Vice President Kamala Harris may have just had her, “You didn’t build that,” moment.
In other words, she just uttered a line that’s likely to be used against her and President Joe Biden for the rest of their administration, and certainly during the upcoming midterm election season.
Harris this week celebrated the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. If confirmed, that would fulfill Biden’s promise to put a Black woman on the nation’s highest court for the first time.
That promise is widely believed to have helped turn Biden’s flagging 2020 primary campaign around, giving him a victory in South Carolina and stealing momentum from then-frontrunner Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
Biden won the nomination and – ultimately – the presidency.
But Harris’ choice of words is striking some as more than a little tone-deaf.
“As we all know, elections matter,” she said. “And when folks vote, they order what they want. And in this case, they got what they asked for.”
As the audience cheered, she added: “I went off-script a little bit.”
That was likely true, as no careful speechwriter would’ve allowed the line given the conditions 14 months into the Biden/Harris administration.
It implies voters “asked for” everything else Biden has delivered: gas prices approaching $5 a gallon, unaffordable groceries, the failure to fully reopen schools, and one foreign policy disaster after another, from Afghanistan to Russia.
Or as conservative commentator Ben Shapiro said on Twitter: “This is going to be in every GOP ad this year.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) added:
The American people didn’t ask for any of this:
Record Inflation
Record border crisis
Closed schools
A war on American energy
Afghanistan disaster
Russia invasion of Ukraine https://t.co/hahTDoG2rC— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) February 28, 2022
Barack Obama in 2012 had a similar moment when he declared that business owners had to thank the government for their success.
“If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that,” he said, offending millions of hardworking small business owners across the nation and giving free material to the producers of GOP campaign ads at the time.
Amazingly, “they got what they asked for” was only one of three odd moments by Harris this week.
Another came when she was asked to explain the situation in Ukraine in layman’s terms, to people who aren’t following global news closely.
She explained it as if she were talking to a simpleton.
“So, Ukraine is a country in Europe,” she began. “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 it goes against everything that we stand for.”
OH… MY… GOD
Q: “What’s going on in Ukraine?”
Kamala: “Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine so basically that’s wrong.”
pic.twitter.com/gDJDJQVsWb— Greg Price (@greg_price11) March 1, 2022
Instead of offering an explanation for the layman, she came across as condescending.
Ppl are calling her 'dumb' over this but that's unfair: the point is that's what she thinks of the audience. She just has a real inability to talk normally to ppl. Layman's terms doesn't mean 'assume the audience has never heard of Russia.'
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) March 1, 2022
It's like if she spoke really s l o w l y. Layman's terms just means don't answer 'the parallel trends of NATO enlargement and post-Soviet de-nuclearization in the 90s really set us on the path to the failed Minsk Agreement.' You may use, without defining, words such as 'Russia.'
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) March 1, 2022
And in the third case, she was seen mouthing a correction as Biden spoke during his State of the Union speech.
Biden referred to the Ukrainian people as “Urainian” people, and as he did Harris appeared to say “Ukrainian,” correcting her boss during his biggest national TV moment yet.
Harris’ missteps come as the administration’s poll numbers plunge to nearly record-low levels.
Biden’s approval rating now sits at 41.5 percent, with a disapproval rating of 53.1 percent, according to the FiveThirtyEight.com average.
That puts him a full 8 points behind where Obama was at this point in his first term, and 14 points behind Bill Clinton. He’s also neck-and-neck with where Donald Trump was 400 days into his own first term.
As Harris said, voters order what they want.
Given those poll numbers, there’s a good chance they’ll order an entirely new menu during November’s midterm vote.
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert.