It takes a certain kind of Democrat to make questions from ABC’s “Good Morning America” look tough — and unfortunately for Arizona, Katie Hobbs is one of them.
The Grand Canyon State’s current secretary of state, and the Democratic nominee for governor in the Nov. 8 election, took what she surely thought would be a puffball interview opportunity Friday with the People magazine of morning television.
Hobbs ended up getting stumped by a question that has dogged her campaign — and proved just how little she deserves to ever take the governor’s office.
She was asked why she continues to refuse to debate her Republican opponent, former television news anchor Kari Lake, and if that refusal is making her look “scared” to potential voters.
The moment has been making the rounds on conservative media, and on the first viewing, it looks like Hobbs has been victimized by malicious editing. No candidate for governor of a major American state – or even a minor one – could be this inept, right?
Arizona Democrat Katie Hobbs gets roasted for refusing to debate @KariLake. Why is she so afraid? pic.twitter.com/zHj8BqLlR6
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) October 24, 2022
But watching the full video, it’s clear that Hobbs didn’t do much better in real time. After being served up one easy question that gave her a chance to mouth her boilerplate blather about the plain-speaking Lake being “too extreme and dangerous to Arizona,” she got hit with the second.
And her performance was just as bad as the abridged version on Twitter.
“Secretary Hobbs, a lot [is] at stake … It is a battleground state, the polls are razor thin, as you point out. Why have you refused to debate your opponent?”
The result was an embarrassment, by any standard of intellectual honesty. Check it out here:
Hobbs stammered and stuttered through her rationalization – that Lake’s unapologetic questions about the conduct and results of the 2020 presidential election made her unfit to be given a “larger platform” to share them with voters.
There’s a logical corollary to that, of course: A debate would give Hobbs a larger platform to debunk doubts about 2020, if she could, and maybe make inroads with independent voters who simply want to move ahead with the country’s future.
If the Democrat is so sure she’s right, she shouldn’t have any problem having it out in public.
Do you think dodging debates will cost Katie Hobbs the election?
That was either not considered strongly enough for Hobbs to mention or – much more likely – it was clear to Hobbs and her campaign that she is not a strong enough candidate to make the case.
In short, she’s dodging the debate, and she’s doing it so artlessly that even interviewers on “GMA” – a programmed co-anchored by George Stephanopoulos, the longtime Democratic operative who poses as a journalist – weren’t buying it.
And social media users noticed:
If you can’t stand toe 2 toe and debate your opponent you should be immediately disqualified.
Folks lives aren’t to be toyed with.
— hateblindstoreason (@themostconfuse2) October 24, 2022
If you cannot debate your Opponent one on one How do the voters trust what you stand for????
— Lucy (@lme644) October 24, 2022
Worst campaign strategy imaginable!
The optics make it seem that she thinks the cost/benefit of debating is not in her favour
AKA Kari Lake would outperform her so dramatically, that ducking the debate altogether would do less damage.
Awful candidate. How did she win the primary?— ScottGreen (@s_green0403) October 24, 2022
How is it possible she just keeps getting worse? https://t.co/Rd3k9wsHQN
— Jellenne (@jellen805) October 24, 2022
Reactions like that raise an even bigger question: How is it that with a Democrat running such a clearly cowardly, incompetent campaign, polling shows the two are separated by less than 2 percentage points among voters? (The most recent RealClearPolitics polling average had Lake at 47.8 percent of the vote and Hobbs at 46.2 percent.)
Lake herself had an answer to that in an interview with Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” on Monday. The polls, she said, are wrong.
.@KariLake: “I think [Katie Hobbs] knows why she won’t debate. It would be like a birthday cake versus a chainsaw if she showed up.” pic.twitter.com/aXUXVTTEea
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) October 24, 2022
As “Fox & Friends” Ainsley Earhardt noted, Democratic candidates around the country are dodging debates with their Republican counterparts – no doubt knowing full well that in the United States under President Joe Biden and a Democratic Congress, there’s little they can say to defend their party’s astonishingly abominable rule.
Lake’s answer was pure Lake: conservative, convincing and practically daring the listener to disagree.
“I think that they realize the American people are completely opposed to what the left is pushing,” she said. “Their policies are dead-end, destructive policies that we’ve seen destroy states like California, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, New Hampshire, and I can go on and on and on.
“And we’ve seen these Democrat policies destroy our once-great cities – New York, LA, San Francisco, Seattle. And they know that this is not what the people want.
“And so they hide, and they put out bogus polls, to make people think it’s close. I can tell you, it is not close.”
That’s one answer, and conservative Americans should hope it’s true, not just for the political benefits but for the sake of the country.
Democrats and the usual suspect institutions – the mainstream media, Big Tech, Hollywood, academia – already proved in 2020 that they will pick the possibility of failure over the potential for success when they tipped the scales for the Joe Biden presidency over Donald Trump’s dynamic four-year run.
Voters who opt for Democrats in this year’s midterms are going to be even worse.
The failure of the Democratic Party’s policies over the past two years is proven by an economy racked by inflation, a country flooded with an invasion of illegal immigration and a tarnished American image from Biden’s disgraceful withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 to his equally disgraceful, tacit invitation to Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine in 2022.
The vote for Republicans in 2022, up and down the ballot, shouldn’t even be close. And there should be no debate about that question.
Every conservative, every Republican, every independent and even every Democrat who cares about the future of the country needs to get out to the polls and make sure the answer sticks.
