This article originally appeared in The American Spectator on September 26, 2024
Vice President Kamala Harris has turned down an invitation to speak at the Al Smith Dinner in New York City. Her staff says she will be busy campaigning, but that is a poor excuse: every presidential candidate, save for Walter Mondale in 1984, has accepted the invitation (New York Archbishop John Cardinal O’Connor did not extend an invitation to either candidate in 1996 and that is because he could not bring himself to invite President Bill Clinton; he had just vetoed a ban on partial-birth abortions).
The Al Smith Dinner, named after the first Catholic to run for president in 1928, is well attended by elites from government, the media, business and the entertainment industry. It is an opportunity to showcase one’s policies and persona. This is the real reason Harris is taking a pass: she fails on both counts.
Neither Harris nor Trump is Catholic, but that doesn’t matter as much as their policies. Trump is pro-life, pro-school choice and pro-religious liberty. She is anti-life, anti-school choice and anti-religious liberty. Given this reality, a Catholic setting is not exactly the kind of venue that Harris would relish.
On abortion, Harris has never found one she couldn’t justify. A proponent of abortion-on-demand, she claimed during the debate with Trump that he was wrong in saying that she would allow abortions “in the seventh month, the eighth month, the ninth month.” She answered, “That’s not true.”
It is true and it is what Roe v. Wade allowed. To deny that late-term abortions exist is simply wrong. In 2019, the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute admitted that at least 12,000 late-term abortions take place annually in the U.S. In 2023, a fact-checker at the Washington Post conceded that at least 10,000 late-term abortions take place each year.
Harris has consistently voted against every school choice measure ever proposed. Beholden to the teachers’ unions, she will not allow indigent minorities the same right to send their children to the school of their choice that more affluent Americans enjoy.
When it comes to religious liberty, Harris is a co-sponsor of the Equality Act and the sponsor of the Do No Harm Act. Both would exempt the bill’s provisions from the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), the most consequential religious-liberty legislation ever adopted. This says it all.
Without RFRA, Catholic doctors and hospitals could be forced to perform abortions and sex-reassignment surgeries. This is what Harris wants. So radical is she on this issue that in 2019 she answered an ACLU survey saying she would have taxpayers fund sex-reassignment surgery for illegal aliens and federal prisoners.
Important as these policy reasons are, there is a bigger reason why Harris is not going to the Al Smith Dinner. Her persona is the problem.
The event is known for allowing the candidates to “roast” each other. This is right up Trump’s alley—he is lightning fast and loves to roast his foes on a regular basis. But for Harris, this kind of setting would be a disaster.
Let’s face it—she talks like a pre-schooler. Gibberish. Hands waving, she has a hard time stringing two coherent sentences together. No matter what the question is, she begins by personalizing her response, all the while thinking of something—anything—to say. This event demands that the participants be quick on their feet, and that is not exactly her strong suit. And she won’t have her dancing sidekick, Tim, or her billionaire buddy, Oprah, there to bail her out.
Senator Chuck Schumer wants Harris to attend the Al Smith Dinner. It’s time Trump sent him a MAGA hat.
