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This was roughly my immediate response upon seeing Harris's answer to Maddow. I found this disconcerting for a few reasons.
One is that other excerpts reveal that she's aware of the "word salad" criticism, and yet she clearly hasn't taken it seriously enough to polish up her interview/conversation/PR skills. Either she lacks the desire to improve, or she lacks the ability to improve, neither of which is a good characteristic to have in the leader of your party.
Two is that she presumably provided this answer with the expectation that the audience would go, "That is a reasonable response that properly negates Maddow's supposition." This either speaks to her having extremely low opinion of voters' understanding of logic or her lacking an ability or desire to engage in logic. Again, not what I want in the leader of my party.
Three is related to two, and it's that there was an OBVIOUS deflection RIGHT THERE! Just say that Pete polled poorly with blacks - which is a bloc we need to keep heavily shifted in our favor - for a variety of reasons. Truly, it's a mystery wrapped in an enigma, a question for the ages, something as hard to figure out as how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop (if you're not a snarky owl, anyway). And in 107 days, we simply didn't have time to do the deep analysis needed to figure out what was going on and how to fix it, and so we decided to go for someone who polled better among blacks. It's an invisible fig leaf, but for people who want to see the leaf, this could've provided them enough ammo with which to convince themselves that the leaf is visible and to bully others into loudly proclaiming that the leaf is visible. And Maddow herself certainly has the motivation for the former.
Lol, lmao even. The point is to accuse the American people as such of racism and sexism and homophobia, precisely because it's broad enough that anyone can duck the charge and it'll likely be read as an attack on your enemies.
The point is very much not to accuse a loyal - the most loyal - voting bloc of the same even if you could objectively prove it. That way has its risks (Dan Savage iirc got a ton of shit for basically stating the point out loud and criticizing black homophobia).
This is all progressive stack thinking: Kamala cannot fail so we'll say that the audience failed her due to bigotry. By the same logic black women cannot fail the Democrats.
One definitely did.
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This accusation is always leveled at the right in particular. It's inconvenient when it would point at blue voting blocs, so I'm not surprised it gets swept under the rug. See also what happened to "Stop Asian Hate", and much of the mockery of that Gillette commercial.
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The point of the deflection is that it's not accusing blacks of homophobia. Again, this is an invisible fig leaf, an Emperor Has No Clothes sort of situation, but one of the biggest takeaways from the past couple decades of US politics for me has been that the least believable part of that story was that the crowd had to pretend to see the Emperor's clothing, rather than the crowd genuinely experiencing the qualia of seeing their Emperor wearing impressive clothing, because they were motivated to see such a thing by their superiors. And Maddow herself, along with the remaining audience of Maddow seem far more likely than the general populace to see that fig leaf if Harris points it out.
Instead, Harris came out looking homophobic to that same audience, and stupid to a wider, likely overlapping, audience. Which, perhaps doesn't speak to her incompetence as I had initially thought, but a rational calculation that, as a black woman, she has the privilege of copping to homophobia without being politically punished. Perhaps I ought to give her credit for taking personal responsibility for making a homophobic decision, unlike most of her other comments about her campaign, even if she probably did it unintentionally.
The audience is primed to just not be outraged when they hear claims about American racism. They are not primed to behave this way when faced with attacks on this allied group. That's all there is to it.
And yes, it is an attack. Being vague about it won't change it.
Even if they were ignorant of it, there's an entire other side of the political spectrum that reacts very badly to these sorts of claims. They just don't care (or even enjoy their outrage). The same dynamics aren't at play here.
This is where I disagree. I believe that being vague about it would have been more than enough to paper over it to not look like an attack. Perhaps an extra step of vagueness by excluding "blacks" altogether and just saying "Pete polled poorly in key voting blocs we needed," and then deflecting with word salad when pressed on the details would've been needed. But underestimating the ability of motivated voters to fill in vagueness from people on their side with good things for their side and bad things for the other side is something that has burned me too many times to fall for again.
This would almost certainly have averted controversy. Make it sound like you're working really hard to avoid saying "lots of black voters hate gay stuff" and someone like Maddow will undoubtedly help you accomplish that.
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