Kamala Harris Survives Major Interview Like It’s Something She’s Done Multiple Times Already
Kamala Harris Survives Major Interview Like It’s Something She’s Done Multiple Times Already
Inside a manufactured media crisis
Vice President Kamala Harris sat down with CNN’s Dana Bash on Thursday for her first major interview as the Democratic presidential nominee. Thus ends what legacy media spun as a defiant standoff with Harris after she became the presumptive nominee all of 39 days ago.
Prior to President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race, the media stamped their feet because he wouldn’t submit to an extensive interview. This is a good time to remind everyone that Harris met with 40 New York Times reporters and current publisher A.G. Sulzberger last May, so she doesn’t exactly hide from the press. (They spent most of their time with the vice president asking why Biden wouldn’t talk to them.)
Times reporter Astead W. Herndon wrote an in-depth profile of Harris last October, “In Search of Kamala Harris” (he literally just found her). The article hasn’t aged well, considering its major thesis is that Harris struggles to define herself and her political future is dim. Thursday, Jess Bidgood at the Times conducted a public therapy session with Herndon titled “The Challenge of Interviewing Kamala Harris.” (She’s the vice president, not Blake Lively who I hear is also a tough interview.)
“[Harris] often pushed you to define words like ‘radical,’ ‘progressive,’ and even ‘economic inequality,’ in a lawyerly way,” Bidgood asked Herndon. “What tone did that set for you?”
I think the tone it should have set was “use precise language in your questions and don’t waste my time with BS.” Harris is a former prosecutor and a serious person.
“I wrote this in the piece, but it wasn’t just the words, but the body language,” Herndon said. “She didn’t break eye contact. It was intense. You feel on trial. Fifteen minutes in, I thought, I don’t know if I’m getting what I need to here, and this might be the last time we talk — and it was.”
This seems more like an issue with Herndon rather than Harris. He’s definitely not ready for the Blake Lively beat.
On with the show …
Dana Bash spoke with Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz during a break on their two-day bus tour of Georgia. Harris would later headline a packed-house rally in Savannah.
Trump, who whined that the interview was “boring,” will argue that CNN is on Team Harris, and Bash just threw her softballs. That’s definitely not true. Bash isn’t Megyn Kelly — there’s no yawning abyss where her soul should be — but like many mainstream journalists, she can too often present right-wing talking points as good-faith inquiries. Harris and Walz traversed that minefield without triggering any explosions. Harris might even agree with Trump that the interview wasn’t thrilling. However, she rightly saved the fireworks for her Thursday night rally.
Harris explained why she’s modified her positions on some key issues and that her overall values haven’t changed. She used a common rhetorical method where you repeat the key phrase you want people to remember (“my values have not changed”), which reinforces that Harris has values (unlike her opponent) and they are consistent. Of course, Fox News will just claim that her brain short-circuited like Marco Rubio at the 2016 GOP debate. Meanwhile, Donald Trump can’t clearly articulate his position on the upcoming abortion rights referendum that’s on the ballot in the state where he currently lives.
Harris declined Bash’s invitation for a mud-wrestling match with Trump. When Bash asked her about the racist sludge Trump’s hurled her way, Harris simply replied, “Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please.”
This was brilliant, because she “sanity blocks” Trump from making the race about her race and gender, which is what he wants, but she also reminds voters that Trump is old and tired. He’s evil on Betamax.
Harris had kinds words about President Joe Biden, defending his record while making clear that electing her wouldn’t just mean more of the same. She told Bash about the moment she learned Biden was dropping out of the race and endorsing her. She’d cooked breakfast for her nieces and was about to do a puzzle with them when the president called. (I’ve often used the old “president’s on the phone, I gotta take this” trick to get out of doing a puzzle or playing a board game, but Harris’s excuse was legit.)
She subtly but firmly stressed that she didn’t ask for the endorsement and that Biden made it clear he supported her. She asked him if he was sure he wanted to step aside, which subverts any power-hungry narratives about her among reasonable voters at least. She never wavered from Team Biden.
The CNN interview was presented as high-stakes for Harris, the non-felon in the race, but the stakes were probably higher for the media, who needs to prove that it can cover the vice president without making fools of themselves. So far, the evidence is thin.
For example, the Washington Post ran an op-ed earlier this week titled, “A sitting VP has won once in 188 years. Harris isn’t likely to be next.”
