Rantz: Jay Inslee couldn’t answer easy question he based his entire campaign on

Jay Inslee, unable to crack 0 percent support in most polls, had the opportunity to bring his message to the 113 people watching CNN last night during a Town Hall, and he botched it. Big time.

RELATED: Inslee will soon run a failed campaign for president

Running exclusively on saving the environment, you’d think Inslee would be prepared for a question about recycling. He wasn’t. And it was embarrassing.

An audience member asked Inslee about foreign countries refusing to recycle our waste, which means what you think you’re recycling doesn’t actually end up getting recycled. The question was simple: How can we fix our broken recycling system?

“I thought I had the answers to every question and I don’t have (an) answer to that,” Inslee stupidly admitted. “But next time we meet, I’m going to have a better approach. I know that I have a team of people who are looking for options on this.”

There won’t be a next time, Jay.

CNN’s Dan Merica noted the unbearably awkward moment:

In one of the more curious moments of the night, Inslee — a candidate whose campaign is almost entirely focused on climate change — said he didn’t know enough about the recycling system to say how he would change it.

Perhaps if Inslee spent time in the state he governs, he’d realize this is a major issue facing our state. Tacoma is actively figuring out what they’ll do with the problem. How is this a question that catches him off guard?

Here’s a simple answer that Inslee hasn’t thought about giving: Invest in technology and infrastructure in the United States to handle the recycling.

Inslee says the green economy will create jobs, yet he didn’t think to talk about how we should invest in the jobs here to handle the recycling, so we don’t have to ship our waste overseas.

RELATED: Inslee can’t muster 1 percent in poll

He doesn’t even have to know what kind of technology we’re talking about. He just had to say “we should build it” and use buzzwords like “invest” and “job creation,” and he could have handled it. Most of the time, he doesn’t even know what he’s saying anyway — he just stumbles through vaguely decipherable sentences.

He couldn’t string together words beyond “I don’t have an answer” on the general topic he’s based his entire campaign on?

Instead, he fumbled. Why? Because he’s not ready for prime time. And seeing him literally in prime time made that point rather well.

Listen to the Jason Rantz Show weekday afternoons from 3-6 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (or HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3). Subscribe to the podcast here.

Follow @https://twitter.com/jasonrantz