A week ago today, I stopped in my tracks when Kamala Harris handed Donald Trump what might have been the soundbyte of the cycle on a big, beautiful gold-plated platter. The latest NBC News national poll -- which shows a tied race, with Trump ahead by a point in the wider field -- actually gives Harris a small edge on the "change" question. By five points, she is seen as a the candidate of change, at a moment in which the electorate is craving change. She has no business leading on this metric. She is the incumbent. She is the co-pilot of the unpopular and unsuccessful Biden-Harris administration. Biden recently said that he and Harris are "singing from the same song sheet" and that she has been "a major player in everything we've done." When The View asked Harris if she could think of anything at all that she'd have done differently than Biden over the past year, she responded that "there is not a thing that comes to mind" before bragging that she was central to all the Biden-Harris "decisions that have had impact."
The Trump campaign has decided that Harris' top vulnerability is her inextricable connection to the Biden-Harris administration. Biden and Harris have succinctly made Trump's closing argument against her, in their own words. I have yet to see Team Trump produce or air the paid television ad that literally writes itself, for reasons that I cannot explain. Every day that passes without blanketing battleground states with clips of Harris and Biden fully endorsing their record, with Harris effectively calling it flawless, is a missed opportunity, bordering on malpractice. But now, another comment has stopped me in my tracks. Former President and Harris surrogate Bill Clinton -- the Big Dog, as the media has excitedly called him -- went to Georgia and threw a grenade at the Biden-Harris administration over the border crisis:
Bill Clinton says Laken Riley's death "probably wouldn't have happened" if Kamala did her job at the border, continues on to imply that we need illegal immigrants for cheap labor.
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 14, 2024
He was supposed to be campaigning FOR Kamala. YIKES. pic.twitter.com/k55Ee8rVH3
Let's set aside the demographic concerns he raises about Americans not having enough children, to which there are several tempting replies. I am willing to give him a modicum of credit for acknowledging this murder, which has been conspicuously ignored by most major players in his party. Biden finally mentioned the victim's name, getting it wrong, only after he was heckled into doing so. He subsequently expressed regret for referring to the suspect as "illegal," despite the fact that he is an illegal immigrant who'd been arrested and released multiple times in various sanctuary jurisdictions, before allegedly bludgeoning a young American woman to death. I don't believe Border Czar Harris has ever mentioned Riley, or any of the prominent victims of illegal immigrant crime. Clinton rightly points out that if migrants like this accused murderer had been "properly vetted," Riley would probably still be alive today. Of course, there is no way to properly vet millions upon millions of illegal immigrants flooding across the border in the span of a few short years. And that doesn't even touch on the entirely unvetted got-aways. Clinton is admitting a failure here, and that failure lands squarely at the feet of the administration that has allowed this ongoing catastrophe to unfold.
One more note on this: The man who authorities say beat Laken Riley to death entered the country illegally in early September of 2022. A few days later, Kamala Harris went on national television and called the border "secure," even though the future charged murderer was one of approximately 2.4 million people who unlawfully crossed the southern border that year alone. The border was not "secure." It was historically, disastrously un-secure. But she called it secure anyway. She is now pretending that a bill she supported in an election year is her "fix" to a crisis she denied even existed as it raged. In 2022 (and 2021 and 2023, for that matter), there was no Senate bill to use as a talking point. There was just a crisis they created, which they wouldn't acknowledge, let alone stop. People died as a result, one of whom Bill Clinton inconveniently decided to mention. What would Kamala Harris say to the families of victims like Laken Riley, stripped of her misleading go-to talking point about a bad bill that was introduced and failed years later? I discussed this issue on Fox last night:
The political damage of Bill Clinton’s campaign trail comment in Georgia about the Biden-Harris-era illegal immigrant who stands charged with murdering Laken Riley — from tonight’s @SpecialReport panel: pic.twitter.com/46VTVOipHt
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) October 15, 2024
I'll leave you with this, which is a timely reminder of how far left the Democrats have lurched on illegal immigration:
Remember, Harris thinks it's bigoted to even use the term "illegal alien," which Clinton does four times in this short clip.