Kamala Harris Doesn't Consider 'Humble' A Personal Stretch Goal
Hop aboard the Harris media train!
Vice President Kamala Harris is on a media blitz. She sat for an interview with 60 Minutes, which aired Monday night, and later this week, she’ll appear on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The View, and The Howard Stern Show. All this while managing hurricane relief. She’s practically everywhere all at once.
Yet Politico complained on Sunday that Harris is “still largely avoiding the media,” which only makes sense if you strictly define “the media” as “people who spout nonsense.” If so, then Politico’s correct: Harris isn’t wasting time on Fox News, which is a right-wing propaganda outlet that paid $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems because the network repeatedly lied about the 2020 election.
Pollster Frank Lutz asked, “How many watchers of The View, Stephen Colbert, or Howard Stern are undecided voters?” That’s an absurd question, as these programs average millions of viewers/listeners, most of them in the key demos for Harris and Democrats. This is the mobilization stage of the campaign. She needs to rally her supporters. Turnout will decide this election, just as it did in 2022, 2020, 2018, and so on. Persuasion is mostly a West Wing fantasy, where a single rousing speech can carry the day. Of course, Harris has made every effort to appeal to rational center-right voters. She’s the candidate with endorsements from both Liz Cheney and Bernie Sanders. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.
Lutz did offer “kudos” to Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, for going on Fox News, where he’ll reach exactly zero truly undecided voters. It’s more a hazing ritual than successful message outreach.
Politico also claimed Harris’s upcoming interviews “likely won’t press her on tough issues, even as voters want more specifics,” but as the late Alex Trebek would say on Jeopardy! “that too is wrong.”
The people who claim they want to hear more “specifics” from Harris — a perfectly normal candidate — are just looking for any excuse to vote for the drooling psychopath who’s also a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist. Trump isn’t bothering to close the deal with undecided voters. He’s dragging out weirdos like Elon Musk. He’s sharing Nazi race science on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show. He bailed on an interview with 60 Minutes, which is part of the hospice care package at most rest homes. Polls show that Harris has higher approval than Trump among the remaining undecided voters. The concern scolds should go lecture Trump.
Harris won’t audition for the Statler and Waldorf demo
NBC News anchor Andrea Mitchell argued on Sunday that Harris should “double down on more interviews and serious interviews,” which is exactly what she’s doing. It’s like they’re giving her a Jim Crow literacy test. There’s no way to pass.
Mitchell claimed that Harris has “got such a big problem with men ... big problem,” which isn’t true. Yes, she’s losing men overall, but she’s polling better among them than Trump is polling among women, who represent a larger share of the electorate. That’s why she’s led most national polls for almost two week straight.
Howard Stern’s audience is about 73 percent male and 74 percent are between the ages of 25 to 54. It’s an ideal platform for Harris to reach men who, like Stern, are receptive to her message. However, Stern listeners aren’t the men who Mitchell thinks Harris needs to impress.
“But also the business world, they don’t think she's serious,” Mitchell said. “They don't think she’s a heavyweight.”
Harris is the vice president of the United States, a former U.S. senator, and the former attorney general for California. Meanwhile, Trump proposes economy-tanking tariffs during rambling speeches that are only coherent when he’s expressing his bloodlust.
Mitchell is married to former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan, a lifelong Republican who was born just six years after women were able to vote. I’m sure Mitchell knows businessmen in smoke-filled rooms who don’t think Harris is a “heavyweight,” but most of them are too attached to their personal biases to even consider changing their minds.
The International Association of Fire Fighters has endorsed every Democratic candidate since 1960 except for Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. That’s not a policy difference. It’s blatant sexism, and no amount of interviews would fix the problem. Harris shouldn’t waste time on the Bert Cooper/Roger Sterling vote. She should speak to voters who are willing to listen.
That’s why Harris’s interview with Alexandra Cooper from the Call Her Daddy podcast was such a revelation. Call Her Daddy has the second-biggest audience among podcasts on Spotify (after Joe Rogan). The show’s 5 million listeners are 70 percent women, 48 percent Democrat, 24 percent Republican, and 20 percent independent (i.e. Republicans who don’t want people to think they’re bigots).
