With only a month before the election, Kamala Harris continues to successfully elude any vigorous questioning from interviewers who are not firmly in her campaign’s dugout.

She’s gotten in some swings at the carefully crafted underhand wiffleballs tossed by MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle and ABC’s Brian Taff. But even as Ruhle and Taff did everything but hold the vice president’s hand during their brief, highly scripted conversations, Harris appeared as anxious as a schoolgirl giving her first class presentation. One could be forgiven if one’s instinct was to feel sorry for the poor soul at the beginning of the Taff interview, as her eyes darted nervously around the room and her voice lightly warbled with trepidation. But then one remembers: She wants to run our country. Sensible people should get over it.

Fortunately for Harris, however, if the partisan hacks at left-leaning TV networks are too much for her, she seems to have found her niche.  In a recent appearance with two former NBA players who named their podcast “All the Smoke” in an obvious reference to their well-known deep interest in recreational marijuana use, Harris appeared right at home.

The two hosts, Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, asked Harris questions that, for the most part, had nothing to do with politics while they nodded so vigorously in agreement with her answers that their heads appeared to be in constant danger of rolling off their shoulders. She was so at home with them that the interview was longer than the MSNBC and ABC puppet shows combined.

As a lifelong basketball aficionado, I enjoy the fast-expanding cultural phenomenon of former NBA greats hosting podcasts as much as the next NBA fan. But the idea that this is the place to go for political discourse is laughable. Our country should be embarrassed that candidates now regularly drop by to talk politics with people who throw a ball in a hoop for a living and who have no expert knowledge on any topic that is even remotely related to the business of running a country.

Sure, presidential candidates have been doing the talk show circuit for years now, dating back at least to when Bill Clinton showed up on The Arsenio Hall Show to play  some mediocre saxophone while sporting sunglasses. But this is a new low, several levels below our previous basement.

Jackson and Barnes were solid players in the league, and they are funny commentators on things having to do with basketball, but they know next to nothing about the matters of central importance in a presidential election. It was also apparent that Harris knows next to nothing about basketball,   although that didn’t stop her from trying to discuss it before turning to topics she considers of vital importance in demonstrating her ability to do the job she is seeking.

What kind of topics were those? Well, they asked her how unfair it is for people to question her racial identity and they inquired into her methods for looking out for her mental health in the midst of attacks she must endure from her opponent and his supporters. They asked her to elaborate on how she met her husband and how she formed relationships with his children from his previous marriage. She got to talk about her love of cooking and Doritos and her support of people like the hosts who like to “smoke weed.” You know, important stuff like that.

Did they ask her anything about politics? As little as possible, as one can guess that the audience for the podcast is likely not the most politically engaged, stoned as most of them almost certainly are much of the time. And Harris said as little as possible about actual political matters in response to their questions. When she was prompted to say something about her plan for the economy, she began (can you guess it?) with “Look, I grew up…” She then repeated practically verbatim the only things she has ever said publicly during the campaign about this topic.

This “plan” appears to consist of her pledge to give away a lot of government money. This would be in the form of small business grants to those who have any hare-brained business idea (doubtless a lot of “All the Smoke” listeners are now making plans for their own podcasts about cannabis and sports). She’ll also dole out federal grants to encourage the building of more houses, and still more grants to the people who desire to buy those houses but don’t really have the money to pay for them. Not a word was said here, as has been her practice since her campaign began, as to how the United States will pay for all of this without significantly cutting other public expenses and/or collapsing the economy outright.

But all of that would be a downer, so take a toke and relax!

Barnes and Jackson responded with chirping, glazed-eyed agreement: “Oh, they [the people receiving all the public largesse] will ride after that!” Because, Harris assured us, “most people have ambitions and dreams and they will work hard,” and so why shouldn’t we shower people who have shown little evidence of any work ethic with tax money we have collected from those who have demonstrated it? Only seems fair.

Harris also took the opportunity to drop in a word or two about her view that the American “system” is powerfully engineered to crush people who look like the podcast’s hosts. (Of course, one is asked to ignore the fact that Barnes and Jackson, while looking like they do, are interviewing a presidential candidate who is also said to share their complexion, on their successful podcast, after highly successful professional careers, and as they add to big, fat bank accounts dwarfing those of most people they probably believe are responsible for the machinations of “the system” keeping them down.) It goes without saying—though Harris made sure to say it anyway—that we cannot be content with noting and celebrating the perseverance and values of those poor black men who do well in life because there are still others who fail, and the failure of any of them is evidence not of anything that can be attributed to them, but of the brokenness of “the system.”

Jackson jumped in at this point to muse that the only thing differentiating him from George Floyd was the opportunity Jackson had to play basketball that Floyd did not have. It would probably be in bad taste to note that basketball courts and basketballs almost certainly existed at the public schools Floyd attended or to point out that Stephen Jackson (marijuana aside) has not, to the best of our knowledge, ever made the consummately bad decision to take significant quantities of more damaging narcotics and then determinedly physically resist while police were attempting to arrest him as a suspect in a crime.

Welcome, America, to the bottom of the political barrel. For now, that is. One can be reasonably confident that the people who have brought us here are not yet finished with their descent.