On Wednesday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” Knowles talks about the failure of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. Video and partial transcript below:
But on that point, on 2020, on the leader of the free world and the hope for the future and the hope for 2020: Another one bites the dust. You’ve probably already seen this going around the Internet, Kamala Harris is officially out of the race.
It’s not significant, in terms of the actual election — no one thought that Kamala Harris was going to be able to claw her way out of the 2% in the polls that she had, but it does say something about the state of the Democratic Party right now. The fact that her candidacy flopped, her candidacy — which looked very good on paper — flopped. Tells you a lot about where we are.
Why did the candidacy look good on paper? Because the Left is obsessed with identity politics, racial identity, and sexual identity politics. Obviously, Kamala Harris checks those boxes. The Left is obsessed with unfettered immigration; Kamala Harris is the child of immigrants. In terms of presidential appeal, in terms of how these races tend to work, if you’ve been on the scene too long, generally that doesn’t bode well for you, especially in the Democratic Party.
Now think of Barack Obama, [who] goes up against Hillary Clinton. We all knew Hillary forever, she’d been around since the dawn of time … Barack Obama, very little was known about him, and that actually helped him. He was a better candidate because people didn’t know that much about him. They could project their hopes and dreams onto him — hope and change was the big theme of that campaign.
Same thing was true of Kamala Harris. People didn’t really know who she was. She was an attractive-looking candidate. She sounded pretty good when she wasn’t giving that awful cackling laugh, she had been attorney general, she had been a prosecutor, she had been a senator for about five minutes. Everything looked good about her campaign, except ideologically because Kamala Harris couldn’t pick a lane.
This could be the name of the 2020 Democratic primary — “Can you pick a lane?” Pick-a-lane primary, no one’s able to do it. They’re all veering left, they’re all veering center. Liz Warren, is she going to be a kind of establishment Harvard professor, or is she gonna be this radical leftist trying to go to the left? Bernie Sanders — Mayor Pete, is Mayor Pete going to be this radical person saying that if you don’t support abortion and gay marriage, you’re not a Christian? Or is he going to be the moderate guy in Joe Biden’s lane? Joe Biden himself, who is the moderate in the race, is Joe Biden going to lean into being a moderate, or is he going to support lifting the ban on taxpayer funding for abortion? That’s the trouble with this race.
One thing we’re seeing is it doesn’t hurt you to be in either of those lanes when Joe Biden is playing the moderate. He generally does pretty well when Bernie Sanders is playing the leftist — he generally does pretty well. But when you start to veer left and center and left and center, that’s when you fall apart, and that’s what happened to Kamala Harris.
Kamala Harris lost because of her own weaknesses — she also lost because Tulsi Gabbard absolutely shanked her during one of the Democratic debates. You can almost pinpoint there — there are two moments, I think that you can pinpoint when Kamala Harris’ campaign completely fell apart. One of them [was] at the hands of Tulsi Gabbard on CNN.
GABBARD: Senator Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president, but I’m deeply concerned about this record. There are too many examples to cite, but she put over fifteen hundred people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana. She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so, she kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California, and she fought to keep a cash bail system in place that impacts people in the worst kind of way.
GABBARD: When you are in a position to make a difference and an impact in these people’s lives, you did not. And worse yet, in the case of those who were on death row, innocent people — you actually blocked evidence from being revealed that would have freed them until you were forced to do. So there is no excuse for that, and the people who suffered under your reign as prosecutor, you owe them an apology.
Tulsi, stop it! Stop it, Tulsi, she’s already dead! So this was the attack, the attack on Kamala. Kamala was a cop, Kamala is too tough on crime, Kamala was throwing people into the prison system — that was the attack from the Left, which is funny that it’s made by Tulsi Gabbard, who is ostensibly more to the right of the Democratic Party on a number of issues. That was the hit that they were putting on Kamala. It worked very well, because Kamala played her whole campaign as though she’s going to prosecute the case against Donald Trump.
Right, she’s the tough prosecutor, she’s the serious candidate, she’s she’s not one of these hippy-dippy candidates, she’s going to be really tough. And what Tulsi Gabbard did is she didn’t go for Kamala’s weaknesses, exactly. She went for her strengths — Kamala is running, “I’m the ex-attorney general, had a good career as a prosecutor,” and Tulsi goes for that strength. Now, if Kamala were a smart candidate, she would have leaned into that. She would have said “Yes, damn right, I put criminals in jail and I’m going to put the biggest criminal in America who’s sitting in the White House, whose name is Donald Trump. I know, put that guy in jail.” It would have kind of done what Donald Trump did in 2016, right.
Donald Trump in 2016, when Hillary Clinton said, “I don’t want to live in an America where you’re president,” Trump said, “Yeah, that’s because you’d be in jail.” He’s leaning right into it, that’s what Kamala Harris should have done. Instead, she didn’t, she goes on the Breakfast Club, this popular radio show, and talks about how much she loves smoking joints, and blunts, and listening to Snoop Dogg.
Listen to full episodes of “The Michael Knowles Show” on iTunes.