Kamala Harris
Vice President of the United States. Soundbites and speeches, parsed for what they actually say.
Kamala Harris has spent a lot of time in the news, and a lot of that coverage is about how she says things rather than what she means. She is a careful speaker, which people read two ways. Some say it makes her professional. Others say it makes her hard to pin down.
My view: politics is a game of words, and she plays it cautiously. She rarely says something that can be cut into a damaging clip, and in today’s media, that is a real skill. The downside is that caution can sound like distance. People want to know where she stands, and sometimes her answers leave room to keep guessing. I think the honest read is that she is a politician who learned that a single sentence can end a career, so she chooses her sentences very carefully. That is not exciting, but it is not stupid either. She is going to keep being a big part of the story, so I will keep paying attention to what she actually does, not just how she says it.