The New York Post is going hard on Kamala Harris for a line in a recent speech she gave to commemorate Women’s History Month.
“Vice President Kamala Harris served up another helping of her trademark word salad in comments to mark Women’s History Month,” The Post reported.
GOP and Their Allies Won’t Stop on Kamala Harris
Here’s what Harris said:
“So, during Women’s History Month, we celebrate, and we honor the women who made history throughout history, who saw what could be unburdened by what had been,” Harris said. “We see the suffragists, the riveters, the marchers, the mothers and sisters and aunts and grandmothers and daughters, all the giants upon whose broad shoulders we stand.”
So, did you catch the slip-up? The mockery inducing phrase? It was: “the women who made history throughout history.”
Yeah, not super eloquent but there’s not much there. It’s an awkward redundancy but hardly egregious and surely not newsworthy.
It’s not “word salad.” It’s not a story.
Yet, according to the Post, the remarks “have earned [Harris] mockery across the political spectrum – and drawn comparisons to Selina Meyers, the often clueless vice president played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus in HBO’s satire “Veep.” (“Well, we are the United States of America because we are united…and we are states,” Selina Meyers once stated.)
Twitter, of course, had some fun at Harris’s expense. “This reboot of Veep is kinda funny,” one Twitter user said.
The Real Issue?
Caroline Hakes, the digital media specialist for Texas Governor Greg Abbott, gets a little closer to the heart of the issue. “I’m convinced her speechwriter hates her,” Hakes wrote.
And that’s really the rub of it right there. You think Harris wrote that speech? She was going through the motions, reciting a few rote lines she’ll roll out once a year about suffragists and riveters. Not to belittle women’s contributions to history in any way at all – as they are vast – but as far as the vice president of the United State’s schedule, remarks commemorating Women’s History Month might not get as much attention as, say, the war in Ukraine.
So, Harris was given these lines in this speech, and probably didn’t even give them a once-over. Maybe she should have but whatever. Now, should she find a little smoother writer to craft her speeches? Probably. But that’s a separate issue and not really worthy of the framing the Post is manufacturing here.
Senator Marsha Blackburn weighed in, too, albeit she had less to say about Harris’s eloquence. “They can’t even define what a woman is,” Blackburn said, presumably in reference to the Left. That’s pretty good. And that’s a criticism worth exploring more. But that’s not the point of this article, so we’ll save that for another day.
Criticizing Harris
Now, I’m happy to criticize Kamala Harris all day. I’ve written several pieces doing exactly that – for everything from her 2020 campaign to her prosecutorial background to her governing effectiveness to the way she reportedly treats her staff like garbage. Harris deserves plenty of criticism. But saying the “women who made history throughout history” is not a big-ticket item for me.
Sure, Harris sounded ineloquent. And sure, Harris might want to pull aside her speechwriter and ask ‘what the hell does “make history throughout history” mean?’ But this is not news and despite the Post’s best efforts to whip up “mockery across the political spectrum,” I have a difficult time believing anyone really cares.
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Harrison Kass is the Senior Editor at 19FortyFive. An attorney, pilot, guitarist, and minor pro hockey player, Harrison joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee but was medically discharged. Harrison holds a BA from Lake Forest College, a JD from the University of Oregon, and an MA from New York University. Harrison listens to Dokken.
