VP Kamala Harris tells @JudyWoodruff that she knows many have reached "a level of malaise" nearly two years into the pandemic.
"We want to get back to normal," but we must do the work of "pushing through with solutions … let's meet the challenges where they are," she said. pic.twitter.com/ebQxVGRL84
— PBS NewsHour (@NewsHour) January 6, 2022
Kamala Harris channels Jimmy Carter, blames American ‘malaise’ for Biden’s woes
Vice President Kamala Harris acknowledged a “level of malaise” among Americans — and channeled one of the lowest moments of Jimmy Carter’s presidency — in an interview this week.
“I fully appreciate that there is a level of malaise,” Harris said Thursday during an appearance on “PBS Newshour,” in answer to a question about why President Joe Biden’s social spending agenda has stalled.
Harris sought to link Americans’ fatigue with the ongoing COVID crisis to Biden’s sinking poll numbers amid rising inflation and high energy costs.
“We’re two years into this thing, you know,” Harris told anchor Judy Woodruff. “People – we want to get back to normal, we all do.”
Critics quickly seized on the comment, which harked back to Carter’s so-called “malaise speech” of July 1979 — a disastrous address that blamed Americans for the economic woes that had sparked widespread anger against his administration.
“Jimmy Carter 2.0,” Fox News commentator Michael Tammero noted on Twitter.
Carter’s speech, which presaged his electoral trouncing by Ronald Reagan one year later, has made the term “malaise” a taboo word among American politicians.
Harris’s comment aired just hours after she provoked outrage for a speech at the US Capitol equating the Jan. 6 riot there to some of the most harrowing and deadly days in American history, including the Sept. 11 terror attacks and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.