National Review senior writer Michael Brendan Dougherty, on today’s Editors episode, said that Kamala Harris’s not attending the Al Smith Dinner was “another missed opportunity.”

“The genius of the event,” Dougherty said, “is that you get professional comedians to write the material, you deliver it, you look both magnanimous for taking the jokes on the chin and then you look funny for giving a few.”

Dougherty gave two reasons he thinks Harris didn’t attend, one of which is “the decline of the Catholic Church as an institutional presence in American life. . . . And maybe this is a sign of it that she didn’t go.” It also might be that “Archbishop Cordileone in San Francisco has nothing like the presence Archbishop Timothy Dolan has in New York. And none of his predecessors have . . . so [Harris] may not see this as an important vote.”

“But,” Dougherty pointed out, “in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Catholic moderates are a swing constituency. And this might be a way of getting toward some of them. It certainly could have been.”

Not only was it “another missed opportunity,” Dougherty said, it was “another data point in what’s become an endless string of them in the last few months: that she does not have self-confidence and self-possession.”

“She doesn’t trust herself in environments where there might be a little improvisation or a surprise.”

The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.