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Vice President Kamala Harris has been on a media tour in the last 48 hours. Like earlier media appearances, the new set of interviews has been with questioners who mostly ranged from friendly to super friendly, including The View, Howard Stern, Stephen Colbert, and the popular podcast Call Her Daddy. (There was one notable exception, which will be discussed later.) During this media tour, Harris has proven that she can make a mess of even the friendliest of interviews and that she can make a mess of more difficult interviews too. And she did both in a way that could have lasting repercussions for her campaign.
Start with The View. How positive was the treatment Harris received? Well, it started with the host asking the audience to welcome "the next president of the United States." Early in the program, one of the co-hosts, Sunny Hostin, gave Harris an easy question wrapped in a compliment. President Joe Biden had appeared on the show, Hostin told Harris, "and he said there wasn't a single thing that he did that you could not do." Then the question: "What do you think would be the biggest specific difference between your presidency and a Biden presidency?"
Harris danced a little, repeating her oft-made observation that "we're obviously two different people." But then she stressed their similarities, saying she and Biden had "a lot of shared life experiences." As she often does, Harris talked at some length but did not answer the question, so Hostin asked again, "If anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the last four years?"
"There is not a thing that comes to mind," Harris answered. "And I've been part of most of the decisions that have had impact." In that moment, Harris blew up her very delicate strategy of running as a candidate of change who is also the incumbent vice president of the United States. It was never clear how that would work exactly. And in one sentence on The View, Harris showed that she cannot make it work at all.
Also at that moment, minds were blown, in a happy way, at the Trump campaign. "Just like that, Kamala's entire bulls*** campaign about being a 'change agent' collapses," tweeted Donald Trump Jr. "You can't call yourself a change agent when you not only agree with every single disaster Joe Biden is responsible for, but you brag about being involved in all those decisions!"
"Prices up over 20 percent, the worst border crisis in U.S. history, and the world on the brink of World War III, and Kamala says she wouldn't have done anything differently," tweeted the Republican National Committee. And then this from Trump senior adviser Jason Miller: "How glorious is it that ‘The View' of all shows killed Kamala Harris's candidacy? Karma!"
Putting the partisan celebrations aside, it is remarkable that Harris was not prepared to answer the question. Is there any question about this race more fundamental than that? More predictable than that? More reasonable than that? "There are gotcha questions that take candidates by surprise," USA Today Washington bureau chief Susan Page said on Fox News's Bret Baier podcast Tuesday. "This would not be one of them."
Yet Harris was unable to answer the question. (Yes, she came back later in the show and said one difference with Biden would be her plan to appoint a Republican to a Cabinet position, but that's a woefully inadequate response.) Harris has been the Democratic standard-bearer since Biden withdrew from the race on July 21. That is nearly three months. No, it is not the long, grueling campaign that sharpens a candidate's ability to deal with any situation — Harris skipped that — but it is long enough for her to be better than she is. Now to the other notable interview. In addition to The View, Colbert, and the others, Harris did what might be called a real interview — that is, an interview with an actual journalist. On Monday evening, CBS broadcast a 60 Minutes interview with correspondent Bill Whitaker. It was heavily edited, sometimes with several cuts in a single answer. But Harris faced actual questions and, more importantly, follow-up questions.
She did badly. Her answer on inflation was weak. Her answer on the question of Ukraine was embarrassingly skimpy. But her answer on the border was worse than both of them.
Whitaker began by pointing out that Harris recently visited the U.S.-Mexico border and that Biden's "crackdown" there has "produced an almost immediate and dramatic decrease in the number of border crossings." Which led to the question: "If that's the right answer now, why didn't your administration take those steps in 2021?"
Harris tried a rhetorical trick that didn't work. "The first bill we proposed," she said, was to "fix our broken immigration system." It did not pass, Harris said. And then she continued, "Fast-forward to a moment when a bipartisan group of members of the United States Senate … got together, came up with the border security bill."
Wait a minute! The first bill, the U.S. Citizenship Act, was proposed on Jan. 20, 2021. The Senate bill was introduced on Feb. 4, 2024. More than three years passed between them, during which millions of illegal crossers poured across the border. How are we supposed to "fast-forward" past that?
Whitaker did not buy it. "There was a historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration," he said to Harris. "As a matter of fact, arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump. Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?"
Harris moved on to another avoidance technique. "It's a long-standing problem," she said. "And solutions are at hand. And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions."
Whitaker did not buy that either. "What I was asking was, was it a mistake to kind of allow that flood to happen in the first place?"
At that, Harris just flat-out rejected the question. "I think — the policies that we have been proposing are about fixing a problem, not promoting a problem, OK?" she said. The "OK" suggested she was finished responding to Whitaker's questions about the border.
But Whitaker still did not give way. "But the numbers did quadruple under your watch," he said. Harris shot back, "And the numbers today, because of what we have done, we have cut the flow of illegal immigration by half. We have cut the—" Whitaker tried to interject, "But should you have done that—" Before Whitaker could finish, Harris gave her last word: "But we need Congress to be able to act to actually fix the problem." And that was that.
It was a dreadful performance. Did Harris win because Whitaker finally gave up without getting an answer to his question? Or did Harris lose because viewers will see her unyielding determination to avoid answering the most basic questions about the Biden-Harris administration's disastrous record on the border?
What is certain is this: Harris botched an easy interview. And then she botched a hard interview. She appears to lack some very basic preparation for the job she seeks. Until now, her campaign has counted on a supportive press to paper over, to look past, that deficiency. Whether that will last for another month is an open question.