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As we enter the final stretch of election season, every day seems to bring another Trump/Vance victory in spite of a hostile media, and another embarrassing loss by the Harris/Walz campaign. Recently, for example, Trump endeared himself to regular Americans by putting on an apron and working the McDonald’s drive-thru; conversely, McDonald’s dealt a fatal blow to Kamala’s claim she had worked for them as a teenager by releasing a statement declaring they could find no evidence of that. She is looking more and more like the most hapless, brainless, inauthentic, unqualified presidential nominee in modern history, if not ever. Even the state media like CNN can’t cover for her anymore, as evidenced by the tepid assessments of CNN commentators in the wake of Kamala’s recent CNN town hall hosted by Anderson Cooper.

To recap: when the Democrats realized that Joe Biden could no longer be propped up as their 2024 candidate, they found themselves painted into a corner. The Democrat kingmakers – Barack Obama, Susan Rice, and Valerie Jarrett – needed to step in and depose the decrepit Biden but didn’t want to fall back on Vice President Harris, whom they knew was devoid of accomplishments, likeability, brains, and presidential charisma, but how could they not go with her? Running the vice president as the nominee would ordinarily be the obvious move; leap-frogging over Kamala and selecting someone else would be a clear acknowledgement that she had never been anything but a diversity hire. And how could the party of identity politics not go with a “woman of color”? It would discredit their entire ideology.

So they rolled the dice and installed Kamala, knowing she was not ready for prime time but counting on a supportive media and a strategy of painting Trump as Hitler 2.0 to get her over the finish line. But in the ensuing months she has not only not risen to the occasion, she and her campaign are flailing to such an extent that all they have left is to fear-monger hysterically about Trump as A Threat to Democracy™.

Then came CNN’s Wednesday evening town hall in Philadelphia. David Urban nailed it when he declared afterward that she lost a one-person debate. A couple of examples of her prevaricating and fumbling will suffice to give a sense of just how badly the event went for her.

When Cooper hit her with a question she should have seen coming from a mile away – is Trump’s idea of a border wall actually “stupid,” as she had initially called it? – she panicked immediately and rambled about Trump until Cooper interjected to get her back on track. As an open borders enthusiast who plans to give citizenship to millions of illegals in the country, she had the nerve to say that there needs to be a legal process for immigration and that she will secure the border. Cooper flustered her further by pressing: “So you don’t think the idea of a border wall is stupid anymore?” and she responded again by attacking Trump and complaining that “he didn’t do much of anything” with the wall.

This is the Border Czar who has been in office for four years and overseen a tsunami of illegal migration that will surely prove to be the greatest security debacle for America since the 9/11 attacks.

As another example, Cooper asked, “Is there something you can point to in your life, political life, or in your life in the last four years that you think is a mistake that you have learned from? This is the kind of “what do you consider your greatest weakness” question that the average job applicant would know to be prepared for, but apparently Kamala’s team didn’t think to drill her on this or any other obvious question.

“I mean, I’ve, I’ve made many mistakes, and they range from, you know, if you’ve ever parented a child, you know, you make lots of mistakes, too, in my role as vice president,” Kamala replied, giggling to try to connect with the audience. Not even Cooper cracked a smile. “I mean, I’ve probably worked very hard at making sure that I am well versed on issues, and I think that is very important.”

This was an embarrassment, first of all because she didn’t have an answer for the question. Second, her comment about parenting a child fell flat because Kamala doesn’t have any children. Her husband Doug Emhoff’s two kids from another marriage were already 20 and 15 years old when Kamala became their stepmom. She knows less about parenting than she does about economics.

In a discussion afterward, CNN propagandists were forced to admit that, as Dana Bash put it, Kamala didn’t “close the deal” with undecided voters in this town hall. Jake Tapper complained that the Vice President “focused a lot more on Donald Trump” than on her own policies. In fact, she didn’t even attack his policies; she simply denounced him repeatedly in unhinged terms as a dangerous fascist.

On a different CNN panel, David Axelrod expressed his concern that

when she doesn’t want to answer a question, her habit is to kind of go to word salad city, and she did that on a couple of answers. One was on Israel. Anderson asked a direct question, would you be stronger on Israel than Trump? And there was a seven-minute answer, but none of it related to the question he was asking.

Van Jones agreed with Axelrod. While he did his best to put lipstick on a pig by claiming that he believes she will fight for the American people, Jones admitted that “the word salad stuff gets on my nerves. I think that some of the evasions are not necessary.”

Well, they’re necessary for Kamala because she does not have answers of substance to offer. She has to evade because she is hopelessly out of her depth. Every day Kamala Harris demonstrates that she is not any closer to being ready for prime time than the day her campaign began. The CNN commentators know it, the town hall’s 3.3 million viewers witnessed it, and the American people know it too.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior