Kamala Harris, notorious for avoiding anything but the friendliest interviews during her truncated presidential campaign, found herself in a pickle in her Wednesday interview with Bret Baier at Fox News. Baier was asking questions Harris did not want to answer and then following up on them in response to Harris’s evasive replies. What to do? Harris decided to employ, among other strategies, one that brings to mind a scene from the movie Forrest Gump.
When Forrest Gump, whose life is the focus of the movie, ends up in training for the United States military, he becomes friends with a fellow soldier named Bubba who is obsessed with shrimp. In on scene, Bubba recounts to Forrest many different types of shrimp and shrimp-incorporating foods of which Bubba is aware. The recounting is presented in the scene as if it continued through the day, or longer.
Baier started his interview of Harris by asking Harris “how many illegal immigrants” she would estimate the Biden administration, in which Harris is vice president, “has released into the country over the last three and a half years.” As would happen repeatedly through the 27-minutes interview, Harris evaded answering this question. Instead of just giving a number, she started into one of her now famous “word salads,” stating: “Well, I’m glad you raised the issue of immigration because I agree with you — it is a topic of discussion that people want to rightly have, and you know what I’m gonna talk about right now which is.”
Baier interrupted Harris then to redirect the discussion to his question stating, “Yeah, but just the number: Do you think it is one million, three million?” In response Harris started off promisingly, saying, “Bret, let’s just get to the point.” But then, instead of giving an answer to his question, Harris returned to more nonresponsive grandstanding. Baier then tried querying if the number may be around six million and asking of Harris “looking back, do you regret the decision” to terminate at the beginning of the Biden administration the prior US policy that illegal immigrants “be detained through deportation either in the US or in Mexico” and replace it with a policy of releasing them from custody while they await trial. Baier said among those released were “a large number of single men — adult men — who went on to commit heinous crime.”
It is at this point that Harris shifted her evasion tactic to one right out of the scene where Bubba presented his lengthy shrimp-centered list to Forrest. Harris replied:
At the beginning of our administration — within practically hours of taking the oath, the first bill that we offered Congress, before we worked on infrastructure, before the Inflation Reduction Act, before the Chips and Science Act, before any — before the bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first bill practically within hours of taking the oath was a bill to fix our immigration system.
Keeping the irrelevant filler words rolling out is key to evading a real discussion regarding US government policy. Harris would have kept this repetition and listing of one unrelated Biden administration action after another going until time ran out, if Baier and viewers would let her get away with it. But, to succeed over time requires deploying a mix of delay and evasion techniques. For this, Harris has a well-stocked toolbox.
Baier interjected after this Bubbaesque listing only to back down from trying to obtain a responsive answer from Harris when she complained “may I finish responding please” and “you have to let me finish please” and “I’m in the middle of responding to the point you’re raising, and I’d like to finish.” It was only then, after two and a half minutes of evasion, that Harris finally started talking some about immigration policy. But, in doing so she just launched into her often repeated talking points on the general matter instead of addressing any of the particular questions she had been asked.
This filling time with irrelevancies, dancing around answering interview questions, and periodically reciting unresponsive talking points consumed nearly the entire interview. Harris succeeded in running out the clock without saying anything new or making a serious effort to answer most the questions she was asked. Mission accomplished for this interminable evader.
