ArcaMax

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — There's a reason why Howard Stern is considered one of the best interviewers in the business. He just managed to show us exactly who Kamala Harris is during a recent interview, despite his own declared effort to mitigate that.

Right from the get-go, legendary shock jock Howard Stern said that he had been nervous about interviewing Vice President and Democratic presidential contender Kamala Harris. But not for his own image — for hers. Stern said that he desperately wanted Harris to look good on his show — enough to beat rival, former President Donald Trump — because there was just too much at stake for the country in this election. The admission implied that he didn’t consider Harris competent enough to handle the softball chat.

The idea seemed to be to showcase Harris’ personality. It started with a discussion about how she and her husband were big fans of the late artist formerly known as Prince. That’s nice. But also irrelevant.

When Hillary Clinton was running against Trump in the 2016 race, it wasn't a lack of relatability that cost her the election, but rather her insistence on replacing much of her personality, or any evidence of critical and independent thought, with well-worn establishment talking points, leading voters to believe that nothing much would improve in their lives beyond the prevailing status quo.

Harris is giving Hillary a run for her money in the mindless establishment rhetoric department. The fact that she’s attracting its practitioners from the other side of the political aisle, like former congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY ), whose dad, former Vice President Dick Cheney, set the Middle East on fire when he wasn’t chilling out and accidentally shooting his hunting buddy, only reinforces that point. Harris told Stern that Liz Cheney was “remarkable” — despite being turfed by GOP primary voters in favor of a Trump-backed rival.

Political parties are almost irrelevant when you're singing from an identical hymn book.

Harris’ constant use of establishment buzzwords comes off as a substitute for critical and thoughtful analysis. It doesn’t take any real brainpower to call Russian President Vladimir Putin a “dictator,” or Russia an “adversary”. The more interesting issue is how exactly that came to be, what the benefit is for Washington and it’s special interest backers in perpetuating that notion, and whether the taxpayer cash being washed in a bipartisan manner into the pockets of the weapons industry and multinationals who benefit from post-conflict gold rushes means that Americans are prevented from having nice things like better infrastructure at home.

Harris has been on such a roll with her autopilot lingo that she’s been going around suggesting, as she did on the Colbert Report, that any and every leader who doesn’t fall into line with Washington’s agenda — not just Putin, but Chinese President Xi Jinping and even Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban— is a “dictator,” “authoritarian,” or even “people who have been well described as murderers.”

Anti-authoritarian Harris, a former prosecutor and district attorney, also told Stern that she’s proud of having put “a lot of people in jail.” Yet she wants voters to be worried about what Trump might do when he gets into office.

We already know one thing — during Trump’s last term, he spearheaded federal prison and sentencing reform in favor of reintegration and rehabilitation to help reduce the massive number of prisoners incarcerated at astronomical taxpayer expense. Meanwhile, Harris directly oversaw a system in California where the number of incarcerated minorities far outweighed their representation in the general population – which would serve to explain why, last week, former President Barack Obama was virtually having to beg “the brothers” (in his words) to support her. The progressive policy magazine, The American Prospect, accused Harris in 2020 of jailing nonviolent prisoners in violation of “a 2011 Supreme Court ruling requiring the state to reduce its prison population.” Sounds like the authoritarians she keeps talking about might want to take a few notes.

Harris suggested to Stern that Trump, in adopting more of a neutral position on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, is being played by Putin. “Some would say you’re getting punked if you stand in favor of somebody who’s an adversary over your friends on principles that we all agree on,” she said. What “principles” are those? Democracy? Ukraine’s president remains in power despite his term expiring, is conscripting fighters by force, has enacted selective religious and media bans, and Ukraine still ranked 104 out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s global corruption index.

It looks more like it’s Harris who has been hoodwinked by her pals in Washington into taking a position against the interests of the average American voter.

Harris also complained to the shock jock about all the crazy stuff Trump said during the presidential debate. “This was a very serious moment to earn the votes of the American people, and he was talking about things that were factually untrue and quite ridiculous,” she said, crying on the shoulder of the guy who built his entire career while racking up the highest ever dollar amount of Federal Communications Commission fines for broadcasting material deemed indecent.

All the social media posts showing people’s pets reacting to audio of Trump’s claims during the debate of migrants in Ohio “eating” the dogs, cats, and pets, made it seem like it could have been a Stern show bit.

Few know better than Stern, who ran for governor of New York himself in 1994, that American voters put a high priority on entertainment. And at least Trump would give them a chuckle while they contend with any potential systemic reform proceeding at a glacier’s pace — if at all. Harris? Not so much.