When did shock jock and satellite-radio wit Howard Stern turn into a cream puff and shill for Kamala Harris and her floundering campaign for the presidency?

Is she really that far behind that she needed to play vaudeville, first The View and then The Howard Stern Show, presumably on the basis that a defanged Howard would lay off Californication questions about cocaine or encounters of a hot-tub kind.

I tuned into the nationally syndicated interview with the vice president, thinking that if anyone could chip away at Harris’s iceberg persona, it might well be Stern, who has eaten the lunch of many guests, even if they are served up over breakfast.

For much of the last generation, Stern has been nobody’s fool, but then the sitting vice president entered his studio, and he went weak at the knees, as if he had been granted a date with Miss America—to whom he gushed:

I think you’d be a great president. I think you’re compassionate. I think you’ve had all the life experience. I love your experience as a prosecutor and I want to thank you for all the years of public service. I appreciate anyone who really serves the public and serves them in a way. And I know even as a prosecutor, you got people out of jail who were falsely accused.

Howard, we hardly knew ye. But Kamala, when you go on the Stern show, it’s a moment to tell jokes or feed off his riffs, not to sound like an AI reading of a Brookings Institution white paper.

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I am sure you have seen interview outtakes on social media, but what the excerpts missed is that for 57 minutes of the hour-long show, Stern held Harris by the hand as she walked across dangerous political intersections.

For example, Stern said:

It’s really weird, too, because to me, you’re the law and order candidate. And yet they try to paint you like you’re some leftist who, I don’t know, who wants to have people running through the streets committing crimes. You were a prosecutor…

And he asked her pageant contestant questions about her departed mother, about paying for law school, her early job interviews, working at McDonald’s, and how, as a crime-busting prosecutor, she had fearlessly sent numerous wise guys up the river.

Harris’s answers were the political equivalent of painting-by-numbers, little set speeches that her staff has market tested and written (based on polling algorithms) and that she has memorized.

Here’s one recital (she told exactly the same anecdote at the debate with Donald Trump):

Well, I think that we just — we should remember the good. And I don’t mean to sound naive, but we have to remember the good. We have so many hardworking, good people who I have the great experience of meeting every day. For example, one of my passions is small businesses. So my mother worked full time. Worked long hours. And we lived on a nursery school above a child care center. And the woman who owned that, Mrs. Shelton, we called her our second mother. She helped my mother raise us. She was a small business owner. I grew up as a child knowing small business owners. They are leaders in the community. They hire locally. They mentor. So I have a real passion for small businesses.

Maybe she does, but her stage voice, at least on the sycophantic Stern & Friends, was deadpan, to the point that Howard had to jump in and coax her toward her punchlines.

I am not saying she’s Biden or Trump, lost at sea in mid-sentence, but one reason she’s not scraping the deck with the dysfunctional Trump is because there’s a bloodless quality to her language, which often makes her sound like a seventh grader reciting the Gettysburg Address.

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Only in the last three minutes of the interview did Harris drop her monotone and show she has a pulse—over the improbable subjects of a U2 concert at the Vegas Sphere and her passion for Formula One car racing.

I could have guessed the U2 devotion (although “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” might be too close to her campaign’s continental drift), but not her Age of Aquarius gushing for the otherworldliness of the Sphere, of which she said (perhaps with the only conviction of the interview):

You sit in there and it’s almost like Disneyland or Disney World where things just start to change around you….And you feel like you lose a sense of gravity because it’s really phenomenal. And also what’s interesting about it, then, is to your point about mics and all this stuff, you don’t really need a lot of stage props because the props are all in the sphere on the monitors.

Then she tried to convert Stern—who by this point must have known the interview was a bust—to Formula One, if not Sir Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes team. At least this exchange had some passion.

For once sounding like the old Stern, he asked her: “Why do you like Formula One? These guys drive around the cars over and over again in a circle.” Then they had this banter:

HARRIS: We love it. Our whole family does.

HARRIS: No. I mean, oh, once you start, I think you should see it. You might get hooked.

I am not saying that enthusiasm for a Vegas escape room or Lewis Hamilton are enough to allow Harris to beat the deplorable Trump, but these were the only words of her interview that hinted of delight or conviction. Alas, presidents are not often chosen based on their passion for Vegas floorshows.

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Stern is enough of a pro so that even on bended knee he decided not to ask Harris why she wants to be president, fearing that the answer would meander to the “opportunity economy” and those $6,000 tax breaks so that new parents can buy car seats to drive newborns to the mall.

But for him not to bring up Gaza or Ukraine (or the undeclared war in Yemen) was journalistic malpractice, and it led the most cringeworthy dialogue of the interview, which began with Harris’s world view sounding like a brochure for Model United Nations:

HARRIS: But to your point, I’ve now met as vice president over 150 world leaders, presidents, prime ministers, chancellors and kings. And part of what keeps me up at night is the knowledge based on experience. America is so important to the rest of the world, Howard. We are so important to the rest of the world. We are a role model for what it means to be a democracy so we can look at other countries and our allies and our adversaries and say, these are the principles that must be upheld. And while we uphold these principles, we will also be the strongest economy in the world. We will have the most lethal fighting force in the world. All these things coexist. But you’ve got to have a president who appreciates and understands that on the issue of military. We already discussed where Donald Trump is. He belittles the members of our military.

HARRIS: But right. You look at the economy. My plans for the economy. Listen, I am a capitalist. I’m also — I’m also a devout public servant that knows government can’t do everything by itself.

[Note to Howard: I can think of many things “more important than our military”, especially since the Pentagon hasn’t won a war since 1945.]

Trump’s vision of foreign policy is to sell the United States down the river Putin (perhaps in exchange for oligarchic funding for his failed condo and golf projects?), but Harris’s city-on-a-hill allegory (“a role model for what it means to be a democracy…”) doesn’t quite jibe with the administration’s weekly shipment of cluster bombs to Israel.

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In 1976 and then again in 1992, the struggling Democratic candidates—Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton—put their hands on the radio or opened their doors to Playboy magazine to give their campaigns a jolt.

Even the Georgia peanut farmer Carter confessed to Playboy that “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust; I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times…” which made the Sunday school teacher seem a little less saintly.

For this fifteen minutes of humanity, Bill Clinton acknowledged “personal failings” in his marriage and to blowing some weed (although never inhaling).

Even with Howard Stern, the father confessor of drive-time radio, Kamala Harris remained buttoned up (“I don’t like talking about myself. It feels I was raised not to be a narcissist…”), struggling just to remember her lines about the economy (“My econ policies, Goldman Sachs, the 16 Nobel laureates will tell you that my plans will strengthen our economy…”).

At the same time her candidacy (and most of her hour with Stern) is all about the immaculate conception of Herself, yet another American politician (as was Obama) whose favorite bedtime story is the lottery win of their presidential nomination and celebrity apprenticeship.

Trump is criminally insane, but he does speak to his supporters as he might talk to them in a booth at Denny’s—perhaps something he learned from his appearances on Howard Stern (who, by the way, when he on top of his game, got Trump to confess his incestuous desires for his daughter Ivanka).