On Thursday, outside Air Force Two at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport, Vice President Kamala Harris held a brief — extremely brief — conference with reporters.
By Jim Geraghty
Harris replied: “I’ve talked to my team. I want us to get an interview scheduled before the end of the month.”
She wants to get an interview scheduled before the end of the month — about three weeks from now.
For perspective, early voting begins in Pennsylvania on Sept. 16. In Minnesota, Vermont and Virginia, early voting begins around Sept. 20.
Harris is the vice president. If she wanted to do a sit-down interview with a major TV network, newspaper or magazine, she could probably get it arranged within an hour or two. It’s not like any media organization is going to turn her down!
President Joe Biden withdrew from the race on July 21. There was no serious challenge to Harris’s ascension to the nomination, but she formally won the nomination on Aug. 2. (Note that since his decision to withdraw, Biden has done just one sit-down interview, this past weekend, and only a brief news conference announcing the prisoner swap with Russia. He’s barely more accessible than people in the witness protection program.)
The Associated Press noted, “Harris travels with reporters on Air Force Two and frequently talks to them, but her campaign staff insists the conversations are off the record.” This seems to be largely placating the media covering her campaign. It shouldn’t be perceived that way.
First, there was Biden’s “basement campaign” in 2020, limiting him mostly to Zoom calls and minimizing his off-the-cuff interactions with voters and reporters — on paper, a justifiable precaution against a septuagenarian contracting the coronavirus, but also a convenient way to avoid unscripted gaffes.
Then, after White House press secretary Jen Psaki pledged that the new administration would “bring transparency and truth back to government,” Biden offered a presidency with far fewer interviews and news conferences than each of his six predecessors. At the 2023 White House correspondents’ dinner, Biden even joked about how few questions he took. The assembled reporters laughed: Oh, that Joe. What a scamp!
Campaigning now, Donald Trump is only marginally better. Sure, he gives interviews, but almost exclusively to Fox News hosts who represent his amen corner. Since early July, Trump has given interviews to Maria Bartiromo, Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, Brian Kilmeade, Sean Hannity, and the hosts of “Fox & Friends.” Not exactly a murderers’ row of skeptical questioners, but maybe there’s a good reason for the Trump campaign’s wanting to keep him around friendly venues. Put Trump in front of tougher questioners, such as at the National Association of Black Journalists, and he’ll declare he didn’t know Harris was Black until recently.
Let’s note that Trump skipped the primary debates, and right now there’s just one debate scheduled between him and Harris. Three presidential debates and one vice-presidential debate — that’s how it worked in 2016, 2012, 2008, 2004, 2000 and 1992. Not this year, apparently.
I could snark about the number of columnists writing effusively about the Harris campaign’s “vibes” and “joy,” but vibes and joy are pretty much all they have to write about. It’s not like there’s a policy section on the campaign website to discuss and analyze. It’s not like she or her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, in their speeches is going into great detail about the policies they intend to enact.
A typical Harris speech excerpt: “Our campaign is about saying we trust the people, we see the people, we know the people. You know one of the things I love about our country? We are a nation of people who believe in those ideals that were foundational to what made us so special as a nation.” Hey, everybody likes ideals. The question is what those ideals are, and what policy choices we make in the name of those ideals.
Credit Jay Caspian Kang of the New Yorker for pointing out that Harris is running the most generic campaign imaginable, the policy equivalent of unsalted mashed potatoes. He laments that “on the Democratic side, there’s an energized, good feeling about Campaign Kamala — to a degree not felt, on a Presidential level, since Barack Obama’s last race — and nobody wants to mess that up with debates about policy.”
We’re told, through a campaign spokesperson, that Harris no longer holds the positions she espoused when seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. Back then, she supported banning fracking, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, defunding the police, instituting mandatory buybacks of assault weapons, eliminating private health insurance and guaranteeing federal jobs. Such dramatic 180-degree flips ought to be the sort of thing a presidential candidate would have to explain, if she ever deigned to sit down and take some questions.
But Harris apparently doesn’t have to explain, or at least isn’t feeling much pressure to do so, because anyone supporting her candidacy — and, let’s face it, that includes plenty of reporters — knows that quizzing Harris closely about her agenda risks helping Trump.
Republican primary voters didn’t punish Trump for skipping the debates and sticking to friendly interviewers. The grumbling about Biden’s inaccessibility never turned into a serious headache for this administration. Few people outside of the conservative press are griping loudly about Harris’s unavailability.
Why isn’t the Democratic nominee doing interviews or news conferences? Because not enough people want her to — and, so far, it’s working.
