From a Consider This story. The subject is Kamala Harris’s effort to align herself with popular Biden administration policies while establishing her own candidacy:
“How is she walking that needle, and how are you going to look for that, particularly in the debate coming up?”Maybe just listen for the screams?
You can walk a line. You can thread a needle. You can walk the line if you’re Johnny Cash. But you cannot walk a needle. Ouch.
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[Know your clichés!]
comments: 8
Maybe it was in a haystack.
Ah, “look for” — I didn’t catch that. Very nice!
It comes up in Google books, in a medical context
That seems to mean something like guiding a needle along a path? I think NPR wanted a needle to thread.
From the sentence before it looks like a mixed-metaphor and a talking at cross-purposes
“… the way that Harris is trying to chart her own course of turning the page forward, but also, you know, claiming credit for the Biden things that voters seem to like.”
So, walking the needle refers to “the course” and look for that refers to “claiming credit.
But, seriously, if they’d have used a walking a tight-rope metaphor in the first place they could have continued with walking a fine line.
I think it is a mixed metaphor, or a mixed cliché. The medical meaning, which I didn’t know, could make a kind of sense here — proceeding carefully, but I doubt that’s what Scott Detrow had in mind.
Perhaps what is being said is that Harris plans on needling Trump in the debate.
Very nice!
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