Her interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier on Oct. 16 was not an immediate disaster. She was still standing after this, her first combative media encounter since displacing President Joe Biden in the Democratic Party coup led by Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama.

But Harris’s performance on Fox News may have dropped a depth charge into the minds of voters, and it is likely to explode soon in a realization that the nominee is neither qualified for the job she seeks nor honest in the way she is pursuing it.

What was the key phrase of the interview — the one that exposed her? It was “I am very clear,” “we are very clear,” “let’s be very clear,” and other variations of that untruthful assertion. She used it not to answer questions but to sidestep them.

The phrase makes a claim to candor that must almost imperatively be followed by elucidation on whatever point is being discussed. With Harris, however, the opposite was the case.

The first time she used it came after Baier reminded her that for years she’s said the southern border is secure, and he asked her when she decided it became a crisis. Harris pulled out her “I’ve been clear” and then filibustered about the need to fix immigration and increase Border Patrol resources, and she blamed former President Donald Trump for killing a bipartisan bill (which Baier reminded her would have let 1.8 million illegal immigrants into the country each year).

Harris used her boasted clarity to avoid answering whether she still supports driver’s licenses, free healthcare, and free college tuition for illegal immigrants, to avoid saying whether she still wants to decriminalize illegal border crossings, to avoid saying why the public prefers Trump’s economic policies to hers, and to explain what she’d do differently from Biden.

What all this boasting about transparency makes clear is that Harris is determined not to speak plainly about what she believes and what she will do if she is given the keys to the White House.

She is willing and eager to let voters get the impression she has become a centrist, but when asked about what she will do, she says she is very clear that she will “follow the law.”

Yes, yes, said her frustrated interlocutor, but “you have a say in this.” In other words, you, the Democratic nominee, are central to the process of making laws. You don’t just follow them. What do you believe? What will you try to do?

There was no answer. Harris is determined to run as a cipher, an empty pantsuit.

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She is trying to pass through the green channel with nothing to declare, but isn’t that what Biden did in 2020? His baggage was laden with undeclared left-wing policies — orgiastic debt-financed spending and devalued American global authority — which he unpacked only after arriving in the Oval Office.

It worked. He tricked America. Now Harris is trying to do the same thing.