Former Obama White House adviser David Axelrod said Vice President Kamala Harris turned in a “mixed” performance at a CNN town hall Wednesday evening, at times offering up an evasive “word salad” as she avoided answering questions from moderator Anderson Cooper.
“The things that would concern me is when she doesn’t want to answer a question, her habit is to kind of go to Word Salad City,” Axelrod told a CNN panel after the event. “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.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Axelrod also criticized Harris for failing to relate to the people who asked questions at the town hall. “She didn’t do a lot of that,” he said. “She didn’t ask them questions. She didn’t address them particularly so she was giving set pieces too much.”
Not all was bad, however, on what was a “mixed night” according to the former Obama adviser. He praised Harris for being “very strong coming out of the gate” and for being well prepared to hammer Trump on revelations from his former chief of staff, retired U.S. Marine Corps general John Kelly, who called Trump a “fascist” who wanted to have generals like Adolf Hitler’s.
Harris made sure to agree with Kelly’s sentiment and press the issue. “She was very strong on abortion rights, because she feels passionately about it,” added Axelrod. “She was great on long-term care for the elderly.”
He added that Harris finished the town hall on a note he thought her campaign should capitalize on: “She said ‘[Trump will] have an enemies list and I’ll have a to-do list, and the to-do list is going to be the concerns you mentioned tonight.’ I think that is a fundamental argument here, who is gonna actually work on the stuff that is gonna impact positively on your life.”