Columnist Marc A. Thiessen is a former George W. Bush speechwriter and a Fox News contributor, and he’s passing off an educated wish as historical prophecy. Sitting Vice President George H.W. Bush won in 1988, just 36 years ago, and since then, the only sitting vice president to lose was Al Gore in 2000. Thiessen might want voters to see a Harris presidency as a “second Biden term,” but that’s not the case. She’s fundamentally different, unlike Gore who was perhaps too similar to Clinton (southern white male moderate) while lacking Clinton’s charisma. Meanwhile, Harris is running against a former president who lost re-election. A recent Fox News poll of the sunbelt states had Harris leading Trump as the “candidate of change” by one point (49/48 percent).
The Guardian suggested that the CNN interview would prove a “key test of” her “credibility.” I repeat: She’s the vice president, a former senator and attorney general. She’s damn credible. It’s insulting to run this article the day after Donald Trump shared viciously sexist content about Harris on social media. Trump fails the credibility test daily and the media doesn’t seem to notice or care that much.
Whose interview is it anyway?
It wasn’t long after the interview was announced that the Goal Posts Movers of America started working overtime. Former CBS News White House Correspondent Mark Knoller posted on social media, “Should CNN have insisted on a one-on-one interview with Harris and turned down a joint interview with Harris and Walz? Too tough to walk away from. But first question to Harris ought to be why [she] couldn’t appear solo.”
Asking this question would mean that you’re either a complete dullard or a partisan hack promoting MAGA talking points. The Present Age’s
provided almost instant visual confirmation that these joint interviews are fairly standard (see below).
Interviews with both members of the ticket are usually more about test driving the nominee’s first major decision, their VP pick. The nominee had campaigned for more than a year by that point, and frankly, you’d started to get sick of them. Harris wasn’t an official candidate until July 21. However, she’s hardly an unknown quantity. She’s the sitting vice president.
Meghan McCain, who owes her entire professional career to her father, posted this nonsense: “I don’t know if democrats fully realize how damaging the image of the possible first woman president being incapable of giving an interview alone without the presence of a man to help her.”
Harris has given multiple interviews by herself. If anything, she’s the safety net for Tim Walz, who until recently was just the governor of what MAGA now calls the People’s Republic of Minnesota.
Late last year, Harris was interviewed on 60 Minutes where she discussed Israel, the Ukraine war, gun safety, and the 2024 election. It’s much harder to defend another person’s choices and policies than it is to simply present your own. She also deftly avoided the trap door marked “Can Biden Actually Serve Another Full Term”?
She spoke at length with Face the Nation’s Margaret Brennan in September 2023. She also fielded tough questions about Biden’s health. When you rewatch these interviews, you could almost see Harris carefully consider how each response would best serve the Biden administration. I’ve argued that perhaps Pete Buttigieg could do this more effortlessly than Harris, but his background is more corporate. Harris was probably better accustomed to prosecuting her own case.
This Greta Garbo image that the GOP and an enabling press have tried to push isn’t supported by facts. Harris was delightful and charming during her interview with The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert in March 2023.
She addressed serious topics with Jimmy Kimmel, who managed to survive her intense eye contact.
Donald Trump just rants over the phone on Fox News, and it’s unlikely JD Vance could get through even a low-key interview without saying something gross about women, again. I’d actually typed that last sentence before seeing that Vance had posted some peak incel content. He compared Harris’s interview, which he hadn’t seen, to 2007 Miss Teen South Carolina Caitlin Upton’s infamous word salad answer during the Miss Teen USA Pageant. That was petty and cruel but also incredibly stupid: Upton was once signed to Trump’s modeling agency and she’s openly MAGA. He’s now insulting people who might barely tolerate him.
Any reasonable person who’s paid the slightest bit of attention to Harris over the years wasn’t surprised to discover that she sounded fully competent and totally normal during her latest interview, a stark contrast to her deranged opponent. I’d like to think her performance has pleased the media doubters, but like Prince’s mother, they’ll probably remain unsatisfied.
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"Harris was delightful and charming during her interview with The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert in March 2023."
I misread this because of the line break and wondered how he'd died.
"Fifteen minutes in, I thought, I don’t know if I’m getting what I need to here, and this might be the last time we talk — and it was.”
What he needed to get was pablum that was vague enough to have his fellow journalists spin to mean whatever they wanted it to.