Kamala Harris is "bluntly putting down markers on nuanced topics to help inoculate her from false critiques with answers that also illuminate how she views her own identity."

That's from Politico, "Why Kamala Harris is glad people are asking if she's black enough/The candidate is looking to head off a problem that dogged Barack Obama" by Christopher Cadelago.

First, I don't believe that Politico knows that Harris is "glad." Also, I wouldn't use the word "dogged" with Barack Obama, given that he was dogged with the question of the literal eating of dogs.

But what I want to do is count the metaphors in the quote I put in the title:

1. bluntly — The adjective leads us to think we'll be referring to something that could be sharpened — like a weapon or a pencil — but in this case is not.

2. putting down markers — "A marker, to a gambler, is an I.O.U. ... The gambler's definition of marker as 'promissory note'' appeared first in 1887, but was popularized in Damon Runyon's 'Guys and Dolls'' in 1932: 'Now I am going to pay my landlady, and take up a few markers here and there, and feed myself up good.' A 1934 film based on a Runyon tale about a little girl used as an I.O.U. was titled 'Little Miss Marker.''' Wrote William Safire, a while back, in the NYT. (Here's the film clip with Shirley Temple as an IOU in human form.)

3. nuanced — "Nuance" comes from words that mean cloud. We're talking about subtlety in shading. How could you in an unsharp way put an IOU on a cloud?

4. inoculate — To inoculate is to engraft or implant. The "ocu" part actually means "eye," because it was a plant eye that was engrafted. We now have to think of the IOU as something that, engrafted into a cloud, is like the germs put into the human body to produce immunity from the disease that would be caused by those germs if the body had encountered them in some other way. The disease in this image is "false critiques," and the immunity is "answers." This is the one metaphor the writer probably thought about consciously. A good writer would notice that this is the central, useful metaphor and edited out any hint of a metaphor that doesn't fit — including "dead metaphors" like "bluntly." (Here's George Orwell on dead metaphors.)

5. illuminate — Now, it's about giving light. The light source is the "answers," but, as we just saw, within the inoculation metaphor, the answers were immunity. Immunity resists disease. That's a good thing. Let the answers be good in that form. Don't change them into something else that you think is good. I like light, but you're annoying me with the task of picturing light along with sharpness, gambling, clouds, and inoculation.

In short, don't mix metaphors. And I miss William Safire. I should read a lot of his old columns and get some ideas about how to write the kinds of things I'd like to be able to just read, but he's not there anymore to write them for me.