MAGA Stumped By Kamala Harris's Stump Speech

And the Fred G. Sanford Big Dummy Award goes to …

Republican attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris have gotten so desperate you’d almost feel sorry for them if you possessed endless reserves of empathy to waste on some of the worst people alive. There’s probably a puppy somewhere who’s wet and shivering.

The latest smear is that Harris is a disciplined politician who sticks to message when she speaks in public, often before a massive crowd of supporters.

Last weekend, Fox Business host Cheryl Casone suggested that Harris “copied” Donald Trump’s hardly original idea to end taxes on tips and claimed she’s “even copying herself … she gives the same speech basically in Michigan and Wisconsin.”

Casone provided a “side-by-side” example of Harris speaking the same words in different states on the same day. She’s even wearing the same outfit! (Watch below.)

---

---

In the clip, Harris says, “It’s good to be back in Wisconsin” when she’s in Wisconsin, and “It’s good to be back in Michigan” when she’s in Michigan. Rock stars who also fill stadiums open their shows in a similar way. When I saw Bernadette Peters (my idea of a rock star) in concert, she said she was glad she was back in Seattle before starting her set. That probably wasn’t true, but it was nice of her.

Casone was seemingly aghast that Harris didn’t offer the good people of Eau Claire and Detroit new material. The Fox News chyron read “Harris Accused Of Repeating The Same Speech,” as if she’s the candidate who’s committed major felonies.

“Is this normal campaigning in politics,” she asked some doofus, “to just give the same speech over and over, word for word, or do you try to change it for the audience?”

This is what’s known as rhetorical propaganda. Casone asks a misleading question that’s intended to produce a misleading answer that can advance the misleading smear. The doofus replied that candidates do change their speeches for the audience. Of course, that’s also misleading. No candidate has enough Toby Zieglers and Sam Seaborns on staff to craft entirely new speeches for every rally or personal appearance, especially on the same day. Casone also dings Harris for reading from a teleprompter, so she apparently assumes that a candidate can memorize a new speech for each rally. Obviously, a one-minute clip doesn’t prove that Harris didn’t change the speech slightly, but this is classic Fox News disinformation.

The 'Cabaret' Conundrum: When Evil Is Also Weird

It’s the stump speech, stupid

Republicans and right-wing media are playing stupid because they think their supporters/viewers are stupid. They all know what a stump speech is. It’s hardly a new concept. From Merriam-Webster: “a speech that is made many times by a politician who is traveling to different places during a campaign for election.” However, if MAGA world believes Harris can digitally manipulate photos with AI, they probably assume she can alter the dictionary like in 1984.

The “stump speech” derives its name from the early days of campaigning when politicians would deliver their speeches from a sawed-off tree stump. Now, politicians have proper elevated platforms so no one has to stand on Lauren Boebert’s head.

Republican Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, when he was governor of New York, used the phrase “the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God” so often in his speeches that his stenotypist just started abbreviating it as “BOMFOG.”

The New York Times annotated the four major Republican presidential candidates’ stump speeches during the 2012 primary. The Washington Post described Barack Obama’s 2008 stump speech as a “45-minute, ever-evolving set piece that he has given as often as three or four times a day for months and months, from tiny county fairgrounds in Iowa last summer to packed basketball arenas in big cities around the country in recent weeks.”

Obama added humorous references to news events and countered attacks from his opponents, but the “evolution” was over the course of several weeks not within the same day. Harris has been running for president for three weeks. She gave her first speech as the presumptive nominee on July 23, two days after President Joe Biden withdrew from the race. No one seriously expects her to drop new speeches at the same rate as posthumous Tupac albums.

Kamala Harris Breaks Barriers, Plus Some Dummies' Heads

During my freshman year of college, I saw then-Sen. Al Gore speak at the University of Georgia’s Sanford Stadium. (I presume my classmate Marjorie Taylor Greene was not in attendance. Or maybe she was the heckler in the white hood.) R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe introduced him if you want a sense of how very 1992 this was. (Stipe was younger at the time than Taylor Swift is now, because I’m incredibly middle-aged.)

I clearly remember getting excited when I heard Gore go into his “up and down” riff, which I recognized from his stump speech: “Unemployment is up. The number of jobs is down. Poverty is up. Consumer confidence down. Fear is up. Hope is down. Everything that should be down is up. Everything that should be up is down. They’ve got it upside down, and we’re gonna turn it right side up with your help.”

Yes, I was already a political geek, but most of the audience repeated the words along with Gore, as if he were singing “Losing My Religion.” Effective stump speeches offer these opportunities for call-and-response. Trump supporters would often start shouting, “Lock her up!” at his 2016 hate rallies, but that was rarely inspired by any clever rhetoric. It was less Sunday church service and more rabid lynch mob.

Trump’s off-message gibberish

Republicans are clinging to the Karl Rove playbook, where you turn an opponent’s strength into a weakness. Harris is packing stadiums and remains scrupulously on message, a clear contrast to the shrinking crowds showing up to hear Trump’s rambling drivel. Rich Lowry at the National Review claims that Biden’s “basement campaign,” which he won, has been updated with Harris’s “teleprompter campaign.” Kathleen Parker dismisses Harris as just a pretty face who lacks Obama’s eloquence in a mean girl rant for the Washington Post that my college paper would’ve rejected. (No link!)

Trump often goes off script but his improv act is rarely coherent. The KamalaHQ social media account shared a super cut of Trump riffing mindlessly about Hannibal Lecter. (Watch below.)

He even gave a shout-out to the serial-killing cannibal during his Republican National Convention speech: “The press is always on me, because I say this. Has anyone seen Silence of the Lambs? The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’d love to have you for dinner.”

Trump might as well spend his rallies discussing everything he finds annoying about air travel: “So, I go to the bathroom in the airport. What is the story on the sinks in airport bathrooms that they will not give us a twist-it-on twist-it-off, human-style faucet? Is that too risky for the general population? Too dangerous? We gotta install the one-handed, spring-loaded, pain-in-the-ass Alcatraz-style faucet.”

Yes, that was a Jerry Seinfeld bit but Trump does complain a lot about water flow. Back in July 2020, he whined at a news briefing, “You take a shower, the water doesn’t come out. You want to wash your hands, the water doesn’t come out. So what do you do? You just stand there longer, take a shower longer. Because I don’t know about you but my hair has to be perfect, perfect!”

This was during the height of the COVID pandemic, when the greatest challenge facing Americans was recalcitrant shower heads. The next month, while visiting an Ohio Whirlpool manufacturing plant, he said, “You turn on the shower — if you’re like me, you can’t wash your beautiful hair properly. Please come out. The water — it drips, right?”

That was all very weird.

He didn’t retire the water bit for the 2024 campaign, either. At a Turning Point Action event in June, he said, “Do you ever go into a new home where you have a shower? Where the water doesn’t come out of the shower head? They put a restrictor on. I took all the restrictors off. I took them off. I’ve had the experience. I take a shower, I want that beautiful head of hair to be nice and wet. Lather, I want it to be lathered beautifully and I get the best stuff you can buy. And I dump it all over and then I turn on the water and the water drips out.”

Trump’s random idiocy is no less repetitive than Harris’s stump speech, but instead of an actual joyful message, Trump only offers a grumpy old man diatribe. It’s why more voters every day are moving to Harris, who at least knows how to make water come out of a faucet.

I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber for $80 a year or just $8 a month, if you’re not already. This helps sustain the newsletter and keeps all the content free for everyone.

Follow Stephen Robinson on Bluesky and Threads.

Subscribe to his YouTube channel for more fun content.