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The Beltway demand for Kamala Harris to do her ninth or twentieth “substantive” (read: mainstream media) interview is reaching a fever pitch in the wake of Harris’ campaign announcing a new round of podcasts, Late Night and influencer interviews coming right after her appearance on 60 Minutes. Yesterday’s Politico’s Playbook captured the mood in a newsletter edition that managed to be both catty and frivolous, a churning mix of trying to make “fetch” happen and “debate me, bro” hectoring. Yes, she’s doing a bunch of interviews, they announced. But sorry lady, they just ain’t the right ones …
After avoiding the media for nigh on her whole campaign, VP KAMALA HARRIS is … still largely avoiding the media.
That’s not the Playbook lead her team is gonna want to read this morning after announcing at 5 a.m. that she’s blitzing the airwaves with unscripted sit-downs in the coming days. A quick rundown of her plans …
After cataloguing the list of Call Her Daddy, 60 Minutes, Howard Stern, Univision and Colbert, Rachel Bade and Eugene Daniels continued: “Let’s be real here: Most of these are not the types of interviews that are going to press her on issues she may not want to talk about, even as voters want more specifics from Harris. Instead, expect most of these sit-downs to be a continuation of the ‘vibes’ campaign Harris has perfected.”
There’s a part of this story that is a well-worn one from fair-minded partisans. Presidents and presidential candidates have for decades seen the advantages of doing local affiliate interviews and late night TV interviews over those with hard-news and political-news reporters. They’re not as confrontational. They access potential voters who don’t watch a lot of news. In the case of local affiliate interviewers, the questioner usually isn’t as versed in the policy particulars of the latest events in Washington as their White House briefing room peers. So a candidate can dodge or non-answer a question without the interviewer quite realizing it, or so the argument goes. They’re also, perhaps, more star struck. For a local news reporter, it’s a big deal interviewing a president or nominee. For the hosts of a Sunday morning show, a bit less so. And thus partisans see the logic of candidates being pressed on the hard questions but also understand why their favored candidate wants to do those other kinds of interviews. The type that could actually help you get elected.
But there’s something a bit different in this presidential cycle. Harris has now taken questions from the inside-the-Beltway press, in impromptu sessions, in a sit-down interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, with reporters at the National Association of Black Journalists convention, where Daniels was actually one of the questioners. But again and again these interviews have focused on process questions and restating opponents’ attacks and asking Harris to respond. In Dana Bash’s interview with Harris and Walz, the most focused questions were over whether or not Harris had “flip-flopped” on fracking and why Walz had said he and his wife used IVF rather than a related but distinct fertility treatment. In other words, they actually haven’t been very substantive at all. They are more confrontational, but absent a basis in policy particulars it’s not clear why that’s better than an at-length interview in which potential voters get a feel for who the candidate is and that discusses issues like abortion rights or jobs or foreign wars or immigration policy in ways that actually connect with people’s lives. The whole proposition becomes more a matter of candidate feats of strength for campaign gatekeepers than questions that are particularly substantive or ones that campaign reporters have an especial ability to address.
I should note here: I’m not picking on Dana Bash. Her interview is what we now expect from a major media interview. The problem isn’t the interviewer but the format, the genre of interview. Not only are these interviews not terribly valuable for the candidate; they’re not terribly valuable as journalism. You can tell your favored candidate to blow off the prestige MSM interviews guilt free.
Another journalist I respect told me recently he’d like to see each candidate do interviews with economics or tax-policy journalists. I told him that I agreed, though I’d make the same argument for policy reporters in a host of areas. I’m not sure the campaigns would see those interviews as particularly valuable for them to do. Even if they got by without showing an embarrassing ignorance on some policy point, people who are versed enough in public policy to be able to follow or be interested in such an interview have almost certainly decided who they’re voting for. Tax-policy interviews are ones that Colbert or Howard Stern or Alex Cooper simply can’t do. But these vaunted prestige media interviews don’t do anything like that either. You could just surf politics Twitter for a few days, get a sense of the current attack lines and you’d basically be set. That’s harsh but it’s not hyperbole. It’s true.