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CNN analyst likens Kamala to Thatcher: ‘You’re asking the independent voters to all get collective amnesia’

August 24, 2024 | | Print Article

A corporate media pitch for “collective amnesia” even left the panel laughing when one analyst stretched a comparison of Vice President Kamala Harris to The Iron Lady.

(Video: CNN)

Thursday, the “palace coup” against incumbent President Joe Biden was completed as his former running mate served up her acceptance speech as the Democratic Party’s nominee without winning a single delegate at the ballot box.

Managing to avoid expounding on any of her policy positions with help from complicit talking heads, the weeks-long rebrand of Harris strained credulity when former Obama administration official Elliot Williams served up a comparison to Cold War era U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

“You had a woman standing on stage saying, this is a paraphrase, in the battle between U.S. and tyranny, I know where I stand and where the USA belongs,” said Williams on “CNN This Morning” the day after Harris’ speech. “That is the rhetoric — that’s Margaret Thatcher, dude.”

Triggering laughter from the panel, the once deputy assistant attorney general for legislative affairs at the Department of Justice and assistant director for legislative affairs at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement continued, “I mean, that’s powerful rhetoric in an arena where people were chanting ‘USA, USA.’ Something you don’t hear at Democratic rallies a lot, and waving these flags. It was almost shocking to see.”

The pitch to promote the nominee as suddenly a stateswoman saw commentator Kate Bedingfield contending earlier, “It was a huge night for Vice President Harris. I mean, I think she had a high bar to clear, and she cleared it…But I also think she just did a terrific job introducing herself, selling herself, in a moment that’s not always easy to do that.”

Likewise, commentator Bakari Sellers had sold the performance by saying, “What I saw was flawless execution.”

Meanwhile, the panel’s lone Republican, strategist Scott Jennings acknowledged the DNC had generally been a success for the left and said, “I think the convention for Democrats was effective. I mean they wanted to come out of here feeling like they had a chance to win. They didn’t have a chance to win with Biden. Now they have a chance to win with Harris. So that was a mission accomplished on that front.”

Noting improvement in the vice president’s delivery, he further argued, “She seemed plausible,” before calling out, “Now, what she did not do was take any amount of responsibility for her current job, which is vice president of the United States for the last three-and-a-years under Joe Biden.”

During his coverage of the speech, commentator Tucker Carlson raised the vice president’s projection of the Biden-Harris administration’s poor policies onto former President Donald Trump as he asserted, “This woman’s really scary. She could easily get elected president. She’s much more skillful than I have ever seen.”

“She’s a liar on the deepest level, the things she is saying right now are not just untrue, they’re the opposite of the truth, which is the hallmark of evil,” he went on. “She’s an extremist, she’ll say anything. She’s much more like Gavin Newsom than I ever realized.”

Bedingfield commended that performance when she said, “The way she addressed these things last night was smart. I mean, she didn’t, you’re right, she didn’t address them in the way that you, as a Republican strategist, would like to see her address them, but she did talk about immigration, and she said, hey, Donald Trump blew up our best option to make progress on this issue.”

“So if you’re an independent voter and you’re trying to sort our left from right in this race you say, oh, well, that seems like actually she’s making a good point here. Like, there’s, it’s not that she didn’t address these issues. It’s that she actually took them on in a way that was smart and on the offensive,” she added.

Meanwhile, before Williams attempted to peddle a Thatcher narrative, Jennings said, “Well, you’re asking the independent voters to all get collective amnesia and not remember all of the actions, or inactions, that Biden-Harris did or didn’t do for three-and-a-half years leading up to the political fight over the border bill. The reality is, everybody believes this administration made the border weaker. This legislative thing is a political argument. And you’re asking people to forget that she had the job.”

The panel wasn’t alone in laughing at the pitch to further rebrand Harris as social media users added their own take on the argument.

Kevin Haggerty
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