David Wasserman, a Cook Political Report elections analyst, was quoted in Friday’s Wall Street Journal:

This has been the central challenge for Harris in the snap election: can she seize the mantle of change [from the present Biden/Harris administration or from the prior Trump administration]?

Can she, indeed? She has said within the last few years that she would ban fracking and that she would decriminalize coming over our border illegally, among other things. Her erstwhile Senate colleague Bernie Sanders (I, VT) said late last summer that any words she’s saying now that differ from those positions are only words uttered to garner votes, not serious policy changes. Harris said this fall that her values haven’t changed. In two separate interviews within the last couple of weeks, Harris gave one of the few direct answers she’s ever given to interviewer questions, this one to the question of what she would do differently from Biden. Her direct answer both times was that nothing came to her mind.

Now, at this late stage of the election season (9 days, including today, before Election Day), who would believe her if she did claim explicit, clearly stated, and materially differing policies? How could anyone tell such changes would be sincerely claimed and not just more words as Sanders characterized them earlier? Who could believe such changes, representing as they would—as they must, if they’re truly different—changes to her values?

Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris held a town hall campaign event in Delaware County, PA, Wednesday. CNN‘s Anderson Cooper moderated the event.

No less a light than Progressive-Democrat and ex-President Barack Obama senior official David Axelrod was unimpressed with her failure to perform.

The thing 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,” and 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.

That’s true enough, although it’s less a matter of Harris not wanting to answer such questions so much as it is that she has no answer to them; she’s that unprepared.

CNN‘s Jake Tapper:

She focused a lot more on Donald Trump, I think it’s fair to say, than she did on many specifics in terms of what she would do as president[.]

That’s because that’s all she has. She has no policies of her own, other than the ones she’s clearly articulated over the years—banning fracking, decriminalizing coming across our border illegally, continuing Party profligate spending. She has given one direct answer on the matter, twice: when asked by different interviewers what she would do differently from Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden, her clear and unequivocal answer was that she couldn’t think of anything she’d do differently.

That however, though: a significant part of her resorting to Axelrod’s word salad city is Cooper letting her get away with it. He chose not to follow up on her evasion; he chose not to press her and repeat, or even restate, the question and insist she give a substantive answer.

Cooper is an example of the coddling the press (Tapper lately notwithstanding) does of Harris.