Republicans are scrambling to come up with talking points against Kamala Harris now that President Joe Biden has pulled out of the presidential race and endorsed her—and it’s not going well.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee released a memo Monday with suggestions to Republicans on how to attack Harris, and many of them are attempts to transfer their criticisms of Biden onto Harris. These include calling Harris Biden’s “border czar and the architect of his biggest failure” and accusing her of “siding with Hamas terrorists, not Israel.”
But at the bottom of the memo is a section titled “Weird,” which seems more hilarious than cutting. Among the attempted criticisms are “Kamala Harris loves Venn diagrams,” “Kamala Harris loves electric school busses [sic] because she went to school on a school bus,” and “Kamala Harris recently discovered that electricity doesn’t smell.”
The memo shows that Republicans don’t have any new ammunition to use against Harris beyond their standard attacks on most Democrats. The “weird” section is especially weak considering convicted felon and GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s own litany of weird stuff, like that time he went on a bizarre rant about sharks and electric batteries, or, more seriously, his history of disgusting comments about his own daughter. And that’s barely scratching the surface.
It’s pretty clear that the GOP was taken by surprise with Biden’s announcement to leave the race and his subsequent endorsement of Harris on Sunday. They’ve been freaking out ever since and, despite earlier reports that Harris taking over was a real possibility, they apparently have only come up with weak lines of attack. They are reportedly even second-guessing Trump’s running mate choice, J.D. Vance, as he seems to have been selected to drive up turnout from the MAGA base against a weak Biden, rather than attract swing voters away from Harris, whose popularity has been rising in the last day.
As Monday began, Vance had already made one boring, low-energy speech at the Republican National Convention last week. By the late afternoon, he added another one in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, where he attempted a weird, anti-woke punchline about diet Mountain Dew which fell flat with his friendly audience. If Republicans think they are offering something normal to Americans in the face of Democratic weirdness, they may soon receive a rude wakeup call.
