Anchovies and Bacon: Harris Bombed in Podcast Interview So Badly It Got Spiked

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File this under Too Fun to Check, with a subcategorization of Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction. 

And a side-tab of “Reasons why the campaign nixed that Joe Rogan interview.”

Meet Kareem Rahma, a podcaster in New York City with quite the buzz and audience. The New York Times profiled Rahma yesterday to get a sense of his audience and his reach. He had just recently published a light and frothy interview with Tim Walz, which put Rahma on the Gray Lady’s radar. As it turns out, Rahma had also interviewed Kamala Harris, but never published it.

Why? Be sure to pad your forehead for when you feel the impulse to slam it into your desk. Rahma had wanted to address one serious topic — Gaza — but the campaign and the DNC refused:

As a Muslim and an Arab, he objected to the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza, which has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians — including many women and children — since Hamas’s attack on Israel last October, in which 1,200 people were killed and over 200 were kidnapped. In three phone calls with Harris’s staff and the Democratic National Committee, he said, he had proposed raising the conflict with the vice president — perhaps at the end of the episode — but was rejected.

Rahma’s show mainly entails having extemporaneous conversations with random New Yorkers about mundane matters. Rahma agreed to keep it light with Harris, who desperately needed to find a way to reach podcast audiences as long as it didn’t entail actual questions about policies and values. Instead of letting it unfold organically, however, Team Kamala and the DNC insisted on programming the topic ahead of time, to which Rahma agreed … to his regret.

The two sides agreed that Kamala Harris would take a bold stand on removing one’s shoes on airplanes — clearly a pressing matter for the executive branch and presidency. And even then, Harris reneged in the dumbest way possible:

What happened was a dispute over Harris’s take. Rahma said he had been told that the vice president would be taking a stand against removing one’s shoes on airplanes. When they sat down, however, Harris had surprised him with a different take: “Bacon is a spice.” (Two senior campaign officials said this topic had been raised in advance. Rahma and his manager dispute this.)

Rahma, who doesn’t eat pork for religious reasons, was taken aback. “I don’t know,” he says, in an unpublished video recording of the interview, his voice rising to an unusually high pitch. Harris elaborates that bits of cooked bacon can be used to enhance a meal like any other seasoning. “Think about it, it’s pure flavor,” she says.

Ahem. Did we mention that Rahma is Muslim? His desire to press Kamala on Gaza should have been the first clue, but it’s also part of his show persona, too. Talking to a Muslim about bacon is the same thing as talking to a Hindu about the virtues of a medium-rare porterhouse steak. Even when Rahma reminded Harris that he doesn’t eat pork, Harris wanted to continue the bacon-is-a-spice argument. Rahma asks if they can go back to the shoes-on-airplanes crisis, but then Kamala gets another brilliant idea:

But, on the advice of a staffer, Harris decides to declare her love of anchovies on pizza — an alternative the campaign had floated earlier in an email. Rahma wraps the discussion one minute later.

“Well,” he says, with an awkward laugh. “I’m 100 percent unsure on both of those.” … “It was so complicated because I’m Muslim and there’s something going on in the world that 100 percent of Muslims care about,” he said. “And then they made it worse by talking about anchovies. Boring!”

It’s not so much boring as just plain weird. It went so badly, in fact, that Rahma spiked the episode rather than release it and try to explain how it all went so wrong. Team Kamala offered Rahma another shot, although what other ideas they had for conversation topics is anyone’s guess. Rahma told the NYT that he’d lost interest in Harris, and in politics generally. 

When did this take place? The NYT story suggests that it was close in time with Rahma’s Walz interview, which was posted on August 27th. The topic of that conversation was rain gutters and their importance to home ownership. There’s a certain charm in the fluffiness of the episode, I suppose, and at least Walz looked like he was having fun with it. 

But contrast this with the ease in which Donald Trump did Joe Rogan’s podcast. They spent three hours talking about actual issues as well as fluff, apparently without any preconditions o topic restrictions. Trump related easily to Rogan over an extended period of time. Unless you do radio — and I have done plenty of it over the last 20 years — you have no idea how hard it is to sustain a conversation for three hours on the air. That’s true for both the host and the guest, and it’s a credit to Rogan and Trump that they succeeded at it. 

Harris wouldn’t even do a few minutes without controlling the format, and even then couldn’t relate to her host for even that long. This report describes someone desperation to cosplay as a normal person and a capable politician, and isn’t authentically either. It’s a very revealing look at the empty suit that Democrats anointed in desperation, and pretty good evidence of how Harris is failing to connect with voters. And this explains why her campaign never allowed Harris to get within a hundred yards of Rogan’s show.