Interview with a Kam-pire

A brief review of a vapid Kamala Harris interview

Kamala Harris has been pounding the pavement, talking to pre-approved groups of people who like her and deftly avoiding the previously considered necessary act of being interviewed by media outlets. But she made an exception to speak to two former NBA players who have a podcast. Legendary interrogators Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson sat down for a broad-ranging conversation that even covered political policy for a few minutes.

I’ve never been much of a basketball fan so I have no idea who the interviewers are, but some cursory googling tells me that when they were active in the NBA, Jackson earned about $10M a year and Barnes earned between $4M and $7M. Remember that for later.

The conversation hit all the points we can now expect from a Harris interview, with some slight twists. She stopped herself before saying the full “I grew up middle-class,” and managed to graft the intro phrase onto her story about her small business-owning second mother. “I from a child knew who our small business owners were” is a strange phrase, but it does its part in building the silly image of a little Kamala who loved going to the community bank to discuss who was a leader in the small business community (when she wasn’t demanding fweedom).

Here’s where my blood started pumping - Harris is talking to two multimillionaires. She brings up her proposal to give a $50k tax break to new businesses, and it sounds like the hosts don’t really understand and think that she means the government will give $50k grants to entrepreneurs.

Then the working man cosplay comes in. They agree that you can’t do “anything” with $5000 as an entrepreneur, acting like they know what it’s like to start a business from nothing rather than considering the rest of their life after a successful professional basketball career. This is a hurricane of posturing so strong it gives Helene an inferiority complex.

They continue to discuss how Harris thinks we need to expand the child tax credit, and give all new parents $6,000. One of the interviewers gravely mutters “I could have used that!” to a chorus of “mm-hmms.” Far be it from me to be cynical, but $6,000 is .06% of a $10M annual salary - these guys could lose $6,000 in the cushions of their imported Scandinavian modern couch.

But the real kicker was when they asked Kamala about cannabis - or “weed” as our cool wine mom candidate calls it. Her take on the issue? “I just feel strongly that people should not be going to jail for smoking weed. And we know historically what that has meant and who has gone to jail... And this is not a new position for me.”

Yes, yes, you do know who has gone to jail for cannabis, because you sent over 1,900 people to jail for cannabis offenses as DA in San Francisco. This is just a sickening, laughable inversion of reality. Kudos to her if she gets away with it, you have to admire the chutzpah.

So another interview down, and we still don’t know much about what Harris wants to do other than lie about her record, give vague policy proposals on one or two issues, and generally glide into the future unburdened by what has been.