After launching her campaign this week, former UN ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley subtly emphasized the age of the two presumptive front-runners in the 2024 presidential campaign — President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump — by calling for older politicians to submit to “mental competency tests.”
“In the America I see, the permanent politician will finally retire,” Haley said on Wednesday, according to Fox News. “We’ll have term limits for Congress and mandatory mental competency tests for politicians over 75 years old.”
So the Democrats called in Vice President Kamala Harris — a politician who proves that one need not live for three-quarters of a century to come across as mentally befogged. To say she succeeded is an understatement, particularly when you see the expression on her interviewer’s face after she defended her octogenarian boss.
Harris was being interviewed by NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell at the Munich Security Conference, where Harris is representing the U.S. (I’m guessing Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, “Corn Pop,” that one dead Amtrak conductor Joe keeps making up stories about, and literally anyone else remotely in Biden’s orbit were all unavailable.)
Mitchell mentioned Haley’s announcement and said her rhetoric was aimed “very pointedly at both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, people over 75.” Harris was asked whether she thought requiring cognitive tests for elderly politicians was a good idea.
Now, watch Harris answer “no” in the most circuitous, incomprehensible way possible while still using words:
What? pic.twitter.com/7FHs0ZUkIZ
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) February 17, 2023
“When you present the suggestion that anyone is saying that it is time for a new generation, and they’re running against the person who is president, and when presented as though it’s an attack, I would like to let us all be clear that the attack is misplaced if the point of it is that we need leadership that is strong because we have a strong leader in Joe Biden,” Harris said.
In trying to parse that word salad, one notices a look briefly flash across Mitchell’s countenance — a bit like her brain is a Commodore 64 trying to load Photoshop. That said, even though Mitchell is over 75 herself — 76, to be exact — she’s sharp enough to know that bit of rhetorical software on Harris’ part is incompatible with coherence. So she gives up and thanks her for her time.
Consider the cognitive test passed, at least in Mitchell’s case. Harris, eh, not so much.
