"I've paid far more attention to Kamala than I ever imagined I would with a presidential candidate, listening to her interviews, speeches, and so on.
"I suspect that many people, even people who are her partisans, are realizing something quite shocking. It's this: she knows less about policy, news, existing public controversies, and even recent history, than most people who read X or NYT or even just listen to the news on radio or TV. For that matter, I suspect that just about any person on the street knows more.
"It's like she hasn't really paid much attention to anything for years. Interviewers are trying their best to be kind to her, but even the slightest bit of push on what she knows turns up a big nothing. It's not that she is being cagey or clever. The trouble is that she truly does not know.
'It's hard to understand why. It could be that she has, for most of her career, been able to outsource knowledge and understanding to others. She has always just been a smiling face, the socializer, the spouter of bromides, and gotten by with faking it. After a while, it probably doesn't feel like faking; it feels like this is the way the job is supposed to be. She has not known any other way.
"Now she is expected to play the part of someone who knows some minimum something about a range of issues, and she simply cannot deal with it. What's remarkable is that her champions are as mortified by this as anyone.
"Of all people who should find her off-putting and intolerable it should be professional women. In the workplace, people like are despised because they bring discredit to everyone else. They usually create their own glass ceilings."