COLUMBUS, Miss. — Kamala Harris rolled into a Mississippi high school gym Thursday night to fire up voters for Democratic Senate hopeful Scott Colom, and instead fired up the most powerful force in Southern politics: silence.
According to the New York Post, Harris reached the inspirational portion of her speech and dropped this motivational banger: "Never let someone else with limited ability to see your capacity be a limitation on your ambition." The crowd responded with the kind of quiet you usually only hear in church right after somebody's phone goes off.
So she did what every great orator does when the room goes cold. She said it again. "Let me repeat that," Harris announced, like the problem was the volume and not the sentence. Round two: "Never let anybody else's, somebody else's limited ability to see your capacity to be a limitation on your ambition." Same words, new order, same confusion. That's not a quote. That's a Mad Lib somebody filled out on an airplane.
Then she brought it home: "That's their limitation. That's not our limitation. That's their limitation." At this point the word "limitation" had been used more times than in a Chevy warranty. The only thing limited in that gym was everyone's patience.
Remy Rattigan reached out to a local cricket who was present and, per sources inside the bleachers, chirped exactly once out of pity.
To be fair, the venue didn't help. Local outlets WTVA and the Magnolia Tribune reported the rally had to move to the Columbus High School gymnasium after Mississippi University for Women declined to host it, citing logistics. The campaign said more than 1,000 people RSVP'd. The Post described the gym as far from full, which is a brutal combination: you get bumped from a college to a high school and still can't sell out a basketball court on a weeknight.
And it gets better. Colom, a district attorney challenging Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, told the crowd people had asked him why on earth he'd bring Harris to Mississippi. "Why would you do that?" folks asked. His answer: "Why not?" Buddy, she just showed you why not. Live. On a livestream. Twice.
Harris closed with a classic: "We are not limited in our ambition and desire and ability to see what is possible and what can be." The crowd, presumably still processing the first one, is expected to reach a consensus on its meaning sometime around Thanksgiving.
Political strategists are reportedly trying to figure out whether Harris on the trail in a Republican state is a secret weapon or a Republican one. Meanwhile, President Trump rallies in Mississippi on Monday, where the crowd will be loud, the quotes will make sense or at least be short, and nobody will have to hear the same sentence twice unless it's "Build the wall."
Remy Rattigan's free speechwriting tip for the former vice president: if you have to say "let me repeat that," the problem isn't that they didn't hear you.
This article is satire from The Demorat. Quotes from Harris and Colom are as reported by the New York Post; venue and RSVP details come from WTVA and the Magnolia Tribune. The cricket interview and all commentary are parody, not factual reporting.
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