Cooper’s recent guests have been Avril Lavigne, Gwyneth Paltrow, Miley Cyrus, and Simone Biles, so the vice president was a stark change, one that Cooper explained up front.
“As you guys know, I do not usually discuss politics or have politicians on the show because I want Call Her Daddy to be a place that everyone feels comfortable tuning in,” Cooper said. “But, at the end of the day, I couldn’t see a world in which one of the main conversations in this election is women and I’m not a part of it. I am so aware I have a very mixed audience when it comes to politics, so please hear me when I say [that] my goal today is not to change your political affiliation. What I’m hoping is that you’re able to listen to a conversation that isn’t too different from the ones that we’re having here every week.”
So, Politico and other naysayers are wrong when they suggest that this was a safe space for Harris. It was far more serious and informative than what legacy media offers, and it wasn’t like one of Trump’s attempted sanewashing sessions on Fox News. Just last night, a desperate Laura Ingraham tried and failed to make Trump look like a mammal. She fact-checked his grotesque lies about the federal government’s response to Hurricane Helene, and whenever he suggested he’d prosecute his political enemies, she gently steered Fascist Grandpa in the general direction of rationality like he was lost at the supermarket.
Cooper isn’t a partisan hack whose livelihood depends on making Harris look good. (The interview actually cost Cooper some followers, which isn’t shocking. White women have almost as many Trump supporters among them as pumpkin spice latte drinkers.) Cooper asked better questions than 60 Minutes’ Bill Whittaker, even if she did so in sweats. (No Black woman would’ve dressed down for MVP.) They addressed “tough issues,” including abortion rights.
Perhaps the standout moment from their conversation was when Cooper brought up Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s gross smear about how Harris “doesn’t have anything keeping her humble” because she doesn’t have (biological) children. Harris didn’t accept the premise, nor did she act as if she had to justify her life choices. Instead she said, “I don’t think [Sanders] understands that there are a whole lot of women out here who, one, are not aspiring to be humble.”
“Two, a whole lot of women out here who have a lot of love in their life, family in their life and children in their life,” she added. “And I think it’s really important for women to lift each other up.”
Harris is a mother but she doesn’t believe people like Sarah Huckabee Sanders and JD Vance have the right to judge any woman, including “childless cat ladies.” Claiming that Harris lacks “humility” is a less-than-subtle dog whistle, especially from the party that’s become a personality cult for a narcissistic egomaniac. Harris is running for the presidency. She doesn’t have time for “humble.” Andrea Mitchell, Frank Lutz, Maureen Dowd, and the Politico crew probably bite their lips to keep from calling her “uppity,” but Harris isn’t running this campaign to please them. She plays to win but she won’t play that tired game.
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Lutz is nuts because the typical viewer of Colbert, Stern, etc. are people tuning in for entertainment and not politics (by contrast with Fox or CNN viewers) so these are exactly the sort of viewers who may not be planning to vote or may not know who they will vote for yet. It makes sense to try to reach them through those venues. Disengaged voters are not sitting around watching news shows.
Hell, I even think it'd be a good idea for Harris to go on Rogan's show, because though he skews right wing he's got a reputation as an overly credulous interviewer who lets his subjects say whatever they want. It wouldn't be like accepting an interview with Hannity. And like Stern, his audience (mostly male) tends to be there for reasons other than politics and would include a lot of people who don't know much about Harris and could be persuaded by her.
It's nice to see her team is adopting a smart media strategy--fossils like Mitchell are so caught up in their legacy self-importance they don't realize how irrelevant they're becoming, at exactly the moment their credibility is most widely doubted. Some self-reflection should be in order, but I doubt they have it in them. And that hypocritical trash Sarah Huckabee may think Harris needs some "humility" (not hard to see her channeling some plantation-mistress shit with that comment) but good for Harris deftly swatting that shit down.
“Andrea Mitchell, Frank Lutz, Maureen Dowd, and the Politico crew probably bite their lips to keep from calling her “uppity”, (and Kamala Harris just told them, in not so many words, that they can bite her ass.)