Earlier, my colleague Ward Clark wrote about a question Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin asked the Harris-Walz campaign Tuesday regarding whether Harris planned to “keep the Biden administration’s controversial CBP One cell phone app and CHNV [Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans] migrant flights mass parole program” should she get elected president.
It was an important question to get the answer to for many reasons, with perhaps the most pressing reason of all being the concern over whether more Springfield, Ohio situations could potentially crop up under a Harris-Walz administration.
Melugin noted that the campaign’s response was to not address the questions he asked directly but instead to deliver a generalized statement that indicated Harris “supports the bipartisan border bill, and would sign it,” which was a roundabout way of saying she would still support keeping the CHNV plan in place (since the border bill would leave that program unchanged).
SEE ALSO: It’s Happened Again – St. Louis Police Officer Struck and Killed by Suspected Illegal Immigrant
But it was another response Melugin received that was also cause for alarm.
His colleague, Jacqui Heinrich, pointed out that it has become standard operating procedure for Harris’ handlers to issue the same canned responses without answering the actual questions put forth, no matter what the question was:
The other story here is the Harris campaign continues to recycle responses that don’t apply to the question – they’ve done this on a host of inquires over various issues https://t.co/LC0nfYLIdt
— Jacqui Heinrich (@JacquiHeinrich) September 24, 2024
Though it goes without saying, I’m gonna say it anyway: If Kamala Harris is only doing “interviews” with Democrat-friendly media outlets and the handlers/surrogates who she has tasked with speaking on her behalf don’t (or won’t) give straight answers to questions asked of them by the press, then from who are we supposed to get the answers?
This follows a troubling media avoidance/monitoring pattern that we’ve seen take place since before the official start of her candidacy.
For instance, during campaign rallies starting back in mid-July before Joe Biden was forced out of the race, campaign staffers at the local level apparently were being told either to trail reporters when they were trying to talk to rally attendees or to cut them off completely (or both).
We saw it during a Biden-Harris rally in Nevada in July when the POTUS was still poised to be the nominee and then again during a Kamala for President rally in Pennsylvania in late July. In the latter, campaign staffers tried to block reporters from interviewing rallygoers beyond the press pen. At both rallies, the idea was to keep audience members from saying anything negative about Biden and/or Harris to journalists.
A similar, more recent instance was once again in PA, where Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz was heavily shielded from press scrutiny, with the media being shut down and told by handlers “not to disrupt the program,” as relayed by a local reporter.
In a nutshell, this is shaping up to be a lot like “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” – except much worse. Here’s hoping (and praying) voters see right through this “rope-a-dope” strategy and reject it via the ballot box in November.
RELATED–>> Ouch: Cardinal Raises Eyebrows After Sharing What Schumer Told Him About Kamala Skipping Al Smith Dinner
