famously said, “Sometimes I’ll start a sentence and I don’t even know where it’s going. I just hope I find it along the way.”
Joseph Curl has covered politics for 35 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent, and ran the Drudge Report from 2010 to 2015. Send tips to [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @josephcurl.