Opinion

Was CNN’s big Kamala Harris interview a dud?

Since President Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from the race — and Harris emerged quickly as his replacement — the vice president has avoided interviews, preferring to answer questions here and there from assembled media. All the carping and commenting on Harris’s interview evasion ultimately served as free advertising for CNN. So this moment was both big (voters wanted to see how Harris handled important questions) and small (it was an interview, not a debate). So I asked my colleagues Perry Bacon and David Von Drehle to break down this ambiguous moment: How did Harris — and CNN — handle the spotlight?

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Erik Wemple: I am guessing that the buildup to this interview will turn out to have been greater than its impact. Agree?

Perry Bacon: CNN put out a press release during the day about Harris saying that she would appoint a Republican to her Cabinet. (The interview was taped in the afternoon.) That is not too interesting — past presidents have done that, particularly Dems. I worried that what CNN was hyping was the biggest “news” from the interview. And it was.

David Von Drehle: I think Harris got off to a very weak start, unable to answer a pretty obvious question clearly. (What would you do on Day 1?) But both she and Walz got better.

Erik: Couldn’t Bash, though, have pushed a bit harder on what Harris knew about Biden’s fitness for office and how she viewed his decline over time?

Perry: Yes. I think there was only one question about Biden’s fitness versus , by my count, four questions on fracking.

Harris’s campaign sent out emails during the interview touting the new, more centrist stands she was declaring on CNN, such as promising to not ban fracking and not supporting the Green New Deal. In some ways, Bash played into Harris’s strategy by asking repeatedly about Harris abandoning more liberal positions from 2019. Harris is eager to move to the center. So this seemed like a “tough” interview — Bash kept implying Harris is a flip-flopper — but Harris seems happy to flip to the center/right.

David: Harris wants to look like a flip-flopper. 2019 and early 2020 were as far left as the Democratic Party has gone in more than 50 years — all the way back to 1972. Harris got caught up in that madness. She needed to cure that, and the only way to do it is with some flip-flopping.

Erik: And so do you think Bash should have intervened and pushed Harris on just that point — namely, that Harris is continuing to course-correct here?

David: I think people overestimate what an interviewer can accomplish with an experienced subject. This isn’t the 1950s, when Edward R. Murrow grilled Joseph McCarthy. Everyone understands TV now — that is table stakes for a political career. The interview subject is going to answer the question they want, not the question you ask, and if you drill down too hard, the audience turns against the interviewer. The goal is to get the person talking and let the audience get a vibe from them.

Erik: I’m not so sure I agree with that take. I’d point to some pretty searing interviews of Donald Trump by George Stephanopoulos and Chris Wallace as counterexamples. There are ways to poke and prod and elicit genuine and unscripted responses from interview subjects. And it struck me that Bash didn’t excel in that department Thursday.

But moving to a broader question about media and politics: The Biden White House has done vanishingly few interviews with major outlets during his time thus far in the presidency. Now Harris waited until about 40 days after Biden’s withdrawal to do one. Clearly there’s a theme here, one of circumventing the mainstream media and choosing other methods of getting out your message. What do you think the Harris-Walz team got out of this interview, and what should we expect for the balance of the campaign?

David: I guess I grade on a curve. Being tough on Trump is not that difficult. The man has a track record going back to the 1980s of saying outrageous stuff. Harris does not. She uses a very large number of words to say a very small amount of anything. Folks like that are hard to pin down.

Erik: I am just speaking out in favor of trying a bit harder to pin them down.

Perry: I think Harris and Walz got the news media off their backs. They ended a narrative (she won’t take questions) that implied she was afraid or wasn’t smart enough to do that. Now, I think the pressure to do gaggles, interviews or anything else is way down. I expect (unfortunately) very little engagement with the media from here on out from the Harris campaign. Its strategy is that interviews take them off message. I thought the no-interviews strategy was because of Biden (who is aging and struggles to answer questions). Now, I think this is a new, anti-mainstream media approach from Democrats.

Erik: Is there an upside for Harris-Walz in doing interviews with other sorts of journalists — say, business reporters to talk about the economy, or a roundtable with a climate and energy publication, or just a bunch of interviews with local publications?

Perry: Not that I am always right, but in a recent column, I suggested Harris might be better-off doing media based on (1) issues — talk to CNBC or Bloomberg on the economy; (2) region — Atlanta or Philadelphia or Savannah, Ga., newspapers and TV stations; or (3) voting bloc — Black or Latino outlets, something that targets voters over 65, Teen Vogue or something for young people.

Would that increase her vote share? I’m not sure. As a person who just wants to see interesting questions of the candidates, I would prefer that approach compared with the kind of broad approach that we saw Thursday.

I might have learned more if Harris had talked to Rachel Maddow. At some point, “Why did you flip-flop on X?” was tedious. Harris said liberal stuff in a primary and is saying more moderate stuff in a general election five years later. No surprise. “How hard would you push to expand abortion rights?” or another liberal-framed question might have yielded a more interesting answer.

Erik: Years ago, it seems, covering a presidential campaign was a more interactive thing — you might actually glimpse the candidate, ask a question or two, and so on. Nowadays, it seems, reporters more often end up cordoned off, feeding off official statements and emailing spokespeople. Is this job just not what it once was?

Perry: I covered the 2004 and 2008 campaigns, which I think were the last of the era where you could really talk to the candidate. But not everything was great. The campaign press corps of today has many more women and people of color.

Last week, there was a flap about the Democrats giving convention credentials and access to TikTok folks. I don’t oppose that. I think those people and more traditional journalists should get coverage opportunities. My general view is that we want more information about the candidates, and part of that comes from questions from voters, influencers and the press. Harris has not really been answering questions from anyone. I think that diminishes the election process. But it might help her win.

David: During my first campaign, in 1988, there was a bus ride with the eventual Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis, where a dumb kid from a local paper (me) rode so long between events with the candidate that I actually ran out of questions. Nothing remotely like that could happen now. On the other hand, ordinary people have a feeling of intimacy with candidates through social media. Which is better? I don’t know. But the past is long gone.

Erik: Okay, now for the closer, which is an evergreen but a bright evergreen: What approach do you think Harris-Walz should take toward Fox News?

Perry: If you are trying to move to the right, don’t you want to do an interview with Fox?

Erik: Perhaps. Fox News is forever boasting about the large numbers of independents who tune in. Not sure those are undecided independents, but anyway.

Perry: Based on her strategy now, shouldn’t she do an interview at the border with Fox and talk about the border agents she is going to hire? Not just to reach the Fox audience. The coverage of “Kamala goes to Fox” would reinforce the openness to the other side she is trying to communicate. That would reach center/center-right people who are not Fox watchers.

David: I think the campaign should make Walz available 24/7 to Fox. He ran for Congress and won in a red district again and again. They have no moves that he hasn’t seen 100 times. And they should put Harris on “Fox & Friends” one time to say that they did. If she can’t handle Steve Doocy, she doesn’t deserve to be president.